“You’re pretending you don’t know that your father committed suicide.”
“The fuck?” I said, out loud I think, standing up. It was a car wreck, murder or manslaughter. The San Francisco Chronicle had said so. My ears were ringing and I was feeling dizzy and seeing the weird liquid kaleidoscope like when I had accidentally beaten up Paul Krebs. Part of me was wondering whether I was going to end up accidentally beating up Dr.
Hexstrom, too, when the liquid kaleidoscope swallowed the rest of my mind and I kind of lost track of things.
I knew I hadn’t been unconscious for long, because when I came to there was still time on the clock. I had fallen back into the chair, and it was possible that my blackout had been so brief that Dr. Hexstrom hadn’t realized it had even happened. I could tell she was taken aback by my reaction, 235
though, blackout or no. We stared at each other, trying to work out who knew what, who was mistaken about what, and who was lying about what. I concluded she really believed that my dad had killed himself, and had also believed that I had known, and that she was shocked to learn that the idea came as such a spectacular surprise to me.
Was she right? Well, that was really two questions.
Question one: was she right that I ought to have known about the supposed suicide, or that I did know but was pretending not to know? Lying to myself ? I’ve learned I should never be too sure about such things. I hadn’t known about the Catholic thing, though I should have—it was obvious enough that even Amanda had known all about it. If I were to ask Amanda about the suicide thing (which I would never in a million years do, but still), would she look at me like I was dumb as a cup of melting ice and say “no duh?” Well, I can’t speak for Amanda, but a quick, ruthless self-examination indicated that my ignorance was genuine. I truly had not “known” about the suicide, nor even considered it as a possibility.
The second question was, was the suicide story itself true? It didn’t seem possible. I had read all about it in the paper, and even though there had been details missing, the car crash had definitely happened. If my dad had killed himself, he would have had to have done it in the car before the hit-and-run. How likely was that? Maybe someone had intended to murder him and just hadn’t realized that the guy in the car was already dead by his own hand? Or someone had known he had killed himself and had crashed into the car to make it seem like an accident? Or my dad had deliberately placed himself in a position where he knew he’d be crashed into, as a roundabout suicide method? That sounded really crazy. I realized I should probably go back and read those articles again: since I did the research at age ten, I’d had four whole 236
years of being disappointed by my fellow man and having this and that illusion shattered, which had resulted in a firmer, or at least less inaccurate, grasp of reality, presumably.
Maybe I’d read things differently now.
Of course, everything Dr. Hexstrom knew about me and my family history came from my mom and from me, filtered through her own (admittedly impressive) knowledge of the world and corrected by her equally impressive powers of de-duction. I had exaggerated and left out details and tried to make myself look better and/or worse than I actually was all over the place for various personal reasons. Her view of my world based on my account was wildly inaccurate, except in those areas where her own common sense corrected the picture. But she hadn’t gotten the suicide thing from me. So either my mom had lied to her deliberately for some unfath-omable reason, or my mom genuinely believed, rightly or wrongly, that the suicide story was true. Since it was the better explanation for her freak-out over the song, I had to conclude that the latter was the case. She liked to exaggerate and fabricate things for melodramatic purposes, but she wouldn’t do that to someone to whom she was paying a hundred and fifty dollars an hour to cure her son of individuality. Would she?
These thoughts took a lot less time to think than it just took to describe them. When I finally spoke, I was almost incoherent. The questions I was able to get out were, how did my mom know about this when everyone else seemed to think it had been a hit-and-run, and why had Dr. Hexstrom believed her, a known liar.
“She said he left a note,” said Dr. Hexstrom, but then seemed to think better of continuing. “I need to speak to your mother about this. And our time is up.”
She wouldn’t let me leave on my own, though. She in-237
sisted on calling Little Big Tom to pick me up. I spent the ride home in a daze, thinking about my dad’s alleged suicide note and how I’d have to do some Little Big Tom–style snooping to try to locate it amidst Carol’s stuff. If it really existed.
A B ETTE R C LAS S OF LI E
I was starting to wonder how anybody knows anything at all about anything. All sources are suspect.
Even if I were to find this supposed suicide note, chances were it would be inconclusive, too. “Dear Honey, I have decided to end it all,” it would say, and there would be no proof that he was talking about his life as opposed to eating red meat or subscribing to TV Guide. On the other hand, I suppose a wife would know. One thing I knew: asking her about it would serve no purpose. God help Dr. Hexstrom if she really planned to go through with trying to talk to her about it. I was sure the good doctor had encountered quite a few crazy people in her day, but my mom was in a category all her own.
I was starting to realize the extent of the problem here: everyone is always lying to each other, and even when they’re trying to tell the truth, it can still be misleading or wrong. In fact, it almost always is wrong from at least one angle. I mean, in a way, the truth is really just a better class of lie.
And then there was Fiona. She was still at large, whoever she was. The Deanna Schumacher episode, pleasant and mind-blowing as it was, hadn’t changed that. Sam Hellerman had stated categorically that Fiona was Deanna Schumacher dressed up as a fake mod, which was plausible, but which 238
hadn’t been the case. He could have simply been mistaken, misled by his CHS friends. On the other hand, it was possible that he had known and had been lying, for obscure reasons of his own. Had he been trying to help me get over my Fiona-related pain and longing by providing me with a fake fake Fiona to focus on, feeling fairly certain I wouldn’t end up putting his story to the test by tracking her down and going over to her house for some illicit oral sex? (A safe assumption: I still couldn’t quite believe it myself.) Or maybe Sam “the Matchmaker” Hellerman had known all along that I would follow up on the Deanna Schumacher lead and had intended for us to get together? Maybe the Deanna Schumacher blow job had been a gift from Sam Hellerman unto me, in return for my years of faithful service to the Hermetic Order of the Alphabet. Maybe Deanna Schumacher had been in on the scheme, as well.
All I knew was that Sam Hellerman always had something up his sleeve. He had a plan for the band. He had a plan for me. He had a plan for everybody, and he would only let you in on what he felt you needed to know.
I suppressed the urge to point-blank him on it as I had done with Dr. Hexstrom. He would come up with an explanation that would be just as plausible as the others (in other words, just barely—but I would want to believe). Or he would refuse to say anything and subject me to the dread power of his overwhelming, wordless sarcasm. Fearing more Hellerman eye-ray treatment than I felt I could handle in my confused and enfeebled state, I decided to hold off on the point-blanking, at least till after the Festival of Lights. We still had a lot of work to do to get the band ready for the show, and, as I had learned the hard way when the whole Fiona business began, a disgruntled, sarcasm-soaked Hellerman is in many 239