The Song is You (2009) (7 page)

By the time he was fifteen, having the facts at his fingertips was so essential and habitual to him that he defined himself as that—knowledge itself, a superhero or Greek god of data. And with that conscious self-identification, a loop began to carve itself in his mind. As with dance students who feel, as they improve, that the music they have long practiced to must be slowing down, so Aidan’s speed of recall and reply had always to accelerate or he felt not just his quirky powers failing but he himself, his soul, melting away from inside him, as if he were being deboned, leaving only a heap of flabby skin and spotty beard to be stomped on and torn by all the world’s passing cleats and high heels. When he moved to New York in his early twenties, when speed was still paramount to him, he was answering all questions—even from strangers asking directions in the subway—as if he not only had the answer but had even known that
that
question was going to be asked. His reply would begin most pleasurably before the question finished.

And so, the Incident. Aidan was fifty-three when, in peak mental condition, he scaled to the apex of the television game-show mountain and in that thin and pure air was accepted to compete on
Jeopardy!
, a trivia contest whose gimmick was the reversal of questions and answers (Quizmaster: “Its capital is Paris.” Contestant: “What is the capital of France?”). This show had long loomed as Aidan’s destiny, watched obsessively, statistically analyzed, trained for, auditioned for again and again, meditated over, contemplated with teachers and trivia-bar comrades and the two sufficiently drunk girls in college whom he once convinced to play strip Trivial Pursuit with him, but whom he then released, with his apologies, before things went too far.

The day came. He performed well, unseating a champion and then holding that title himself for two more days, winning more cash than he had earned in the previous three years, before his ghastly end.

The fourth day, endowed with purpose, as if fulfilling an ancient prophecy, he opened the game by quickly clearing two categories: “Space Travel” and “The Underworld.” With only a few seconds before a commercial break, Aidan selected “Whose Fault?” for $1,000. The host read out the question beaming white-on-blue from millions of screens across the country:

Aidan clicked his signal button, the podium lights circling his name illuminated, the host called Aidan’s name, and Aidan, with the same look of stern satisfaction he had worn for three days, replied: “Who are the Jews?”

Fans of the show, and Aidan’s brother and friends, long debated whether the episode should have been broadcast at all, or whether this single moment could have been edited out. But if it had, how would anyone have understood Aidan’s cement silence for the remaining twenty-two minutes or his refusal even to make a guess for the game’s final, written question?

“Ohhh, nnnnnnoooo,” came the host’s pained reply. “Saul?”

“What are rats?” the furious competitor to Aidan’s left nearly shouted, though the director perversely (or in paralyzed wonder) kept the camera on Aidan, whose face now displayed an amazing array of legible thought, projected with clarity even through his beard and mustache and glasses. He had known the answer was “Rats”—it was a gimme. They would have accepted “fleas” as well. He did not believe, had never believed, that Jews carried the plague. He had never held an anti-Semitic belief in his life. He didn’t hate any group, except idiots, defined as anyone less intelligent than Aidan but who believed himself to be more intelligent. He had Jewish friends (though not for much longer in most cases). These thoughts visibly pass first.

Then comes the pain of having been not just wrong (a clenching around the nose and upper lip that his friends and family knew well) but having appeared insane, even evil, on national television. Then, as Aidan’s eyes narrow and slowly move to his left in an unfortunate expression that TV translates as suspicion, the canny viewer will see that Aidan is noticing only now that Saul Fish of Saint Louis Park, Minnesota, is definitely Jewish. Saul went on to answer nearly all the remaining questions, winning the game by a wide margin as Aidan simply stopped trying, his signal button dangling untouched at his side.

Aidan was not much comforted telling himself that the speed of synaptic connections required for high-stakes competitive trivia will cause the best players’ brains to bypass, simply for convenience, certain neural gateways (such as self-censorship), and in the case of a brain like Aidan’s, the risk of affectless information hitching a ride from one memory bank (“Carriers of Bacilli”) to another (“Famous Racist Slurs,” over the bridge word
interlopers)
was unavoidable.

Aidan, in the months between the recording and the broadcast, nearly convinced himself that the producers would avoid airing his disgrace to the nation. He even returned to trivia nights in bars from Harlem down through Brooklyn and onto Staten Island, where one Saturday he hustled well enough to finish four hundred dollars up and still leave the local quizzicists believing he’d just been lucky. That night, feeling almost himself again, he came home, turned on the television, and saw the ad he’d recorded months before, in the studio before taping his first game, “Hi, I’m Aidan Donahue of New York City. Watch me this Monday on
Jeopardy!
right here on WABC.” His victorious debut was forty-eight hours away; his foregone conclusion would follow seventy-two hours later.

