The Candy House(95)
2
He made it to the Upper West Side on three different subways. There was a bad spell when he couldn’t get a seat on the 2 and hung swaying from a bar with his eyes shut until one opened up. At 110th and Broadway, he stepped out into heavy mounting snow that accentuated the tree-starved concrete landscape. The address Dennis had given him was on 107th, toward Central Park. As Gregory walked, the grand old apartment buildings above and around him began to look strangely familiar—not from his own memory, he realized, with a start, but from his father’s! His father had played certain sections of his consciousness for Gregory and his siblings, usually to illustrate a point or teach them a lesson—although, lately, it had occurred to Gregory that maybe what their father wanted was just for them to know him better. One such memory was the night he’d conceived of Own Your Unconscious. The stated lesson was that inspiration could come from any direction; that they should never give up. They’d watched as a family, sprawled together on his parents’ huge bed, wearing individual headsets. Gregory was ten. His father first showed them what he called the Anti-Vision: a vacancy where a new idea refused to appear. For several moments it filled the screen, depthless and white. Gregory was fascinated. Was it really empty?
Then the Anti-Vision gave way to Upper West Side streets as his father searched for an address, dry leaves tumbling over his boots.
“Can you go back to the Anti-Vision?” Gregory asked.
But the Anti-Vision wasn’t the point. Their father fast-forwarded through parts of the professors’ meeting and his cringy interactions with Rebecca, the pretty graduate student—first on the subway, then in the East Village, where they chased and fled each other in the dark. Gregory’s sisters tore off their headsets in agony.
“Oh my God, Daddy! You were such a dork!”
“I believe the word is ‘flirt,’?” their mother said, jabbing their father with a toe. “Little did I know!”
Their father activated the thought-and-feeling portion of his consciousness just before the moment of revelation. Gregory felt him straining to remember a boy who’d drowned, then felt the roar of his frustration at the inaccessibility of his memories. But amid that frustration was a tiny fillip—a hiccup, almost—of possibility. “There. That!” their father said as they peered through his eyes at the rippling dark river. “Can you feel that instant when it happens? I only knew later.” And Gregory felt it—a sensation like dropping through a trapdoor without noticing, yet, that everything is different.
“Can I see the Anti-Vision again?” he asked, and everyone groaned.
Another night, their father played for them his return to the professors’ apartment. The lesson here was the importance of coming clean and expressing gratitude, even when it was hard or—in this case—contentious. A professor named Fern kept interrupting as he tried to explain why he’d worn a disguise the first time. “You lied to us once,” she said. “Why should we trust you now?”
“Shut up,” Gregory’s sisters yelled at her from beneath their headsets. “Let him finish.”
Gregory’s father ended by thanking the group for having occasioned an idea that would direct the next phase of his work. The host, Ted Hollander, who turned out to be an uncle of their mother’s friend Sasha, erupted, “How marvelous! We helped you to shift a paradigm without knowing who you were or what you were grappling with! You were right not to tell us; fame is distracting.”
“Feels a bit biblical, doesn’t it?” said English-Accent Guy. “We took in a weary traveler, and lo, he turned out to be Christ our Lord. Lucky us!”
“We didn’t take him in,” said Kacia, the Brazilian animal studies professor. “We were all strangers, remember?” Gregory’s father ended up hiring Kacia a few months later, and she’d come to lead a division of Mandala.
“It almost feels like we were a focus group for Bix, not a gathering of peers,” said Portia, Ted’s wife.
Rebecca spoke up a little shyly. “This whole experience has helped me finalize my dissertation topic,” she said. “Authenticity as problematized by digital experience. So thank you all.”
She and their father had never met again, but Rebecca Amari had gone on to write many books—in fact, it was she who’d coined the term “word-casings” in Eating Our Tails: Craving Authenticity in a Hyper-Mediated World, which Athena had assigned in workshop.
“You should interview my son Alfred,” Ted told Rebecca. “He’s obsessed with authenticity. He screams in public just to watch people react.”
“Wow,” said Rebecca. “Definitely.”
“What do you want from us?” Fern demanded of Gregory’s father.
“He wanted to join a discussion group,” Ted said. “And after one meeting, he overcame a mental block. I say more power to him.”
In that instant, Gregory felt his father’s joy: a giddy infusion of promise alongside a faint cadence of thought: I’ve got it. I’ve got it. I’ve got it. He was about to change everything, yet again, but no one knew it yet.
“What bothers me,” he said, “is that I might’ve derailed this group.”
“If we let ourselves get derailed, that’s on us,” said Broken-Glasses Guy. “We’re supposed to be professionals.”