In Los Angeles there just seemed to be less detail per square foot of the visual field. A palm tree is simple, for example, a mere stick figure compared to an oak, and at least from a distance, stucco is featureless compared to shingles or brick. There was nothing on the surfaces that made up my visual field to anchor my attention, and these surfaces were almost always alarmingly bright. Los Angeles gets 329 sunny days a year, compared to Boston’s 230, with Boston being an approximation for Lowell. That’s ninety-nine more days of photic aggression, of sharp outlines and the harsh planes that made up buildings and roads. There was no hiding here, and none of the false coziness engendered by snow or long days of rain. If something was trying to get to me—not that I thought that anything was—but if something was coming at me from a distance, there was no longer much cloud cover to keep it at bay.
“Something”? Up until now I had thought of the dissociative experience as a “place,” but since I had no control over my access to it, there was the possibility of some being or agency that swooped down to take me there. If I had no power over the experience, then maybe something else did. But of course there were no candidates to fill such a role. You might say that the major lesson of my upbringing so far was that there was nothing “out there”—no God, no reliable others, and no help coming, or, for that matter, any threats other than those of human invention. So my uncanny “jolts,” or sudden fissures in reality, could not represent interventions by some alien being. Rationally speaking, they were nothing more than brief breakdowns of normal perceptual processes, and were ultimately explainable, like everything else, in terms of cellular and molecular interactions. Science confirmed that the universe was dead or at least made up of tiny dead things, mindless particles following their destinies.
Science—straightforward, reductionist, Newtonian high school science—should have kept my feet on the firm ground of communal reality. Or so you might think, because there’s no room in it for abnormal perceptions of the kind that can’t be shared in a few words or mathematical symbols. In fact, I can imagine science being used as therapy for all sorts of alienation-related psychological disorders. What better way to bring an errant mind back into the fold than to give the patient a stopwatch, a ball, and an inclined plane and tell her she can have lunch as soon as she comes up with something interesting to report? Or send a young romantic off to observe a sunset with the instruction that he is not to come back with some mush about glory and uplift; just stick to wavelengths, temperature, and angles of light. That’s what science is about: seeing the exact same things that other people do, finding the units of measurement with which to describe those things, communicating in the fewest and most precise words available. What could be saner—or more sociable—than that?
But science wasn’t working out that way for me, and not because I wasn’t paying attention. I didn’t take the high school course in biology, but I did qualify, on the basis of my grades, for what amounted to some kind of biology aversion therapy. This involved long bus trips to Saturday morning lectures on the subject of taxonomy, meaning the similarities between sketches of different creatures—mostly, as I recall, mollusks, although the vertebrates too were presented as so totally immobilized that they might as well have been encased in shells. Since Darwin went unmentioned, these similarities implied no genealogical connections, and I could see no more reason to focus on the sorting of creatures into species and subspecies than to discuss the way the lecturer arranged items in her chest of drawers. If there was any motion in the realm of “living things” (a fascinatingly oxymoronic notion in itself)—any creeping or running or lunging or reaching—the work of biologists was to replace it with a static series of slides, and this I figured they could do perfectly well without any help from me.
As for high school physics, all it offered was a view from which, as far as I could determine, “matter’s chief property is inertia,” meaning that the physical world was dead—a huge corpse deposited, for unknown reasons, in the middle of space-time. Let go of a rock and it falls; planets keep tumbling through their orbits; x is always tethered meekly to y. Pendulums swing and water flows downhill. All pretty dull until you reflected on the fact that all this motion arose from something totally occult, a “force” of some kind—which was what? A silent, invisible, odorless manifestation of will, but whose will, and what was it striving toward?
Chemistry was a far more potent distraction, my refuge from the barrenness of physics, trigonometry, and family. Maybe because it was the closest thing I could find to my father’s erstwhile field or maybe because I was actually good at it—good enough anyway to have won a copy of the Handbook of Chemistry and Physics with my name emblazed on its cover for achievement in ninth-grade science—but I couldn’t get enough of chemistry. “All I think of is chemistry, chemistry, chemistry,” I wrote:
I am a supersaturated solution, I’m a filter paper who’s had too much. Chemistry is the last thing I think of at night and at 6:30 AM my first conscious thought is about the occurrence of aluminum. And this is only the introduction to the preface to the beginning of the most elementary chemistry. It’s not blood in my veins, it’s a colloidal suspension.
Of course if I had really been a science prodigy, I would have been doing chemistry and not just reading about it. I would have been like Linus Pauling, who as a high school boy ransacked junkyards to build equipment for his home chemistry lab. I possessed a chemistry set—of the kind that was popular in the fifties and seemingly designed, with its many readily opened vials of toxic materials, to exterminate budding scientists. But it just gathered dust on a shelf, which is probably a good thing, since of course I had no source of water in my bedroom and no way of washing, say, uranium dust off my hands.
