My old teacher talked over my internal voice. He said he’d heard I joined The Eleven, and laughed about it a bit too loudly.
“You ever hear anything these days?” he asked.
“What?”
“From the Society. They still send me invitations to the annual dinners, but I’m usually out of the country. Do you still go?”
I shook my head. I hadn’t heard anything from The Eleven for many years. But then, I’d never bothered to update them as to my several changes of address.
Still, the mention of the Society reminded me of something I hadn’t thought about in a long time.
“Dr. Humberton, did you know that Isaac Newton was an alchemist?”
Humberton laughed again, and said I should call him Ron, now that we were equals. We were perched on red stools by the table, like a couple of awkward sheep propped upright, trying to figure out what to do with our front trotters.
He told me he was divorced these days, and I didn’t know what to say about that so I said he had inspired me, back in Cambridge. Isn’t that what you’re supposed to say to your old teachers?
It wasn’t far from the truth, really. He’d given me a strange superpower. His lectures, the ones Deb and I attended, were supposed to be about the problem of other minds—all that stuff about books and the topology of spacetime and everything was technically irrelevant. But sometimes people digress into what matters, and that’s how you find out what you should have been doing all along. Humberton was the one, really, who taught me about meaning. He started with books. With how, when you read, everything—every character, every moment, every detail—goes through you. It has nowhere else to go. Whoever you’re reading about, they can only see through your eyes. When they’re feeling something they have to do it with your gut. Their world is a world digested by you. It’s not about projection, at least not in the way you’d assume: this can be a kind of accuracy. An act of interpreting can be truthful. Even kind.
Or, of course, it can be bullshit. A powerful euphemism will bend morality like light in a prism. Eventually I realized he wasn’t really talking about books. Meaning went far beyond. “The home” was not a home. It was a cell, a holding pattern, a way of circling the airport while you ran out of fuel. A child could see that, but it was Humberton who taught me how to know it as an adult. He taught me to read. He always said the base layer of truth is what matters, even in fiction. You can make up whatever else you want, but if you lose sight of that fundamental level, the basement of your world, everything you build on top of it is wrong.
When Deb got written out of the story, it would have been easy for me to be the crazy one. That was the quick fix, the path of least resistance, and it would have restored order to the world. Which was what I wanted, wasn’t it? Everything back in order? Everybody gathered in the sitting room for the final chapter, the big reveal: You made a mistake, it’s okay, just move on? But everything I built on top of that would have been wrong. That was how I used the power Humberton gave me.
And yet, now I saw him, I suddenly didn’t want to tell him any of this. I’d held out all those years and now here he was, this man who should have been the missing piece in my puzzle. The one who could make it all fit again. Make it right. But now I had this terrible understanding that he was not going to.
And still, I had to ask.
“Deborah…” He looked slightly confused, and not very interested in the question. “Mmm. Hmm. Deborah who?”
“Deborah Orton. Blonde hair? She wore pink a lot? She was in your lectures that whole year, on the problem of other minds. She always sat by me and asked a lot of questions and she talked really…slowly…” I slowed my own voice down in imitation, trying to prompt the memory.
“No, I don’t think there was anyone like that,” he said.
“But you remember me?”
“Of course, Vicky! I usually remember my students.”
“Please don’t call me Vicky.”
“Let’s have another drink.”
Something nasty was going on in my lower intestine. A deep rumble, a distant storm. Being in a minority, even in a minority of one…oh god, Orwell? Now? How cheesy…did not make you mad. Only sort of, though, Georgie. It might not mean you are mad at the beginning, but if it carries on you sure will be. There’s neuroscience on this. The processing of the signals in your brain physically changes when everyone around you is telling you the long line is the short line, the moving dot isn’t moving, the triangle is a square, the immigrants are rapists. You will start seeing it that way. That’s how desperate we are not to be totally and completely alone. Even alone with the truth. Especially with the truth—that’s the most terrifying place to be left alone. So cold. Here’s the thing: this phenomenon is adaptive. Like most of the odd things brains will do in difficult circumstances. Features not bugs.
“I don’t think I want another drink,” I told Humberton. But he had already turned away to catch the bartender’s eye.
They said she was premature but who was counting. I mean, I had no idea there was anything to count. Perhaps she was too late. It happened, that’s all.
