We left the galleries of paintings and walked back down the staircase to find the ancient sculptures, which Jane loved. When we arrived in the skylit hall, I discovered that I’d somehow absorbed the colors from the paintings and could project them now onto the smooth marble of the statuary or let them play across the museum’s high walls; I was a kind of magic lantern. I described this pleasant hallucination to Jane, who seemed to be tripping not at all, and she told me in what I called her “Barnard voice” that Roman marble sculptures had been vividly colored, that the image of pure classical form we inherited from the Renaissance was false; there was elaborate polychromatic painting, gilding, silvering, inlay. And these sculptures would have had eyes, Jane explained to me, not smooth vacant spaces, but lifelike organs of sight constructed separately out of quartz and obsidian and set into the sockets: blue or green irises; jet-black pupils. As Jane described them, the eyes materialized in a hundred marble heads, and soon the court was a vast network of crisscrossing gazes, encaged by them—like those laser motion sensors you see in heist movies; I could sense whenever I passed through one of the Romans’ sight lines an almost imperceptible pressure on my face, like walking through mist or a succession of tiny webs.
I really started to lose it when I met them, the gazes, when I locked eyes with this or that sculpture and perceived the contempt, the “lofty and solemn contempt, a terrible contempt. In the language of these silent, majestic eyes, Ziegler read, he, with hat and cane, his gold watch and his Sunday suit, was no better than vermin, an absurd and repulsive bug.” If, instead of a Sunday suit and carefully maintained whiskers, I wore a mustache on my collective face, had shoulder-length hair, a secondhand corduroy jacket over a plaid button-down shirt and faded jeans; if, instead of an uncritical faith in money and science, I believed, I claimed to believe, in the liberation of repressed drives and the reorganization of social forces, the contempt communicated by the statues was still overwhelming, their mockery specific to me, my hypocrisy. Your received jargon regarding the mind and its functions; the contradiction between the normalizing force of therapy and your supposed belief in revolution; your use of your mother’s death to justify your behavior toward Rachel, behavior you’ll just repeat with Jane. I read all this in their eyes and knew I didn’t, still saw the unpainted marble underneath my vision; I understood that the drug had tapped and was now externalizing some vein of self-loathing. This isn’t real, I repeated to myself, breathing deeply, and I started to calm down.
Until I heard the voices of the elderly couple near me; the man, black turtleneck beneath blue jacket, leaned over to read aloud from a placard beside the portrait bust of a powerful-looking curly-headed figure, some minor emperor. At first I thought the man was speaking a foreign language, maybe Hebrew, which I knew a little, but, as I listened, I grew convinced that I was hearing the garbled shadow of the wall text. Then I realized the collapse of sense was general: the girl in a plaid skirt who skipped past us, click of her saddle shoes on the mosaic floor, addressed to the grown-ups trailing her a stream of unintelligible if shaped noise. A red-haired woman in cat-eye glasses pointing out a detail on a Greek funerary relief said something to her friend that sounded like a recording played in reverse. I turned to Jane, but, instead of reassuring me, she opened her mouth and released, with the exception of one or two recognizable words, the rapid nonsense from my study. “Dejected and wrenched out of all habits of thought,” Samuel’s voice in my head, “Ziegler turned back to his fellow men in despair. He looked for eyes that would understand his terror and misery; he listened to conversations in the hope of hearing something comforting, something understandable and soothing.” I tried to keep it together—I’d had a bad trip before—but there were guards moving in the periphery of my vision; they’d noticed my agitation; they’d haul me off to Bellevue. Chlorpromazine and electroshock.
I remember the next several hours of the Episode in both the first and third person, probably because I’ve depended heavily on Jane’s account. At the time it was hell, but it would come to be an endearing part of our prehistory, a comedy—Buster Keaton, black-and-white, the action at once stuttering and sped up. Set it to piano music in your mind: I flee the museum, not allowing Jane time to claim our coats; she rushes down the steps after me, follows me freezing into the snowy park; I inadvertently lead us past the north gate of the Central Park Zoo (the animals laughing at my plight—although, since that afternoon in 1969, over half of the world’s animals have disappeared); eventually we exit the park on Fifty-Ninth, the sudden smell of manure drawing Jane’s attention to nearby carriage horses, whose blinders block the animals’ majestic eyes; enticed by the heavy blanket she glimpses in the back of one of the white carriages, Jane more or less forces me to climb in; she instructs the carriage driver to take us wherever he wants, anywhere, just don’t stop until I tell you, and we’re off, huddling together under the coarse blanket, hooves echoing anachronistically on pavement, a sound Ziegler would often have heard on the Brauergasse in Basel or Berlin, while I’m babbling on about Samuels and alchemy and cancer and kings and cars and the lies of progress and civilization that horses and statues so easily see through, while Jane, stroking my hair, tries to shut the future father of her children up.
* * *
The first successful hatching of a golden eagle in captivity took place at the Topeka Zoo in 1971; as a result, the American Association of Zoological Parks and Aquariums honored the zoo with the Edward H. Bean Award for the year’s most significant animal birth; it also allowed the Topeka Zoo to officially change its name to the World Famous Topeka Zoo, a title only the association can confer (and which it would, twenty years or so later, following a string of animal deaths and failed sanitary inspections, revoke). When we arrived in Topeka for our postdocs at the Foundation, the ascendency of the zoo was front-page news, along with charmingly insignificant crime, crop reports, and cattle futures. (I remember visiting the zoo’s “children’s farm,” Jane’s laughter as the sheep’s black tongue lifted the pellets from her palm.) In our first year in Topeka, my default joke was to describe everything as World Famous: this is the World Famous Topeka Howard Johnson’s Motor Lodge and Restaurant; on your right, you’ll see the World Famous Westboro Beauty Plaza; and so on. Like most of the staff at the Foundation—which was in fact a world-famous psychiatric institute and hospital—we initially thought of Topeka as the affordable and almost exotically boring backdrop to our professional lives. Most of our colleagues also came from the coasts or, in the case of several influential senior staff, from Europe, having fled, by whatever circuitous route, the war. We are now passing the World Famous Dillon’s Grocery. The World Famous Kaw Valley Pawn and Gun. That’s the World Famous Miniature Train carrying children through the World Famous Gage Park.
We planned to complete our two-year fellowships and return to New York, but we met Eric and Sima, Berkeley transplants, and we liked Topeka’s lack of exclusivity, the unobstructed sky; we watched thunderstorms together on the wraparound porch of the ramshackle Victorian house we bought without having to ask my father for a dime. (Smell of ozone after lightning; green tinge to the clouds.) Jane found it easier to write in what she experienced as the quiet, easier to imagine starting a family where we were known only as a couple—no memory of Rachel, no complicated preexisting social networks, no potentially difficult relations nearby. I wanted children badly, maybe in part to mark how different my second marriage was from the first.