Andersen, Kurt (13 page)

After dinner, Peter retreated to his room to work on his mail-order model rockets. Sabrina and her friend with cystic fibrosis, who was sleeping over, went out to the backyard to whack croquet balls and catch fireflies. I sat down on the rug in the TV room to watch
Saturday Night at the Movies
with my parents. It was
The Sun Also Rises.

During the first commercial, after I said I’d thought this was the one about the Spanish Civil War and my dad said that was
For Whom the Bell Tolls,
he told me about his friend Einar who, the day after they’d finished their high school exit exams in Copenhagen, enlisted to go fight in Spain and had been shot dead by the fascists before the end of the summer, at eighteen.

“There but for the grace of God,” my mother said.

“There but for my lack of balls,” my father replied.

“Nils,”
my mother scolded.

I didn’t ask exactly how his war experience made Jake Barnes unable to have sex, even though I knew the question would’ve made Dad chuckle. I also silently noted that Ava Gardner was sort of flat-chested.

“I think I’m gonna go to bed and read,” I announced at the next commercial. Curiosity followed me out of the basement and up to my room and jumped up on the bed. He snuggled in next to me, as usual, laying his head on my leg. I started the book at the beginning, the preface first, then the introduction, then chapter one. I really was interested in the novel, in Miller’s intentions, in its fraught publishing history, in its influence on postwar writers, the full scholarly and critical appraisal.

But soon I was skipping pages, searching for the good parts. And then I was reading certain quoted sentences again and again. “He bent down and kissed her breasts, and after he had kissed them fervidly, he stuffed them back into her corsage.” I’d never encountered that meaning of “corsage.” “She commenced rubbing her pussy affectionately, stroking it with her two hands, caressing it, patting it, patting it.” I’d never read the word “pussy” in the anatomical sense.

Before long I was rubbing myself affectionately, stroking with just one hand, caressing, caressing, thinking of Chuck Levy’s muscular arms and tanned belly and sweaty chest.

Curiosity stood up on the end of the bed and looked at me with his head tilted to the side.
What?
he seemed to be saying.
You okay? What?

I’d not had a lot of orgasms before that night—even by myself, I played slightly hard to get—and I had never had one so violent or transporting. I felt like smoking a cigarette.

9

I’ve got channels on my cable TV that show pornographic movies. I’ve watched a couple and both times felt an odd emotional alloy, bemusement plus sadness, a cousin to what I felt when I visited Disneyland with Waverly and attended a Sunday service with my assistant at her megachurch in Garden Grove, a sense that Americans are adorable and ridiculous, both overliteral and desperate to immerse in fantasy.

One of my UCLA colleagues, a woman, has a client in Estonia who wants to distribute child pornography that he’s produced without using any child actors—the videos are entirely computer-generated. Digital animation is apparently moving beyond what they call the “uncanny valley,” where animated human characters look more real than regular cartoons but not quite fully human, either—eerie, unsettling, uncanny.

As junior high schoolers, I’ve come to think, Alex and Chuck and I were living through something like our own uncanny-valley phenomenon. No longer children, not yet young adults but enacting travesties of adulthood—adults who lie and betray and kill and make love lovelessly—I think we became a little eerie and unsettling to ourselves. This is part of what most adolescents feel, I suppose, being neither one thing nor the other, pretending to be a butterfly and feeling like a caterpillar, chrysalids alternating between narcissism and self-loathing, stuck for a few years in a beautiful and monstrous pupal stage.

Yet when children
finally
become adults, they don’t feel as if they’ve achieved paradise. I think it’s a problem with all utopias. For instance, my online searches and discoveries these days are never as delightful as they were that blissful afternoon ranging through Northwestern’s library. And not just because I’m no longer fourteen years old. Except in fairy tales and religious visions, perfect and permanent bliss never arrives all at once. Plus, awesomeness has a half-life. You grow accustomed to every new marvel and miracle. You forget that a visit to a great library was once precious and astounding. You forget that you didn’t see color TV until you were fifteen or a cellphone until you were forty, that the murder rate in New York City was four times as high when you arrived than when you moved away. And you forget that it was once cool to say “cool” and wear blue jeans, that “under God” wasn’t always part of the Pledge of Allegiance.

