CHAPTER 25

Dear Grasshopper,

Biology can explain everything in its brutish language of eat or be eaten. The balance of our applied values serves either our self-preservation or, in times of emergency, species-preservation by extension of tribe or family. Yet given evolution is supposed to be a wholly blind process that makes the most of happy and unhappy accidents, it is odd a so-called ‘God Spot’ should emerge in our physiology.

Followers of scientism locate this “anomaly” in the brain with a pair of tweezers and see an end to the discussion, as though the mere physical matter was the god sought. This line of reasoning equates the parchment with the message, and the message with the messenger. But to make a hobgoblin of logic in this fashion is to posit value in materialism without value itself being accounted for as material.

Buckminster Fuller said he never sought beauty when he set out to work on a scientific problem, but if beauty was not present in the answer, he knew he had it wrong. It is curious “beauty”, a value judgment, should be a consideration in any equation where value has no purchase beyond something either being true or false.

THE CHILD, Part Two

The young woman made a cell phone call while still at the deli, and Michael, knowing she was calling Evan, or his machine, cleared off to the parking lot to wait for her. He watched her through the large plate glass window, since he was always watching her through glass. Her spirits seemed to rally while she spoke, as if to hide with her face what deceit she conveyed with her words. Perhaps it was a pantomime intended strictly for the painter’s consumption; yet he could not say whether such a performance would be to encourage or dissuade his hope. The glass, in many ways, was all that was left to separate them—would always be the slimmest of things to separate them.

Emma came back to the car wearing a haggard smile, and he knew (if he knew nothing else) she would not be leaving town anytime soon.

Given the continuing Homecoming celebration, getting back to the house was easier said than done. The driver took the long way round to avoid the clogged bypass, though found driving past the fraternity and sorority houses no less daunting a task. Countless trees were rolled with toilet paper, and ruckus partiers, having abandoned all propriety, were overturning parked cars to goad campus police. The air was charged with something, and every intersection in passing felt like a fateful crossroads.

Michael looked stonily out the windshield, striking a pose for what he wanted to say. “Emma,” he began confidently, “I want to take financial responsibility for you. For your education. For your child.”

She turned her attention from the to-doings out the passenger window. “What?”

“You can go to another school, and I will pay your way.”

The woman could not help but laugh a little. “But you can barely take care of yourself.”

He visibly deflated.

She reached over to stroke his arm. “I don’t want you acting out of pity, or duty, or anything like that.”

“I wouldn’t put it in those terms.”

“Then what terms would you use?”

He would not say.

Instead of going straight to his house, the pair swung by Emma’s apartment to fetch a clean dress. Staying behind in the car, she entrusted Michael to go inside and choose one for her. He paused in the doorway on detecting a change in the packing boxes: one now contained the dollhouse; two others were filled with stuffed animals from the bedroom. Across from them, the snapshot of Seth was removed from the bulletin board; one of the pictures taken of him during the outing at the golf course hung in its stead. It then occurred to the self-appointed guardian, with belated recognition, that there was no other image of an older man: no one who could be reasonably presumed to be a most beloved father. As with so many things in the human sphere, it was a crucial detail he failed to notice. The painter stepped closer to examine the remaining pictures of friends, and pondered, with more late thinking, which of them was Evan.

Michael continued into the bedroom, where the hand of the mannequin was still sticking out from under the bedskirt. He got down on his knees to eye it in the dark recess. Silken cobwebs hugged the figure’s contours so perfectly they must have been spun in place over a long time. He let his fingers light reflexively on his Galatea’s clavicle, and with little effort tore open the gauzy gown down to her pubic bone. The sticky tatters were pushed off over a breast and hip, and with complete indifference to any spiders that might be lurking in them.

Given their earlier tiff, the young woman had not offered Michael the option of dressing her; and this oddly affected him more than missing the chance to while away hours in her bed. The activity, he thought, would have given them something mechanical to do, something formal to share so as to re-cement their bond, as tentative as it was. Such undertakings were as much scientific as either artistic or sensual for him. He needed to probe the surface of a woman’s skin like a doctor, to bring his mind as close to the permeable layer of reality as possible.

The man could not explain how the quality of impersonality in the female form made it both sexual and untouchable at the same time. Somehow, he reasoned, it was when things got personal that these irreconcilable poles (object and ideal) found a happy if imperfect medium. And maybe this was his great failing: He had not kept faith with love long enough for it to produce a workable solution to his conundrum. As an incurable romantic, he was in love with love, yet had no faith in the concept as a practical matter. Impersonality may have been cold and austere, but it was never cruel.

But to be in love body and soul was to invite cruelty.

Perhaps in hindsight the intended recipients of his affection appreciated this impersonality so telling in him. And whether they perceived his interest as being wholly sexual, or blindly romantic in nature, no woman in the crosshairs wanted to be a means to an end. Yet the only things transparently clear about Michael were the frankness and naiveté of his heart—not his motives.

Returning to his feet, he looked over the sea of dresses still in the floor, finally seeing them for what they really were: one half man snare and one half means to a girl playing dress-up. In truth Emma was the young woman he never understood as a young man, but this acknowledgement came with the irony of years; and only with the understanding a misunderstanding existed.

The wedding dress rose above the others in a dim, ankle-high cloud; Michael picked it up in the way he picked up the stargazer lily two days before. Omar once told him symbols stood halfway between this world and the next, yet for the uncommunicative man it was only vagueness he aspired to as a next move. Historically this indeterminism meant his actions in emerging romantic situations were chronically too much of something: too abrupt, too early, too overpowering, too indecisive, too finagled, too late… However, these miscalculations stemmed from the woman being too female for his logic to get around.