Q: A Novel (14 page)
Authors: Evan Mandery
“Like the people who thoughtlessly razed Q’s beloved garden.”
“Yes,” he says, chanting along in unison. “Like the people who thoughtlessly razed beloved Q’s garden.”
“Like the hateful Deliver Corporation.”
“Like the hateful Deliver Corporation . . .” he repeats mindlessly.
“I didn’t realize you knew their name.”
John Deveril reels, as if struck by a bullet, but he does not need me to point out his mistake. He realizes his error before he has finished his sentence. Q realizes it immediately too. With a start, she looks up from her hardly touched dinner and stares at her father. After I discovered the identity of the Deliver Corporation, I shared the information with Q before the doomed protest. She in turn shared the identity of the villain solely with Ethel Lipschutz. Unless John has been hanging around with Ethel Lipschutz, which seems unlikely to say the least, there remains only one way John Deveril could know this name. It is his company, as I-60 told me yesterday in the forest on the banks of the Hudson. It is pointless for John to deny it.
“I’m sorry,” he mumbles.
Q first looks at her father with hatred and betrayal and disgust in her eyes. Then she looks at me. This look is, if possible, worse than the first. In her eyes, my betrayal is more fundamental. I have taken from her the one thing in which she believed completely, and accomplished nothing in so doing. The garden is gone. What was the point of this?
I understand in that moment that she is lost to me forever.
Around the table, no one understands exactly what is going on. They know only that it is bad. Q has left the table. John Deveril’s head is hanging. Joan is casting an unflinching stare of death at her husband. It is eerily quiet. When Tristan Handy speaks, even I am grateful for something, anything, to break the silence.
“As it will be in the future, it was at the birth of Man,” he says quietly. “There are only four things certain since Social Progress began. That the Dog returns to his Vomit and the Sow returns to her Mire. And the burnt Fool’s bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the Fire.”
I look at him quizzically.
“Kipling,” he says.
“But that’s only three things,” I say quietly and with total resignation.
T
he Monday following the fateful Thanksgiving dinner, I move out of our place on Mercer Street. Q does not demand this, but I understand it is expected, and hastily arrange a sublet near Columbia from a colleague on sabbatical. I take only the bare essentials with me. Thinking about any further details is too painful.
This grief is real, not hypothetical. I spend one evening after another staring at the ceiling of my studio on Morningside Drive. Sometimes I rouse myself from bed and take long, aimless walks in the cold. Sometimes I pen letters to Q, tomes of confession or explanation, only to discard them in the morning. Sometimes I write angry missives to I-60, but in the morning discard these too as obviously futile. Nothing helps. I revisit the sites of our dates: the Angelika; the boathouse in Central Park; the garden, now a construction site; the communist miniature golf course. No sight is so pitiful as a miniature golf course in winter.
Many times, I open my cell phone to call Q; once I even press the speed dial key, then catch myself and snap the phone shut after the first ring. I worry that she will check her log and call back. What would I say? The only solution is to delete the number, which I do, as if that would purge it, or her, from my memory. On another day, I walk all the way to the Lower East Side, and sit in a teahouse across the street from our old apartment. Q does not come or go, which is for the best. The temptation to run to her would be too much for me to resist. On my long walk home, I resolve to pull myself together, though I have no idea how.
In time inertia draws me back into the old routine. I am back in the neighborhood I know, teaching on Thursdays and jogging the old routes. I don’t feel normal, but slowly, inexorably, my life inches its way to normal. For me, normal means research and writing. Soon, almost in spite of myself, I am immersed in a new book. I think, perhaps, it may do me some good to lose myself in another person’s life for a while.
The idea is hatched
during a sensibly priced dinner at Levy’s Delicatessen with my agent, Janet Snarklee. Over knishes and cream sodas, I describe the various ideas germinating in my brain. My dream is to write a history of the sand wedge. I explain that there is a huge, untapped market for golf books, and that the history of the sand wedge, with its bulging sole and prominent flange, is a vehicle for discussing twentieth-century technological innovation and politics, as Eisenhower is known to have been greatly frustrated with his bunker play. Said frustration is recognized to have informed his cold war strategy, particularly the policy of brinksmanship, conceived after Khrushchev holed out from a sand trap on his very first time playing golf, at a course the Soviet premier had built specifically for Eisenhower’s planned visit to Moscow in 1960.
“It will be to golf what
Seabiscuit
was to horse racing,” I explain, “if
Seabiscuit
had been about the development of the bridle worn by the horse rather than about the horse itself.”
“Biographies of inanimate objects are so passé,” she says.
“What about the development of the utility wood? They quite helped Bill Clinton’s game.”
“I don’t think so,” Janet says. “Golf is on the wane.”
