Glyph (7 page)

My parents stopped at a restaurant on our way home from the hospital and ate in awkward silence. They looked at me only occasionally and then only for a second, offering half-meant smiles. They talked a lot about how their food was only mediocre and finally, my mother said, “I don’t like that Dr. Steimmel. I don’t trust her.”

Inflato shrugged. “She got a little worked up, I guess.”

“A little worked up? It seemed to me like she was taking things awfully personally for somebody who’s supposed to remain clinical and objective.”

“Nobody can be objective,” Inflato said.

“You know what I mean.” Mo was irritated now and so she looked to me for more than a second. “You know what I mean, don’t you, Ralph?”

I nodded. Then I gestured that I wanted something to write on. Mo dug into her purse while Inflato glanced nervously around.

“My god, Eve,” he said. “What if somebody sees?”

“To hell with them,” Mo said. She put a pad and a pen in front of me.

I wrote:

I don’t want to go back to the hospital.

Mo read it and told Inflato what I had said. “Don’t worry honey, we won’t take you back there.”

“Maybe not there,” Inflato said. “Eve, we have to get some answers, learn what we need to do to deal with him.”

“
Him
is sitting right here. It’s not like he’s got a contagious disease, Douglas.”

“How do we know?”

I felt my little body convulsing with laughter. I wrote:

Father
wishes
I were contagious.

Mo read it and laughed.

Inflato grabbed the pad and read it. “Very funny. So, you’re smart, you little nipple-hound.”

I wrote quickly:

So, that’s it, you’re jealous of the attention your wife pays me.

He pulled the pad over, read it, and bit his lip. “That’s not it. You need special help. I don’t want you to grow up all twisted inside. You could become a juvenile delinquent or worse.”

A poststructuralist pretender.

That one really scared him. He ate a forkload of potato salad and looked away. I was not proud of having stepped on him the way I did, but I was interested in the exchange because it was my first real confrontation. Certainly, I had toyed with Steimmel and watched her lose her grip, but with my father at the table, I actually felt a twinge of anger. I learned at that table that I had a mean streak.

Whether atoms, monads, or words, things are made up of small things and small things are made of smaller things and, to some extent, my understanding of the whole world depends on my comprehension of its constituent parts. But my poop is my poop, to me here in California, to a fat Australian woman in Melbourne, to an engineer in Nigeria, to a pearl diver in the South Pacific. And though Inflato might have argued to the contrary, my performance at the shrink’s was limited to a finite number of readings. He would, in his philosophical mode, have liked to claim an infinite number of interpretations, but as is the case with most
theories
, application is a bit of a sticky wicket. Locke might have claimed all day that there was no material world, but still he would have stepped out of the way of an oncoming carriage that evening.

An infinite number of readings indeed. Certainly, my sentences read backwards or pulled from the text randomly will produce the kind of
fragments
certain individuals have suggested. I am free to read this way. But I do not, any more than I might walk the middle part of my trip to the refrigerator first this time and last the next. Even when I have read half the novel, when I go back and read the first lines of the first chapter, I am reading the beginning. If I could, I would make numerous trips to the refrigerator. Sometimes I would be hungrier than others. Sometimes I would retrieve a bottle of milk, others, strained peaches. Still, it would be a trip to the refrigerator that begins at my little desk. Even if I were just going there to feel the cold air on my face, it would be a trip to the refrigerator. Never would I go there to see an elephant.

What I know of my parents’ lives I know from photographs. I know somewhat more about my mother’s life now, but, generally, people are only inclined to speak of the past with those they believe will somehow not only share some commonality, but who will also be disposed to exhibiting sympathy. The photographs are many; some of their childhoods, some of their courting and marriage, but few in between.

1) My mother is eight, if my math is correct, and she is sitting on a porch with her brother Toby, I can tell by his ears, and they are looking down into Toby’s lap where there is a cat.

2) Inflato is fourteen and standing in the background, behind his father who is posing with a fat man wearing a raccoon cap. Inflato is holding an oddly shaped case that seems heavy for him.

3) Mo and Inflato are not married yet. They are sitting in front of a campfire. It is not quite dark and there is a lake behind them.

Is a photograph always present tense? I described them so. About photos people say things like, “Here I am after nearly drowning,” or “There you are with Linda Evangelista.” Looking up from the photo, you might then ask, “When were you with Linda Evangelista?” I tell you I was not with her. Looking back at the photo, you say, “Here you are right here with her.” So, better, let the question be, is what is in the photograph always in the present, without a before, without an after? Of course, it is. And isn’t that actually
you
in the picture?

I was lying in my crib, reading
Daisy Miller
when I heard sounds outside my window. I stood up and attended to the noises, wondered if my parents heard them in their room, wondered if they were outside making the noises. Choosing not to engage in speech had its drawbacks, among them an inability to summon help from the next room. As I watched the sash of my window begin to move, I considered hurling a book across the room to make a ruckus, but I was not strong enough to do it and, even if I had been that strong, I would not have found it in myself to do such a thing to a book.
²

My window opened and in rushed the cold February air. A woman’s voice whispered angrily to someone else outside. Then someone was climbing through the window into my room. Dressed in dark clothes and wearing a black knit cap was Dr. Steimmel. She put a finger to her lips as she approached my bed.

“Don’t be scared, Ralph,” she said. “This is all just a dream.
³
I’m not going to hurt you.”

Another similarly dressed person was at the window, but he didn’t come in. “Just grab him so we can get out of here,” the man said.

“Shhhh!” Steimmel hushed him. “Come on, Ralphie.” She lifted me and held me to her chest. Her bra seemed to be made of hard plastic.

“Let’s go,” the man at the window said.

“I’m coming, damnit.” Steimmel wrapped me up in the cotton blankets of my bed and carried me to the window where she handed me to the man. He was smaller than Steimmel and, in a significant fashion, softer. The cold air, in spite of the blankets, was rude and I felt my body shiver involuntarily. The man put me under the front of his wool coat. It was scratchy, even through the layers of blanket, but warm. He stepped away from the window and let Steimmel climb out.

“You should close the window,” the man said. “They might feel the cold and wake up.”

“Good thinking,” Steimmel said. She turned back to the house and quietly lowered the sash. “Okay, now, let’s get the hell out of here. Oh, my god, I can’t believe I’ve got him.”

The man carried me and the two of them made their way across the yard, crouched low like monkeys, to a dark sedan.

Inside the car, in the dark, Steimmel strapped me into a carrier in the backseat, stuck a legal pad and a marker in front of me, and said, “Knock yourself out.”

On Ludwig Boltzman’s tombstone is carved:
S = k. LogW. S
is the entropy of a system,
k
represents Boltzman’s Constant, and
W
is a measure of the chaos of a system, essentially the extent to which energy is dispersed in the world. This equation meant little to me as I read of it the first time, but as I considered it I grew excited. The space between
S
and
W
is the space between the thing in front of me and the stuff hidden inside beyond my observation and comprehension. It raises the question: How many ways can the parts of a thing be rearranged before I can see a difference? How many ways can the atoms and molecules of my hand move and recombine before I realize that something is wrong? Thinking about it scared me. Certainly, I understood that natural events symbolize collapse into chaos and that events are motivated by dissolution, but the idea of such subversive and invisible change moved me. I likened it to observing the minds of others.

The man with Steimmel, whose name was Boris, drove hunched over, his lips nearly touching the steering wheel. I could see him through the gap between the front seats. The sun was just coming up over the hills and we were headed north along the coast. I could smell the coffee that Steimmel was guzzling.

“I have a really bad feeling about this,” Boris was saying again.