The Executor Read online

  Still. It sounded so strange, so enticingly strange.

  I could have called from inside the library—there was nobody around—but I have always considered Widener a temple, disturbing its dusty silence a sacrilege. I packed up and left, crossing the Tercentenary Theater in the direction of Canaday Hall, the hideous dormitory known as “The Projects,” where I’d lived as a freshman. Outside the Science Center, the snow was soiled, compacted by hundreds of feet, and I paused to watch a group of students putting the finishing touches on a giant, Daliesque snow-ear. Once indoors, I breathed on my hands, took out my cell phone, and dialed. A recorded voice told me that this account had been deactivated, message one-one-four-seven.

  I tried again and got the same voice, and after it happened a third time, I realized that this was actually happening. Yasmina had cut me off. That she footed the entire bill seemed irrelevant just then; she had once again stranded me without a word of warning, and I was livid. I almost threw the phone against the wall. My need for a source of income grown even more pressing, I went downstairs in search of a pay phone.

  SHE SOUNDED ELDERLY. I thought I detected an accent, although I needed to hear more than a single hello.

  “Yes, hi, I’m calling about the ad in the Crimson.”

  “Ah. And with whom am I speaking?”

  “My name is Joseph Geist.”

  “A pleasure to meet you, Mr. Geist.”

  “Thank you. Same to you, Ms....” I paused to let her introduce herself. She didn’t, so I said, “I’m intrigued. What sort of conversationalist are you after?”

  “A catholic one. Small c. Is that how you would describe yourself?”

  “I think so. Although for the record, I’m Catholic, big C, as well.”

  She laughed gently. “Well, I shan’t hold that against you.”

  I’d settled on German, although her inflections were decidedly different from those I’d encountered in Berlin. Perhaps she was from the countryside, or another city.

  “I’m no longer practicing, for what it’s worth.”

  “Ah, a lapsed Catholic. That I find more to my taste.”

  “Glad to oblige.”

  “So, Mr. Geist, the lapsed Catholic, you saw my advertisement. You are a Harvard student, I presume?”

  To explain my exact status would have taken far too long. I said, mostly truthfully, “Graduate student.”

  “Yes? And what do you study?”

  “Philosophy.”

  There was a tiny pause. “Really. That is very interesting, Mr. Geist. And what kind of a philosopher are you?”

  Though tempted to puff myself up, I decided to proceed with caution.

  “A catholic one,” I said. “Small c.”

  She laughed again. “Perhaps I should ask instead your philosopher of choice.”

  I couldn’t possibly anticipate her tastes, so I said what I thought would best provoke and amuse: “Myself, of course.” Except what I actually said was, “Ich, natürlich.”

  “Oh, come now,” she said.

  But I could hear her smiling.

  “I shall be pleased to meet you, Mr. Geist. Are you available at three o’clock?”

  “Three o’clock—today?”

  “Yes, three o’clock today.”

  I almost said no. I didn’t want to seem too needy. “That should be fine.”

  “Very good. Allow me to give you the address.”

  I wrote it down. “Thank you.”

  “Danke schön, Herr Geist. ”

  Standing there, receiver in hand, it occurred to me that we had not set any terms. I didn’t know how long she wanted to talk or what she wanted to talk about. Nobody had mentioned money, so I didn’t know what, if anything, she intended to pay me. I didn’t even know her name. The whole arrangement was incredibly bizarre, and I wondered if it was a scam after all. She sounded harmless enough, but.

  The phone began to chirp. Distractedly, I depressed the hookswitch, fumbled out more change, and called information for the number of the local sperm bank.

