“I think you’re right,” he said. “I think we should talk.”
“I agree. Uh, maybe we can get together tomorrow?”
“You’re at the Carlton?”
“Yes.”
“I’ll meet you in the lobby. Is noon all right?”
“Of course—sure—”
“See you there.”
And then the line went dead, and she was left sleepy and amazed, staring at the receiver in her hand.
She rode the elevator down at five minutes to noon the next morning and found him waiting.
He was standing by a marble pillar, dressed in worn Levis, track shoes, and a blue windbreaker over a T-shirt, with his hands tucked into his jacket pockets. Susan moved toward him with her heart beating hard, as his head swiveled owlishly and his eyes focused in on her.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t think I did a very good job yesterday. I didn’t know how to start.”
“You’re in a tough position,” John said. “The messenger with bad news.”
“Plus—I guess I was a little frightened.”
He smiled. “Of me?”
She laughed, but it was true. She
had
been frightened. Still was. But it was easier now, at least a little. “Where do we go for lunch?”
“Depends. I don’t have a lot of cash. Are you on an expense account?”
“It’s paid for.”
“By Max?”
“Ultimately.”
“Well, there’s a decent Japanese restaurant around the block. I’m sure Max can afford it.”
“Sounds fine,” Susan said.
She had never eaten Japanese food but didn’t want to admit it. The atmosphere in the restaurant was traditional: koto music and waitresses in tight kimonos. She felt somewhat gauche, lost among the rice paper screens; she let John order for her.
The waitress brought miso soup in a wooden bowl. No spoons —apparently you were supposed to pick up the bowl like a cup. John said, “You’re not used to this.”
She forced a smile. “Redondo Beach WASP. We never ate anything more challenging than Mexican. I remember a lot of TV dinners.”
“The main course is tempura. Nothing scary. Unless you have a problem with shrimp?”
“No, that’s fine. You know, I learned to eat Cantonese and Szechuan in college. Just never got around to Japanese.”
John turned his attention to the soup. He ate meticulously, Susan observed; almost mechanically. When the bowl was empty he pushed it aside and ignored it. “Max knows I’m ill.”
Straight to the point, Susan thought. “He suspected it.”
“Is he still working with prenatal growth regulators?”
“Not officially.”
“But on his own?”
“Some animal research.”
“Out of curiosity, I wonder, or guilt?”
Susan frowned. “I’m sorry?”
He waved his hand—never mind.
The waitress brought sashimi on wooden plates. “Thank you,” Susan said. The waitress bowed and returned a “Thank you.”
“It might be easier,” John said, “if you just told me what you know about me. We can begin there.”
But it was a tall order:
What kind of monster do you think I am?
Susan told him what Dr. Kyriakides had explained to her—that John was the product of a clandestine research project conducted in the fifties. Before his birth he had received an intrauterine cocktail of cortical growth regulators, human hormones Dr. Kyriakides had isolated under a classified government grant. The purpose of the research was to produce a superior human being, specifically in the neocortical functions—the most highly evolved functions, such as intelligence.
John’s smile was fixed. “ ”Highly evolved‘—sounds like Max. He told you all this?“
“At greater length. And with more breastbeating.”
“He does feel guilty.”
“I have the impression he always did.”
“Did he mention that his ”government grant‘ was by way of a client operation of the CIA? That his name came up twice in the Church Committee hearings?“
“Yes. He says they were funding everything in those days— LSD at McGill, exotic botany at Harvard. Postwar insanity.”
“Did he also mention that he was the closest thing to a father I had for the first several years of my life?”
“Something like that.”
“And that he farmed me out for adoption when the project was closed down?”
“He didn’t have a choice.”
“But now he wants to talk… because he thinks I’m dying.”
“I should never have said that! I’m sorry—I just wanted to get your attention.”
“But it’s possible?”
“The animal studies have been mixed,” Susan admitted.
“Some animals have died.”
She looked at the table. “Yes.”
The tempura arrived then. Susan picked at hers. It was good, but she’d lost her appetite.
John ate vigorously.
When the check arrived Susan used her credit card and filed away the customer copy. John said, “Are you up to walking a little?”