I mention the second idea, which came to me during the ruinous Thanksgiving dinner, as a throwaway. It’s another what-if yarn, taking as its hypothetical dramatic starting point the success of young Sigmund Freud, during his formative days as a medical student, with his research on the life history of the eel.
Janet leaps at this. “That’s what you should be writing!” she exclaims, banging her fist on the table. “Why didn’t you mention that idea first?”
“I was focused on the sand wedge. Besides, I didn’t want to pigeonhole myself.”
“Pish. Make yourself famous. Then you can branch out. After the success of
Time’s Broken Arrow
, you are hereafter the counterhistorical novel guy.”
“It sold 1,550 copies.”
“You’re on your way to becoming a bestseller,” she says. “Off you go on Freud.” She picks up the tab, which makes a real impression on me. It has been a long time since someone treated me to a meal.
I begin work the next day. At the start I am apprehensive, but Snarklee’s enthusiasm buoys me and, after a few weeks of investigation I begin to believe there is a story to be told. The project builds momentum. Soon I am heavily immersed in the background research on Freud, intellectually absorbed, and past the point of no return. I even embrace the direction of my career. I envision the Freud novel as the first book in an antifactual quintology focused on late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Eurasia.
The second book of the series is a spicy tale in which a young Otto von Bismarck emigrates to England to pursue, successfully, the hand in marriage of the niece of the Duke of Cleveland. He goes on to become a Byron scholar and German history is never the same. In the third, Robespierre takes up transcendental meditation, which does wonders for his disposition. In the fourth, Gertrude Stein becomes president of Vichy France after Pétain dies from a bad schnitzel. In the finale, Mohandas Gandhi becomes the most successful cricketer of his generation. All are premised on reality, and in my grand vision, my brand of historical fiction, grounded on solid research, becomes as recognizable as Vonnegut’s satire or Pynchon’s impenetrable postmodern prose.
Freud was obsessed
with eels. Few people know this. Everyone knows about the beauty of his mother, twenty years the junior of his father. Many know of his addiction to cocaine, his reluctant identification with Judaism, and his latent homosexual relationship with Wilhelm Fleiss. Almost no one knows about the eels.
The fixation began in early 1876 when Professor Carl Claus seconded Freud to the Austrian zoological research station in Trieste to identify the testes of the eel, one of the great enigmas of science at the time. The mystery of the gonads traced all the way back to Aristotle, who performed the first known research on eels, and concluded that they were earthworms that grew from the guts of wet soil. This didn’t make very much sense, but no one could prove Aristotle wrong, so it became the default theory, not unlike how people came to believe in stress as the cause of the ulcer or the existence of God.
Setting Aristotle straight became nothing less than young Freud’s purpose in life. It was both his intellectual cause and, he believed, the route to academic immortality. Freud worked tirelessly. During his time in Trieste, Freud dissected countless eels in search of the male sex organ. In connection with this, he produced more than four hundred sketches, each drawn in pencil, which remain to this day among the most exquisite samples of the microscopist’s method.
Sigmund Freud saw meaning in everything, so if he had himself on the couch, he undoubtedly would have found symbolic significance in the fervor he brought to his study of eels. This is not to be understated. Because of their mysterious origins and enigmatic migratory patterns, anti-Semites often insidiously connected eels and Jews and Gypsies. There is, further, the matter of their elongated, protuberant construction. But the eels also had substantial literal influence on the course of Freud’s career. For Freud was trapped in the middle of the greatest scientific controversy of his day.
On one side of this debate was Simon Syrski, former director of the Museum for Natural History in Trieste, who hypothesized that flat petal-like lobes in the eel intestine were in fact the male sex organ. He had failed only to demonstrate that these structures produced sperm. On the other side was Freud’s mentor, Carl Claus. Claus, an avowed Darwinist who had studied hermaphroditism in animals, operated from a presumption of the eel’s bisexuality, which would have been consistent with Darwin’s idea that men “descended” from hermaphroditic or androgynous origins.
Freud believed the weight of the evidence supported Syrski. Indeed, his research came tantalizingly close to accurately describing the male eel’s sex organ. His histological analysis showed the cells of the lobes to be distinct from eel ovaries, and the shape and arrangement of these organs suggested the possibility of forming spermatozoa. Yet when Freud published his results he never abandoned the paradigm of hermaphroditism. He hemmed and hawed and hedged throughout the paper, and in the end said, “the opinion cannot be rejected that the lobed organ is a modification of the ovary.” The paper, “Observations on the Configuration and Finer Structure of the Lobed Organs in Eels Described as Testes,” published in 1877 in the
Proceedings of the Imperial Academy of Sciences
, was at that time the definitive study of eel testicles, universally praised in the academy for its thoroughness and the quality of its pencil sketches, flawed only for its failure to shed any light on the whereabouts of the gonads.
