Gabriel Roth - The Unknowns

“Yeah,” I say. “I guess we’re done.”

I have a mode for retreat, practiced during those long hours in my childhood bedroom. My job now is to soothe myself, and I dedicate myself to it. I ignore a series of increasingly urgent voicemail messages from my father. I spend days reading collected editions of old comics and watching TV shows on DVD. For boys of my generation, the dream was not to be an explorer or an Air Force pilot but to own every comic book and every video game ever made, and I am keeping faith with my childhood self. Perhaps girls were a distraction all along, a fool’s gold, and the toys and hobbies they replaced were the true path. In my dreams, Cyclops and Wolverine fight each other to a stalemate over Maya’s corpse.

Right now Maya is going to work, filing stories, complaining about me to a friend. Although I can’t identify anyone she might confide in. I’ve been wearing the same T-shirt for three days. What if she turns up on my doorstep? I could change the T-shirt in anticipation of her arrival, but that would be self-defeating. I compromise by leaving a clean T-shirt on top of my dresser so I can pull it on when the doorbell rings. Months from now, when I’ve resumed changing my clothes and leaving the house, the T-shirt I’m wearing now will remind me of this period and I will try to smile but fail. I spend minutes at a stretch trying unsuccessfully to remember how she smelled. Maybe I should buy some of her citrus shower gel and become a pathetic old man who stands fully clothed in the bathtub sniffing at a bottle of shower gel. I’ve known her only a couple months, but I’d been waiting to meet her ever since I noticed Bronwen Oberfell’s profile while watching television, and so my mind took her in: things shifted into position around her and wedged themselves securely in place. The problem of loving her is a bug, a big one, a showstopper, and I chew on it endlessly, nagged by the feeling that I’m missing something. There must be some way to love her that can coexist with ignorance. Maya’s past is unknowable, but what part of anyone is knowable? We can only know each other the way we know distant stars: by observing years-old light, gathering outdated information, running calculations and making inferences.

Cynthia, worried about me, calls in the evenings. I try to present with the precise emotional blend that suggests psychological health for someone in my position: a mixture of grief and regret and wry sad humor and self-awareness, not repressing or wallowing but authentically experiencing and processing and healing. Cynthia is pretty acute when it comes to feelings, and delivering so complex a performance to the necessary standard of verisimilitude leaves me exhausted.

I consider hiring a prostitute, which I’ve never done, but I’m afraid it would provoke a repeat of the crying-on-a-stripper incident. I wonder if there are prostitutes who will let you cry on them, who will even make noises of consolation for a small surcharge.

The guiding idea, inasmuch as there is one, is to make myself comfortable while time works its anodyne ways on my heart. My dad’s phone calls are sand in the gears. When I see his name on the phone’s screen I erase the message unheard, but this makes me feel guilty, and my job at the moment is to minimize bad feelings, and after two messages a tipping point is reached. When he calls for the third time I find myself picking up the receiver and putting it to my ear.

“Eric, hi,” he says with a mixture of surprise and wheedling. “Listen, I’ve got a—”

“What’s your bank account number?” I say.

He makes some hemming noises and then begins to recite the digits, which I write on the margin of a newspaper. “And the routing code?” As he speaks I hold the phone two inches from my ear, so the voice saying the numbers sounds very small and far away. “This isn’t going to happen again,” I say before hanging up. I fax my signature to my financial manager to authorize the transfer. Five minutes later his assistant calls to let me know it’s gone through. She has the pragmatic good cheer of a nurse, someone who knows private things about people. I won’t speak to my father again until after the stroke, almost ten years from now.

That evening, the United States launches missiles at Dora Farms in southeast Baghdad, on the basis of reports that Saddam Hussein is visiting his children there. Fifteen civilians are killed. The reports turn out to be mistaken. Ten days later Pete Oberfell will parachute into Iraqi Kurdistan with the 173rd Airborne. Kirkuk falls quickly, and Pete’s division misses almost all of the fighting, to the relief of Pete’s family. The 173rd stays to provide security after the collapse of the Iraqi government.

Three years later, at Stacey Oberfell’s request, my mother and I will visit him at his parents’ house on Christmas Eve. The snow is unusually heavy, even for Colorado. On our way, my mother tells me that Pete’s fiancée broke off the engagement a few weeks after he got home.

Pete is still pale but now he towers over me, with big adult-sized arms and legs. As we shake hands, he takes in my presence like I’m neither a good thing nor a bad thing but a fact to be aware of.

“You showed me that computer game that one time,” he says, sitting down in a high-backed chair. “That was cool. I was going to learn computers right after I got back. I started taking a course.”

“How’d that go?”

“It wasn’t for me,” he says. “I couldn’t concentrate. I have a hard time paying attention to stuff like that.”

Stacey comes in with mugs of coffee on a tray. Pete takes the first one.

“So are you glad to be back in the country?” my mom asks.

“Honestly, no,” he says. “I hated every second when I was over there, but this is worse.” The tone in which he reports these feelings is factual and uncomplaining.

“How can this be worse than Iraq ?” my mother asks.

Pete’s level gaze never flickers. “What do you know about it?” he asks.

“Pete,” his mother says. Pete stands without saying a word and leaves the room. We don’t see him again. Back in San Francisco I make a donation, in Pete’s name, to a charity that helps veterans with posttraumatic stress disorder, and I wonder if Maya’s name should be attached as well.

I will see her once more, while I’m out with someone else. I quit girls for a long time after Maya. Even after I could reliably get out of bed, even after I had started working on a JavaScript graphics library and buying a car and leaving the apartment, the idea of meeting a girl and getting to know her was too much to contemplate. And then, about a year ago, time and boredom and loneliness wore me down and I signed up with an online dating site.

From the moment I clicked CREATE YOUR PROFILE the whole endeavor felt exhausting. I didn’t want a new set of protocols to optimize: what to write in the profile fields, what to say in an initial message, when to escalate from email to brunch — all the crap I’d wasted my life on, only now I was doing it alongside millions of extroverted and apparently well-adjusted people.

And then I had to go on these dates, dozens of them, one after another, all formally identical, struggling each time to remember that I was seated across from an entire human being with a unique consciousness and a full set of private associations, each of us iterating on our questions and answers like algorithms trying to mate. I was at the point of giving up when I met Annabelle. I liked her photo, with her overstyled clothes and wide-open face, and I liked the earnest way she actually answered the generic questions in the profile form instead of taking a meta approach like everyone else. We went to a sushi restaurant where I’d been with half a dozen other girls, but I found myself saying different things to her. She was shy and unostentatiously perceptive, and I began cultivating a crush on her. It’s going OK.