The Great Perhaps (10 page)

Q. The cloud, shaped like a man, begins to move.
Madeline is shocked. She watches as the cloud slowly drifts over the tops of the trees from the spot where it had previously been fixed, crossing incrementally toward the west. The cloud appears to be walking in the sky. “Where are you going?” Madeline calls out. But the cloud keeps on walking.

R. Madeline does not know what to do.

S. The cloud keeps on walking.

T. Madeline thinks how Jonathan would laugh at her right now if she told him what was happening.
So would her daughters. Both of them. All of them.

U. The cloud keeps on walking.

V. Madeline thinks how everything in her life is terribly, terribly complicated.
The cloud does not seem to be. It seems to be stupendously obvious.

W. The cloud keeps on walking.

X. Madeline watches it drift farther west, hanging gently above an old apartment building, still moving.

Y. Madeline decides to follow the cloud, climbing into the Volvo quickly.
She starts the car up, throws it into reverse, and begins to follow the cloud, its silvery shape faintly crossing the late afternoon horizon. Madeline says to the cloud, “Okay, okay, don’t go so fast.”

Z. The cloud keeps on walking.

A
MELIA, ON
F
RIDAY, HER FINAL DAY OF SUSPENSION
,
finds she does not know what to do with herself. Because she has been suspended from the only thing that matters to her, because she does not have any lame homework to do or another stupid column for the paper to write, because she finished all of her schoolwork two days ago already, she is now bored to death. Worse than that, Amelia realizes that all she has in her life is high school, and the thought of that, the fact that she is just a dumb high school kid with a beret and not a young revolutionary, makes her extremely depressed. She prints out a large photo of Patty Hearst from the Internet and tapes it to her bedroom wall, just above her computer. She organizes her wardrobe and tries to get rid of anything that isn’t monochromatic or military in color: blue, green, beige, brown, and black, she moves these clothes all toward the front of her closet. She switches on the television, then switches it off, and mopes around the house all morning until she decides to go surprise her father at his office, in the biological sciences building of the university. Maybe she will sneak into his lecture class and watch him teach. Maybe she will raise her hand and ask a question and maybe he will wink at her and later tell her he was glad that she came. Maybe she will meet a college boy or two who actually give a shit about something other than getting in her pants. Maybe.

F
INDING HER BLACK BERET,
affixing it to her head, Amelia then puts on her reading glasses and her smartest-looking outfit, a dark blue turtleneck and gray skirt, then grabs her book bag and rushes off to her father’s building. She has never seen him teach before and smiles at the thought of her dad, up there at the front of the lecture hall, pointing, talking, gesturing, everyone taking notes on what he is saying. How weird! What a funny idea that is, her dad, like how could anybody take him seriously? She skips across campus to the sciences building, then finds the lobby, where a list of the current semester’s classes and their respective rooms has been posted. She finds her father’s name, checks her watch, and rushes to Room 201. The university’s hallways are dark wood and marble, and Amelia is thrilled at the idea that someone might mistake her for a student. She searches the building, finds the lecture hall, and opens the heavy wood door as quietly as she can. She hurries inside, finds the nearest open seat, somewhere near the back, and sits down. The hall, a large room of one hundred seats, is mostly empty. Her father, in a brown sports coat and tie, is muttering something near the front of the class. His back is mostly turned and he is writing something on the board. “The Paleolithic era,” he repeats. “That’s what I asked you guys to study? Did any of you do the reading or not? Because we can go back to having quizzes if you want. It doesn’t matter to me either way. Is that what you would like?”

The class does not seem interested enough to answer.

“I’ll be honest,” her father mutters. “I’m a little disorganized right now. I’m just trying to get through this semester. So it would really help if you could do the assignments. I mean, that would make a difference for all of us, I think. Unless you know all of this information already. Does anyone here have a doctorate in paleontology? No? Then maybe it’d be good if you all did the readings.”

A girl sitting next to Amelia looks at the boy beside her. In her notes she has written, in a large, underlined script:

THIS GUY SUCKS

The boy nods, then scribbles in his own notes:

HE HAS LOST HIS MIND

“Did you guys ever wake up and just want to say,
Okay, Universe, that’s it. I quit
? Because that’s how I feel right about now.”

