It must have been Dad’s admittance into The Nightwatchmen that led to their shift in strategy. “Blind Dates: Advantages of a Silent Civil War” and “Rebellion in the Information Age” were two of Dad’s most popular Federal Forum essays (every now and then he still received fan mail), and it was a Primary Theme that had served as the basis for his highly regarded Harvard dissertation of 1978, “The Curse of the Freedom Fighter: The Fallacies of Guerrilla Warfare and Third-World Revolution.” (It was also the reason he called Lou Swann a “hack.”) And then there was Dad’s palpable Moment of Turning, a moment he spoke lovingly about in a Bourbon Mood (as if it were a woman he’d seen in a train station, a woman with silky hair who had tilted her head close to the glass so Dad saw a cloud where her mouth should have been), when he stood on Benno Ohnesorg’s stiff shoelace at a Berlin protest rally and the innocent student was shot dead by police. This was when he realized that “the man who stands up and protests, the lone man who says no—he will be crucified.”
“And that was my Bolshevik moment, so to speak,” Dad said. “When I decided to storm the Winter Palace.”
When charting what I knew to be my life, somehow I’d managed to omit an entire continent (see Antarctica: The Coldest Place on Earth, Turg, 1987). “Always content, aren’t you, to hide behind the lecture lectern?” I’d overheard Servo shouting at Dad. Servo was the “hormonal teenager,” Dad, the theorist. (Frankly, Servo had hit the nail on the head; Dad didn’t like dishwasher soap on his hands, much less the blood of men.) And Servo doubtlessly paid Dad well for his theorizing. Though Dad, over the years, had always pleaded poverty, when it came down to it, he could still live it up like Kubla Kahn, renting an ornate house like 24 Armor Street, staying at the Ritz, shipping a 200-pound, $17,000 antique desk across the country and lying about it. Even Dad’s choice of bourbon, George T. Stagg, was considered by Stuart Mill’s Booze Bible (2003 ed.) “the Bentley of all bourbons.”
In Paris, had I come upon them arguing about Hannah Schneider, or the encroaching problem of Ada Harvey? Highly hysterical, problem, Simone de Beauvoir—the overheard conversation was a mule; it wouldn’t come back willingly. I had to coax and cajole it, tug it back into my head, so by the time I lined up the shards of conversation for inspection, I was just as confused as when I began. My head felt hollowed out with a spoon.
After the initial sting, my life — jam packed with highways, Sonnet-a-thons, Bourbon Moods, notable quotations by people who were dead — it peeled away with remarkable ease.
Frankly, I was astonished how unfazed I felt, how unflappable. After all, if Vivien Leigh suffered from hallucinations and hysteria, requiring shock treatment, ice packing and a diet of raw eggs simply by working on the set of Elephant Walk (a film no one had ever heard of except descendants of Peter Finch), surely it’d be conceivable, maybe even mandatory, for me to develop some form of dementia over the fact my life had been a Trompe l’Oeil, Gonzo Journalism, The $64,000Question, the Feejee Mermaid, a Hitler Diary, Milli Vanilli (see Chapter 3, “Miss O’Hara,” Birds of Torment: Luscious Ladies of the Screen and Their Living Demons, Lee, 1973).
After my Socratic revelation, however, the subsequent truths I unearthed weren’t nearly so jaw dropping. (One can be only so hoodzonked before one’s hoodzonk maxes out like a credit card.)
In the ten years we’d traveled the country, Dad appeared to have been concerned, not so much with my education, but with a rigorous Nightwatchmen staffing exercise. Dad had been their powerful Head of HR, his voice intoxicating as the Sirens, most likely directly responsible for that “inspirational recruitment,” detailed by Guillaume on www.hautain.fr. It was the only logical explanation: every professor who’d come to dinner over the years, the quiet young men who listened with such intensity while Dad delivered his Sermon on the Mount, his story of Tobias Jones the Damned, his Determination Theory—“There are wolves and there are brine shrimp,” he’d said, going for the Hard Sell — not only were they not professors, they didn’t exist.
There was no hearing-impaired Dr. Luke Ordinote spearheading the History Department at the University of Missouri at Archer. There was no fig-eyed Professor of Linguistics Mark Hill. There was a Professor of Zoology Mark Hubbard but I couldn’t speak to him because he’d been on sabbatical in Israel for the last twelve years studying the endangered Little Bustard, Tetrax tetrax. Most chillingly, there was no Professor Arnie Sanderson who taught Intro to Drama and History of the World Theater, with whom Dad had had a riotous dinner the night Eva Brewster destroyed my mother’s butterflies, also at Piazza Pitti the night he’d disappeared.
“Hello?”
“Hello. I was trying to get in touch with an Associate Professor who taught in your English Department in the fall of 2001. His name is Lee Sanjay Song.”
“What’s the name?”
“Song.”
There was a brief pause.
“No one by that name here.”
“I’m not sure if he was full-or part-time.”
“I understand, but no one by that—”
“Perhaps he’s left? Moved to Calcutta? Timbuktu? Maybe he was flattened by a bus.”
“Excuse me?”
“I’m sorry. It’s just — if anyone knows anything, if there’s someone else I could talk to I’d be grateful—”
“I have supervised this English Department for twenty-nine years and I assure you, no one with the last name of Song has ever taught here. I’m sorry I can’t be of better assistance, miss—”
Naturally, I wondered if Dad too had been an imposter professor. I’d witnessed him speaking in lecture halls on a handful of occasions, but there were more than a few colleges I hadn’t visited. And if I hadn’t seen with my own eyes the closet-office Dad referred to as his “cage,” his “crypt,” his “and they think I can sit in this catacomb and come up with novel ideas to inspire the featureless youths of this country”—perhaps it was similar to that tree falling in a forest. It never happened.
I was entirely off the mark on this front. Everyone and their grandmother had heard of Dad, including a few departmental secretaries who’d just been hired. It seemed, wherever Dad went, he’d left a blinding Yellow Brick Road of adulation in his wake.
“How is the old boy?” inquired Dean Richardson of University of Arkansas at Wilsonville.
“He’s fantastic.”
“I’ve often wondered what happened to him. Thought of him the other day when I came across a Virginia Summa article saluting Mideast policies in Proposals. I could just hear Garry howling with laughter. Come to think of it, I haven’t seen an essay of his in a while. Well, I suppose it’s tight these days. Mavericks, nonconformists, those who march to the beat of their own drum, speak up, they’re not finding the same forums they used to.”
“He’s managing.”
Obviously, if a corner of one’s life ended up covertly cultivating a shocking amount of slime mold, one must switch on unflattering fluorescent lights (the cruel kind of chicken coops), get down on one’s hands and knees and scrub every corner. I thus found it necessary to investigate another thrilling possibility: What If June Bugs were not June Bugs, but Spanish Moon Moths (Graellsia isabellae), the most captivating and well bred of all the European moths? What If they, too, like the bogus professors, were gifted individuals Dad had meticulously handpicked for The Nightwatchmen? What If they only pretended to bond vigorously to Dad as lithium does to fluorine (see The Strange Attractions of Opposite Ions, Booley, 1975)? I wanted it to be true; I wanted to pull my boat up next to theirs, rescue them from their wasted African violets and quivery-voiced phone calls, from their tepid waters with nothing flourishing in them, no reefs, parrot or angelfish (and certainly no sea turtles). Dad had left them stranded on that boat, but I’d set them free, send them away on a powerful Trade Wind. They’d disappear to Casablanca, to Bombay, to Rio (everyone wanted to disappear to Rio) — never heard of, never seen again, as poetic a fate as any they could hope for.