“Something like that.”
“And that he farmed me out for adoption when the project was closed down?”
“He didn’t have a choice.”
“But now he wants to talk … because he thinks I’m dying.”
“I should never have said that! I’m sorry—I just wanted to get your attention.”
“But it’s possible?”
“The animal studies have been mixed,” Susan admitted.
“Some animals have died.”
She looked at the table. “Yes.”
The tempura arrived then. Susan picked at hers. It was good, but she’d lost her appetite.
John ate vigorously.
When the check arrived Susan used her credit card and filed away the customer copy. John said, “Are you up to walking a little?”
She nodded.
“It’s a good day for it. Autumn is the best time of year in this city.” He stood up and pulled his windbreaker over his T-shirt. “I don’t get many afternoons like this.”
They rode the College streetcar west to Augusta. The day was cool but endlessly sunny, the sky a shade of blue you never saw in LA. When the streetcar stopped, John climbed down through the rattling mid-car doors and offered her his hand. How dry his skin is, Susan thought … and then scolded herself for thinking it. He wasn’t an animal, after all.
He led her south through a maze of ethnic markets, fish stalls, vegetable bins, used-clothing outlets. This was Kensington Market, John said, and it was his favorite part of the city.
It was also crowded and more than a little bewildering—no two signs in the same language—but Susan felt some of the carnival atmosphere, maybe picking it up from John. He took her to a cafe, a sidewalk table under an umbrella and far enough from the fish stalls that the air was tolerable. He ordered two cups of fierce cappucino. “Legal drugs.” Smiled at her. She sipped the coffee. He said, “Well, maybe I am dying.”
Her cup rattled against the saucer. “Do you always have these two-track conversations?”
“You mean, is this a manifestation of my superhuman intellect? Or just an annoying habit?”
“No, I don’t mean that. I mean—well, if you don’t want to talk about it—”
“Max must have warned you, surely? John the monster.” He startled her by closing his eyes. “You’re wearing Levis and a brown sweater with a checked collar showing at the neck. You have brown hair, blue eyes, a mole under your right cheekbone and another one just under your ear. You have both hands on the table; the nail is chipped on your left index finger. You don’t wear nail polish. The building behind you is catching the sunlight; it has twenty-eight rectangular windows facing the street and a revolving door with a mango cart parked on the sidewalk in front of it. The cart vendor is wearing a yellow plaid shirt and a black beret. A grey Nissan Stanza just drove past, southbound—it should be at the intersection by now.” He opened his eyes and stared at her. “You come from Southern California and you’re timid with people. You have an exaggerated respect for Dr. Kyriakides—take my word for it—and some unresolved feelings about your own father. You have a suppressed speech impediment that begins to surface when you talk about your home, which you don’t like to do. You think you like me, but you’re still a little frightened. You—”
“Stop it!”
There was a silence. Susan blushed deeply.
John said, more gently, “I don’t want you to forget what I am.”
“As if I c-could!” She thought about leaving. She wasn’t sure her legs would hold her. “How can you know all that about me?”
“Because you’re a book. Not just you, Susan. Everyone. A book of gestures and twitches and blinks and grimaces.”
“Do you want me to be frightened of you?”
“Only … appropriately frightened.” He added, “I’m sorry.”
Gradually, she relaxed back into her chair. “Do you still want to talk?”
“Do you still want me to?”
She took a deep breath. “Yes.”
“To you, or to Max?”
“Talk to me if you want. But only Dr. Kyriakides can help you.”
“If in fact he can.”
“If.” She didn’t want to risk lying—assuming it was possible to lie to him.
“It’s a game of chance, then, isn’t it? Roulette.”
“I’m not the doctor.”
“You’re the doctoral candidate.”
“It’s not exactly my field. I never worked directly with Dr. Kyriakides on this, except for a few tissue studies.”
He shook his head. “I’m not ready to talk to Max.”
“Then me. Talk to me.”
He gave her another long, speculative look. Susan could not help wincing. My God, she thought, those eyes! Not the windows of the soul … more like knives. Like scalpels.
“Maybe it would be good to talk,” he said. “It’s been a long time since I talked to anyone.”
“I’m not going anywhere,” Susan said.
She asked whether he had been having symptoms.
“Episodes of fever, sometimes dangerously high. Transient muscular weakness and some pain. Fugue states—if you want to call them that.”
“Is that what was happening yesterday?”
He nodded.
“I don’t know what you mean by a ‘fugue state.’ ”
He sipped his cappucino. “May I tell you a story?”
The formal research project had ended when John was five years old. He was adopted by a childless couple, the Woodwards, a middle-income family living in a bleak Chicago suburb. The Woodwards renamed him Benjamin, though he continued to think of himself as John. From the beginning, his adoptive parents were disturbed by his uniqueness. He didn’t do especially well in school—he was contemptuous of his teachers and sometimes a discipline problem—but he read beyond his years and he made conversation like an adult; which, the Woodwards told him, was very disrespectful.
“Jim Woodward was a lathe operator at an aerospace plant and he resented my intelligence. Obviously, a child doesn’t know this, or doesn’t want to admit it. I labored for almost eight years under the impression that I was doing something terribly wrong—that he hated me for some fundamental, legitimate reason. And so I worked hard to please him. To impress him. For example, I learned to play the flute. I borrowed a school instrument and some books; I taught myself. He loved Vivaldi: he had this old Heathkit stereo he had cobbled together out of a kit and he would play Vivaldi for hours—it was the only time I ever saw anything like rapture on his face. And so I taught myself the Concerto in G, the passages for flute. And when I had it down, I played it for him. Not just the notes. I went beyond that. I interpreted it. He sat there listening, and at first I thought he was in shock—he had that dumbfounded expression. I mistook it for pleasure. I played harder. And he just sat there until I was finished. I thought I’d done it, you see, that I’d communicated with him, that he would approve of me now. And then I put the flute back in the case and looked at him. And he blinked a couple of times, and then he said, ‘I bet you think you’re pretty fucking good, don’t you?’ ”
“That’s terrible,” Susan said.
“But I wasn’t convinced. I told myself it just wasn’t good enough, that’s all. So I thought, well, what else is there that matters to him?
“He had a woodworking shop in the basement. We were that kind of family, the Formica counters in the kitchen, Sunday at the Presbyterian church every once in a while, the neighbors coming over to play bridge, the woodwork shop downstairs. But he had quality tools, Dremel and Black and Decker and so on, and he took a tremendous amount of pride in the work he did. He built a guitar once, some cousin paid him a hundred dollars for it, and he must have put in three times that in raw materials, and when it was finished it was a work of art, bookmatched hardwood, polished and veneered—it took him months. When I saw it, I wanted it. But it had been bought and paid for, and he had to send it away. I wanted him to make another one, but he was already involved in some other project, and that was when I saw my opportunity—I said, ‘I’ll build it.’