Taking Off (9 page)

“Yes?”

“I'd like to go to one that's held in New Mexico. I've kind of got my heart set on going to New Mexico now.”

“And ‘where the heart yearns to go, we mun go or die in the attempt,'” he murmured, mostly to himself, while he began rummaging through some papers on his desk. “Let's see—I've got a notice from the Institute for Future Œnophiles—but that's in Paris—and there's the Institute for the Study of Callipygian Women—but that's on the island of Martinique—and—ah!—here's the Faustroll Institute of 'Pataphysics—in New Mexico.”

“What?” I blurted hopefully.

He held a clutch of papers toward me. I snatched them from him and examined them. There was a notice from the administration about scheduling final exams, a list of lunch menus for the remainder of the school year, and a memo from the vice principal reminding faculty members that only he was permitted to park in the space beside the space allocated to the principal himself.

“Oh,” I said, managing a smile. “It was a joke.”

“Something to lift you out of the dump.”

“You really had me going there.”

“‘Nane can play the fool sae well as a wise man.'”

“I guess so,” I said on my way out the door.

“Peter,” he said to my back, “ask yourself something.”

“Yeah?”

“Does it really require an institute to get you to New Mexico?”

Chapter 17

Antinostalgia

THE ANSWER to Mr. MacPherson's question was, I decided while thinking about it on the way home, yes. Something as solid and convincing and worthy as the Summer Institute that Matthew would be attending would be required to justify my going to New Mexico—to justify it to my father, who retained full veto power over any travel that might take me farther than the next town. A trip to New Mexico was likely to cost some money, and if I was going to ask my father to contribute to the expenses—which was what I had in mind—I was going to have to be prepared to convince him that I was going in pursuit of something that he would approve, like an education at an institute sponsored by an agency of the United States government.

New Mexico. “Land of Enchantment.” The slogan stared at me from a poster that I had tacked to the wall beside my bed. I had written to the Department of Tourism of the State of New Mexico and requested everything that they could send me. I'd received a large, fat envelope stuffed with maps, posters, guidebooks, and brochures. Any of it that was suitable for framing I had thumbtacked to the walls of my room, in the gaps between my maps. I was surrounded by New Mexico and potential routes to New Mexico, but I was stuck in Babbington; my mind was in the Land of Enchantment, but my physical self was in the Land of Disappointment. I had to find a way to get there—but how?

I summoned a council of friends. We met in a booth at Kap'n Klam, Porky White's clam bar.

“If only there were some other institute that I could get into,” I said, concluding my opening remarks, “I'm sure my father would let me go. In fact, it's the kind of thing he'd be eager to have me do. But if I just told him that I wanted to build the aerocycle and fly to New Mexico for the hell of it, he'd never let me do it in a million years.”

They sat in glum silence. They all lived in similar circumstances. I wonder how many dreams of going elsewhere were entertained in the adolescent heads hanging over root beer and Coffee-Toffee soda that afternoon. We all wanted to go somewhere, anywhere, anywhere beyond Babbington. We wanted to be broadened by travel. Broadening was what we expected from travel, an enlargement of experience, an inflation of our essential selves.

Our teachers were to blame for this expectation and our collective wanderlust. They couldn't stop talking about the broadening effect of travel. Each of them had been somewhere and could prove it. They had slides. They had snapshots and postcards. They had souvenirs. Whenever one of those school days arrived with something in the air that made sitting in a classroom almost unbearable, we could mitigate the annoyance of our having to remain in school simply by asking about their travels.

Take, for example, Mrs. Bond. “Mrs. Bond, when you were in Minnesota, Land of 10,000 Lakes, did you find that—” one might begin, and following that prelude anything at all might be appended, and whatever it was it would induce in Mrs. Bond—who is serving here as a representative of all her colleagues, you understand—a reflective pause, bringing a recollective distance into her eyes, and sending her into what might be called a state of antinostalgia, the pain not of a yearning to return home but of a yearning to get away from home, or to return to a place other than home where one had felt for a while more keenly alive than one did at home, which, for Mrs. Bond, was more specifically the disease of Minnesotalgia, the yearning to be back in the Land of 10,000 Lakes rather than suffering the daily durance vile of teaching the history of New York State to some of its denser young citizens and spending her evenings in the smothering presence of Mr. Bond, who liked to think of himself as a humorist, the Man of 10,000 Jokes.

“Apply to the Faustroll Institute,” said Matthew quietly.

“There isn't any Faustroll Institute,” I said. “I told you—”

“Your father doesn't know that,” he said, just as quietly.

Reader, I wish you had been there. I wish you could have seen those young heads rise, buoyed by the possibilities that Matthew had placed before us.

“Oh, this is going to be good,” said Spike. She had a luminous smile, and she gave it to us now, allowing it to emerge slowly, to warm us, to drive away the chill drizzle of disappointment. “Very, very good.”

“We'll need a brochure—” I said.

“It could just be an announcement,” said Raskol. “If it's on official stationery, it wouldn't have to be a brochure.”

“Then we'll need official stationery.”

“I can do that,” said Marvin. “I can make a linocut based on the seal at the top of the letter Matthew got, set some type, and run off a few sheets in the print shop.”

“We'll need an application form—”

“We'll copy the one for SIMPaW,” said Matthew.

“Don't forget to change the due date,” Marvin cautioned him.

“And I'm going to have to get Mr. MacPherson to tell me what the Faustroll Institute of 'Pataphysics is supposed to be,” I said.

Chapter 18

I Am Challenged

ALBERTINE FROWNED. She rarely frowns. When she does, my world churns.

“Don't you think that perhaps you're being too hard on him?” she asked softly.

“Mr. MacPherson?”

“No. Your father.”

“Too hard on him?”

