Remember that you are an actor in a play, which is as the author wants it to be: short, if he wants it to be short; long, if he wants it to be long. If he wants you to act a poor man, a cripple, a public official, or a private person, see that you act it with skill. For it is your job to act well the part that is assigned to you; but to choose it is another’s.
That night, the room began to smell of death from Lauren’s breath (she, who had always smelled so good). At 3:00 a.m. her breathing became labored. Her head began to inscribe circles as her lungs heaved, and her eyes opened sightlessly. Sometimes her breathing would stop for several seconds, then begin again. At 7:17 a.m., her breath halted and Saskia, looking at her face, knew at once that she had died. The clear demarcation startled her. The minute tremors and blood-cell pulses of a living face that one normally doesn’t notice, all ceased simultaneously. The effect was like a freeze frame.
It was September 12, 2001. Saskia called the nurse, who arrived at eight and made an offhand, appalled reference to New York City that neither Bill nor Saskia understood.
• • •
So Lauren’s death was the fall of a sparrow.
Bill arranged for a memorial service at the New Age retreat center Lauren often went to. Lauren’s friends popped up, one after the other, and celebrated her triumph with wet shining faces. Unable to bear it after a certain point, Saskia escaped outside with Mette and kept her entertained by walking with her through a labyrinth, which had been constructed with lines of stones set in the grass. This kind of thing was right up Mette’s alley—a demarcated path, a rule to follow. Saskia had the vague idea that New Agers believed that when you reached the center of the labyrinth you were supposed to have gained some insight, or attained peace or something. All she found was the Minotaur—thoughts of her father. She did feel guilty, after all, for not having tried to reach him regarding her mother’s illness. But she told herself that her feelings were her concern, not his. He had banished them from his concern long ago.
It turned out the house and land didn’t belong to Lauren, but to a trust owned by her brothers, from whom she’d been estranged for many years. Not that it mattered. Saskia had never expected to inherit anything from Lauren beyond an eating bowl and a pair of sandals. In fact, there was a little more than that. Lauren had left the contents of the house equally to Bill, Saskia, Jo, Melanie, Shannon, Austin, and Quentin. Saskia would have cleared maybe a thousand dollars, except that a crude pencil sketch of a naked hairy man graphically fucking a naked hairy woman that had hung in the dining room forever—a payment for a few weeks of macrobiotic food and a lively co-ed crash by a long-ago communard who was now a famous artist—sold for $82,000. Saskia’s share amounted to just enough money to make it conceivable, if somewhat reckless, to move to New York City. A number of people that fall were going in the opposite direction. But Saskia felt passionately that 9/11 was an assault by purists on mongrelism, and she wanted to throw her lot in with the mongrels.
Well—that, and also she had an acting career to pursue. It was January 2002. Mette was almost seven, Saskia was thirty. It was high time to figure out what her actual life would look like.
2011
10:23 a.m., March 2, 2011
Dear Mette,
Happy 16th birthday. Please say hello to your mother for me.
I’m pleased that the Newman volumes continue to interest you. You’ve increasingly made me regret that I never looked into them myself, although I remember their position in my father’s bedroom bookcase when I was growing up. I, too, thought the bindings were attractive. As for your comments about Laplace, if you want to have fun with probability problems in more depth, I could mail you the textbook I worked through when I was a little older than you are now. I have a feeling you would like the subject. Let me know.
Have you heard of the Monty Hall problem? If not, google it. It’s an extremely simple veridical paradox. The solution has always made sense to me, but plenty of people, otherwise good with numbers, have been bothered by it, including my father. He had good company—none other than Paul Erdös refused to believe it until he saw it proved in a computer simulation.
Speaking of my father, I wrote one of those “data sets” the other day, the first I’ve written in a long while. You were probably hoping they had disappeared forever. I wondered why I was thinking about him more lately, then realized that he died five years ago this January. I’ve always found it interesting how the human brain can subconsciously keep track of time passing with remarkable precision. Even more, that the subconscious seems to prefer round numbers. If we humans had twelve fingers, I probably wouldn’t be thinking about my father until next year. In any case, here it is:
Data Set: Futility
My father hated parties.
But he did have one party trick.
He would imitate a defense satellite trying to destroy a wave of incoming ICBMs.
He would pump his arms like recoiling cannons and rotate from the waist, moving in jerks, with incremental backward corrections.
This was meant to evoke the recalculations of a feedback mechanism trying to track a fast-moving object.
He would give up one ICBM, jerkily try to target the next, give up on that, try the next.
It was a good imitation, and everyone would laugh.
Except for my father, whose face wore a wild and angry glare.
Years later, he developed Parkinson’s disease.
Because Parkinson’s induces both muscle tremors and muscle rigidity, it leads to
