None of this Ever Really Happened (13 page)

I decided I wouldn't tell Gene Brooke about the whole business
with Lydia. It wasn't out of any desire to obfuscate, but
out of a need to get on with the Lisa Kim stuff. It turned out
that he wasn't in as big a hurry as I was, but it didn't matter
anyway, because as soon as I sat down, I told him everything.
I thought I was getting it out of the way, but he didn't; he
thought I was introducing it. It was his belief that Lydia and
Lisa probably weren't two separate issues, that it probably
wasn't coincidental that they were happening at the same
time, that I probably needed to understand my feelings for
Lydia before I dealt with Lisa Kim. All of this seemed terribly
obvious when he said it, and I felt foolish or naïve for not
having seen it. Jesus, my feelings for Lydia? Why had I not
stopped to examine these more thoughtfully? I guessed that
I was sad. I guessed that I felt some relief or release, but also
some guilt; more than anything, I was pissed off.

"Can you tell me why?" he asked.

"Because she's acting as if this whole Lisa Kim thing is
some kind of frivolous lark, and she's treating me as if I'm
Don Quixote, off tilting at windmills."

I thought he might ask me if I
were
tilting at windmills;
if the tables had been turned, I probably would have asked
him, but Gene seemed seldom to ask the next question, the
obvious one. I wondered if not doing so was a technique,
something he had studied and learned. I imagined grad students
sitting on folding chairs in a circle asking each other
unexpected questions. The one he asked me was, "What do
you think that Lydia feels?"

Lydia? Jesus. I didn't know. It was as if I were going on
a journey, and he was asking me the most basic questions:
Have you packed a bag? Have you purchased a ticket? Have
you planned your itinerary? I'd done none of it. I guessed
that Lydia, too, was angry. I guessed that she was hurt and
worried. I guessed that she was resentful.

"Why do you think she feels those things?"

"Because she's possessive."

"Which is something you had both agreed never to be, so
you're angry."

"Exactly," I said.

"But why is she possessive?" he asked.

"I don't know."

"Is she afraid of losing you?"

"Maybe."

"Why is that do you think?"

"I don't know."

"Could it be because she loves you?"

"I guess."

"Okay," he said, "would I be twisting your words too much
if I said that you are mad at Lydia because she loves you?"

I had to think about that for a while. "I suppose not. We
weren't supposed to fall in love with each other."

"So she's violated your agreement?" Then he wanted to
know why Lydia would have ever agreed to such a thing in
the first place. Why would she want to be in a relationship
not based on love? We decided the only reason would be if
she was afraid of love. And if she was no longer afraid of love,
wasn't that good? Didn't it say that she was healthier and more
mature? And why had I ever wanted to be with someone who
was neither of these things? Was I, too, afraid of love?

I needed time to think. "I was different," I finally said. "I
doubted the existence of love because I didn't think I'd ever
really been in love."

"And are you now?"

"No, but I think I can be. That's the difference. I think
Lisa Kim's death shook me by the shoulders. It said, 'Look,
that could be
you
crumpled there.'"

"So you've changed, too, like Lydia," Gene said.

I had to admit that I had. Then why was I mad at Lydia
for changing? Was I mad at her because I didn't love her? Was
I mad because she wasn't lovable enough? Suddenly our time
was up, but I didn't want to stop. Gene insisted.

"Man," I said, "this is hard." We agreed to meet again before
I left for Canada.

Speaking the truth to Gene made me feel like an honest—if
foolish—man, and seemed to ease my anxiety a bit. I wanted
to do more of it; on Saturday I went to see Tanya Kim. She
was fitting someone, so I waited and looked over the boots
on display. She noticed me when she came out with arms of
shoeboxes: "Oh, hi."

"Sell me some stuff for a canoe trip?" I asked.

While I waited, I picked out a waterproof poncho, a flashlight,
a pocketknife, and an unbreakable water bottle.