Its resounding thud in the scientific community hit Freud hard. He had placed all of his eggs (pardon) in the eel-testes basket. When the piece failed to earn him the fame he had hoped for and expected, the dejected Freud decided to change the course of his studies and career. He moved away from Claus and cast his lot with physiologist Ernst Wilhelm von Brücke, whose concept of psychodynamics, the idea that all living organisms are energy systems, became the intellectual cornerstone of psychoanalysis.
The tantalizing question is why Freud lacked the courage to authoritatively identify the testes. Why did he hold back? What essential quality kept Freud from being what he most wanted to be? Because one can only imagine what might have happened if he had the courage to declare the gonad found, Syrski vindicated, and Aristotle refuted. It seems beyond peradventure that it would have been the launching point for a very different career. He would have been the discoverer of the eel testicle, with all of the fame and possibility attendant to that.
Freud himself offers
a useful starting point for attempting to solve this puzzle. He engaged in extensive self-analysis, beginning in the mid-1890s during his forties and continuing for at least ten years and, arguably, until his death. During the early part of this process, Freud recognized for the first time his animosity for his father, Jakob, and his sexual feelings for his mother, the fetching Amalia. The exploration informed
The Interpretation of Dreams
, published in 1899, and
The Psychopathology of Everyday Life
, published two years later.
During the most intense phases of this process, Freud lamented that his analyst said very little, leaving him to do all the talking, and that he did not know where it was all going. He also complained about the bills, which were very high, though he made a point of always paying them promptly.
My sole remaining
reservation about the project is whether it is appropriate for my academic career. Though the history department at City University is famously left-leaning and broad-minded, I have the nagging sense that I should be writing about things that actually happened. I seek an audience with Hank Snjdon, the chairperson of our department. Hank is the author of the definitive biography of P. G. T. Beauregard, great-great-great-great-great grandson of Lucrezia Borgia, and the Confederate brigadier general who led the South to victory at the first battle of Bull Run.
The Beauregard biography is, possibly, the least interesting book I have ever read. The inclination is to fault the author, but it seems to me the problem is the subject: Beauregard just isn’t compelling. By all accounts, his victory at Bull Run was blind luck. He made no major tactical decisions, and at a critical point in the battle retreated from a key position when he mistook his reinforcements for fresh Union troops. Following his ascension to general, Beauregard developed a Napoleonic penchant for grand strategies with no regard for such trifling matters as logistics, intelligence, and troop strength. After the war, he went into the railroad business. It’s not enough to fill a book, and in the end a full chapter is devoted to Beauregard’s taste for cheese, which he fully indulged antebellum. He was particularly fond of Wensleydale.
To his credit, Snjdon freely admits the book is a dud. He particularly laments the cheese chapter but says he had no choice: he needed material. He had spent seven years researching Beauregard’s life, and with his tenure riding on the manuscript, he could not very well declare his research bankrupt and start over. So he finished the book and published it, and it served its purpose. He got tenure and is now chairperson of the department. But because of the book’s inadequacies, Snjdon never achieves the status he desires in the community of Civil War scholars. He says the great regret of his life is that he did not focus on Winfred Scott. It haunts him, he says, and he spends many a night lying in bed thinking about what could have been.
I like Hank. It is a tense period in my department, and he is not having an easy time of it. We are in the middle of a fierce debate over whether our core offering, the department’s contribution to the school’s general education program, should be in world history or global history. It may not sound like an issue of great moment, but this is academia, and the dispute has created a massive schism. One half the department won’t speak with the other half.
Matters come to a head when two professors nearly come to blows in the men’s room. Their failure to strike one another is not for lack of effort. Hef Angkot, the octogenarian Peloponnesianist and ardent globalist, throws a hard right in the direction of Stig Neuborne, the nonagenarian Visigoth scholar and fervent worldist, or antiglobalist, the appropriate characterization turning on one’s sympathies. Fortunately, Professor Angkot’s bursitis impedes his blow. It misses its mark and strikes, instead of Stig Neuborne’s chin, the Purell dispenser mounted on the wall, diffusing a stream of sanitizing foam. The professors emerge from the bathroom unscathed, arguably cleaner than before the altercation, although Neuborne alleges that he is allergic to Purell and that some has gotten in his eye. Neuborne is ceremoniously taken to the hospital, where he is treated for excessive sterilization and offered a gauze eye patch, which he wears for the next two months, until it is so badly frayed that it is no longer opaque or recognizable as gauze. The incident further heightens the already substantial tensions within the department.