Andersen, Kurt (23 page)

“That’d be a serious commute,” I say.

“It is what it is,” Jungo says. “About an hour and a quarter.”

“Bullshit,” Seth corrects, “two hours door to door if you’re lucky.” I don’t mean to be flip about my son’s illness, but his symptoms of mild autism spectrum disorder often strike me as bracing and admirable.

“Well,” I say, “there’s one key to institutional effectiveness—three hours on the train every day to deal with all the emails in your in-box about institutional effectiveness.” I am joking, sort of, but Jungo nods earnestly. This is an established pattern with us. The first night I met him, he told me he was investing in a friend’s company that contracted with private schools to pick lice out of children’s scalps for $150 per kid, and I’d thought he was joking. A few years ago, when I said the lice-picking firm should expand into “high-margin artisanal bedbug removal,” he didn’t realize I was joking.

Greta arrives home, laden with plastic bags. I’d offered to spring for dinner out, but she was adamant about eating at home, “to have a real old-fashioned family dinner,” so we are eating microwaved Whole Foods sole amandine and broccolini with garlic.

During the meal, Waverly brings up the work in Greta’s lab on visual processing, how fascinated she is by the fact that ten billion bits of information reach the eye every second but ninety-nine-point-nine-nine percent never get to the brain.

Seth comes alive. “Machines kick our asses in so many ways.” He saw
The Matrix
seven times the first two weeks it was in theaters. “It’s like we’re stuck with a permanent dial-up connection in here,” he says, tapping his right temple. “It’s fucking insane.”

Jungo frowns, and I ask Greta if Waverly’s statistic is correct.

“It’s a lot worse than that,” she says. “Our conscious visual perceptions are based on just a few
hundred
bits from those billions of bits of information the retina collects. The brain takes those few specks, this very, very rough sketch, and then … 
imagines
the rest of the image.”

This is why I find Greta’s work more interesting than that of almost anyone else I know, including mine. “So everything we think we’re seeing,” I ask, “everything we’re sure looks just
so
—the salt shaker, the piece of broccolini, it’s all just a guess? Really? A
prediction
our brains are making?”

“More or less, probably, yeah,” Greta says, standing, taking her plate and mine away, “and consciousness in general probably has a lot of features like that.”

“It’s not a
bug,
” Seth shouts, “it’s a
feature
!’”

“We think we know why we think something,” Greta continues, “or why we feel a certain way, but our minds
hide
the mental processes from us that produced those thoughts and feelings. Some people think that could be a main point of consciousness—hiding the processing states from ourselves.”

“I find the point-oh-oh-oh-oh percent thing sort of beautiful.”

“Of course you do, Glenda,” Seth says to me. “Every glass half full, even the cracked, empty ones.”

Seeing silver linings is one of the family caricatures of me, along with working too hard and being a stickler for accuracy.

“Good old PMA,” Jungo says, giving me a thumbs-up. This stands for “positive mental attitude,” which he likes to think is the one trait the two of us share.

“Beautiful how, Grams?”

“Because it means that simply in order to
see,
we’ve got to be like artists all the time, every waking moment, constantly taking those few dabs of information and using them to imagine this whole complex, panoramic picture of reality.” We’re each the god of our own experience, the maker of all that is, seen and unseen.

Greta and Jungo exchange a quick, weird look. “Who wants apple crisp?” she says. “It’s sugar-free, Mom.”

“Thanks, sweetie.” I’m irritated by well-intentioned people who make special accommodations for my diabetes, but they are trying to be nice, so I never say it annoys me. “With a tiny scoop of the vanilla, please,” I tell Greta.

Over dessert, she resumes the brain conversation. “There’s a very senior guy at our lab who’s convinced he’s figured out the function of this entirely mysterious area of the brain, this area at the very top, V7, that we know is somehow connected to visual processing. He thinks it’s semi-vestigial. He thinks it might be the part of the brain that allowed us, eons ago, to see energies and colors we don’t see anymore. He thinks it’s why people used to believe more easily in magic and angels and things. ‘The cerebral seat of enchantment,’ he calls it.”

“Is he possibly right?” I ask.

“He’s got no data. It’s more like a hunch.” She pauses, takes a deep breath. “We worry he may be going a little loopy.”

