Trust Exercise(78)

For all the time and money she’d spent anticipating this event, she’d less formed a plan than fostered a hope, that if she brought herself here, something would happen. Someone—not Claire—would say something, or do something, or be something, and then Claire would know what to say, do, and be. This hope of Claire’s, if it could even be called that, was characteristically passive and uncertain. As usual, her Listener had undermined her efforts to not be this way by praising her as “courageous and determined” in “creating conditions for change.” The few feeble ways she’d imagined creating conditions for change she gave up on arrival. The office, which she’d known was a long shot but at least gave her someplace to start, wasn’t open. The crowd, which she had expected to resemble an audience at the movies—a couple hundred people sitting still, unsuspectingly allowing themselves to be closely examined—turned out to be a shape-shifting monster with no head or tail, a surging tide of thousands. Worst of all, her goal was still unclear. Even if she homed in somehow, using instinct or magic, what then would she do? Claire remembered the single time she’d broached the idea to her mother, years ago when she’d just started college. Her mother had neither scolded nor cried, as Claire had no reason to think that she would. But their closeness ensured that Claire would feel the vibration of sadness her mother failed to hide. “I always knew you’d want to know, and you should,” her mother had said in a false, strident voice. “Dad and I can’t be everything to you.” “But you are,” Claire had argued, as if the whole discredited idea had been her mother’s to start with. Claire’s hold on the idea had been so tenuous already that she’d been glad, at that moment, for the chance to abjure it. Her parents being everything to her at least was an idea that was robustly, reassuringly true. Claire’s parents had prized her so much, tried so hard, organized their lives so completely around her, that the one thing they’d failed to give her was the reason she craved something more—something so potent, singular, and undefined that Claire was embarrassed to even share with a Listener she paid by the hour her private name for it. The Look: a grail that for all the time Claire spent imagining it, she could still neither see nor describe. Who delivered the Look, what exactly they saw Looking at her, were the urgent details Claire would learn only when the Look happened. She was, however, sure of how it would feel: the electric shock of being recognized, of being herself the object of a quest, the one thing someone else had been missing.

Instead Claire was plunged in this agoraphobe’s nightmare where she lingered not courageously, as her Listener might claim, but because it was impossible to leave. The crowd groaned along like a glacier carrying with it all the squealing and hugging and crying people and her, until the force of it squeezed her into a seat. There the man next to her—he was maybe forty or thirty-five or fifty, she was terrible at guessing people’s ages who were older or younger than her—talked to her with the assumption that she belonged there, saying Wasn’t it so terrible, but Wasn’t this incredible, and Had she heard who was going to be there, until at last he was interrupted by the lights going down and a screen gliding out of the ceiling and the audience roaring like the thing was a fucking rock concert. Projected on the screen, white on black, ROBERT LORD, 1938–2013.

A very highly produced tribute played, managing to take low-quality video and photos and make an asset of how low their quality was. The emotion in the room grew more audible the queasier the colors and the worse the resolution. By the time it was the early 1980s you could barely tell the gender or race or age of anyone in the murky black-and-white photos while the occasional image in color was almost unbearably elegiac, as if not only Robert Lord had expired but also whatever kind of special sunshine had once shone on his students, whatever better air they had once had to breathe. Everyone looked so young and beautiful and glad, although perhaps this was just Claire’s anxiety racing to extract the possibility from each image before it dissolved to the next. At first certain images had elicited particular explosions of applause or cries of recognition but soon enough every single image elicited explosions of applause and cries of recognition until continuous full-throated yelling and continuous flesh-numbing slapping of palms seemed required. Claire must have looked as stricken and enraptured as everyone else. She hadn’t anticipated this additional realm of possibility, photo after photo of Robert Lord midstride amid a changing crowd of raptly attentive kids in dance togs or ridiculous costumes or holding play scripts in front of their faces. But Robert Lord thoughtfully stroking his beard, or retrieving his glasses from the top of his head, or sitting backward on a chair, or demonstrating a dance step, or forming his mouth in an elongated O as a youngish, then less young, then older, then oldish, then decidedly old man with hard creases cut from his nostrils to the ends of his mouth was not what Claire stared at devouringly. What Claire was staring at, her eyeballs burning with the effort, was the ever-changing constellation of kids clustered around Robert Lord. Claire meant to see to the heart of every long-ago young ancient face. She’d had the irrational conviction that she’d never see the video again, that this opportunity was passing so swiftly that if she so much as let herself blink she would miss it. Of course, she’s rewatched the whole thing several times on her laptop, not seeing anything more than she did the first time. The lights came back up and the endless testimonials and live performances began. None of the speakers set off her alarms but even before she’d arrived she had already felt in her gut that it wouldn’t be one of the speakers but a spectator, if one of these thousands at all. She toggled back and forth between absolute doubt and absolute certainty that it had to be one of these thousands. This event was a net that had dredged up possibilities from far and wide and deep into the past—if not here and now, where and when? Claire swiveled her gaze around, trying to scan every face in the crowd. But the crowd was so enormous it seemed not even made out of faces. It was a carpet of life that did not even have individual threads. Not even counting the excluded throng who’d had to settle for the simulcast, crammed in the lobby.