Lost In Place (30 page)

It seemed like the rational choice, but as long as my parents were alive it was a hopelessly impractical one. The thought of what it would do to them was so revolting, so inexpressibly obscene, that I could only shake my head and think, Maybe tomorrow I’ll come up with something, maybe tomorrow a miracle will happen.

On an impulse, one Saturday afternoon I asked Professor McBirney if I could borrow his car for the weekend and visit my parents. If I was keeping myself suspended in a living hell for their sakes, I figured, they could at least entertain and feed me every once in a while. He agreed. I thanked him, drove home and spent that evening on the couch wrapped up in the green blanket, watching Dad work on a watercolor. As usual, that night I had a stupid anxiety dream—only, this one was so stupid that I made myself remember it when I woke up so I could tell it to my dad in the morning, thinking he’d get a kick out of it.

In the dream I had been invited by NASA to give a lecture to a blue-ribbon committee of engineers gathered to discuss the construction of a space capsule that would carry a man to the planet Jupiter and back. Because of my
extensive experience as an astronaut on several of the Mars missions, the engineers wanted to know what suggestions I had for the Jupiter capsule. After I’d been introduced, I opened up my briefcase and produced a sheaf of diagrams I’d prepared showing exactly how to build the new capsule. As I lowered the first one into the projector, nervous laughter filled the room. I looked at the screen on the wall and saw, to my initial confusion, a crude drawing of a cardboard box.

It must be a prank, I thought, examining my pile of diagrams. When I held them in my hand they looked exactly as I’d drawn them, elaborate and precise, but as soon as I fitted each sheet into the projector, they turned into sketches of the cardboard box I’d sat in as a child dreaming that I was an astronaut. The nervous laughter in the audience turned to annoyed silence, then to an ominous murmur. At last the director of NASA asked me to step down. I tried to protest, but two men in dark suits with reflective sunglasses and tiny ear radios picked me up roughly and threw me out of the auditorium.

“What do you think of that?” I asked Dad.

“Pretty stupid, all right,” he said distractedly, getting his brushes ready for the afternoon’s work.

Obviously he hadn’t been paying full attention; otherwise he would have given more of a response. I didn’t say anything for a few minutes, while he picked up where he’d left off on the painting the day before. It was of the woods outside our living-room window at night, done almost entirely in shades of black except for two bright green plastic lawn chairs, facing each other and glowing eerily in the light coming from our house.

“You know what I want to call it?” Dad asked, looking at the painting and grinning.

“What?”

“ ‘They Think We’re Only Lawn Chairs.’ ” He chuckled, but I, feeling angry that he hadn’t shown more interest in my dream, didn’t respond. When he started touching up one of the chairs, I decided to return to the subject.

“You know what’s weird about that dream, though?”

“What?”

“It’s kind of true. I mean, I am a phony, if you think about it.”

“How are you a phony, Mark?”

“Think about it, Dad! I’m always trying to change myself into somebody I’m not. It’s the story of my life.”

He nodded and kept painting. I suppose he thought I hadn’t finished speaking. I was annoyed with him, but something about his way of handling the conversation—he hadn’t exactly rushed to disagree with me about my being a phony—provoked me to continue.

“Look at what I’ve done since I was thirteen: first I tried to become a kung fu master, then a concert cellist, now a professor of Chinese, and none of these are really me. I might as well put on a cape and pretend to be Superman; it wouldn’t be much more ridiculous. Other people do things gradually, but not me. I don’t want to have to take little steps to get somewhere; it’s always the Big Leap for me, always the Complete Transformation. Of course I don’t ever get there because I’m a quitter.”

To drive the point home, I went on to produce the evidence that I was a quitter, evidence that also showed that I consistently quit things whenever I was about to be revealed as a phony:

1) I had quit martial arts because kung fu hadn’t turned
me into a fearless warrior, something that any idiot could have told me I would never be.

2) After ten years of cello training, most of which I spent trying to please him and Mom, I heard Yo Yo Ma play once, which made me quit. If I couldn’t be him, I apparently didn’t want to bother at all, though any fool could have told me that Yo Yo Ma, besides being a genius, had been practicing six hours a day since he was three years old. But did I think I should have to work that hard? No way!

3) After becoming a Chinese major because it was the one subject I had a head start in and could therefore look smarter than I really was by focusing on it, I became convinced that reading Chinese philosophical texts in the original language would transform me into Tungli Shen. When I finally did read some of those texts in the original, however, and remained unenlightened, I lost all interest in Chinese culture.

4) (Most ludicrous of all) I had quit college because I was too depressed over being a quitter to concentrate on my homework.

Lastly I reminded my father of the pointlessness of everything, just in case he’d forgotten. “We’re just big clumps of atoms jiggling around in patterns. It’s just like you always used to say: We think we’re so special, but then if we give it any careful thought we realize,
Who do we think we’re kidding?
”

Dad didn’t look as if he was going to contradict me on this point, so I continued. “It’s finally dawned on me that all the people I like or respect have admitted to not knowing any of the answers to the great questions of life and death. Still, they all seem to live with that; they move forward. But I can’t! I’m constantly feeling, Is this all there
is? Even when I was little I was like that, which is probably why I was always daydreaming. Now I can’t daydream anymore because I’m old enough to know that all of that is just kidding myself, it’s just a smoke screen I throw up to distract myself. Now that I don’t even have that anymore, all I can see is fifty or sixty years of drudgery, after which I’ll probably drop dead in a retirement home. That what it’s all about, isn’t it?”

