June - The Liars 4 страница

Eventually, I knew, I would have to pick something. If I did not pick something, like in those seven years of waiting for him in Paris, I would perpetually be defined by his influence over me. I knew that his influence was good, and I tried to respect my feelings and give them justice like Alexa had instructed, but I knew I would eventually have to choose another path. For now, though, I was still learning and thinking.

My dissection of myself from Gerard, although the thought of it hurt me when I did let myself feel it, and reminded me of his death, also made me care for him better. It made me love him more, if that was even possible. Because I could now see myself as different from him, I began to understand he had different needs. I noticed his nuanced behavior when he was pretending to be okay, and he really wasn't. He would sometimes ask for help easily, without shame or guilt. But, I was noticing, that was when the illness didn't surprise him. He would often keep his to-do list beside his bed, and the date and year around, to prompt and remind himself as he had done months prior. But some nights before he went to sleep, he would forget (whether that was just because he was busy or because he actually did forget, I never knew), and then in the morning it would hit him. This fog, this insecurity, this dementia and he would be angry at himself for failing. He didn't mind asking for help when he anticipated the need for it. If he was struggling with a word or concept that was slipping, he didn't mind if I stepped in and gave him the abstractions that he was missing. There was no way one could anticipate conversation, and he did not feel inferior for not being prepared for it. But when it sprung up out of nowhere, and hit him in the morning, it made him feel sicker than he really was. He would not ask for help then; he felt he couldn't ask for help then. Instead I had to watch his facial ticks that displayed frustration and notice how he would toy with the tip of his shirt or wring his hands. Then I would have to do my best to make sure he was okay again.

When I was able to help him without exposing how he perceived his own error in preparing himself, he expressed his thanks in a way I had never been accustomed to before. He gripped my hands stronger than I could fathom for his slender body, and pressed himself against me. He rarely said 'thank you' itself, but when the words escaped his lips, there was vulnerability displayed in the tone of his voice. This vulnerability was similar to the kind he showed in the clinic, but now he wanted me to be there and bear witness to it. He began to realize that I was not pointing out illness when I helped him; I was helping him because I loved him. He was unreliable to me as an instructor, now, but he was human to me again. I loved him so much more because of it, now that I could see myself as not falling away anymore too. He was just a person now. He was a wonderful person who I would eventually grieve until I could not feel grief anymore. But for now, he was here, and I was trying to treat him as here- as much as I could.

When The Professor greeted me after my knock, I felt pretty good. I had been doing all of this morning work on my own in dealing with Gerard's loss and my own self-identification and reflection. I had been paying my bills and still keeping a managed household with Jasmine and her pregnancy. She and I had been a bit distanced this month, but it was only because we had so many other interests filling our time. I was still gaining momentum at work and being ushered into this life by Mikey, in addition to devouring all this theory and trying to use my reason as much as possible. I had also visited Alexa a few more times and discussed feelings, to try and maintain that balanced perspective that she had emphasized so much before. I felt like I was doing a really good job, but I knew that my interpretation of my own work was flawed. The Professor had offered me this position as his student in order to truly assess if that work I was doing was useful.

"Hello, Frank," he greeted me after opening the door. He was wearing a burgundy collared shirt and had a freshly trimmed beard. He shook my hand fondly, and then invited me into his office. Haphazard piles of paper were shoved in corners and displayed on any open space on desks, along with graded exams with red pen scratches all across them. There were books lining the back wall, in shelves, and even under the leg of a chair to keep it even. I looked down at the book and laughed when I noticed that it was The Bible.

"You know my sentiments," he said with a smile. "Good stories, but some bad ideas. But you know, it's all in how we use them."

I wanted to speak up, to tell him about the things that Alexa had told me about The Bible, but I kept quiet. I didn't want to regurgitate her ideas and claim them as my own. I also wanted to move onto whatever we were going to discuss today. We weren't in the library anymore. If we were going to discuss books, we could do it there. I had brought nothing with me, but my mind was ready and full of questions, and I was getting ready to show him what I had learned. We both settled into our seats; he was on his desk chair with a blue back that had paper stuck in the wheels, and I was on a small floral chair that was in the opposite corner. I had to remove Ulysses and The Iliad from the spot before I sat down, along with a failing exam.

"So how did your week go?" he asked, but before I could really divulge into it all, he requested with a raised hand: "One word answer, please."

"Okay," I said, agreeing to his request, but he took it as my answer.

