The disease also rigidifies the face and suppresses the blink reflex, causing the sufferer to look wild-eyed and angry.
Finally, it often destroys the brain’s ability to focus on a subject.
Now life in bits and pieces flew continually past my father.
Like some frightful episode of The Twilight Zone, he had been turned into his party trick.
Love,
Your Father
1:10 a.m., March 3, 2011
I looked up the Monty Hall problem. I agree with you, it only seems paradoxical at first. Speaking of twelve fingers, what are the next three terms in the following sequence: 84, 91, 100, 121, 144, 202, 244, 400, ___, ___, ___?
That thing with your dad sounds bad.
Please send me your probability textbook. Do you need it back?
1994
Mark landed in Zagreb, relieved to have survived another flight. He hated flying. All construction designed for public use was structurally overengineered except airplanes, which had to be light enough to get off the ground. In bad turbulence he could hear the cabin flex like a drinking straw, he could watch the wings flap. It was inarguably the safest form of travel, and normally he trusted statistics, but not in this case, not on some unreachable limbic level. He wished he could say to Saskia, See? I can be irrational, too.
After checking into his hotel, he found his way to UN headquarters. They were housed in a dingy white building, probably nineteenth century, but he didn’t know enough about European architecture to be confident. Surrounding the building was a makeshift wall with a different person’s name written on each brick, flowers laid along the bottom, candles lining the top, tattered photos, scribbled messages. Inside, he was told it was a memorial to Croats who had died or disappeared during the siege of Vukovar. “They blame us,” said the young UN soldier at the intake desk, speaking with cheerful dislike. “They think we should fight their war for them.”
Mark found the correct office, waited an hour, confirmed he had permission to be on the flight the next day, was handed a waiver indemnifying the UN, its agencies and personnel, including but not limited to etc—it was a long sentence—from any legal liability in the event of his injury or death. He was to affirm that he was acting under his own volition as an independent agent etc—another long sentence. He signed here and there, initialed there, there, and there. He was told to appear again at 0800 hours. It was the first time Mark had heard someone outside of a movie say “oh-eight-hundred hours.” What a sheltered life he had led.
He returned to the city center on foot. He always walked in unfamiliar cities if he had the time. He liked to absorb details as they randomly presented themselves, the look of buildings and people, the sound of conversation, the amount and kinds of shops. He tried not to form opinions—that universal human delight and comfort—which would necessarily be ignorant. Simply hear and see. But today he didn’t take in much, other than an impression of summery youth, old men in black hats that maybe were fedoras, fake-limestone stucco nearly black with soot, blue trolley cars, a plethora of Croatian flags in red and white. His thoughts were in what would probably be called “turmoil,” and a fair fraction of that turmoil was a self-questioning about whether all his life he had insulated himself too much from mental turmoil. How cowardly of him that he had left that to Susan—the family and its unhappinesses, the world and its tragedies—freeing himself to focus on more-rewarding topics. Obliviousness often served selfish ends.
He ended up in the old central square, where restaurants had set out tables in the August sunshine. He sat and ordered a coffee. Then he realized it was 1:00 p.m., so when the waiter returned, he asked for a lunch menu. He had spent some of the last six months reading up on Yugoslavia, but had arrived only at the conclusion that local opinions were passionate and prejudiced, and that there was virtually no trustworthy data. The various peoples here did not seem to share the same reality. He was surprised at how deeply it unnerved him, this inability to find a factual foundation to stand on. Then again, he didn’t often read about ethnic conflict, maybe it was always this vertiginous. If so, he wanted no part of it.
There he went again, retreating, with his hands up. Protect me, big sis.
He ordered. He’d learned a couple of phrases for politeness’s sake, but assumed English would be widespread in the city. He had never been good at languages. Whereas Susan had become fluent in Spanish after a year in Madrid, had picked up Dutch while living in Belgium and the Netherlands, had acquired a working knowledge of Serbo-Croatian (or Bosnian, or whatever you were supposed to call it, what a load of nonsense over a label) before she came here. Yes, children in families differentiate assiduously, studies showed that. Competition for parental attention, need for a secure sense of self. Reverence for a sibling could be just as strong a motivation as resentment. How much of his personality had been formed in opposition to Susan? Susan disobedient, Mark obedient. Susan combative, Mark conflict averse. Susan impulsive, Mark strategic. In a strangely compelling way, he felt that, with her gone, he no longer had any justification for being the kind of person that he was. Illogically, he felt like a fraud.
If one feels like a fraud, one behaves fraudulently. He and Saskia had had their first coffee date on March 2, only five months ago, and their last dinner on June 21. So they were “together” for three months and nineteen days. In that interval, they were alone in each other’s presence on nine separate occasions, yet he had never told her about Susan’s recent death, nor about Susan at all. What did that say? Oh, he had
