Robert Wilson - The Divide

“But Max was different. Max knew what I was. Took pride in me. That meant a lot.

“I decided he was my real father. That Marga was only some kind of hired nurse. Eventually, of course, they took me away from Marga altogether; and then Max was my father, or the nearest thing.

“I trusted him.

“That was a mistake.”

Susan said, “Why did they take you away from Marga?”

“She came home from the Safeway one morning and found me taking apart the radio. I was doing a pretty good job of it. I had it sorted by component size—quarter-watt resistors on the left, power supply on the right. Desoldered the parts with a needle from her sewing kit—I heated it over a candle. Burned myself a couple of times, but I was beginning to make sense of it.”

“Marga was angry?”

“Marga was frightened, I think, and angry, and she was wearing The Look—which is really a kind of horror. Changeling in the crib, worm in the cornmeal …”

“She punished you,” Susan guessed.

“She turned on the left-front burner on the Hotpoint and held my hand over it. Second-degree burns. I healed up pretty fast. But they took me away from her—or vice versa.”

It wasn’t all bad (John explained). There was more luxury than torture. He was pampered, really. And in some ways, it was an ordinary childhood. He had toys to play with. He remembered the extraordinary vividness of colors and sensations … the radiant blue luster of a crib toy, the pale intricate pastels of a sun-faded beachball; he remembered the letters etched on glass storefronts like black cuneiform (“chicken-tracks,” Max called them), pleasing but mysterious.

He remembered the day he learned to read—acquiring the phonetics and the approximations of written English, puzzling out a newspaper headline to himself. He remembered riding into town on some errand with Dr. Kyriakides, and his amazement that the angular marks on signs and windows had resolved suddenly into words— A P, USED BOOKS, WOOLWORTHS—this pleasure mixed with frustration because, having recognized the words, he could no longer see the lovely strange chicken-tracks. The marks had turned into words and words they stubbornly remained. The abstraction had displaced the concrete. Story of his life.

One by one, category by category, the objects of his perception faded into language. A tree became “tree”; “tree” became “a noun.” Categorical hierarchies exploded around him, somehow more organic than the organic things they named. For instance, the oak in front of Marga’s town house: even when he tried to focus exclusively on the texture of its bark or the color of its leaves, he triggered a network of associative ideas—gymnosperm and angiosperm, xylem and cambium, seed and fruit—that displaced the thing itself. He became afraid that his vision—that the world itself—might dissolve into a manic crystal-growth of pattern and symbol.

“It’s an inevitable process,” Max told him. “It’s good. Nothing is lost.”

John wondered whether this was true.

He began to understand the way in which he was different, though no one would really explain it and even Dr. Kyriakides dodged the subject. He learned how to slip into the research unit’s snail medical library when his keepers weren’t looking, usually during lunch hours or bathroom breaks. The neurological tomes that resided there were too advanced for him, but he could divine a little of their subject. The brain. The mind. Intelligence.

On his fifth birthday he asked Dr. Kyriakides, “Did you make me the way I am?”

After a hesitation and a frown, Max admitted it. “Yes.”

“Then you’re my father.”

“I suppose … in a way. But Marga wouldn’t understand, if you told her.”

“I won’t tell her, then,” John said.

It didn’t matter. He understood.

Outside this small room in Toronto, the snow continued to fall. Susan wondered whether Amelie could see the snow. Whether Amelie was cold—wherever she was.

The tape recorder popped up a cassette. Susan inserted a new one.

“I trusted Max until he farmed me out to the Woodwards,” John said. “Even then—at first—I gave him the benefit of the doubt.”

The explanation was plain enough. Max had explained meticulously. The research was funded by the government and now the funding had been revoked. The legality of it was questionable and people were afraid of the truth getting out. John would have to be careful about what he told the Woodwards. “Also, we won’t be able to see each other for a while. I hope you understand.”

John didn’t answer.

Max had checked the family out and they were decent enough people, an older couple, childless, referred through a contact in an adoption agency. “Obviously, they don’t know what you are. You may have to conceal your nature. Do you understand? You’ll have to become at least passably ‘normal’—for everyone’s sake.”

John listened politely, watching Max across the barrier of his polished oak desk in this indifferent room, his book-lined office. “You have to do what the government tells you,” he said to Max. John was five years old.

“Yes, I do. In this case.”

“But you’re a Communist,” John said.

Max rose slightly in his chair. “What do you mean? Who told you that?”

“Nobody told me. I watch you when people talk about politics. I watched you when Kennedy came on TV and talked about Castro. Your face. Your eyes.”

Max laughed. John was pleased: even at this terrible moment, the hour of his exile, he was able to make Max happy. “I should never mistake you for a child,” Max said. “But I always do. No, I’m not a Communist. I was at one time. During the war. I gave it up when I came to this country. My uncle died fighting for Veloukhiotis, and it was pointless—completely futile. Now we have the Generals. Is there any sense in that? I don’t believe in revolution any more.”

“But you believe in the rest of it,” John pressed. “Marxism. Leninism.”

He had read the entry under “Communism” in the Columbia Encyclopedia and these questions had been on his mind.

“Not even that,” Max said, more soberly. “I gave it all up.”

“You stopped believing in Marxism?”

“Do you really want to know?”

John nodded.

“I stopped believing in ‘the people.’ I’m an apostate from that central faith. Marx believed that mankind was perfectible through economics. But it’s a childish idea. People talk about Stalinism, but Stalinism is only fascism with a different accent, and fascism is simply the politics of the monkey cage. The failure is here”—he thumped his chest—“in the mechanism of the cells. In our ontogeny. If you want to perfect mankind, that’s where you begin.”

“But you still believe in the perfectibility of mankind.”

“Wouldn’t you rather talk about the Woodwards? Your future?”

“I want to know,” John said.

“Whether I believe in the perfectibility of mankind? I will tell you this: human beings are cowards and thieves and torturers. That I believe. And yes, I believe the species can be improved. Why not? The only alternative is despair.”

But there’s a contradiction here, John wanted to say. How could you want to improve a thing when you despised it so entirely to begin with? What could you build out of that contempt?—especially if the contempt encompasses your own being?

But he didn’t ask. Max was going on about the Woodwards, about school—“Don’t trust anyone,” he said. “Anyone might be your enemy.”

It was a sweeping statement. Including you? John wondered. Should I mistrust you, too? Is that what this is all about?