"Good. I'm glad that it was okay for you. I'm sure you learned a lot and you were able to impress your friends," he informed me with a smile. I was about to interject and add something else, but he kept going. "I don't need you to do a test or anything, Frank, don't worry. If you didn't do your reading then the only person you're hurting is you. You won't need to memorize dialogues and recite them to me, nor will you ever need to worry about failing an exam."

He waited to see how I reacted, and I had to admit, I was a bit relieved. I liked the prospect of not failing, and it made what little knowledge I acquired that week seem like an immense amount. If it was relative to my own standards, then I had done a lot. I was proud of myself.

He nodded, and went on. "Good. No tests, ever. You either did or didn't do work, it is that simple. But now, I want you to forget it all."

My eyes widened. "What?"

"Forget it all. Forget you know anything right now."

I sighed and gestured with my hands. "What was the point in learning all of that then, if only to forget it? Why did you make me feel like I needed to go and do it?"

"Because you always need to go and learn. You also need to know that you will never achieve or obtain it all. You will never know anything, really, because it is impossible to know everything."

"Then why bother?"

I was suddenly overwhelmed by all the hours that I had wasted, apparently, and how I could have been spending them with Gerard or Jasmine. Jasmine and Hilda had been putting together the baby's room that week, while I had been off at the library at night. The spare room next to her bedroom and study was going to be Paloma's room. Though we had not gotten a crib and Jasmine wanted to try co-sleeping, the baby would still need her own space in the house. She needed to feel as if she had something as equally her own. Hilda and Jasmine had overtaken that, but Jasmine made it clear to me that I could help only if I wanted to. I wanted to- but my work here had been distracting me. I could manage what I had been doing with Gerard in the morning, work, and then the library, but after coming home from that I wanted to do nothing but sleep. If I had to forget everything that I had just worked so hard on, then this was just plain frustrating. I expressed this to The Professor, trying to not use my feelings about how hurt I now was, but by explaining to him the facts about time and all of the obligations that I now had under my belt.

"You're having a baby?" was all he said in response. His eyes had perked up, and he went front leaning over the arms of his chair intently to sitting back in it, relaxed.

"No, well, yes, but my, ugh,... Jasmine is having the baby. I'm helping. I'm the... it's complicated."

"I can see that," he smiled.

He leaned back even further, opening the desk drawer, and took out a few photos of his family. They were not in frames nor professionally done, I could tell right way. They were probably done with the film and canister cameras that everyone had and that people could take to the grocery store to develop. There were even some Polaroid shots, ones that were clearly his wife when she was much younger, and their son just as he was born. He had mentioned his wife only vaguely before, through his wedding ring and his admission that he had been getting The Collected Works of Colette that first day for her, but he had yet to really address this personal side of himself so explicitly. It was almost a relief to see the boy, who looked to be about Isaac's age, and his wife with long dark hair that were the other side of his personality. It felt like we were no longer fighting an academic battle of wills, and for a few moments, our teacher and student relationship was even broken down. He told me more about his wife; she was a prosecutor now, and they had met during a conference on Ethics while they were still doing graduate studies. With the mention of her occupation now embedded in my mind, and the absence of a name, I began to refer to her as The Prosecutor, and linked her to The Justice card that Alexa had shown me shortly after her work on Death was complete ("though no one really completes anything like that, I need to move on. It is only fair. Hence Justice.").

I could image his wife, though her hair was loose at her sides and she was wearing a tank top, and her mouth was frozen in a laugh, that she could embody the Justice figure that held the world in place. She was blindfolded in most depictions, Alexa had told me, but in the Tarot deck, her eyes were open. One needed to see reality as reality in order to enact Justice and to be fair. He told me more about his wife that deviated from her occupation, like how they had met in the spring when that photo was taken and when they eventually decided to have kids, but I was still seeing those images before me. I was stuck and fixated on them. The Justice Card was leaning against Rodin's The Thinker in my mind, and Alexa's voice overtook me again. She had warned me about turning The Professor into art and something impenetrable, because then I would fail to access this side of him, even if he tried to give it to me. It was bizarre to conjure up Rodin's The Thinker as ever having offspring, let alone being in love for an extended period of time with which to produce a son. Love was still very much a part of art, but it was the quick flings, the ones that were filled with passion and intensity, and then, more often than not, death. I thought of Romeo and Juliet, and was surprised when The Professor began to mention Shakespeare. He was telling me about his wife's favorite play, Macbeth.