Jungo shoots her the same look he did before, but this time she avoids his glance.

Sometime after midnight, I’m all alone in their living room working on my laptop, chewing my last Nicorette of the day.

“Hi.” Not all alone: Greta has appeared.

“Hi,” I whisper back.

The bathrobe suggests she means to join me for a while. She sits at the other end of the couch. “Are you entirely sure you’re up to this? The bus trip and chaperoning them down there while they’re doing their Occupy thing? You know, you’re not obligated to prove you’re the coolest grandma on the planet.”

“It’ll be fun for me.”

She tucks her legs under her, her silence signaling skepticism.

“It’ll be an adventure,” I say.

“You’re not seventeen.”

“I’m not elderly, either. Anyway, you ought to be happy she’s willing to be chaperoned. Another kind of kid would just take off and to hell with whatever you said.”

“A kid like you at her age?”

“You know, I wasn’t as much of a hell-raiser as you seem to think.”

“Mom, what did you mean last month when you said you’ve been discovering new memories that you’re putting in the book?”

“What?”

“We were talking on the phone, and you told me you found yourself ‘remembering more and more all the time.’ And in another call, you said you were ‘surprised’ by some of the things you were remembering.”

“I meant that my memory is surprisingly good, crystal-clear, shockingly better than I suspected now that I’m dredging up stuff from forty and fifty years ago.”

“Like
what
stuff?”

I’m tempted to say what she used to say to me when she was a teenager:
Why does everything with you have to be a cross-examination?

“Little moments from my life, things I thought and said and did when I was eleven and fifteen and eighteen.”

“Right. And your book is totally
non
fiction, right? You’re not mixing in imaginary things with real things?”

“Greta? Just what the
fuck
are you trying to get at?”

“
Shhh,
don’t get upset. Just hear me out, okay? In the literature, there are lots of cases where intense exploration of one’s memories—like you’re doing now—can produce … unreliable results. Especially in older people.”

“
I
see. This is why Waverly was so concerned about my mental soundness. You and Jungo have decided I’m senile. Un-
fucking
-believable.”

“Mom, people of all ages for all kinds of neurological reasons can ‘remember’ things that didn’t necessarily happen. People generate false memories. There’s even a particular aneurysm that can occur, this one tiny artery in the brain can burst and produce … confabulation.”

“ ‘Confabulation,’ huh? You haven’t read a word of this,” I say, pointing at my laptop with both hands, palms up, “but you’re worried preemptively that my mind’s gone kaplooey, that I’m fantasizing, making shit up that I think is real? Christ! For twenty-five years I’ve put up with you treating me like a fragile freak because of the diabetes, but I
refuse
to be on some kind of dementia watch for the next twenty-five years.”

“I met your friend Alex Macallister—”

“Oh, Jesus!”

“—at a conference, and we had dinner. He’s extremely well versed in neuroscience on a clinical level, for a layperson, and he told me … He says you’re threatening to blackmail him, that you’ve developed some kind of morbid fantasy about, I don’t know, about … about violence that you and he committed back then, some kind of conspiracy. When you were young.”

I feel great relief along with my anger. For the last minute I’d begun to worry—maybe Greta has noticed dementia symptoms of which I’m unaware. But no, her fears aren’t her own, they’re Alex’s doing, disinformation, part of his
Gaslight
plot to make me seem mentally ill. I take a breath. “Alex Macallister is evil, Greta. An evil, lying weasel.”

“Mom,
evil
?”

“Lying about me when I’m the one proposing to finally tell the truth about what we did? Christ.” Steady, Karen. “Yeah, evil.”

“This is exactly what he said you’d say.”

“Really—those words? ‘Weasel’? ‘Evil lying weasel’?”

“No, how he said you’d react. Anosognosia—the suspiciousness and paranoia when people with a disability are unaware of the disability and deny it.”

“How am I trying to blackmail him? What am I trying to force him to do?”

“He didn’t say—”

“And exactly what is he claiming I’ve fabricated? Exactly what is my ‘morbid fantasy’?”

“He didn’t go into the specifics. He said for possible legal reasons, it was better if I didn’t know the details.”

“He is such a
pathological
bullshitter.”

“Some kind of plot, he said, political violence in the sixties.”