When Tanya came, she looked at these things. She recommended
a different knife and two pairs of water shoes.
"You don't want to cut your foot out there," she said. Then
she sold me some socks and T-shirts that breathe and dry
quickly, and a pair of nylon fishing pants with zip-off legs.

While she was ringing me up, I asked her how she was
doing. I again made my question general, but she again answered
in the specific and with the same air of confidentiality
I'd felt from her before. I decided I'd reciprocate and told her
about going to see Gene Brooke. This interested her. She said
that her father had wanted Lisa to see a counselor and was
now after her to.

"I don't suppose Lisa ever did . . ."

"Of course she did."

"Really? That surprises me a little," I said.

"Why? It was the perfect Lisa situation. Someone else
agrees to sit still and listen to you talk about yourself for a
whole hour. You must not have known her as well as you
thought you did."

Did I detect that she was tempting me to tell her the truth?
I decided to meet her halfway. "Tanya, I didn't know her at
all. That's another reason I came in here today. I wanted to
tell you that I wasn't Lisa's boyfriend."

She cocked her head and maybe she even smiled a little
bit. "I'd kind of figured that out."

"Do you know who I am?" I asked.

"No." She had finished bagging my things, and she was
looking into my eyes now, maybe for the first time.

I took a little breath. "I saw the accident. I was right behind
her. I was the first one to get to her. That's my only connection
to her." I watched her closely; she seemed okay. She
then carefully asked me the obvious questions: How did it
happen? Did she say anything? Was she conscious? Was she
even alive?

Finally she handed me my bags. "I got your letter," she
said. "Have you talked to Rosie Belcher? She was Lisa's best
friend. If anyone can help you, she can."

"Yeah, I made the connection in the yearbook, but I just
can't find her. She's not in any directory, and neither are her
parents."

"They moved to the East Coast after Rosalie got married,
but she's still around here. It's Rosalie Svigos, now. She's
a doctor." Some small thing had changed. She met my eyes
again. She listened when I told her about my trip. She said
she hoped I would have a good time.

Gene had me go through the accident again, looking for the
thing that was bothering me. We went minute by minute. He
asked me lots of questions: How would you have approached
Lisa? What if she'd locked her door? What would you say to
her? Are your emergency flashers on? Does she have bucket
seats? If you take her key, doesn't her steering wheel lock?
He asked me over and over to imagine the best-case scenario,
to imagine everything going right.

"Well," I said, "I guess she probably wouldn't say 'thank
you very much. I know I'm drunk as a skunk, and I really appreciate
your saving my life.'"

"Okay, but suppose she does. Suppose she cooperates and
doesn't scream or Mace you or shoot you. What next?"

We went through the whole thing; there were a thousand
problems. "But Gene, I've known that. I've really known that
all along, but there's still something bothering me. It's like the
name of a state capital or movie director that's circling my
head, and I can't quite reach out and grasp it." I asked him if
there was a memory drug that might bring the thing back.
He didn't know of one. He said that we could try hypnosis,
that he used it sometimes to help people quit smoking or lose
weight or deal with anxiety.

"And it works?"

"Sometimes. It depends on the person. In your case, I
think maybe we're looking in the wrong place and it might
help us find the right place. Have you ever heard of George
Mallory and Andrew Irvine?" He told me about the two British
mountain climbers who disappeared on Mount Everest
in 1924. No trace of them had ever been found. In the meantime,
Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay climbed Everest,
followed by dozens of others, and every one of them had
the same goal: the summit at 29,000 feet. Every one. Then,
a few years ago, a young German climber named Jochen
Hemmleb shifted his sights ever so slightly, and said that he
wanted to climb to 28,000 feet, not 29,000, and he wanted to
reach Mallory and Irvine, not the summit. So he calculated
the most likely place where the climbers would have fallen,
went right there, and found Mallory, who was actually in one
piece, preserved by the thin, cold air, including his clothing and
equipment. Then Hemmleb found dozens of other climbers,
although not Irvine, in the same bizarre graveyard of a
boulder field in various states of preservation, many identifiable
by nationality and expedition because of the clothing
they were wearing and the equipment they were carrying.
So now orthodontists from Dallas and socialites from Marin
County and whole Japanese climbing clubs have gotten to
the top of Everest, but Jochen Hemmleb went somewhere
entirely different and found something entirely different because
he changed the angle of his quest by a fraction of a
degree. "So maybe that's what we need to do," said Gene.