  3

  It may seem immature, not to mention impractical, for a thirty-year-old man to hold his breath and turn blue rather than go out and get a job like everyone else. I had far more at stake than pride, however. For years I had defined myself by my ideals. This had to be the case, because I had published nothing, received little recognition, beat back endless criticism of my choices. Everything I had achieved in more than a decade of study could be, and often was, dismissed as a waste of time. Certainly I hadn’t made any money. So when I laid my head down, when I rose up in the morning, all that I had to sustain me was the knowledge that I had been faithful to a principle: to live by my mind, and my mind alone. What looks like laziness, the tantrum of a postmillennial slacker refusing to make concessions to the real world, was in fact an act of self-preservation. At the risk of sounding maudlin, I will say that it was a struggle for my very soul.

  Why this should be so is best understood with a backward glance. The great chain of causality stretches far into the past, and only the cosmologist approaches the truth when he claims to begin at the beginning. For the rest of us—shrieking as we tumble in medias res—an arbitrary starting point will have to do.

  I WAS BORN in a small town between the coasts—flyover country, to those with less-than-perfect tact. The nearest city referred to itself as a suburb of a second, bigger city, making us the demographic equivalent of an asterisk to a footnote. We had two Dairy Queens, three diners, and an International House of Pancakes. Of sturdy German and Irish stock, sixty-five percent of us were registered Republicans. Firearms ownership was the rule, NRA membership common, atheism unheard-of. Our winters smothered; our summers drooped. On sharp October afternoons I would roam the woods behind our house, stomping leaves and startling the white-tails that came to nibble on my mother’s flowerbeds. As a boy I could identify dozens of birds by call or sight, wearing out a copy of Sibley by fifth grade. Once I left home, all that knowledge bled away, and the deep sense of loss I felt whenever I went back was one of the reasons I never did.

  My mother and father married young, enough so that her parents had to accompany them down to the courthouse for the license. Needless to say, it was a shotgun wedding. My father was nineteen, estranged from his own family, a high-school dropout with little more than a muscle car to his name. My mother hardly knew him, her parents less still, and while I suppose that it’s impossible to place a price on respectability, I will always wonder whether everyone would’ve been better off counting to ten and taking a few deep breaths before doing anything rash. Is marriage so intrinsically valuable that it’s worth sacrificing the happiness of all involved? This was 1970, after all. Single motherhood still carried a stigma, but the world was changing.

  Of course, it’s possible—however implausible—that my mother and her family were genuinely enthusiastic about the match. I’ll never know, because I wouldn’t show up for another seven years, and by the time I got old enough to ask questions, all the original intentions had long since vanished, the emotions dried up and blown away.

  On April 23, six months before my older brother was born, President Richard Nixon signed Executive Order 11527, amending the selective service regulations and making it difficult for men to get draft deferments based on paternity. My father might have tried to appeal his conscription on the grounds that while not yet a father, he was soon to become one. Or he might have argued that the fetus had been conceived under the old law. As far as I know, he never did protest, on any grounds whatsoever, and neither did my mother or her family. The baby, a boy, arrived in October; in November my father shipped out to Nha Trang for the first of three tours of duty.

  There is no need to discuss at length his experiences in combat.

  Snapshots taken around the time of his homecoming show him cutting into a cake; standing with other returned servicemen along the fifty-yard line at Stinton County High School stadium (last winning season: 1951-52), accepting a standing ovation f
rom those present for the home opener; restraining his squirming son, now old enough to feel ashamed when held. In these photos, my father lacks the customary “thousand-yard stare.” To the contrary: looking at them, one gets the sense that he can hardly contain himself, that keeping still requires an enormous effort on his part, and by the next frame he will have exploded all over the walls like a burst melon. The Polaroid is a poor medium for capturing a man who in life never stopped moving, whose defining quality was a physicality so animal, muscular, kinetic, and urgent that it sought any available escape route, however destructive.

  Maybe it was Vietnam that brought this out in him. Maybe it was there all along. That’s a question for a psychologist, not a philosopher, and anyway, not an answerable one. I understand this now. But when I was younger and still believed that lives could be read like stories, I strove to figure him out. Not by talking to him, of course. People seldom possess the self awareness to describe themselves in detail, and even when they do, they’re seldom inclined to, the confessional not being a form found in nature. Instead I looked at the effects he had on me and those around me, and—combining that with what I gathered second- and thirdhand from my mother, my grandparents, my aunts and uncles—worked to reverse-engineer his soul.

