The clock tower began to chime. A car drove slowly by, loud but unintelligible radio voices inside it. The driver, a bearded man he didn’t recognize, recognized him, and waved. He noticed a small bronze plaque affixed to the bench, dedicating it, on behalf of the Topeka City Council, to the memory of Thomas Attison. His first, his most vivid memory of Dr. Tom was false; it was an image lifted from one of his dad’s films; that’s why the memory was black-and-white, set to piano music in his mind. He did remember visiting Dr. Tom’s office with his dad when he was eight or nine to interview him for a school project. He could see the grandfatherly man extending a glass bowl of strawberry hard candies, the ones with the soft center. He’d read his questions off a yellow legal pad: Did you always know you wanted to be a psychiatrist? How does it feel to be world-famous? He’d visited again a year or two later for no particular reason. Again he was offered the glass bowl. Now, on the bench, he touched his tongue to the roof his mouth, remembering how the candies had scraped his palate. (After the session with Erwood, he was unusually aware of his body.) How many of his small gestures and postures in the present were embodied echoes of the past, repetitions just beneath the threshold of his consciousness? What would happen to the past if you brought those involuntary muscle memories under your control and edited them, edited them out? Now he felt the present absence of his babysitter’s tongue, that first metallic contact years ago. Now more recent traces of tobacco, artificial mint. As his father pulled up to the curb, Adam bit down on a phantom pen.
May break my bones but words. Bounces off me sticks to you. The grown-ups had equipped him with weak spells to cast back against the insults. But the need for the sayings disproved them and as he grew they would if anything just feed the laughter. Nice comeback, Darren. If he still sometimes said those things or other private phrases to himself, it was only to interrupt the harmful thoughts before it was too late and he had set some trap for an enemy on a highway or country road. It’s like there is a video game inside his head except what happens there will happen here. Recently it’s been based on Spy Hunter, which is among Darren’s favorites at Aladdin’s Arcade in West Ridge Mall. Same electronic music. From above he sees a strip of asphalt running vertically through a simplified landscape. The image is so vague it would be difficult for Darren to say if he’s picturing graphics or real terrain. But he can make out the silver Fiero that is his avatar speeding down below and he knows that if he presses a button in his mind the car will release an oil slick or smoke screen in its wake. And while it is impossible to say when his enemies will encounter these fatal hazards, understand they will, they’ll go through their windshields. Once, after they’d been talking about his dad, Dr. Jonathan asked Darren if he knew how he had acquired such powers. Darren said no.
But he did know. It was at Bright Circle Montessori on Oakley Avenue when he was four, when he was still the same age as his body. It was warm for late September and the sky was cloudless when his mom dropped him off. Okay, sweetheart. At this point Darren no longer clung or cried. He would just walk to Mrs. Caldwell and hug her hello and then quietly build and knock over towers of wooden blocks and wait for Adam Gordon and Jason Davis to arrive. Then he would follow them around and they would let him. That day they were in the sandbox in the backyard during free play and Adam said that he had a plant with special powers that he had picked from along the chain-link fence. Like poison ivy or poison oak or the way spinach makes Popeye strong this was a plant Adam rubbed between his hands until it released some kind of force. You don’t have to eat it. Adam gave the weeds to Jason who passed them on to Darren who got them to stain his hands a little and buried them as Adam instructed in the sand. Then Adam said you make a wish for something to happen and it does. Darren doesn’t remember what Adam or Jason wished for, or if they told him, but Darren was obsessed with tornadoes and he said he’d use his power to make one happen and then they played some other game.
The chests of fifteen toddlers rising and falling on cots in the beige-carpeted room as poorly simulated wave noise issues from a portable stereo plugged into the corner. Mrs. Caldwell and her assistant Pam are preparing a snack in the adjacent kitchen, small paper cups of grapes halved lengthwise to mitigate the risk of choking. Darren wakes to rain falling on the school’s metal roof. Quietly he rises and carries his stuffed rabbit to the window and parts the curtain to see unusually dark clouds he thinks are lowering. Acorns from the red oak in the school’s front yard hit the window and he startles. Only gradually does he realize he is looking at his work. His hands are clean now, Mrs. Caldwell made him scrub them before lunch, but they feel at once raw and numb, like the time he touched the stove. Beneath the artificial lemon of the soap the smell of the magic plant is still detectable. He hurries back to his cot and pulls the Peanuts sheets up over his head and tries to call off the storm he’s summoned. To his rabbit whose name is lost he says again and again that he is sorry. And then we hear the sirens starting up.
SPEECH SHADOWING
(JONATHAN)
I first read “A Man by the Name of Ziegler” on the 4 train, lights flickering in the shaking, almost-empty car; I was on my way back from seeing Jane, one of the first times we’d slept together; I’d leave Rachel for her within a year.
The story begins with Ziegler’s visit to the city history museum—he’s either in Basel or Berlin—which is free on Sundays. Alone in an exhibit of “objects of medieval superstition,” he reaches unthinkingly beyond a rope to touch the forge and mortars and other implements from an alchemist’s workshop; he is surprised to discover among the tools a “small dark-colored pellet, rather like a pill.” Another visitor appears, startling Ziegler, who instinctively pockets the pill. Later, he rediscovers it over lunch, where, giving in to a “childlike impulse,” he pops it in his mouth, washes it down with a beer. After the meal, Ziegler continues his day of leisure with a trip to the zoo. Wandering around the cages, he slowly realizes that, as a result of the mysterious pill, he can understand the language of the animals, who are, it turns out, viciously mocking the zoo-goers, whom they consider idiots and frauds and brutes. Ziegler is shocked less by the fact that he can comprehend the animals than by their contempt, the extremity of it; derided by monkeys and elk (“who speak only with their eyes”) and ibexes and chamois (whatever those are) and llamas and gnus and boars and bears, he finally breaks down; tossing away his cane, hat, tie, and then his shoes, he collapses in sobs against the bars of one of the cages. At the story’s end, Ziegler is hauled off to an asylum I pictured as Bellevue, where I’d interned.
Dr. Samuels, my analyst in graduate school, so rarely said anything—just “Go on,” or “Say more about that,” or repeated something I’d said to draw out its significance—that his recommendation alone would have imbued the Herman Hesse story with mystery. Was I supposed to be Ziegler? (Ziegler is unremarkable, “not stupid but not gifted,” a man who respects money and science above all things, “one of those people we see every day on the street, whose faces we can never really remember, because they all have the same face: a collective face.”) Was therapy like alchemy, or its opposite? Was Samuels, who knew about my affair with Jane, suggesting some parallel between my marital transgression and Ziegler’s reaching across the museum ropes?