Amelia is horrified: her father is an absolute mess. His shabby little suit coat and tie, his nasal voice, his unkempt blond beard, the incredibly bored students, some yawning right there in the open, now he is up there, scrambling through his notes, he is checking his watch and shaking his head, he is staring at the nearly empty lecture hall blankly, as if it is the first time he is seeing it, he is now mumbling, “Well, I think we’re done for the day,” he is turning and opening his attaché case, shoving his notebooks inside, the students sighing a breath of exaltation at being released half an hour early. Amelia, thoroughly embarrassed for her dad, ducks out, rushing through the doorway, exiting along with the other young people. She glances over her shoulder once and sees her father still standing at the front of the hall, pinching the space between his eyes. It looks like he is still talking to himself about something. Amelia, her face flushed, follows the flood of students away from the lecture hall, pretending to be invisible, an orphan.

U
NSURE NOW
of what to do with the rest of her day, Amelia ambles around the university. She watches the college girls, in sweatshirts and jeans, their books huddled loosely to their chests, or book bags slung lazily over their shoulder with one strap. They seem so demure, so freshly scrubbed, so intelligent and mature and indomitable. They are the former editors of their high school papers, the former presidents of clubs they themselves must have invented. They laugh and chat and smoke in groups of two and three and blink and giggle and talk in low voices when a college boy crosses the quad to join them. It is totally unfair. They are so sure of themselves, so effortless, arguing about Hegel or the ending of
The Stranger
. They are aglow, nearly incandescent with some secret knowledge, they are having sex and probably enjoying it. They are all lying in their dorm rooms, in their beds, a boy with bushy hair beside them, naked, sharing a Chesterfield, and talking about Woody Allen movies. There are no asshole Cro-Magnons crowding the busy hallways, standing around thinking their dumb thoughts, just waiting for someone to make fun of. Everyone on the quad is here because they want to be. And all of them look so vibrant and smart. These girls are all involved in protests, they must have all come close to being arrested. And they are all too stylish, all too confident to be caught dead in something as pretentious as a black beret.

A
MELIA, FOLLOWING A GROUP
of these mysterious girls, ends up in a general education class called the Historical Perspectives of Biology. The professor, a young fellow in his late twenties, is also in a brown suit coat, this one slimmer than her father’s, corduroy, more becoming. He also wears a beard, though his is reddish and has been recently trimmed. The class begins promptly at one-thirty and the professor, winking to a few students in the front row, cracks some unheard joke. He claps his hands together and says, “Okay, guys, today’s topic of discussion is one I am sure you have been recently contemplating yourself: the inevitable nature of war.”

Amelia quickly sits up, realizing she has nothing to write on.

“Why is it that, no matter how prosperous our country is, we always find ourselves caught up in military struggle of some kind?”

Amelia looks around the room and sees the entire class is silent, hurriedly jotting down abbreviated words in their notes.

“Okay, guys, take me, for example. I was born in the early seventies, during the Vietnam War. In the eighties, we had the arms race and the final stages of the Cold War. In the nineties, the First Gulf War, then military intervention in Bosnia. Now it’s 2004, and here we are again, this time caught up as an occupying force in a country most of us know very little about. So my question for you, ladies and gentlemen, is why? Why does this pattern keep repeating? What does it say about us, as a nation? Or about us, our collective human nature? What does it tell us about our instincts? The way we’re made? Our biology?”

A boy with a goatee raises his hand first. “It’s all about money. War is like good for the economy.”

“Sure. There’s some truth to that,” the professor admits. “The Great Depression didn’t end until we got ourselves involved in World War Two. Okay, okay,” he says, scribbling
Money
on the blackboard. “But is money the only reason?”

“What about religion?” a girl asks, raising her hand high above her head.

“Religion. Good. Think of all the wars you know, throughout the history of humankind, how many of those were motivated by differing religious beliefs? A lot, right? Christians against Muslims, Muslims against Jews, Christians against Jews, Christians against other Christians. Not to mention the wars of indoctrination against millions of indigenous people, across Africa, Asia, and North and South America, in the name of some spiritual power.”

The professor nods, taking a sip from a coffee cup, then adds
Religion
to the blackboard.

“Okay, but what about biology? How do you think that plays a part?”

The class is slightly puzzled.