"Everyone looks at it like a tragedy, but my wife likes to be the optimist. She thinks it's Shakespeare's best love story because Lady Macbeth will do anything for her husband, including murder, and he will do anything for her, including murder. They had been together for years. They dedicate themselves to one another so completely they are willing to commit horrible crimes. I think she may have worked something like this into our wedding vows, I can't even recall anymore. Sometimes she's morbid, but I like her anyway, you know." He shrugged his shoulders, but still had a smile on his face. He collected the few photos he had into his palm again, and decided, just as fast, to put this part of himself away again. He wanted to get right back to work again, but I was still struggling behind him.

"Where's the divide?" I asked him "Between work and home? Between what you do for your life and what you do for your work?"

He sighed, scratching his beard. "You're still not getting it, Frank. Your life is your life. This is just books and big words here, arguments and paychecks. I grade exams, essays, and do research. It's my job."

"But you're probably inspiring those kids. You're inspiring me," I confessed honestly, but he only sighed.

"I know, I know. I am that figurehead of knowledge that you all think has come to help and save you. The humanities are difficult that way. I've not figured out a way to convey that humanity is an abstract concept, but human is tangible. We are human, and there can be humans, but there is no such real thing as humanity. It is too inconceivable for us to understand it, too large, and contains too many multitudes. Philosophy is difficult for that same reason. People think you're talking about the meaning of life, but you're using words to convey that meaning, and therefore, it renders that far too abstract and meaningless. Philosophy becomes a representation of the real, no longer existing as such," he said, beginning to get too convoluted for me to follow completely. But I understood bits and pieces, and I tried to tape them together for a better understanding. I told him I had read Said's book, and he began to get excited again.

"So you know what I mean. This life business, this talk of reality within the words, it's not real. "

"But it's in front of me. I read it," I said, growing frustrated again.

"That chair you're sitting on, how do you know it's real?" he asked me, his eyebrow raising.

"Because I'm sitting on it!"

"How do I know you're real?"

"Because you can see me!"

"Then how do I trust in things that I've never seen before?"

"Because you... you just... you just do!" I was getting extremely aggravated, extremely fast. I had no idea what I was supposed to do with this. My perceptions on philosophy were completely warped, apparently, and just when I was beginning to understand the precarious nature of myself, that doubt was thrown in there again. If this was what philosophy was, arguing about the inanities of whether or not a chair existed, then I didn't want to be here. I was about to get up and go, thinking that I had made a mistake, when he told me to sit down.

"See, Frank? No one knows anything for sure. That's what I wanted you to get and understand today. How were you supposed to trust all of those books that you have read if you haven't gone out and done the explaining and the research for yourself? This was the huge issue between you and your friends. While they told you information, they told you something they knew. They did not tell you anything you knew, because only you could find that out for yourself."

I considered this, and had really been considering it since I first met him. I knew it to be true, now. I didn't know if I could really agree with what Said said about Madame Bovary until I had read it. Now I had, and I could agree, but I also saw his flaws. Even though he was an expert, I still saw something that he had missed. "But how does knowledge even exist? How can we say to know anything? How can we publish books if they are rendered useless?"

"Books will never be useless, even if they are proven wrong, because they proved something, in the instance they were created, at least. But this is exactly the point. We can never know anything for sure. Tell me, Frank, when you were in the library, did you read Socrates at all?"

I shook my head.

"Excellent, because he works right into this conversation, and we've been evoking him the whole time," The Professor began to explain, his lesson coming into a sharper focus. "The Socratic Method was a series of questions that he would ask people, over and over again, in order to get to the root cause of their thinking. Socrates was known for being a master with words and would constantly argue. One of his most quoted lines is his claim to know nothing at all. In spite of this claim, he is still a major part of philosophic conversation. Why is that?"

"I have no idea," I responded. It seemed like the safest thing to say. The Professor smiled, and continued on with his semi-informal lecture.

"All sources of our knowledge are relational and from our own perspective. This is why his lessons are all given in dialogues. They are between two people, talking to one another. This was how his lessons or whatever you want to call them were transmitted." He smiled, wondering if I was catching onto what he was doing yet. We were having our own dialogue, right here in his office. He was testing me and quizzing me through the Socratic Method, trying to get me to admit that I knew nothing, so we could start at the bottom, in order to rework where my thinking could take me. He wanted to allow me to drop "my friends" gist of knowledge, and to get at the real source of my own truth.

"You're still thinking with feeling," he told me.

"But isn't that okay? So long as I don't claim to know anything?" I wondered, keeping Alexa's words in mind. "Don't you feel things?"