She nodded.
“It’s a good day for it. Autumn is the best time of year in this city.” He stood up and pulled his windbreaker over his T-shirt. “I don’t get many afternoons like this.”
They rode the College streetcar west to Augusta. The day was cool but endlessly sunny, the sky a shade of blue you never saw in LA. When the streetcar stopped, John climbed down through the rattling mid-car doors and offered her his hand. How dry his skin is, Susan thought… and then scolded herself for thinking it. He wasn’t an animal, after all.
He led her south through a maze of ethnic markets, fish stalls, vegetable bins, used-clothing outlets. This was Kensington Market, John said, and it was his favorite part of the city.
It was also crowded and more than a little bewildering—no two signs in the same language—but Susan felt some of the carnival atmosphere, maybe picking it up from John. He took her to a café, a sidewalk table under an umbrella and far enough from the fish stalls that the air was tolerable. He ordered two cups of fierce cappucino. “Legal drugs.” Smiled at her. She sipped the coffee. He said, “Well, maybe I am dying.”
Her cup rattled against the saucer. “Do you always have these two-track conversations?”
“You mean, is this a manifestation of my superhuman intellect? Or just an annoying habit?”
“No, I don’t mean that. I mean—well, if you don’t want to talk about it—”
“Max must have warned you, surely? John the monster.” He startled her by closing his eyes. “You’re wearing Levis and a brown sweater with a checked collar showing at the neck. You have brown hair, blue eyes, a mole under your right cheekbone and another one just under your ear. You have both hands on the table; the nail is chipped on your left index finger. You don’t wear nail polish. The building behind you is catching the sunlight; it has twenty-eight rectangular windows facing the street and a revolving door with a mango cart parked on the sidewalk in front of it. The cart vendor is wearing a yellow plaid shirt and a black beret. A grey Nissan Stanza just drove past, southbound—it should be at the intersection by now.” He opened his eyes and stared at her. “You come from Southern California and you’re timid with people. You have an exaggerated respect for Dr. Kyriakides—take my word for it—and some unresolved feelings about your own father. You have a suppressed speech impediment that begins to surface when you talk about your home, which you don’t like to do. You think you like me, but you’re still a little frightened. You—”
“Stop it!”
There was a silence. Susan blushed deeply.
John said, more gently, “I don’t want you to forget what I am.”
“As if I c-could!” She thought about leaving. She wasn’t sure her legs would hold her. “How can you know all that about me?”
“Because you’re a book. Not just you, Susan. Everyone. A book of gestures and twitches and blinks and grimaces.”
“Do you
want
me to be frightened of you?”
“Only… appropriately frightened.” He added, “I’m sorry.”
Gradually, she relaxed back into her chair. “Do you still want to talk?”
“Do you still want me to?”
She took a deep breath. “Yes.”
“To you, or to Max?”
“Talk to me if you want. But only Dr. Kyriakides can help you.”
“If in fact he can.”
“If.” She didn’t want to risk lying—assuming it was possible to lie to him.
“It’s a game of chance, then, isn’t it? Roulette.”
“I’m not the doctor.”
“You’re the doctoral candidate.”
“It’s not exactly my field. I never worked directly with Dr. Kyriakides on this, except for a few tissue studies.”
He shook his head. “I’m not ready to talk to Max.”
“Then me. Talk to me.”
He gave her another long, speculative look. Susan could not help wincing. My God, she thought, those eyes! Not the windows of the soul… more like knives. Like scalpels.
“Maybe it would be good to talk,” he said. “It’s been a long time since I talked to anyone.”
“I’m not going anywhere,” Susan said.
She asked whether he had been having symptoms.
“Episodes of fever, sometimes dangerously high. Transient muscular weakness and some pain. Fugue states—if you want to call them that.”
“Is that what was happening yesterday?”
He nodded.
“I don’t know what you mean by a ”fugue state.“”
He sipped his cappucino. “May I tell you a story?”
