Personally, he had never experienced any such thing. So he could be objective. It happened that the library in the town where he grew up subscribed to science journals no one else poked around in. That came to a stop by the time he was a teenager, but he had been looking for something in science that was mysterious and unexplained. He kept randomly discovering stuff about things unknown about the human brain.
Where he grew up, and inside his own home, there was an awful lot of discrimination against you if you were really smart, like you had a disability, or you needed to go through some kind of rehab so you would grow up to be like everyone else.
I think we both knew in a couple of minutes we were going to go to bed with each other. I think we knew it before I mentioned it was my birthday, and also before the inches between us grew a little bit shorter, and he surprised me by asking, “Why do you look so sad?”
I argued that I didn’t look sad, as if he shouldn’t believe his own eyes. I had nothing to tell him about personally hearing of an oob.
“Brains are so awesome!” he told me.
He loved researching oobs. They come from neurons and wiring! People have computers in their heads running programs that kick in at just the right time, programs they don’t know are even there! But all the same it’s unbelievably scientifically mysterious and so cool!
He thought it was awesome of me to be a reverend. He felt we shouldn’t be bothered by the years between our ages. He was nineteen but almost twenty, and he was incredibly mature, he pointed out.
We were lovers for almost four months. He came to my apartment by taking a bus to the entrance of my development. We met nowhere else; we never went out together. He often showed up with his big backpack full of groceries because I never had anything he liked. In my cabinets he stashed Goldfish crackers, Hostess cherry pies, Pop-Tarts. He fried slices of bologna on my stove for white-bread sandwiches with mayonnaise.
I never watched him eat those sandwiches.
“Call me Plummy,” he had suddenly said. Among his groceries were always plums.
Plums were so incredible, so supreme among fruits, he had realized: so tangy-sweet, so firm in the skin, so juicy. It was proof of the power of evolution, but didn’t Plummy sound too like the name of a guy who didn’t come from the middle of America, from a town so ordinary, its name should be, officially, Ordinary?
He thought Plummy sounded like he stepped into my life from one of those British television dramas where it’s always a bygone century and there’s a manor house, and though you end up rooting for the servants, somewhere on the show there’s a dude who went to Cambridge or Oxford, and his IQ is off the charts and he’s moral, and humble too, and everyone calls him something upper-class Englishy, like what they used to call their favorite teddy bear.
His mom used to watch those shows. Sunday nights. He’d sit nearby, teaching himself a new language to write code in, or blowing stuff up in a game where he couldn’t turn the sound on if she was watching TV, not even if he put on headphones. He had not been allowed to have a computer in his bedroom until he was almost ready to leave for college, because his parents knew he’d never come out.
But naturally he had one in there. He scrounged up a pitiful Atari from a storage room at his school, from the days when there wasn’t the internet yet. He sneaked it home and fooled around with it.
He imaged his first human brain at thirteen, when he created a Pac-Man rip-off. In his game, a brain was the main character. It had a mouth. It zipped around eating dangerous little villains who threw footballs like bombs, and just happened to wear uniforms in the colors of his town. The game was primitive and completely amateur, but there was never a chance for the villains to escape their fate of becoming, basically, cannibalized.
The only grown-up who saw it was a guy who worked at Radio Shack and let him hang out there. He needed to keep the game to himself, this guy warned him. It was a football-centered sort of town. His father coached at the high school. His mom helped out with concessions at the Friday night games he only went to because they made him show up and keep stats. His brothers and sisters used to tell him they’d grab him one day, put him in a car, and drive him to one of those places where families bring gay kids so they can be rewired from being gay. But it would be a place where they turn you into a football player, like it was run by retired professional athletes, and wasn’t that a funny joke, rewiring kids, like it would work, like it wouldn’t be some kind of torture, ha ha ha?
At fifteen he had a phase of being into nature. He built a game where you could form a tsunami in the ocean of your choice, depending on your skill level. It was tricky, but one thing leading to another, you could wipe out all kinds of places, even in parts of America that only have ponds and weensy lakes. You could target stadiums. You could tidal-wave a whole Super Bowl. He never showed that one to anyone.
To me, he could boast all he wanted about his old games. The first time we were taking off our clothes, yes, on the evening of the day I turned thirty, I did something I had never let anyone do. I let him undo my collar stud and slip the collar office.
The touch of his hands was a whole new answer for me to the question, What is tenderness?
No one knew about us. Well, my neighbors did. But it’s not the sort of apartment development where people make friends with each other. Many residents work at the medical center, but none were on my block. When I first moved in, I thought it was going to be temporary: the new baby chaplain in a one-bedroom unit at the smaller end of one-bedroom units. But every time I thought I should move, I just didn’t.
“Your brain is as awesome as all the rest of you,” he would say, and I’d laugh at him for how seriously he took me, all the time.
And he thought it was awesome I planned to never stop believing in souls, in spite of all the evidence there is no such thing. It’s like believing in music if you’re tone deaf, he felt. Or colors if you’re blind to colors.
The coolest thing in the world ever would be dying and finding out you’re not dead, he felt. Like one minute your heart stops and—wham—the next minute you’re far away, high up in outer space, hanging out with, like, comets. And everything you wanted to know about, like, everything, wham again! You suddenly know answers to questions you didn’t know to ask when you were alive!
What a dream come true that would be, he felt.
Then, when it was time for him to leave for faraway grad school, we said good-bye solemnly in my doorway.
He had postponed twice the date he was supposed to arrive for the start of the rest of his life. He had missed his orientation and he still had to go home for a couple of days to see his family. There’d be a crowd of them. It was going to make him lonely, so would I call him while he was there, and let him call me, even if I was at work?
“Yes,” I said.
For about a month, I missed him in a general, dragging, I-don’t-feel-well sort of way. I told myself I was maybe bugged by a low-grade virus I’d picked up in the hospital. I did not say yes all the times in grad school he let me know he wanted to see me. He called me a discriminator on the basis of age.
“Oh, grow up,” I’d answer.
I did not love Plummy. I just didn’t.
Not that I said so to him. Both of us were careful to not let the subject come up. I’d remind myself I never fell in love with him. Like I actually knew what I meant.