He nodded, his eyes vaguely wandering to his desk drawer. "I do feel them. Quite strongly. But there is a time and a place. If an argument is what you want to have, then there can be no room for emotions."

"Even if that's what motivates you?"

"What motivates you, Frank?"

"I don't know," I answered, and I laughed at my own bad Socrates reference. I turned the tables, feeling like this conversation was getting ridiculous and out of hand. "Why are you asking me all these questions?"

"Why are you trying to answer them?"

"Why did you ask them in the first place? Why did you invite me here?" I asked, and seeming to finally get it, I turned it completely back on him. "You wanted me to come. I didn't care either way. I came because you let me. Presumably you have better thing to do with your time, and this is not your job. You keep saying that life is life, but your life outside of work is becoming more work for you. You're not getting paid to teach me. So your argument from before is invalid. Why am I here, then? Why are you even trying to make me answer questions, then?"

He smiled. That was all he did for quite some time, I worried if I had offended him. He turned around for a second and began to write something on a piece of paper. He leaned in his chair again, his elbows on his knees, and held the piece of paper between his fingers. Before he gave it to me, he asked me in a serious, but more personal tone of voice, "So, Socrates never wrote down his dialogues. That was all Plato, his student at the time. If you look for Socrates and his legacy, you will always find Plato first, but hiding in the background. I want you to look for those books. In The Republic, the Forms are discussed, and the poets are cast out of the idealized vision of society."

"Why?" I gasped. Nothing I had read so far had ever completely admonished a form of art that way. While Said criticized it, he did not say we needed to get rid of it. Merely do it better. But get rid of the poets; why on earth would that make the world more ideal?

"Because the poets did not represent things as they are. They were filled with fantasy and illusion, the things that could not be manifested in real life. It only made the citizens of Athens more despondent and unruly if they were given poetry that did not represent things as they were. To Plato, the poets were liars. They had no place."

I could not tell what The Professor was insinuating. He had switched his position too many times in this huge dialogue that we were having and it felt as if he never gave me a straight answer. Was he saying that Plato was right? And if that was the case, did that mean what I had been doing before with my life, my passion, my love and absolutely everything that had defined me, was utterly wrong? Was this not how the world was organized and how I was supposed to think? Was I nothing but a liar?

I did not have time to voice my concerns and air my inner monologue. The Professor straightened up again, and with a sigh, gave me the piece of paper in his hand.

"Don't worry too much right now, Frank," he informed me. "You're on the right track. Keep asking questions, keep interrogating reasons and resources and try to find meaning on your own. Have more dialogues, with different people, and try to strip away their knowledge so you can both figure out what's at play. That's my home address and my email for you. Next week, don't come to campus. Come to my house. We're going to have dinner."

I left the campus in a blur. I had no idea what to think anymore, and that was The Professor's point. Once I had just started to gain this foundation again, the link was broken and I was back to step one. I stood on the steps of the school, next to the pillars of the building that had reminded the Professor of Athens, and I tried to sort out how things really were as I waited for the bus. If I was going to be called a liar, I wanted to make sure I could see the falsehood in what I thought was real before, and then, maybe after that, I could find the truth. Mikey was not picking me up that day since his entire house now was sick with the ear infection and flu, so it gave me plenty of time to look around at the world as it was. The trees and the grass and the flowers, especially the flowers, took on a new quality. It was startling that they could just exist without me, and they didn't necessarily need me to render their beauty. If I tried to render their beauty, I assumed I would obscure it. And obscurity was bad. Right? Or did I have to prove that the flowers were there, like I had to prove my chair was there? And what about myself? That self that I had just extracted from Gerard, what happened to that now? Could it exist on its own?

No, it couldn't, I realized, and that was the point. I needed to go out and find other people to talk to, other dialogues to have so I could keep going with this focus and this confusion. I needed to talk to people in order to understand where I was coming from, how I was right, and to reassert my foundation. But I also needed to seek out conversations that would deliberately question what I thought and get me to examine where my beliefs were coming from. It seemed so odd, these two contradictory elements at the same time, but I had been doing this before. I thought of the conversations with Jasmine, back again to my assumption that pregnancy was just something that women could experience. No, pregnancy happened to people, I told myself again, still getting used to the idea. The Professor's interrogations seemed to rip at me deeper, at another level beyond the linguistic function of the word man or woman. He was telling me to begin with that language was useless, that none of this meant anything at the end of the day. That was why the poets were liars, I realized. Because they used words to tell their story, but words never really mattered. The flower was here whether or not I wrote a sonnet about it, took a picture, or was here at all. If this was the case, then, then the critics were liars, too. The Professor was a liar and so was I. I felt better with this realization, but I didn't let myself get too comfortable. I knew that as soon as I thought I had figured it all out that I would have my foundation shaking again. It didn't seem like I could rest. At least with dialogues, I could keep the memory of what had happened between us, even if the contents became useless. I had spent too much time last week reading people's meditations on life and its meanings. I needed to seek out people to have those discussions with, and to create those things around.