Another wave of relief. I’d caught him red-handed. “Really? How interesting. Because in the only conversation I’ve had with him about this during the last forty years, two months ago, in January, I didn’t mention
any
of the specifics at all,
nothing.
So whatever he said to you came entirely from his own memory.” The defense rests. Or am I the prosecution?

Greta is sitting perfectly still, breathing normally, staring straight at me, as tears start running down her cheeks. I move my computer and put out my arms, and she lets herself fall into my embrace, her head on my lap.

“Honey, it’s okay.” Now she’s shuddering, crying the way she did as a child, almost noiselessly. I stroke her head. “Shhhh … Take a breath. Look at me.” She looks up. “Have I said or done anything at all that seems off or demented? Tell me if I have.”

“Nooo,”
she says, sounding twelve again, sniffing, wiping the wetness from her face. “So what
did
you
do
? That you’re writing about? Blow up a building or something?”

“No.”

“
What,
then?”

“It’s complicated.”

I can’t tell her. It was Greta’s absolute ignorance that led Alex to overplay his hand and say too much; I worry I’ll somehow lose leverage with him if she or anyone else knows the details before the book is finished. She might tell Jungo, who might in turn tell God knows who. Any chatter or rumor that reached Washington could ruin whatever chance Stewart has of finding and quietly plucking confidential files from the government’s bowels. For that matter, what if she continues to think I’m confabulating false memories? What if she, a respected Rockefeller University neuroscientist, were to go to my publisher and tell them she’s worried that I’m senile and made everything up?

“Darling, I promise you will be the first person to read the whole thing when it’s all done,” I say, by which I mean edited, locked down, printed, irrevocably headed out into the world for the unseen finally to become the seen. “Until it’s done, all the blanks filled in, all my unanswered questions answered, it’s … I wouldn’t be comfortable. Also?” This is lame and lawyerly but accurate: “My publisher and I signed a very strict mutual nondisclosure agreement.”

“Okay.” She hugs me tighter. “I was worried. I
am
worried.”

“Don’t be, sweetie.”

As I lie in bed, unable to sleep, I realize that I’ve never had a serious enemy—indeed, that making no enemies had been an unconscious but defining MO for me. I’ve gone out of my way to mollify and even befriend rivals. I’ve mostly steered clear of politics. I’ve had legal adversaries, but I was always the one who sincerely preferred pleas and settlements to trials. I stayed married to Jack as long as I did so he wouldn’t hate me. Since I was nineteen, I’ve avoided making implacable enemies, tried hard not to give anyone a motive to dig out the truth and ruin me with it. For forty-six years, I’ve blackmailed myself into being collegial and unthreatening. But now I’ve become a threat. Alex Macallister, my oldest friend, is now my first true enemy.

Outside Grand Central I see three girls standing on the corner, all in burgundy University of Virginia sweatshirts, each taking cell-phone snapshots of one another, grinning as if they know they’re being secretly taped for a reality TV show. They’re like a sign of spring, giant red-breasted robins, seasonal urban megafauna. How is it that white tourists in New York look so much whiter than white New Yorkers?

I miss New York. I miss the hubbub. In particular, I miss the subway. In Los Angeles I’m either entirely alone—in my car, in my house—or among people I know well at my office, in class, in meetings, at meals. But on the New York City subway, I’m a member of a tightly packed group of strangers, alone but not alone, entirely free to read or daydream or snoop, dropped into a random sample of humanity, people of every age and race and circumstance at whom I can stare, at length and close up, examining each one’s face and clothing, noting the book she’s reading, the music to which the head right next to mine is bobbing, inferring sensibilities and moods and habits, imagining lives.

I even find the insane people interesting.

“There is
no … more … witchcraft,
” a wild-haired man sitting three seats away on the platform repeats quietly every ten seconds.

In New York, plenty of people actually look and act as I imagined people looked and acted when I was a teenager taking hallucinogens. I get up from the bench, lean out and look to see if a train’s coming, then glance down when I notice one of the ties on the track squiggling—it’s two rats trying to crawl over the rail. I gasp, disgusted, and turn away. Funny: during the first of my three hallucinogenic experiences I was in New York for the first time and rode the subway. The tracks wriggled then, too, but ratlessly.