Julian saw the same ten-second spot, surprised his brother hadn’t mentioned being on the show, and assumed Aidan had suffered an early defeat and so kept a minor embarrassment to himself. He was therefore puzzled to watch Aidan’s easy victory on Monday evening and yet be unable to contact his brother, leaving a congratulatory voice mail that Aidan listened to in tears. Tuesday’s still more impressive victory, Wednesday’s thoroughgoing destruction of his opponents, reminiscent of a Viking pillage of an undefended Kentish town, and Thursday’s Incident were watched by Aidan’s brother, his editors at various magazines and websites, the patrons at a dozen bars of his trivia-night circuit, the Jewish woman he had taken out twice in the interval, none of whom he had told, none of whom could reach him as he sat on the floor of his apartment, rocking, as the unmistakable theme music began.

Aidan’s Thursday afternoon had passed in rising hopes and ebbing confidence, flash sweats sweeping the pencil from his fingers as he tried to compose a crossword. It was coming, tonight, in an hour, in minutes—maybe they just skipped this episode and blamed a spoiled tape—no, there he was, “Space Travel,” “The Underworld,” any moment now, and now: “Who are the Jews?,” and then all of time screeched to a halt, and Aidan’s flesh burst into flame, and then the universe, having shrunken to a single dimensionless dot, exploded outward in poisonous ripples and scalding dust. The empirical fact (“no longer a matter of scholared disgreement”) of Jewish responsibility for the bubonic plague seeped onto Islamo-fascist and Holocaust-denial websites with intellectual pretensions, footnoting the scientifically unimpeachable work of biohistorian Dr. Aden Donald Hughes, Ph.D. Aidan’s income dried up for months, requiring a careful budgeting of the
Jeopardy!
winnings. He was blackballed from trivia bars and denied writing assignments, even those related to pubic grooming. He watched (as did millions of others) the late-night sketch-comedy routine in which an actor with a motorized, knee-length black beard and magnifying-lens spectacles plays
Jeopardy!
against a hooded Klansman and Elie Wiesel with the categories “Slurs,” “Jew Evil,” “Those Troublesome Darkies,” “Subhuman Races,” and “Justifiable Child Murder.” (Wiesel pulls off a stunning upset.) He duly and hourly Googled himself (an exercise that had previously returned very few and very accurate hits) and read the dozens of editorials from publications around the nation that shredded him to make a potpourri of points: “The Un-derwiring of the Freudian Slip”
(Psychology Today)
, “Burned in the Melting Pot”
(The New York Times)
, “Jews in Jeopardy”
(Commentary)
, “Good Question, That: Who, Indeed,
Are
the Jews?”
(American Jewish World)
, “Mistakes in Knowledge vs. Mistakes in Taste: Editing the High-Speed Trivia Show” (
Gameshows.com
), “Saul Fish: Our Prince”
(Temple Beth Israel Newsletter)
, and “The Year’s 10 Most Grotesque TV Moments”
(Entertainment Weekly—
Aidan’s grainy face, with his eyes malignantly shifted all the way to the right, filling the magazine’s cover). He received a single job offer during this time, a superficially plausible request to submit work for a projected
Golden Treasury of Improving Children’s Verse
, a helpful sample of which was enclosed for guidance with the offer:

He noticed with pained shock and then weepy horror and then muttered grumbling the sudden apparition of stickers and stenciled graffiti all over New York bearing the image of his own mournful, disoriented face at the very instant after his infamous reply. Dozens and then hundreds of him gazed, befuddled and shameful, from subway-car doors and stop signs and traffic-light control vaults and newspaper boxes and car bumpers and the sides of delivery trucks and, huge, on bedsheets suspended from the overpasses of expressways. He received scolding and congratulatory letters, even wedding proposals, though he was by then fully committed to his stumbling steps toward a deep breakdown, at the bottom of which the only voice that caught him and slowly and unsteadily hoisted him back to the surface was that of his nearly-ex sister-in-law, Rachel.

She reached him not through overt pity—when Aidan was no longer returning Julian’s calls or opening up for the Chinese-food guy, only slipping money under the door—but simply by leaving a message saying she had done some research and learned that Aidan’s ubiquitous face was the work of an art student who had created the black-and-white schematic image to fulfill an assignment for a class on Viral Marketing. And Aidan, at last, returned someone’s call.