  Demanding, volatile, possessed of a blunt charisma, he’s actually quite intelligent, albeit extremely concrete. It’s probably for the best that he’s never talked to me about my work. He wouldn’t understand, and I wouldn’t be able to explain it to him. (The flip side is that he can do things I can’t, like run a business or fix a busted washer.) When he decides that someone is bad, they are irredeemable. When they are good, they can do no wrong—for a time, anyway. People like him are destined for torment, as they face the same two choices in judging themselves. That he should be funny, sometimes startlingly so, will come as no surprise, for the true face of humor is cruelty. My mother was not the last to be seduced by him. The checkout girl; my fourth-grade teacher—I remember them flirting with him, leaning toward him in a wet-lipped feline way. As far as I know he never had affairs, but who can say for certain? (By contrast, my mother’s fidelity is unquestionable.) Many of these more pungent qualities have faded as he approaches old age, but back then he was a force to be reckoned with, and while I wouldn’t call him a monster, I will say that he often did a very good impression of one.

  Upon his return from Vietnam, he trained as a plumber, eventually becoming certified and going out on his own. He also moonlighted as a general handyman, evenings and weekends, which was good for everybody because it kept him active and occupied, and allowed him to sock away enough money to buy a three-bedroom tract home with aluminum siding and a gravel driveway. My mother did her best to humanize the place—planting the aforementioned flowers and a vegetable garden, hanging samplers along the staircase—but to my eyes it never looked like more than what it was: a failure of the American petit bourgeois imagination, an impression later reconfirmed with each visit home. Yet another reason why, once I’d left, I tended to stay away. It’s not a place that holds happy memories.

  A lot of men give up working with their hands once they control the payroll. My father did not, continuing to come home every day reeking, famished, and, as people say round those parts, all swole up. I picture the veins in his right forearm, pulsing in a way that made the death’s head tattooed there appear to clench and unclench its jaw. I remember him standing in the living room, stripping off his wet workshirt, his chest hair tangled; remember the way he bellowed for my mother if she wasn’t there to greet him. I remember him kneeling, grabbing me, suffocating me in his testosterone stink. The constant exertion did little to drain off the furious energy roiling within him, and he sought to let it out in other ways. He did some amateur boxing. He was an avid hunter. Four or five nights a week, he drank heavily. And when all that failed to give him peace, he brutalized his family.

  My mother got the worst of it, at least in the early days. A lot of things about her make her the ideal target: an unwillingness to fight back, a tendency toward blubbery hysteria that breeds contempt and aggression in an already enraged man. She was a child when she married my father, and has always looked at him as more of an authority figure than a spouse. Three years raising a child on her own had not done much to give her backbone, as I gather that she had relied heavily on her own parents. Sometimes I think she saw him off expecting him never to come back. And would that have been so bad? My mother, elevated from junior class tramp to war widow; my grandparents, no longer burdened by the consequences of their prudishness and haste. Even my father might have preferred it that way. I have to consider the situation from his perspective. I’m sure he once had dreams, however modest, and I doubt very much that they included a wife and child. He might have seen death as a merciful out.

  I’m being a little hard on them here, as most of the time our home was quiet, if not especially joyous. Indeed, it was the very unpredictability of my father’s eruptions that made them so frightening. If there was a pattern, I missed it. Although this may reflect inattention on my part. As I said, I came on the scene somewhat late, and had hardly begun to make sense of the world around me when it imploded completely.