I paused dramatically, waiting for either a verbal response or at least applause. It had been a devastatingly good speech, I thought. But Dad didn’t even look up from his watercolor, so I decided to force him to speak.

“Jesus, Dad, you’re a social worker,” I said, allowing myself to feel angry. “You must have something to say about all this.”

At last my father put down his brush and raised his head to look at me. He pushed his reading glasses a bit higher up his nose, and examined me for what seemed like a long time. He raised one eyebrow, then lowered it; his mouth opened slightly, then closed again. He seemed to be running through several possible responses before settling on one.

At last his face broke into a grin. “Welcome,” he said, shrugging.

He waited to see what I would do. When I found that I really had no choice but to grin back, he nodded, then resumed painting.

EPILOGUE
 

I
n June of 1993 a trio of astronomers discovered a comet that had broken into several pieces on its last trip around the sun. Soon after they announced their discovery, other scientists observing the comet realized, by calculating its speed, position and trajectory, that the pieces would crash into the planet Jupiter in July 1994. The collisions, they said, would be of such magnitude that if they were to occur here on earth, civilization as we know it would cease to exist. Some scientists predicted the impacts would be so violent that we would be able to see evidence of the destruction through even amateur telescopes, four hundred million miles away from the action. Other scientists insisted that the comet fragments were too small, and would be swallowed up by Jupiter’s cloudy atmosphere and liquid-hydrogen surface like marbles dropped into a colossal milk shake. They warned astronomers not to get their hopes up for a cosmic display.

“We’ll never see it from here,” my dad said, agreeing as always with the naysayers, but that didn’t stop him from driving five hundred miles from Tucson, Arizona, where he and my mother moved after he retired, to California with his new telescope so that he and I could watch from the top of Mount Wilson just in case. I already had the old telescope with me in Los Angeles, which he’d given me, along with a good pair of binoculars, as a wedding present. We would set up the two telescopes side by side and compare the optics.

Dad’s dream of retirement had finally come true, thirty-five years after he’d entered the workforce, and long after the last of our Volkswagen buses had rusted out and been towed away. For this comet-viewing trip he drove a Plymouth Voyager that tended, in spite of sharing its name with the highest-flying NASA probe of all, to stall at high altitudes. He’d brought this problem to the dealer’s attention many times without any positive results. The day before the comet was to hit we tried taking it up Mount Wilson on a dry run to find a good place to set up our telescopes, and sure enough the Voyager quit voyaging before we reached the top.

“Buy American,” he grumbled as we coasted back down to L.A. “I’d like to shove this car up Lee Iacocca’s ass.” The next night we played it safe and took my Toyota Corolla. This meant we could only take his more compact telescope.

Fifteen years had passed since Dad had delivered his memorable “Welcome” speech in Connecticut. As rites of passage go, it could hardly compare in terms of sophistication or drama to such time-tested ceremonies as First Communion, the bar mitzvah or adult circumcision without painkillers. Still, it worked; that moment had proved
to be the watershed experience of my adolescence. As a child I could always count on my father to understand me, to know what it was like, to put himself in my shoes. On that afternoon a cycle was completed: he had let me know that I had finally managed to get
his
shoes on. Like the Wizard of Oz pinning a medal to the Cowardly Lion’s chest, my father merely drew attention, in his streamlined way, to what I already knew.

Another circular aspect to our exchange on that day was that after I’d tried, in a psychological sense, to get away from him for so many years, it was both ironic and cheering to run into Dad at the farthest point of my journey. If Norman O. Brown is right and we really aren’t ourselves, if we really are just masks representing our ancestors, my experience shows that there is a positive side to discovering that your individual soul is actually more of a corporation: being possessed means never having to say you’re alone.

At the same time, standing in my father’s shoes made it clear to me that while we had a lot in common, I was not entirely like him after all. The shoes didn’t quite fit. In fact, most people who know our family insist that in terms of personality, I resemble my father’s oldest brother, Ray, the wildly extroverted interior decorator, more than my wildly introverted father. But that’s another story.

I am a synthetic pessimist, not the real thing. I was seriously depressed over the pointlessness of existence for a year, but after I’d reached the point of exhaustion and knew there was no use going any further with it, I got sick of thinking about pointlessness. I didn’t solve the problem; I simply lost interest. I’d had enough of staring out
the window of my apartment. I went back to college the following year and tried to switch my major to English, only to learn that I didn’t have enough credits to do so; I had to finish up in Chinese. I took the attitude that I would do so for the diploma and not take it too seriously, and as a result ended up enjoying myself more than I would have predicted.

For a senior project I translated a group of Tungli Shen’s vernacular Chinese poems, which gave me the opportunity to meet with him once a week for a whole year and chat over pizza and coffee in a restaurant across the street from the Asian languages building. It was a low-stress project; I liked the poems, and I could relax knowing that if I had any questions about any of them, I had access to the world’s undisputed authority on the subject.

Once he retired, my father was able to devote all his energies to his three major interests: painting, astronomy and getting angry whenever he reads in the paper or sees on television that public interest in the supernatural is on the rise.

“Did you hear that, Martha? Colleges are offering courses in
astrology
.” This was the afternoon of the comet crash, and he was anxious about our trip up Mount Wilson. Would it become cloudy? Would we get a flat tire? What if a carjacker figured out that there might be a few astronomers on the dark, lonely road up to the famous observatory?