“Okay, maybe it’s just part of nature itself that we go to war. Maybe war is part of the way the natural world organizes itself. All right, for example, there are certain male, adolescent dolphins that will gather together as a group and go and hunt porpoises, in gangs. They’ll find a porpoise and kill it. And the scientists who have studied this phenomenon have discovered that it has nothing to do with a struggle for food, because their diets are different. It just seems that these dolphins, this one species, this one group, wants to dominate another group. Can you guys think of examples of this happening in your own lives?”

Amelia nods, wanting to raise her hand, but she restrains herself. She leans forward in her seat and listens to each word of the lecture, captivated, staring at the professor, hypnotized.

A
T THE END OF
the class, Amelia waits for the students to file out so that she can hurry to the front of the hall and thank the professor for his lecture. But it is not so easy. There are two or three other girls, already waiting in a small line. They blink at him happily, twirling their hair in their fingers. Amelia is undaunted, or not daunted enough to ignore the odd excitement building in her stomach. She feels the certain itch of hives trembling along her skin and does her best to ignore the uncomfortable sensation. She waits her turn silently, adjusting the terrible beret, then staring down at her feet, listening to the silly compliments the other girls are making—“I really loved what you said about religion, Professor Dobbs, it really makes a lot of sense,” or “I think your class should be required, Professor Dobbs”—until she is the last one in the room, and Professor Dobbs is carefully stacking his notes, sliding them into his briefcase. When he has finished packing his things, he searches through his jacket pockets, finds a small silver cigarette case, pops it open, selects a foreign-brand cigarette, and lights it using a single match from an elegant-looking matchbook. He sighs, the cigarette smoke darting severely from his two nostrils, as he slips the silver case back into his jacket pocket. Amelia takes this moment to notice how serious, how intense this young man looks before she builds up enough courage to interrupt the professor’s few seconds of silent contemplation.

“Professor?”

“Yes,” he says with a movie-star smile, all white teeth, perfectly aligned, glittering like an advertisement.

“I just wanted to say, well, how incredible it was…your lecture…I think it’s great someone is like talking about issues like that. I mean, it’s so different…” She wants to say
than high school
, but, catching herself, she mutters, “It’s like so different than most classes.”

“I appreciate that, thanks.”

Amelia nods for no apparent reason. The beautiful professor has not looked up from his briefcase yet. She stalls, trying to think of something else to say, and notices a small bald spot at the back of his reddish brown head. The bald spot is not unattractive, there is something about it, something humbling, that makes Amelia believe the professor may be as shy as she sometimes feels.

“Well, that was it, I guess.”

“Well, thank you for your feedback,” he says, still shuffling his papers. Then, with a quick glance, his eyes meeting hers only for a moment, “I like your hat.”

“My hat?” It feels like she might implode.
My hat. What hat? Am I wearing a hat?

The young professor smiles, the smile revealing how young he actually is, twenty-seven, twenty-eight at the most. He says, “Your beret. It’s very becoming.”

Amelia immediately wishes she could die, right there. Oh, my, God. She blushes, touching the beret once, then again, nodding. “Thanks…I…thanks.”

“I hate to admit, but I’m still learning everyone’s name in class.”

“Oh,” Amelia says, fidgeting, running a hand through her hair. “Sure.”

“I don’t believe I know yours.”

“It’s Amelia,” she gushes, then, remembering who she is, her own last name, she adds, “Hearst.”

“Wow. Any relation to William Randolph?”

“Distant,” she lies again, all too easily.

“Are you a freshman or sophomore, Amelia?”

“Um, sophomore,” she mutters, deciding to commit herself to a lie as grand, as bold as she can imagine.

“What’s your major?”

“Undeclared so far.”

“Undeclared? Huh. Ever consider history?”

“Sure. I love history.”

“What part of history are you interested in?”

“All of it.”

“All of it?” he asks, smiling again, now just another boy Amelia has met.

“I like to look at revolutionary movements throughout history. The Soviets, the Chinese, Cuba, South America.”

“A young socialist?” he says with a grin.

Amelia returns the smile. “I’m a Marxist.”

“I see.”

“I don’t think people should be treated as products,” she announces proudly. “I think it’s everyone’s responsibility to care for each other. The only way to do that is to tear down capitalist interests.”