He came to her apartment, and she welcomed him with an expression of such open love and kindness that he felt tricked and was about to turn back and scurry home. At the last moment she corrected her face and said, as coldly as she could, “I’ve learned something that may interest you, a strange fact or two.” That brought him into the apartment, bare-walled and oddly furnished, as she’d only recently left Julian’s. She spoke carefully of the facts: the art student had begun selling the stickers and stencils from a website to map how quickly an image could disseminate through a community’s consciousness, but now he was making real money thanks to the dazzling speed of Aidan’s face’s proliferation. With Rachel’s pro bono legal assistance, Aidan negotiated a percentage of the site’s revenues, and a fair restoration of his income resulted. After that he found himself at her door every evening and sometimes more often, waiting on her step when she was out, finally accepting a key and a dedicated couch.

And so today the premature revelation leapt out: “Rachel sends her love.”

“You see her much, do you?” Julian asked, tightening his towel.

“Did you hear about the surgical procedure they approved?” Aidan recovered. “It was in the paper today. A new technique reduces the number of open-heart surgeries, turns them into just lasery, scopy things, out of the hospital in a day.” He sucked his teeth. “And then all the incivility to follow.”

The Aidan non sequitur challenge. After their regular Wednesday dinners with him, Rachel and Julian used to debate whether Aidan truly thought his listeners made such conversational leaps with him or whether he intentionally gutted all the connective tissue so that the listener would beg Aidan for enlightenment. You were certainly not allowed to blithely agree, not just inattentively say, “Absolutely right, Aid.” He would see at once you were humoring him.

Rachel always insisted that either possibility was the behavior of a sweetly childlike mind, a prodigal boy’s brain, enjoying its own strength or showing it off, and that if Aidan had a weakness, it was only his inability to see that most people simply did not care. “Which is really a most enviable strength,” she’d once said. Julian, who would normally have defended Aidan against anyone (reserving for himself the right to mock him), would take the role of attacker after these Wednesday dinners, simply to enjoy watching how easily and gladly Rachel would leap to the barricade. “He’s his own species,” Julian complained, and she corrected him: “He’s his own man.” Rachel’s easy love for Aidan reminded Julian of their mother, Pamela, the last woman who had been Aidan’s defender, thirty years before.

“You don’t know what I mean, do you?” Aidan asked, shaking his head at Julian. “Why don’t you just say so if you’re lost?”

“All right, I’ll bite. What incivility follows from less open-heart surgery?”

“Don’t patronize me,” Aidan fired back. “It’s beneath you. Where are you taking me for lunch?”

A PIECE OF MUSIC’S CONQUEST
of you is not likely to occur the first time you hear it, though it is possible that the aptly named “hook” might barb your ear on its first pass. More commonly, the assailant is slightly familiar and has leveraged that familiarity to gain access to the crisscrossed wiring of your interior life. And then there is a possession, a mutual possession, for just as you take the song as part of you and your history, it is claiming dominion for itself, planting fluttering eighth notes in your heart.

The exact moment of infection: Julian Donahue is standing on the F-train platform at York Street, in front of a peeling poster decorated with a supine rat with its tongue lolling from under Xed-out eyes, cheerfully advising that rodenticide has recently fumed the area. On the floor, near his foot, as ready proof, there is a tightly wound golden-red coil of rodential innard. On closer inspection, it is a shiny, springy clip-on tornado of exotic hair extension, a follicular concoction molted from a Brooklyn head of arabica-latina-afra-italian curls, and the sight of bunched hair (even fake hair) against the dirt of the floor reminds Julian of Rachel’s incurable phobic refusal to remove the gritty, soapy hair-jellyfish from the shower drain: “Just step up, mister,” she had told her new fiance, “because I never, ever do it.” The Irish girl is on Julian’s iPod, and this time—why
this
time?—this time, the hi-hat figure at the opening of “Coward, Coward” prophesies the hissing arrival of the F train, and the man next to Julian is drenched through with sweat. Sweat streams off him in rivers onto his workout clothes and his blue gym bag held in a brown hand with knuckles gray and cracked. Carlton used to ride in a pack of the same blue material on Julian’s back, and on trains he would “hoo-hoo-hoo!” a whispered shout of delight into Julian’s neck, and the bass line weaves in and out of the hi-hat—Julian hasn’t noticed it before, this jigsawed interplay of the rhythm, propulsive, urging something up and on, and the sigh of the train’s opening doors encourages the bass and drums in turn.