On the bus back into the town, I began to think of Gerard. I began to repeat and replay the lessons that he had given me when I was seventeen again, only to realize that we had been using the Socratic Method. He had taken me under his wing and invited me up, and we had tried to learn together. We were going back and forth, all the time, really achieving that sense of relational purpose. Only ours had meant so much more than we ever could have thought. He had taught me, but he knew that I also taught him. Though he was so much older than me and by sheer age knew so much more, we were both learning. There were things that I could do that he couldn't and things that he could do that I was in awe of. And it was still like that, I thought. Even though his bad days seemed to outweigh the good, and even in the bad ones, I still felt like he knew more than me. I saw it in the anguish on his face when he couldn't remember or couldn't articulate what was inside his mind that wanted to be brought forward. By sheer depths of pain, he was measuring his knowledge by what he had lost.

But I was getting emotional again, wasn't I? Our entire relationship, though very Socratic, had been different than that because it was more than just facts and reason. What we had done could not have been fathomed under facts and reason; although The Professor had shown me a type of vulnerability today with the photos of his wife and son, those were completely different. He hid those in a drawer, and pulled them out periodically. They had no place in his office, out on display. His life was about life, not what he was teaching. Gerard and I had been the opposite of that entirely. Love had been our work, and because of that, we loved one another. It was perfect to me, it felt as if it always would be, even if reason could not touch it and I was speaking from an emotional place. But something was still bugging me, something was still under my skin.

In an ideal society, the poets were cast out because they did not represent things as they were. The Professor quoting Plato's words, they didn't just make me doubt my own relationship to art, but to Gerard. I knew what I knew, but what if I was lying about him? What if I wasn't representing things between us as they really were? I swallowed hard on the bus, and I began to look at the facts of the relationship, and use my reason, and I nearly threw up. What we did was so completely unreasonable. It was fucking pedophilia and I knew it was. In this deep secret part of me, I would sometimes let my mind slip in that direction. Given what I knew now about Jasmine and Mikey, and about the world as a whole, I fucking knew that if you just looked at reason alone, we were in fucking deep shit. I couldn't even be poetic about it. When I thought about it in black and white terms of right and wrong, it should have never had happened. But that thought alone made me want to burst into tears. He was the most important thing to me, ever. Nothing would ever come close to beating him, ever. I knew that in every part of my body. I loved Jasmine with all of my heart. I did. I never wanted to leave her side. But looking at Gerard and myself, that violation under pure reason, using logic, the paedophilic nature of our relationship... it hit me on the bus and I wanted to start crying. I wanted to sob hysterically because he was unreliable and he was a liar as much as I was. He was Humbert Humbert.

But my god it was the most beautiful thing in the world. It was so beautiful and I would have never taken it back. He never hurt me. In spite of all the logic stacked against us, he never hurt me. Ever. Images of Sam and Travis flashed before my eyes and I saw what I was then, and I saw what I could have become now. And though I knew that it was wrong in the academic and argumentative sense if you went with emotion, I also knew that you couldn't just live your life that way. You couldn't just remove the emotion from daily life, because it would hit you like a wave when you didn't expect it, and you ended up sobbing on the back of a city bus. I had been trying to cut away the emotions with drinking, one of the many things, anyway. I didn't want to feel, because I felt things too strongly. I loved him too deeply, and I loved him more and more the further away I got from that precarious age of seventeen. Each year that passed and we were not together, I loved him again and again. I replayed those months in my mind, and it happened to me every night. All over again, every single kiss, touch, and moment, every last breath and word I saw before my eyes. I also now knew the way that constant flashes of memories affected people; I had seen the fear in Jasmine's face and I had seen Mikey's repression. I had none of that. I had only love and this immaculate dream that I would conjure up every night of him. I could not discount emotion from this instance, because then it would make me a statistic. I could not represent things as they were, because this really was how it was to me, and I didn't care if I was a liar for that or not.

Дата добавления: 2015-11-14