We forget.

Could Alex really and truly have forgotten what happened, what we did way back when? It’s possible. Certainly a defense lawyer could claim post-traumatic stress disorder.

Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, you have heard uncontradicted testimony that the events of 1968 were traumatically stressful for Mr. Macallister.

No objection, Your Honor.

According to the psychiatric profession’s authoritative guide to mental disorders, the
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual,
a person suffering from PTSD, quote, “commonly makes deliberate efforts to avoid certain thoughts, feelings, or conversations about the traumatic event and to avoid activities, situations, or people who arouse recollections of it.” And indeed, you have heard testimony from Ms. Hollander that Mr. Macallister has compulsively avoided her, his former best friend, even though they now live nearby one another.

In 1981 he phoned me to discuss a movie he wanted to make about a former Black Panther, and at our college reunion in 1996, we chatted at length about a panel discussion of the mob-bullying that passed for campus protest in the late ‘60s. And collecting celebrated car-bomb cars? That sounds to me like a deliberate effort to arouse and commemorate certain traumatic thoughts and feelings, not avoid them.

Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I call your attention to Criterion C3 for PTSD in the
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual:
“This avoidance of reminders may include
amnesia
for an important aspect of the traumatic event.” And indeed, there has been
no
testimony and
no
evidence that at any moment during the last four decades has Mr. Macallister recalled
any
of the alleged actions or events in question.

Yes, we did weirdly steer clear of the subject for the last three years of college, all of us more or less pretending it hadn’t happened, ignoring the elephant in the room, the monster in the box. But I do remember a conversation about it with Alex, one night just before we graduated, when he started sobbing.

Spontaneous crying: evidence of acute traumatic stress. But that was forty-three long years ago—and since then, nothing, no mention, not even a glancing reference. Once again, members of the jury, I quote from the
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual:
“There may be a delay of years, before symptoms appear.” And those symptoms, I remind you, “may include
amnesia
for an important aspect of the traumatic event.”

Maybe. But I don’t think so. Alex Macallister, I believe, is pulling a Hugo Drax on me—Drax the
Moonraker
villain who pretends to suffer from amnesia about the political crimes of his youth. I know PTSD is real, and I know amnesia exists outside fiction. However, I also know a bogus psychiatric defense argument when I hear one, because I made them myself a few times in court.

Maybe Alex’s forgetting is more recent. Maybe he has moved beyond NARF (normal age-related forgetfulness) to severe AAMI (age-associated memory impairment) or SDAT (senile dementia of the Alzheimer type). He’s going on sixty-six. But even after my dad had wandered off into the Alzheimer’s wilderness, imagining my mother was his mother and calling the car “the rhino,”, his recollections of the distant past remained crackerjack. I was visiting them in Wilmette in 1994 when a Danish TV crew came to interview him about the Nazi occupation and resistance for a fiftieth-anniversary-of-the-end-of-the-war documentary. The filmmaker told me that my seventy-four-year-old dad’s Danish was impeccable, as was his ability to recall names and dates from the 1940s.

I don’t think dementia has wiped away Alex’s memories of the demented thing we did in 1968.

When I ran into him at a political fund-raiser in Pacific Palisades, right after I’d arrived in L.A., he went on and on about his biotech investments. He talked about “the incredible breakthroughs my boffins are making” in cosmetic neurology, such as a drug called “ZIP,” zeta inhibitory peptides, that Alex said could be used to “edit” and “optimize” memory. “From now on, Hollander,” he said as we stood with our goblets of wine watching the sun dip into the Pacific, “it’s all about SENS.” He waited for me to ask what SENS means, and when I did, he smiled and answered with the combination of excitement and irony that has been his default affect forever: “Strategies for engineered negligible senescence.” A pause. “It’s the end of aging.” I smiled but said nothing. I think he probably knew what I was thinking:
Bond villain.