"Explain how hypnosis fits in," I said.

Gene asked me to think of my mind as a circle with a
horizontal diameter. Above the line is the conscious mind
and below it the unconscious. Apparently hypnosis, which
is really nothing more than a relaxation technique, can allow
some people to sink a bit below the line, a bit into their unconscious,
where they may discover the forgotten or the repressed
and where suggestion can sometimes be planted.

I told Gene I thought I might be a bit too much of a skeptic
or cynic to be a very good subject, but I'd think about it.

"Is the Gene Brooke in your story the same one who works at
this school?" asks the dog-faced boy.

"Yes," I say.

"Then how does he know Carolyn O'Connor? Did he
used to work in the city?"

"Actually, he doesn't know Carolyn O'Connor, or didn't
then, and he's never worked in the city. I just rearranged the
pieces a little for the sake of the story."

"I don't understand," says Nick.

"Well, it just works better that way," I say.

"I'm not sure I agree," says the girl whose hair is blue
today, "and I definitely don't buy this hypnotism stuff. That
sounds hokey to me. Sounds like Seinfeld or something."

"But that's the part that's true," I say. "Gene really
does
use
hypnotism and he really
did
use it on me."

"Now let's see," says Nick. "You put something in that isn't
true because it works better, and you put something in that
doesn't work because it's true. I'm not sure you can have it
both ways."

"Sure I can; it's my story," I say.

"Isn't it
my
story, too?" asks Nick.

"You as the reader? Well, yes," I say.

"What if I don't buy it?" asks Nick.

"Do you buy it?" I say.

"I'm not sure," says Nick.

"So Gene Brooke is our Gene Brooke, and Carolyn
O'Connor's real, too?" asks the girl with blue hair.

"Yes."

"And you say they know each other when they really
don't?"

"Well, they didn't. They do now," I say.

"I'm confused," says the blue-haired girl.

"And you can make that happen just because it's your
story?" asks someone.

"Yes."

"Okay," says the dog-faced boy, "if the story belongs to
the writer, and I'm the writer, then why can't I write anything
I want to just like you? Why do I have to write this stupid
double-plot story?"

"Is that a rhetorical question?" I ask.

"No. I'd really like to know."

"I'll give you a serious answer if you really want one."

"I do."

"For one thing, the double-plot story forces you to be
aware of the narrative voice, forces you to think about the relationship
between the narrator and the other characters for
another, and it helps in story development, helps your story
to be dynamic and not static. A lot of times beginning writers
have trouble making a story happen. This assignment forces
you to make things happen," I say.

"I don't want to be forced, I just want to write. Can't you
just let us alone to write?" says the blue-haired girl.

"Well, that would be a bit like teaching you to swim by
pushing you into the water. My job is to show you a few
strokes."

"But this is supposed to be 'creative' writing," says Nick.
"That suggests freedom to me. It's more like 'restrictive' writing
when we have to do your assignments all the time."

"Then make up your own assignments."

"Can we do that?"

"Sure. I'd prefer that you do that. The more responsibility
you take for the course, the more you'll get out of it. But
your assignments have to be as good as mine, and I have to
approve them. Write them out. Use mine as models, if you
wish. Make sure that each one has a specific stated goal or
goals and a specific purpose, and the purpose cannot be to
exorcise your adolescent angst or explore formless, amorphous,
and misguided teenage impressions of love, lust, or
any related topic. Sorry. I mean goals and purposes that
have to do with the craft of writing, the technical discipline
of writing."

"Can I ask another question? If this is a writing course,
why are we doing all this reading?"
"Well, you know, writers read other writers just like golfers
look at each others' swings and young surgeons learn
from old surgeons, and artists study under other artists. It's
kind of how you learn."