folks acted drunker than they were. Like drinking was still the epitome of cool.”
“All right already,” you said, “I won’t go.”
“No, I think you should go. I want you to verify my experience.”
Experience, you think, is not something you want more of at the moment. You’d prefer a nap. No sooner do you close your eyes and begin to fade away, when you hear mild squawking from the backseat. You don’t mean to, but sometimes you forget Owen is there. It’s probably the occasional bursts of noise from the semi-trucks and the lack of movement that are beginning to wake him. His eyes are still closed, but his little lips are smacking together slowly. If you get moving again, he’ll stay asleep. You give Harry D. Jacobs the middle finger and pull back onto the road.
There’s still an hour and a half to kill before brunch. You head south on Randall Road, noticing the newest stores to go up in the cornfields you used to run along in cross-country practice, and soon your thoughts turn again to Alex Mueller. He was your closest friend and rival on the cross-country team. The moment that sticks out most is when he told you about how his grandfather and a few other teenagers in Auschwitz chipped in to get a prostitute so they wouldn’t have to die virgins. “So what do you say?” Alex asked you and a teammate, “it’ll only cost fifty bucks each.” You declined, hoping you wouldn’t have to die before actual sex would take place with Lane.
You heard from a friend of a friend that Alex is going to be in Chicago on business and plans to attend the reunion. You told this to The Professor last time you saw him at the gym.
“Are you gay?” he said, loading the bench press for you.
“What do you think?”
“I wouldn’t be asking if I didn’t have suspicions.”
The weights felt heavier than usual. Weightlifting was one of the first of The Professor’s suggestions. He kept saying that the tension would find a detrimental outlet if you didn’t give it a healthy outlet.
“He’s just an old track buddy,” you said, putting down the bar. “I don’t know what the fixation is. He was a friend, not a best friend. I just have this intuitive feeling he’s done something interesting, something—”
“You’re not going to say profound, are you?”
“Take off some of this weight. Are you trying to kill me?”
“Let me do a set, then I’ll change it.”
In between breaths, The Professor stammered out, “This… latent…homo…sexuality…When do…you think…it began?”
“It’s not homosexuality. I’m just curious.”
He sat up and wiped his forehead. “A serious disparity lies between who or what you think you are and what or who you think other people think you are. It’s a matter of performance. To put it in layman’s terms, it’s like you’re the director, the actor, and the audience of a play. And that play is being filmed from backstage by a voyeur.”
You had no idea what he was talking about, as usual, but it did strike you as vaguely poetic.
“Voyeur?” you said, “do you mean I’m starring in my own porn?”
After another set, he said, “I hadn’t thought about it like that, but sure. Okay, yes, in that milieu, I suppose we could say you’re trying to have intercourse with yourself via Alex Mueller. Boomerang autophilia is the proper term.”
Before you know it you’re halfway to your sister’s house. In an effort to turn around and after a U-turn that nearly clips another car, you get confused and end up on I-90 West. You consider “West” for a moment—the Heroes and Anti-Heroes course you taught last spring, how Huck Finn lit out for the West; you consider not going back to your parents’ house, driving out to your dead grandmother’s hometown in Iowa, four hours away; you consider not stopping there either and continuing to Colorado, hell, all the way to California, visit some old college friends in San Francisco. But you know you can’t do any of this; you don’t really like San Francisco anymore and Owen is going to be hungry when he wakes up and pulling over to feed him would interrupt your momentum and you’d never make it farther than the Mississippi.
Coming up Randall Road again you see someone with a backpack walking on the side of the road. It looks an awful lot like Alex. Mirage?
Suddenly an enthusiastic Daa-daa! rings out from the backseat.
You can’t slow down to get a better look anyway, not in this traffic.
“It’s okay, hon, we’ll be at grandma and grandpa’s soon. Have to stop at the grocery store first. Grandma needs butter and eggs.” Not true, but running around the aisles will keep the little guy occupied. You’re still ten minutes away from the store, though, and Owen is definitely awake and grumbling. To keep him happy in situations like this, where you can’t play or read a book with him face-to-face, you often engage him in conversation about whatever is on your mind.
“Tell me again,” you say, hitting the gas, “how much do you think about Mommy? No, I won’t take notes this time, and you’re not obliged to stick to your answer in subsequent interrogations. Yes, I know you didn’t know her for very long, but she was a beauty and a mensch and she loved you like the dickens.”
You adjust the rearview mirror so that you can see his face better. He’s staring at you, sucking his thumb, which is not a habit except when he wants to feel especially comforted.
“How often do I think about her, you ask? Well, the answer to that would take more time perhaps than we have before our arrival at the store. In any case, I knew Mommy very well—you’ll have to take my word for it—and… oh…I see…an afterlife? I don’t know if there is one—I mean, maybe you can tell me since you were there recently—is there a beforelife?”
Owen makes his noise for what a bird sounds like.
“I guess it is a strange question, but you see my point. Even if there is a beforelife or afterlife, without who you are now, without that beautiful little body of yours, my sweet prince, it won’t matter. What matters then? My best answer—and I don’t mean to be glib as I know you take things to heart, and perhaps you are a bit too sensitive at times, if I may say so—but my best answer is that she still lives inside of you. Yes, that’s right, in your DNA. What—how does she live inside of me then? I know I don’t have any of her DNA, except as you well know the strands of her hair which I keep finding in odd places around the house and storing in a plastic baggie in my sock drawer. I know, I know, it’s foolish if not cliché. But she lives, to answer your question, in my mind.”
You check the rearview. He’s looking out the window in a daze at the subdivisions racing by.
“It’s not the answer you wanted, I can tell. It’s all right if you want to be mad at me. I can take it. I am really tough that way. Besides I realize your ears must be tired. I know from years of experience that your grandma can talk an ear off. On those once-a-month, two-hour phone calls, I get cauliflower ear—in both ears! Yes, my mother, not Little Ma. Did I ever tell you the story of my mother making me pay for long-distance? Before cell phones when I would visit your grandma, say, around a holiday, I would occasionally make phone calls to whatever girlfriend I had at the time. A month later your grandma would send me a photocopy of her phone bill with my calls highlighted. She would then expect a check for $12.56 or whatever it was. I suppose I should have predicted this, as it came from the same woman who avoided the unlisted phone number fee by using her maiden name in the phone book.”
He looks back at you in the mirror with a funny face.
“I am sorry I raised my voice.”
He continues the face.
“Really, you sympathize with her?”
He continues the face and now gives you his intense eyes look.
“What is it, my lad? Oh that, under my lower lip? That is a nice