Matthew Thomas - We Are Not Ourselves

Outside, he broke into a trot. The light at the corner was turning red and he sprinted across the avenue. He ran several blocks, all the way to the park along the Hudson’s edge, where he slumped on a bench and tried to catch his breath. His shirt was soaked with sweat. He hadn’t run that hard, that long, since high school. He took deep, fugitive drafts of the river air and tried to focus on the sun on his neck. A passing tugboat let out its foghorn. The sound reminded him of a bullfrog lowing, and he had a strange, familiar feeling that he couldn’t place. He looked at the diaphanous vapors in the atmosphere and out at the boats passing slowly and the competing skyline across the river, and he thought of the way life arranged itself around water.

He’d had intimations of this moment before. Once, he’d stood in the predawn dark in the kitchen, unplugging his wife’s phone from the charger and plugging in his own, and as he held it in his hand he realized that he could not recall the device’s name. He pressed his hands against the countertop’s edge and leaned his forehead into the microwave, fighting through a thick, aphasic fog, and, after at least a minute had passed, he began to feel a panic like the kind he felt when he cut off the circulation to his arm in his sleep and woke with a start and called out, shaking and flapping it uselessly for so long that he was sure he had lost the use of it forever, until the blood came pumping back in and he recovered sensation in painful stages. All he’d been able to conjure had been the last line of a vaguely recollected poem— blackberry, blackberry, blackberry —and then he’d remembered the poem’s title—“Meditation at Lagunitas”—and finally realized with a mixture of relief and fear that BlackBerry was the very name of the thing he was holding, that his subconscious mind had been faster at retrieving it than his conscious mind, and that this could be an augury of what was to come.

Babe Ruth hit 714 home runs in his career, Hank Aaron 755, Barry Bonds 763. Hack Wilson set the single-season RBI record with 190 in 1930, though decades later historians found a discrepancy in a box score and changed the number to 191. Lou Gehrig played in 2,130 consecutive games, Cal Ripken 2,632. Orel Hershiser pitched 59 consecutive scoreless innings in ’88, eclipsing Don Drysdale’s record of 58 1/3. Cy Young won 511 games, Walter Johnson 417, Christy Mathewson and Pete Alexander both 373. Barry Bonds walked 2,558 times, Rickey Henderson scored 2,295 runs, Hank Aaron drove in 2,297 men, and Pete Rose got 4,256 hits, passing Ty Cobb’s 4,191—some say 4,189—in ’85. Mickey Mantle finished with a.298 lifetime batting average because of some mediocre seasons at the end of his career. Ted Williams lost the MVP award in 1941 to Joe DiMaggio and his 56-game hitting streak, despite hitting.406 that year. Dwight Gooden struck out 276 men as a rookie. Ralph Kiner won 7 home run titles despite playing in only 11 seasons.

Maybe he should have committed other facts to memory. Maybe he should have learned the dates of elections and political coups d’état. Maybe he should know the presidents in chronological order and their vice presidents and the dates of their elections and deaths, or the history of Mesopotamia or metallurgy, or the basics of quantum mechanics, but he didn’t know those facts, he knew baseball facts. He’d learned baseball facts originally because his father had known baseball facts and he liked having them to share with him, and then eventually they were just what rattled around in his head.

Roberto Clemente had a.317 lifetime batting average, was voted to start 17 All-Star games, and finished with exactly 3,000 hits. His plane crashed in Puerto Rico during an off-season relief mission he attempted to fly to Nicaragua in 1974 to deliver food to starving people. He was elected to the Hall of Fame immediately, the Baseball Writers’ Association of America forgoing the five-year waiting period they gave themselves to consider the value of a player’s contribution to the game.

He waited for the sensation of panicked blankness to come back, and after a while he started to wonder whether it had happened at all or whether he’d conjured it out of his fears. Something in the scene in the classroom had triggered it, some nagging déjà vu. He kept circling back to the moment when he turned to the board and saw the single word and didn’t remember how it got there. It hovered inscrutably, an insistent message in it.

He thought of the visit he had paid to his father’s own classroom before anyone knew what was really going on with him. He had watched his father come apart before his eyes.

Empathy . He hadn’t always had it. It was a muscle you had to develop and then keep conditioned. Sometimes he thought his real goal wasn’t to teach them to write better essays but to get them to think more about what it meant to be human.

Michelle had been trying to persuade him to reconsider his firm stance against having children, a child. He had told her from the beginning that he wasn’t comfortable taking the chance he’d get the disease or that the kid would. The line was going to end with him, he had said, and she had accepted it, until she lost her mother after Christmas.

He took out his wallet and dug around in the recesses of its folds for the little piece of tooth. He held it in the sunlight, felt the smooth enamel against his fingertips. It could have been a sliver of seashell, a shard of stone or scree. He had transferred it from wallet to wallet over the years. He had to stop torturing himself with it. He wasn’t helping anyone with all this regret.

He had agreed the night before to go in for genetic testing. She had gotten him to commit to having a child if he definitely didn’t have the gene. It struck him now that what he had been thinking about when he drew a blank before the class was an idea of this potential child. He could see a suggestion of this child’s face, an amalgam of his wife’s and his own. The truth was that even if he had the gene, he’d be willing to have a kid anyway, and not just because there was a chance he wouldn’t get the disease. If he got it, he’d do whatever he needed to do to shield the kid from it as long as he could.

The truth, he saw now, was that he wanted more than anything to have a child with his wife. Her life was as sparsely populated as his was, familywise. After her mother’s passing, her father had moved out to California to live with her brother, Ricky. Except for a cousin in Houston, Michelle didn’t have anyone else. Michelle and his mother had circled around each other for a few years. At first he thought it had to do with Michelle’s being Nicaraguan American, but lately he believed it had more to do with the fact that Michelle and his mother both had such strong personalities. They butted heads without the release of ever actually meaning to do so. Maybe it had something to do with the fact that Michelle was a lawyer, that she’d been a clerk for a Supreme Court judge and was now at a corporate law firm. She’d already lived a lot of the life his mother might have wanted to live, and she wasn’t even thirty-five. His mother and Michelle had gotten close enough lately, though, that Michelle was now the one who called his mother when they had to make plans with her, and when they went over to his mother’s house, Michelle and his mother sat at the kitchen table after dinner playing backgammon while he watched television in the den. He knew that if he had a kid, Michelle and his mother could pull together even more, and it wasn’t hard to imagine Michelle calling his mother “Mami” soon enough, which he thought would make both of them happy.

He could honor his father by loving the kid the way his father had loved him. And if he had to be vulnerable in front of the kid, if he had to be defenseless and useless and pathetic, if he had to forget things and piss himself and get lost on the way home, then so be it. If the kid didn’t handle it well — well, that was what kids did. They went out too often, they stayed out too late, they said things that cut to the quick, they forgot responsibilities, they broke your heart. Years later they thought about it all.