  LIKE ALL younger brothers everywhere, I lived in hand-me-downs. Christopher was small enough that I fit into his clothing three or four years after he had abandoned it, despite the nearly seven-year gap between us. When my father started to earn decent money, he decided that a young man ought to have a new church outfit no less than every two years, and he and Chris began making a biennial pilgrimage to Worth’s Boys Town, where they invariably picked out the heaviest, itchiest suit imaginable, flannel straitjackets that later came to me trailing loose threads, the armpits discolored and stiff. Not that I cared. Expecting nothing more, I was content.

  Compact and dark, Chris took after (in appearance, anyway) my quarter-Greek mother. Think “Rebel Without a Cause”—not James Dean but his anxious sidekick, played by the young Sal Mineo. I, on the other hand, was gangly and marble-mouthed, constantly at the mercy of my expanding body: uncoordinated, incapable of throwing straight, prone to trip over my own shins. Always tall for my age, I didn’t fill out until puberty, so as a young boy I looked broad from the front but ludicrously narrow in profile, like I’d been flattened in a hydraulic press.

  In philosophical literature on free will, one sometimes encounters thought experiments in which a person is manipulated by an outside source, a demon or hypnotist or, most significantly, a mad neurosurgeon. The first time I came across this idea, I thought of my brother. That explained us: we were the result of a brain-swapping experiment gone awry. Why else should I look like my father and sound like my mother, and Chris the reverse? There’s no real reason for us to have behaved like the parent we resembled, but it would have made sense to me, satisfied my youthful craving for symmetry.

  Of course, genetics is never quite as simple as all that. There are bits of my father in me, just as there were bits of my mother in Chris. And I never fully was the beast of burden that she was. Nevertheless, Fate played an ugly trick on Chris by loading our father’s pugnacity into our mother’s small frame, a meiotic shuffle whose tragic consequences began to manifest when I was about five years old and my father’s fury turned away from his wife and went in search of a new target.

  Though I can’t blame Chris for being born to a violent drunk, in provoking the man, he did consistently display a remarkable lack of common sense. Disproportionate to his body, my brother had a loud baritone voice, and he matched my father decibel for decibel. Grades, money, perceived slights—any pretext would do, and supper became a regular battleground, the two of them squaring off like moose, plates rattling as my father pounded the table; Chris slouched, arms crossed smugly, smugly shaking his head; my mother, blanched and passive, hands clasped in front of her, lips moving in unconscious prayer. I, cringing behind my milk. What was wrong with them? It was obvious to me that they were fighting for fighting’s sake, their posturing
accomplishing nothing save to bring them closer to blows. Did anyone really want that? Even my father: did he really—and I mean really—want to hit his son?

  I ask myself this a lot, not only because of all the terrible things I had to witness but because the question speaks directly to my scholarly interests. I have spent my entire career asking what it means to choose freely. Is it a choice if you’re drunk? If you have been to hell and back? What about if your son is mocking you, calling you names, calling you an alcoholic? Is it a choice then? Further: at what point does that choice obtain? Is it a mental process? Or is the choice not a choice until you stand up and take off your belt? Until that belt makes contact with the back of your son’s neck? Until he begins to bleed? Is that choice made now, or is it the culmination of a process that began years ago, when you knocked up a girl in the backseat of your 442? Has the violence of the present been living beneath the soil all these years, germinating, seething upward, so that what we see here and now is merely its emergence into the sun? If so, what makes your choices yours? And could you have stopped them?

  Once things went from verbal to physical, and my father’s size came into play, all bets were off. At his heaviest, he must’ve had seventy pounds on Chris, an advantage only fractionally compensated for by Chris’s speed. My brother learned to anticipate the breaking point, quietly sliding his chair back from the table a few inches, enough room to get up and bolt before my father came lumbering after him. Truth be told, it was riveting to watch, the two of them careering all over the place, overturning furniture, taking out lamps. When I think back on these episodes I see a speck of comedy glinting through the blackness—the Tom and Jerryesqueness of it all. But the house was small, with only so many places to hide. Eventually Chris would be cornered, and the actual and extremely unfunny business of child abuse would begin.