We Are Not Ourselves(141)

The cast went to the Medici afterward. He found himself in the middle of a spirited conversation about the nature of free will. Several people packed into the booth, jamming him against the wall. The girls, Jenna included—Jenna whom he’d made out with a few times and who was on the verge of agreeing to make it exclusive—doted on a stage crew member whose carpentry skills lent him a virtuous concreteness in the abstracted arena of campus life.

Hopped up on an endless series of coffee refills, Connell was eating a plate of baked ravioli and idly playing with one of the sugar packets in the little tray when he was overtaken by an insight into the nature of time and space that made his mind fairly crackle. All at once, he could see the whole chain of hands through which this packet had passed on its journey to him. He could see the sugar cane growing, being gathered, being refined. He could see its manufacture. He was about to enact its consumption. He could see the future too: the packet heading to the landfill, decaying in the earth, disintegrating. In one moment, the packet in his hands didn’t exist yet, and in another he was holding it, and in another its remnants were sitting in the trash bag waiting for pickup. He knew he wouldn’t be able to explain it to anyone if he tried. The other actors were now carrying on some kind of debate about Williams, O’Neill, and Miller, and Connell was there and not there. He thought, Domino Sugar. Dad made the sugar that went into packets like this. He is holding one of these now, in the past. He could see his father looking into the future and seeing the blurred outlines of a life, a wife, a child. His father would be dead and in the ground. Connell would be too. The sugar would keep getting made.

He wanted to call his father and tell him his fevered thoughts, but he knew that even under the best of circumstances it wouldn’t have made sense to anyone, and it surely wasn’t going to make sense to his father now in the state he was in. Still, he wanted badly to share this insight, and he could feel it slipping away. There wasn’t even time to turn to the guy next to him and try to get it across, so he just formed a mental picture of his father as a much younger man, standing in a white smock, holding a clipboard, as he squeezed the sugar packet and sent the thought to that young man in his image, wherever he was in space or time. He ripped the packet open, poured it in, and watched it dissolve.

The director of his play had seen his polish and misunderstood. She hadn’t realized that polish was all he had. He could stand before people and make stentorian declamations, but the only reason he could project a convincing air of youthful ignorance was that he was stuck inside himself, and he knew he was—it was the one thing he could say with real conviction that he knew about himself—and he wasn’t playing a part.

? ? ?

The next morning, he woke up late again and bounded down the stairs, but this time he came down too hard on the landing and felt something snap. He hobbled to class and then to the hospital, and that night, when he showed up at rehearsal on crutches, with a broken foot, it was as if the director had been waiting for this to happen all along. There was no understudy, of course, so Connell had to play the part himself. They had to rechoreograph the fight scenes, which he and his counterpart had brought to such a high level of polish that someone suggested that when he recovered they should put on an avant-garde show that would consist exclusively of them playing out their grapplings over and over. They turned them into arm-wrestling scenes instead.

Connell felt safer, somehow, up on crutches. He had to practice walking around onstage in them, and the new physical demands of the part took the urgent edge off his desperation to remember his lines, which allowed him finally to get off book right before the show went up. It was pure chance that he’d broken his foot, but it was lovely to imagine that it wasn’t merely chance, that there was a higher order working in life, that the mystical flashes of insight born of staring at a packet of sugar in a noisy restaurant might actually connect to a truth of the universe. It was lovely to consider the possibility that he’d been somewhere else with his father, in another neighborhood of time and space, just because he’d been able to conceive of it while watching some crystals dissolve into a coffee cup.

He had to remember to give the old man a call.





67


After the eleven o’clock Mass, they took a walk through the neighborhood, then went to the Food Emporium. They were having the Coakleys over for dinner, and she needed to pick up a few things. As they passed through the first electronic door heading out of the store, Ed came to a halt in the vestibule and started yelling “No! No!”

“Not now,” she said. “We have to get home.”

“Not with her!” he yelled. “Police!”

She yanked his hand. He grabbed on to the sliding door to pull back. Somehow he managed to hold on to the bags.

“We have to go,” she said. “Please!”

“Not with you! Police! Police!”

She pulled harder. He stumbled two steps and threw himself to the ground. The cantaloupe he was carrying spilled out of its bag and rolled into the street. She couldn’t budge him. At first people gave her curious looks as they passed, but then a few stopped to gawk, and then a crowd gathered as Ed continued to call for the police. She offered them sheepish smiles as they thronged around her. Workers from the store came out. Someone must have called 911, because the next thing she knew two officers were parting the crowd.

“Police!” Ed shouted frantically when he saw them.