I was attracted to chemistry the way some people were attracted to Tolkien, because it offered an alternative world full of drama and intrigue. Physics wanted to squeeze the life out of nature, but chemistry revealed that underneath the calm surface of things there exists a realm exempt from brute gravity, where atoms and molecules are in constant motion, pushing and jostling, dancing and mating—activities acknowledged in first-year physics only as “friction”—the irritating stickiness of things, which to a physicist is a kind of imperfection. But who could resist the erotic lives of atoms and molecules—the violent passion of electrostatic attractions, the comfortable mutuality of covalent bonds, the gentle air kisses of van der Waals forces? The rules governing the couplings and uncouplings of tiny particles seemed to me as fascinating as the kinship rules of what we still called “primitive” societies—with the revulsion of like-charged particles, for example, functioning as a kind of incest taboo. Somehow, out of all this invisible turmoil, the gross material world was supposed to assemble itself, because that’s what the world was—really was, in a scientific sense—an ever-shifting alliance of particles, a concatenation of unwilled, more or less automatic events.
All of which amounts to an admission that my mind often wandered as I struggled through long problem sets involving, for example, reaction rates and equilibrium constants. And remember that in those days before handheld calculators almost every problem required some recourse to log tables or the tortured algorithm of long division, providing plenty of openings for the kind of useless philosophical digression available to a person who would rather not be scratching out numbers with a pencil, who would rather be reading novels. Science “works,” of course, but from an aesthetic point of view, was it really a great improvement over mythology? Why do we insist that theories “work,” when they might just as well sit around and look pretty?
I couldn’t help observing that for every advance in science—explaining why the seasons change or lightning rips open the sky—some perfectly competent goddess or demiurge is put out of work, a hypothesized spirit dies, or a living thing surrenders its autonomy. Take an amoeba, creeping along a glass slide one pseudopod after another. Do you think it moves because it “wants” to? No, its movements represent chemotaxis—t
he action of small molecules on its cell membrane, leading to tugs and pulls on the protein scaffolding within, the zipping and unzipping of polymers—and it is this sequence of events that generates the motion. To “understand” the amoeba, in a scientific way, is to turn it into a jerry-rigged contraption that could theoretically be synthesized from reagents in a test tube. Any other interpretation of its motion—say, in terms of “wanting” or desire—would represent the dread crime of “anthropomorphism.”
But what was there to do if not science? Science fiction had helped lure me into it, if only because it made science seem like a pure outgrowth of imagination, without any of the drudgery of making measurements and calculating results. Sputnik also played a role, because it meant that from 1957 on, all bright young Americans, even the girls among them, needed to be steered in the direction of rocket-making skills, beginning with physics and chemistry. (At least no teacher ever said, “Wow, you’re good. Have you thought of a career in art history?”) Then there was my father’s irresistible influence—not only his love of science, but his abandonment of it. The sins of the father were visited on the daughter, and if he wasn’t going to find the cure for acne or some astounding way of generating electricity out of room-temperature granite, then I was going to have to do it for him. That was the implication of his “sacrifice”: The dream of pure science had to be postponed to the next generation, and since neither of my siblings showed the slightest interest, it was I who inherited the obligation.
Besides, as far as I could see, any subject other than science, like history or literature, was just a matter of reading, which I could do on my own. Literature was my default activity—what I did when I wasn’t doing anything else and often, to my mother’s vexation, even when I was. I could prop up a book to read while I was brushing my teeth or washing the dishes, and there was no reason to stop just because someone entered the room. Reading was entertainment; science was work, and everyone had to work; that was obvious. The alternative was to be like my mother, driven to madness by the pressure of unchanneled energy.
If science had admitted that amoebae could have intentions, that oxygen atoms actually lust after hydrogen atoms, I might have felt a little less lonely. But the purpose of science was to crush any sign of autonomous life, or at least of intention, outside of the scientific observer him- or herself. This was the universe as seen from high school physics class, enriched by rumors of relativity: everything reduced to particles rolling around on the wrinkles of space-time, the billiard table of classical physics augmented by Einstein into some vast funereal topography, like the gently furrowed surface of a sunless sea on the distant planet of a dying star. All of which made the question why ever more urgent. Why was there anything at all? Why interrupt the perfection of universal Nothing with the momentary clutter and confusion of Something? If everything else was already dead or determined, how to account for this minuscule perturbation that was conscious human life, or at least my conscious human life? Why, O Lord, didn’t you just go right on sleeping?
