Robert Wilson - The Divide

It was John—no doubt about it.

He looked up as she came through the door. His expression was somber and utterly focused.

“I need to do two things,” he said. “First, I need to talk to you. There are a lot of things I want to say while I still can.”

Susan nodded solemnly. She was too tired to be shocked by this sudden volley; she simply accepted it. “Second?”

He said, “I mean to find Amelie.”

Susan slept for five dreamless hours between three and eight o’clock in the morning.

She woke to find the window of her room laced with frost. She stood for a moment, touching the icy surface of the glass with one finger and wondering at the intensity of the cold. Outside, the world was a blurred grey-white wilderness. The snow had obscured the driveway. The highway was empty save for a plough inching southward under its strange blue safety light. The sky was dark and the snow was falling steadily. She dressed in the darkness of her room.

She carried her portable Sony tape recorder down the hall to John’s door, raised her hand to knock—and then paused.

John was playing the guitar. She had given him the instrument last night, had explained about the layover in Chicago and the sale at the Woodward house. He had taken the instrument wordlessly, his expression unreadable.

The music came softly through the closed door. He was good, Susan thought. She didn’t recognize the piece—something baroque. Not passionate music but subtle, a sad melody elaborated into a cathedral of notes. She waited until the last arpeggio had faded away.

He put down the guitar when she came through the door, looked questioningly at the tape recorder.

“It’s for me,” she said. “I don’t trust myself to remember.”

He nodded. She felt his sense of urgency: it was like something physical, a third presence in the room. Because of his impending neurological crisis, Susan thought, his “change”—or because of Amelie. Or both.

He’s changed. He’s different.

But she put the thought aside for now.

“Sit down,” John said.

She plugged a cassette into the recorder and switched it on.

All that morning he talked about his childhood.

They skipped breakfast. Twice, Susan paused to change tapes. She was afraid she would miss something. It was a fear John didn’t share, obviously. The words poured out of him like water from a broken jug. A cataract of words.

She understood what he was doing. He had explained it to her last night. These were things he had never said, small but vital fragments of his life, and he was afraid they would slip away uncommunicated. She was not expected to learn these things verbatim or play them back to him—the tape recorder was superfluous. It was the telling that mattered. “Nothing is permanent,” John said. “Everything is volatile. You, me, the world— everything. But it’s like throwing a stone into a pool of water. The stone disappears. But the ripples linger awhile.”

She was that pool. He was the stone.

He talked about his mother.

Her name was Marga Novak and she was working through her apprenticeship at a hairdressing salon in downtown Chicago when she answered a classified ad in the back pages of the Tribune: “Pregnant, single women wanted for privately funded medical study.”

She had recently become pregnant by a thirty-five-year-old shingle and siding salesman who had promised to many her but who left town, or was relocated, a couple of weeks after she announced the results of the pregnancy test. For Marga, answering the Trib ad was a last resort. But the salon was sure to fire her when she started to show, and she needed some kind of income.

She passed two screening interviews and was introduced to Dr. Kyriakides, who explained that the treatment—to prevent low birthweight and “give the child a healthy start”—might involve some discomfort in connection with the intrauterine injections but would be perfectly safe for both mother and child. Moreover, the follow-up study would include a fully paid private educational program for the baby and ongoing medical care for both of them. In the meantime all expenses would be taken care of and housing would be arranged.

She agreed, of course. Was there a choice? The injections were uncomfortable but the delivery was easy, even allowing for the infant’s exaggerated cranial size. Mother and child were installed in a two-bedroom town house near the university district, and John’s schooling began almost immediately.

“How do you know all this?” Susan asked.

“I broke into Max’s office one night. Came in from the Woodwards’ house in the suburbs. I was twelve years old. He kept his files and his notes in a little vault behind his desk. I’d seen it there a few years before. I’d seen him open it.”

“After all that time? You remembered the combination?”

John nodded and continued.

Marga’s parents were Czechs who had come to America before the war. She hadn’t spoken to her mother or father for fifteen years; she didn’t know whether they were still alive. This baby was in effect her only family.

Marga understood soon enough that John was a special child. Even the name “John”—she hadn’t chosen it herself. It had been Dr. Kyriakides’ suggestion. The doctor was polite but firm and Marga acquiesced because she was afraid of offending him. He paid all the bills, after all. In a very real sense, he owned her.

She hardly saw the baby. She tried to be a responsible mother, at least at first. But there were research people always coming to take the child away. He slept in a crib in Marga’s room most nights; they had that time together. But the doctors must have been doing something to him, she thought—something she didn’t understand.

He was a strange child.

He began talking too soon—at only a few months! But more than that. She sensed it every time she picked him up … every time she put him to her breast. There was a discomfort she once described to Dr. Kyriakides as something like the sound of a piano string gone off tune. (“Dissonance,” Kyriakides supplied.) And the baby’s eyes were too observant.

It wasn’t like touching a baby, she said. It was like touching … a dwarf.

After that confession, she saw even less of John. Marga pretended that this made her unhappy, but really it didn’t. … It was nice, having some time to herself for a change.

“I remember Max more clearly than I remember Marga. Marga is just a face. Small eyes. Big body, big shapeless dresses. She wore a perfume that smelled like linden flowers. Overpowering!

“Max was different then. He had more hair. A heavy Joe Stalin moustache and rimless glasses. It was frightening. I trusted him, of course. He was the central force, the operating engine. It was obvious that everything revolved around him, everybody followed his orders.

“He taught me more than anyone else. I had plenty of professional tutors. But it was Max who would really talk to me. If I asked a question, he took it seriously. Child questions, you know: how high is the sky and what comes after it? But he understood that I didn’t want trivial answers. I wanted the true answers.

“And there was the way he looked at me.

“You have to understand how the others treated me. The other research staff, even Marga. I would sit at a little table and they would run a Stanford-Binet or a Thematic Aperception and after a while they would start to register their disbelief—or their fear, or their resentment. I was strange, anomalous, different. I was scary. I learned to recognize it—I thought of it as ‘The Look.’ After I was a year old, Marga would never touch me, never wanted to pick me up. And when she did: The Look.