The formal research project had ended when John was five years old. He was adopted by a childless couple, the Woodwards, a middle-income family living in a bleak Chicago suburb. The Woodwards renamed him Benjamin, though he continued to think of himself as John. From the beginning, his adoptive parents were disturbed by his uniqueness. He didn’t do especially well in school—he was contemptuous of his teachers and sometimes a discipline problem—but he read beyond his years and he made conversation like an adult; which, the Woodwards told him, was very disrespectful.
“Jim Woodward was a lathe operator at an aerospace plant and he resented my intelligence. Obviously, a child doesn’t know this, or doesn’t want to admit it. I labored for almost eight years under the impression that I was doing something terribly wrong—that he hated me for some fundamental, legitimate reason. And so I worked hard to please him. To impress him. For example, I learned to play the flute. I borrowed a school instrument and some books; I taught myself. He loved Vivaldi: he had this old Heathkit stereo he had cobbled together out of a kit and he would play Vivaldi for hours—it was the only time I ever saw anything like rapture on his face. And so I taught myself the Concerto in G, the passages for flute. And when I had it down, I played it for him. Not just the notes. I went beyond that. I
interpreted
it. He sat there listening, and at first I thought he was in shock—he had that dumbfounded expression. I mistook it for pleasure. I played harder. And he just sat there until I was finished. I thought I’d done it, you see, that I’d communicated with him, that he would approve of me now. And then I put the flute back in the case and looked at him. And he blinked a couple of times, and then he said, ”I bet you think you’re pretty fucking good, don’t you?“ ”
“That’s terrible,” Susan said.
“But I wasn’t convinced. I told myself it just wasn’t good enough, that’s all. So I thought, well, what else is there that matters to him?
“He had a woodworking shop in the basement. We were that kind of family, the Formica counters in the kitchen, Sunday at the Presbyterian church every once in a while, the neighbors coming over to play bridge, the woodwork shop downstairs. But he had quality tools, Dremel and Black and Decker and so on, and he took a tremendous amount of pride in the work he did. He built a guitar once, some cousin paid him a hundred dollars for it, and he must have put in three times that in raw materials, and when it was finished it was a work of art, bookmatched hardwood, polished and veneered—it took him months. When I saw it, I wanted it. But it had been bought and paid for, and he had to send it away. I wanted him to make another one, but he was already involved in some other project, and that was when I saw my opportunity—I said,
”I’ll
build it.“
“I was nearly thirteen years old. I had never so much as touched his woodworking tools. ”Show me,“ I said. He said, ”You’ll never manage it. It’s not a beginner’s project.“ I said, ”Let me try.“ And I think now he saw it as
his
big opportunity … maybe this would teach me a lesson. So he agreed. He showed me how to work the tools and he gave me some books on luthiery. He even took me to lumberyards, helped me pick out decent woods.”
John paused to sip his cappucino. “I worked on the guitar that summer whenever he was out of the house. Because it was an experiment—you understand? This would be the communication, he would see this and love me for doing it, and if he didn’t—all bets were off. So I took it very seriously. I cut and sanded, I routed the neck, I installed the fretwire and the tuning machinery. I was possessed by that guitar. There was not a weekday afternoon through July or August I was out of the house. I was dizzy with lacquer fumes half the time. And when he came home I would hide the project… I didn’t want him to see it until it was ready. I cleaned the tools and the workshop every day; I was meticulous. I think he forgot about it. Thought I’d given up. Until I showed it to him.”
Susan said, “Oh, no.”
“It was perfect, of course. Max probably told you what his research had suggested, long before it was fashionable science—that the neocortical functions aren’t just ”intelligence.“ It’s also dexterity, timing, the attention span, the sense of pitch, eye-hand coordination—things as pertinent to music or luthiery as they are to, say, mathematics. Jim Woodward thought he’d found a task that was beyond me. In fact, he could hardly have picked one I was better suited to. Maybe that guitar wasn’t flawless, but it was close. It was a work of art.”
Susan said, “He hated it.”
John smiled his humorless, raw smile. “He took it personally. I showed him the guitar. The last varnish was barely dry. I strummed a G chord. I handed it to him… the final evidence that I was worthy of him. To him it must have been, I don’t know, a slap in the face, a gesture of contempt. He took the guitar, checked it out. He sighted down the neck. He inspected the frets. Then he broke it over his knee.”