Chapter 5
All, All Alone
About six months into our life in California I began to indulge in a long-running fantasy that I was the only person left alive on earth, or at least for as far as the eye could see. I woke up one morning somewhere other than home (in the canonical version of the fantasy I had had an overnight babysitting job in a wealthy area like Beverly Hills) and rushed to my car, which was a nice fantastical touch right there—my car—to get somewhere I was afraid of being late to. Not to worry, the streets were completely empty and the traffic lights were swinging dead on their nooses. Nothing came out of the car radio. The little plastic flags strung up around used-car lots still snapped in the breeze, but they might as well have been Tibetan prayer flags now, cleansed of all commercial significance. Before I could put together the idea of a disaster, there was a moment of exultation in the beauty of the abandoned world. It had always been there, of course—the still-green mountains to the north, the fountains of bougainvillea flowing down over walls—but usually hidden under a thick human crust of smog and significations. Now I realized: The city is mine, the sky is clear, and promise glistens from the world like dew. I suppose it was the same feeling I might have had if I’d taken over a small plane and managed by sheer trial and error to get it up a thousand feet or so off the ground, before realizing that I had no idea how to fly.
In the fantasy, it takes me less than a day to figure out that all other humans are gone, along with their clothing and ornaments, and without any sign of struggle or coercion. For the sake of convenience, their cars are not left at odd angles blocking the highways, but neatly parked in front of homes, keys still in the ignition. No clue remains to tell me where all the people have gone or been abducted to. I know this sort of situation comes up all the time in science-fiction stories, usually adumbrated by odd lights in the night sky, curious prophecies, and erratic readings on scientific equipment. But there have been no warnings, at least none that registered with me. I had gone to sleep to the sound of nattering obligations—do your homework, iron your uniform, get to your job at the diner on time—and had awakened to perfect freedom.
The first few days, before the food begins to rot in refrigerators, I take this as an opportunity for scouting and some light, abstemious looting. The doors of even the grandest mansions yield to me. I walk from room to room, testing out couches so big they curve around to outline a room, picking up objects and putting them down. So this is what’s left when you squeeze the human pulp out of the built and manufactured environment—the chitinous exoskeleton, the wood and fabric system of internal surfaces and props without which we would no doubt sag against the walls or collapse on the floor. Without people around, furniture has nothing to do but bear witness to the structural inadequacies of the human body: How much padding, cushioning, embracing, enfolding, and supporting we had needed just to stumble about through our days!
There is very little among the rich material deposits left by my kind that I want enough to pack into the trunk of my car—a book here and there, some batteries, a can of smoked oysters. Sometimes I pause for an hour or so to read a diary stuffed in the back of a drawer, fascinated by the detailed yearnings and plans that have been so suddenly rendered inoperative. Abandoned pets can be a problem, yipping and demanding food, but there’s not much I can do for them beyond hoping they meet their ends as peacefully as the tropical fish now dissolving in their elaborate tanks. I sip crème de menthe, sample chocolates imported from Europe, try lolling on satin sheets.
Then about a week after the disappearance of everyone else, the fantasy acquires a more anxious and compulsive edge. I realize that I have to establish a base. It should be a house with a swimming pool to serve as a cistern, and definitely with a wall around it to keep out the dogs, which, having clawed their way out of their homes, are now beginning to aggregate into packs. The Church of All Religions at first seems like a possibility, because of its wall and freshwater lake, but it offers an insufficient view of the hills, and I need to monitor the entire horizon for any signs of activity. On the other hand, though, my base can’t be so high in the hills that I won’t be able to haul things up from the stores in the valleys by myself, in a shopping cart if necessary, because at some point my car will run out of gas and the tanks of other cars will empty through evaporation. I have to start stocking my base with canned goods, candles, aspirin, sanitary pads, and whatnot—which means repeated forays into the stores along once-busy streets, smashing windows with a hammer as necessary. The worst are the supermarkets, once so enticingly bright that you never noticed the near absence of windows, but now impenetrably dark a few paces in, after you get past the cash registers, cavelike and stinking of rotting meat.
So what was this—wish fulfillment? Horror movie? Both? I can still summon up the fantasy when I’m in L.A.—gauging distances and altitudes, worrying about the reliability of rainfall—and I realize today that it’s a form of entertainment, a serial
ized adventure movie, which was probably its original function. At some point, when I was probably about ten, I had found out that there are settings in which you are not allowed to read, so you have to develop a mental alternative to books. Things might have been very different, for example, if my mother had not banned reading in cars, which she judged, perhaps rightly, to be conducive to nausea. Maybe I would know more today, and probably would be a more practical person, if I hadn’t had all those empty hours in buses and cars to fill with my handcrafted fantasies.
High school was another site of unpredictable reading taboos, which I tried at first to circumvent by concealing my own book inside some useless shell of a civics textbook. When the teacher snatched my book—which was released only after some minor penance performed after class—I realized that I had to become fully self-entertaining. Let them jabber on about the tedious and unnecessary business of checks and balances or the various branches of state and local government. Why did the adults in my life demand so much attention anyway? “Are you listening, Barbara?” was one of their favorite inquiries, followed up cleverly by, “Then what did I say?” Sometimes their eyes bulged out so far when they asked these questions that I wondered whether the attention they needed wasn’t medical. Or maybe they lacked inner resources and had no way of being sure they existed unless someone like me was around to confirm that they did, moment by moment, with appropriate eye contact and nods. And maybe they were right.