Is it possible that Alex has somehow ZIP’d away his inconvenient memories of the 1960s? Could an insistent billionaire financial backer convince his eager biotechnologists to go for broke and test zeta inhibitory peptides on
him,
to edit and optimize
his
memory? At this end of this century, outside of the movies—
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Bourne Quantum of Solace
?—I’m betting not.

I think Alex isn’t suffering from PTSD or dementia and hasn’t rewired his hippocampus with an experimental miracle drug. I think he’s simply engaging in a regular old-fashioned human habit. I think he’s lying.

Thus my desire for corroborating evidence has intensified. During the last month, since I spoke to Alex, I’ve received form-letter acknowledgments of my Freedom of Information requests from all the relevant federal agencies, but not yet any actual answers. The agencies may eventually tell me they can find no records, and that may be true. Or they could give me what’s called a “Glomar response,” a phrase coined in the 1970s after the CIA refused to say whether the agency did or didn’t have certain records about a secret ship called the
Glomar Explorer.
Or they could admit they’ve got files but decline to give me copies. I could appeal such a denial. And then they could leave me in limbo, trying to wait me out. A UCLA colleague who knows all about the Freedom of Information labyrinth tells me there are national security appeals that have been pending for nineteen years.

Yesterday I realized that the problem, if there’s a problem, might just be bureaucratic confusion, stupid but not malign. So this morning I resubmitted all the requests for my files using the original spelling of my last name, the way I spelled it when I was a kid—not Hollander but Hollænder, with the smushed-together
a
and
e,
how they did it in Old English and still do it in Scandinavian languages. My father’s one unbudging point of ethnic pride was insisting on the Danish spelling. “Tell them,” he instructed us as kids, “it’s our
brand
name, as in
Encyclopædia,
like that sign on Wilmette.” Encyclopædia Britannica Films had its headquarters on Wilmette Avenue. Sophomore year in college, when I started doing my best to seem as standard as possible, I became Hollander, simplified and Americanized and unproblematic.

I’m not sure I’d have gotten to the point of doing what I’m doing now—reassembling the skeleton in my closet, then putting it on display—if I hadn’t been living alone the last seven years. I spent the first fifty-seven years of my life sharing houses and apartments with other people. It turns out that parents and brothers and sisters and roommates and spouses and children in close proximity occupy a giant swath of consciousness. Mine, anyhow. Living with other people, especially people I love or wish I could love, is like having music on in the background, several different songs at once, all the time. It’s not that I entirely blocked out thoughts of my youth. No, I’ve revisited certain unforgettable moments obsessively. But “obsessive” is the key word, the way some people with OCD touch a particular object or spot on their bodies in the same special way, over and over for years, to no constructive end. I’ve spent all these decades touching, touching, touching, touching, touching my memories of a few vivid moments, each time with the same quick ritualized private gesture of regret and (if such a thing is possible) retroactive dread. Until I lived by myself in this very comfortable solitary confinement of Wonderland Park Avenue, I didn’t stop and open those memories and try to think about each of them deeply. They were like computer-screen icons for old files that I repeatedly, ruefully glanced at with a sigh and never dared click open.

Living alone has also made me much, much more conscious of inconsequential things, the sweet banalities of a day in a life. I feel now as if I spent most of my previous time on earth in a state of perpetually frenzied obliviousness, intent on executing all the Important Tasks at Hand. The test to take. The application to finish. The man to marry. The job to get, the brief to write, the motion to file, the verdict to appeal, the meeting to schedule, the PowerPoint to prepare. The apartment to buy, the meals to organize, the two miles to run, the sex to have, the kids to get to school and playdates and doctors and volleyball games and SAT tutors and colleges. The marriage to end. The books to write. I was always good at screening out the noise and focusing exclusively on the signal, which made me successful in school and at work and (more or less) as a parent. Until I lived alone, I was not so good at understanding—really understanding, beyond the obligatory modern lip service to smelling the roses and living in the moment—that the extraneous noise can be lovely. The Buddhists call it mindfulness, a word I sort of hate but an MO I’ve come to believe in.