“You're making him into the grand naysayer, the crusher of all dreams, a comic-book villain. It seems a bit much to me.”

“Have I never told you about the time when I was given the opportunity to see a play, in New York, a professional production, in a real theater, for the first time in my little life?”

“You have.”

“I'll tell you again. These memories are so sweet. I love revisiting them. My father, the Grand Naysayer himself—”

“That's enough. I know the story. He wouldn't let you go. He made you paint the garage.”

“Right.”

“You've resented it ever since.”

“Right.”

“I just wonder sometimes if you have done the difficult work of getting inside his mind to find out what he wanted out of life, out of his life, what he might have yearned for.”

I said nothing for a while. I went to the living room window and looked out over East 89th Street. Across the way, on the roof of a town house, one of our neighbors had set up a telescope and invited friends to view Mars during its extraordinary perihelic opposition. Host and friends were behaving in the cocktail-party manner, drinking drinks, eating snacks, and chatting, but one by one each of them would bend to the eyepiece of the telescope and peer through it, and I found that I could easily imagine that for some of them, the ones whose expressions altered while they were looking at the planet that had drawn so near but was still so far, the experience was broadening. They came away from the telescope silent and distant. They had been away for a while. They weren't quite back.

“It's not nostalgia that sends me back to where I've been,” I said, turning toward Albertine, who had been reading while she waited for me to return. “It's curiosity. I want to notice what I didn't notice.”

“Well, then, in that case—”

“Yes. In that case, you're right. Completely right. I ought to spend some time in my father's mind.”

“I agree, but I think I'm going to be sorry that I brought it up.”

*   *   *

I BEGAN TO WONDER. I began to wonder whether my father might have wanted many of the things that I had wanted myself. I began to employ the techniques that I learned during that summer I spent at the Faustroll Institute, the methods of the science of imaginary investigations, and some of my discoveries have found their way into the pages that follow.

Chapter 19

A Baedeker for a Wild Goose

I WAITED until Mr. MacPherson was alone. I stood outside his classroom, watching through the narrow window beside the door. He was conjugating some esoteric verbs for half a dozen students, who were wearing the black berets and ribbons that identified them as members of the French Club, the
Coterie Française.
When they filed out at last, I knocked on the open door.

“
Oui
?” he said, still in the
Coterie
frame of mind.

“Mr. MacPherson, I have a question for you.”

“Yes?” he asked, since it was only me.

“When you were trying to lift me out of the dump, with that joke about the Faustroll Institute—”

“The Faustroll Institute of 'Pataphysics.”

“Right.”

“Yes?”

“What made you pick that?”

“Pick that? What do you mean by ‘Pick that'?”

“I mean, why did you make that up? The Faustroll Institute. Did you just pull that out of thin air, or is there something like it? Is it—by any chance—based on something real?”

“Ah. I see what you are asking. You are wondering, where do we get our ideas? When we have a burst of creative inspiration, where does it come from? Is it stimulated by something real—that is, as you put it, ‘based on something real'—or does it come from ‘nowhere,' so to speak? Is there a place within the mind called the imagination where nothing real resides, a place that holds only things that are imaginary, or is the relationship between the real and the imaginary a more intimate one, with a great deal of easy travel between the realm of the real and the realm of the imaginary, no passport required, no entry or exit visa demanded, come and go as you will—”

“I just want to know whether there is anything like the Faustroll Institute or whether I'm going to have to make the whole thing up from scratch.”

“‘From scratch.' Why do we say that?”

“I don't know,” I said. “It means ‘from nothing'—”

“Not quite, I think. More likely it means ‘from raw ingredients,' like ‘from whole cloth.'”

“I guess—”

“Perhaps you'll inquire about that at the Faustroll Institute.”

“The Faustroll Institute, that's what I—”

“If they set you the task of writing a dissertation, perhaps you'll choose to do it on the question of whether an imaginary solution can be built from scratch, from whole cloth, or must needs be built from a kit, a set of precut pieces—pieces that we cut as we live, without even noticing that we're doing the work, and stack away in a cabinet, where perhaps they grow dry and dusty with time, until the day when we find that we need them, take them out, and assemble them to make a flying machine or the underpinnings for a château in the Pyrenees.”

“Sure. Okay. I don't know what you're talking about, but I'll do it if I'm given the chance. What I need to know now is—”

“You need to know that 'pataphysics is the science of imaginary solutions, which symbolically attributes the properties of objects, described by their virtuality, to their lineaments.”

“Oh.”

“Do you see what I'm saying, lad?”

“No.”

“It's all in here.” He opened a drawer of his desk, the top right-hand drawer, which, for a right-handed person, is the drawer in which are kept the things that are most frequently used—like a stapler—or the things that one wants near at hand in a crisis—like a revolver. From the drawer he took a small book. He handed it to me. It was
Gestes & Opinions du Docteur Faustroll,
by Alfred Jarry, described in its subtitle as a
“roman néo-scientifique.”

“It's in French,” I said.

“Sharp lad. If you want me to write you a recommendation for the Faustroll Institute, I'll need to see a translation of the first chapter.”

“Oh.”

“Shall we say tomorrow?”

“I guess.”

“If you bring me a complete translation at the end of the summer, or at the start of the school year, I'll move you up to French IV.”

“I'll try,” I said, flipping through it.

“And if you bring me several translations, each different from the others, I'll put you in the advanced-placement class.”

“But what about the Faustroll Institute?” I asked, almost pleading, almost whining.

“If you set out from here and go looking for it, with this book as your Baedeker and
vade mecum,
I'm sure that you will find the Faustroll Institute and perhaps even get to know the great Dr. Faustroll himself.”

“You make it sound like Neverland, or Oz,” I said, with the growing suspicion that he was having more fun with me than I ought to allow.