But maybe in spirit.”
“Were some of them meant to be aborted?”
“Maybe.”
“So they weren’t so special after all.”
“But the important thing is you are. You are here. We are here together.”
“I wish you’d do something else.”
“What do you mean?”
“People hate what you do.”
“Some people don’t understand.”
“It could have been me.”
“But it wasn’t. And I wouldn’t do that to you.”
“But how would you have known it was me?”
“I would have known. We are connected.”
“Like an umbilical cord?”
“Like an umbilical cord. Yes.”
“I wish you’d do something else.”
“We are being helpful.”
“Nobody likes us.”
“I like you.”
“I have no friends.”
“I’m your best friend.”
Let me say this about my mother: we are very close, yet we are total strangers to one another. She had read all the how-to books on raising an adopted child, she knew all the rules. Don’t hide the truth, be straightforward, show them you love them, remind them they are not unwanted, they only had to be given away due to compelling, inescapable reasons. Let them grow up whole, and confident, and sane.
She knows the entire rigmarole, and she’s done her best. In truth, I have a niggling, maddening need to probe everything that remains unanswered—about myself, about Brezsky, about how I wound up not in that barrio but here, halfway across the world. Once you start thinking like that, every single thing in the world becomes obstinately imbued with mystery. And that’s a dangerous thing. I know that and Mother knows that. Even the books tell her so.
So, since the child psychiatry manuals have very little to offer (I have been reading them without her knowledge), I’m convinced that, in the grand scheme of things, something like my life—our lives—is largely karmic. Furtively, I even collect the pamphlets left by the Life Crusaders on our door—words literally scorched with fire and brimstone, pockmarked with copious passages from the Old Testament—wondering if maybe they have answers Mother and I should really know about, and guiltily hiding them under my bed the way other boys hide copies of Penthouse. And when Mother discovers them, she reacts like she’s just found her little boy whacking off to Miss July.
“Someday you’ll find the real thing, and all this will be trash.”
“Mother, why does God hate us so much?”
“A God that hates is not true.”
Which leads me to this. According to Tibetan Buddhism, God is all creatures, and all creatures were once our mothers. Presuming we have been reincarnated millions of times, it’s likely that someone out there, the cop at the corner, the Korean greengrocer, the coked-up homeless bag lady, could have given birth to us at some point in time. This idea is supposed to evoke in us compassion for all beings. And once in a while, if you try it, I suppose it does.
But that doesn’t explain much either. This is my idea of reincarnation: at death, our molecules, atoms, quarks, and gravitons disperse, spread into thin air, and realign and recompose somewhere else, mixing randomly with a million other particles to create entirely new organisms. At death, Jordan Yeats can become a fern, a groundhog, the next president of the United States, or all of the above. This, I’ve read, is my mind clinging to its materialist fixations. My mind refusing to let go. I am a Buddha’s nightmare.
Mother always tells me mine was a virgin birth, that I came into the world miraculously, and I am unique and special. That’s what I am, a fucking baby Jesus. Eventually I understand that this isn’t meant to be taken literally. Although I never met Frank, and only spoke to him briefly once or twice on the phone, she always talks to me about him as “your Dad.” But she also makes it clear, in no uncertain terms, that Dad fucked up and ran off with a cocksucking slut from the Dominican Republic.
The years drift by, and strangely I have no clear memory of them, except that everyone I meet in school drives me to bouts of torpor. Year after year my teachers write to my mother expressing their concern about my “reticence,” which in today’s world is a disorder as alarming as, say, bulimia. In my junior year in college, after a long and nerve-racking argument with my mother who refuses to give me her blessing, I undertake a bold experiment and live in a dorm off the Columbia campus. I’ve taken a long time to decide what I’m going to major in but this time I settle on film studies, a course easy enough to endure, in my estimation. It’s also becoming of interest to me, I mean the distance and immediacy of film, which happen simultaneously, its uncanny ability to immerse you in a world that it merely reflects. I decide that I have a lot to say about the subject. I might someday become a filmmaker myself. I will work alone, without a crew and without a studio; the thought of having to deal with so many people for a single work bothers me a little, but in time I will figure it out. In a few weeks, of course, the dilemma of wanting to create a film and not wanting to work with other people makes me doubt if this is the right course for me.
During my sixth week my roommate sets me up with an English major from Barnard who, no doubt offended when I pass on her offer to spend the night, spreads rumors that I am a “homo.” My roommate asks to be moved to another hall, but I do receive a warm invitation to join the LGBT soiree.
A week later I get mugged by two black teenagers on Amsterdam Avenue at four p.m., have to have four stitches to close the cut above my left eyebrow, and, still dazed with painkillers, I pack my bags and head back home. My mother says nothing when she sees me at the door. We are never going to part again.
And so I keep her company, and I grow older. We grow old together, as boring and complacent as a married couple, content in the safety of our lies. I read her some books at night, beside the fire. She makes me a cup of chamomile tea before bed. That’s what the world is like, and we live as best we can. The stories are there to make us feel better. A lie is an act of complicity between the one who tells it and the one who chooses to believe.
WSOWOB
I’m in a time warp.
An elderly woman has been standing outside the post office in La Napoule for an hour, waiting for it to open. Walking with Janya past her, along the slope behind my parents’ apartment, I find myself in a bizarre flashback. When I was a young boy, I would always see an old woman who looked just like the one waiting there, and who kept forgetting that the post office wasn’t open on Saturday. She would spend hours outside the door, ignoring people’s advice to come back the next week. Standing under the searing sun, or sometimes in the rain, she seemed to believe her defiance alone would prove everyone wrong, that this was in fact not Saturday, that a small miracle was going to happen, and the doors would open soon.
That could be the same woman, exactly as she was some thirty years ago. She is wearing the same
