Your Body is Changing (12 page)

Aunt Dora had fed and comforted him—“Or what man is there of you, whom if his son ask bread, will he give him a stone? Or if he ask a fish, will he give him a serpent?”—and it seemed real important to her that Duffy shouldn’t leave the house alone, so Henry nodded and pretended to understand and agree with everything she said.

Finally Duffy gave in because the permissive culture told him it was okay to be bossed around by a woman and a child. Aunt Dora got Henry dressed for the trip. She dug out some of what she called Duffy’s “ancient undergrad duds” to go with Henry’s good blue pants—a black turtleneck and a tweed jacket with leather patches on the sleeves.

“There. That’s cute. You look just like a little professor,” Aunt Dora said to Henry. “An ineffectual little professor with about as much backbone as a bowl of soup.”

“That’s it. Pick away at my soul, bit by bit,” said Duffy.

“What? I was talking to Henry, wasn’t I, Henry? Now go have fun.”

“That’s real Harris Tweed,” said Duffy. “Look at the label if you don’t believe me. That’s handwoven in the Outer Hebrides from Scottish-grown wool. It’s a collector’s item. I don’t even know if they make them anymore. We should look it up on the internet. My mentor gave it to me. Look where he burned a hole in the sleeve. He’s dead now.”

Duffy pouted all the way to the Primate Center.

Henry and Vince rode in the back of the van. Nobody talked.

They pulled up at a medical-looking building of creamy brick. A woman in a white scientist coat and slim rectangular glasses was waiting alone in the portico. Henry heard monkeys hollering and carrying on.

“Hey, Dr. Pogg,” said the beautiful young dark-browed scientist.

When she had climbed in and he saw the dreamy black back of her head, Henry knew for certain that she was the girl from the golf course. He studied Vince, who was likewise fixed on her soft dark misting of hair, almost a crew cut, her almost skull-white scalp beneath it.

“The others couldn’t make it, I guess. For the outing,” said Duffy.

“What?”

“You remember my nephew.”

“Sure…uh…”

“Vince,” said Vince. “Surprised to see me?”

The girl laughed in a natural way. “Do you guys mind?” she said, passing her backpack. She smelled like a powerful handsoap that would kill anything. Henry wanted to climb over the seat and get on top of her. Her forehead was bony and exciting, exposed by her short hair and emphasized by her wild eyebrows like a couple of arrows pointing up. It almost looked like they were pointing at a pair of horns under the skin ready to emerge just at the hairline, but not in an evil way.

“And this is Vince’s friend Henry. Henry, this is Josie. She’s a student in one of my classes. A very gifted student, I might add.”

“Hello ma’am.”

“Ma’am! I’m nineteen.”

“I’m sorry, ma’am.”

“Well aren’t you a little doll.”

“We’re all little dolls,” said Duffy.

Twenty more minutes to Pineknot.

Is this where you’re leading me, Jesus?

Vince would pick up Josie’s backpack and smell it when he thought Henry wasn’t looking.

Duffy had gotten a weird lump in his throat and he never stopped talking.

“Science is terrific. You know? I mean, I love it. The Age of Enlightenment. Am I boring you? I mean, the internal combustion engine runs on gasoline, thank you very much. How far do you think we could run this baby on prayer? Not very far, I’ll tell you that. To put it scientifically, a prayer equals not even one droplet of gasoline. You know? Not one droplet! I would pay a million dollars to a person who could show me a prayer that accomplished even as much as one miniscule droplet of gasoline. Science is just, I don’t know, I get excited just wrapping my mind around it. You know? My awesome comprehension of it. Look at that barn. I bet some poor jerk lives over there who thinks he could lay his hands on an empty fuel tank and make a car go. Well, not in the barn. I mean he doesn’t live in the barn, of course, but somewhere. He’s a type. I shouldn’t have mentioned the barn. I’m making a point, okay? You and I, Josie, we understand gravity and so on. The illusion of free will caused by a slight delay of brain waves. They’ve proven that. We just have the feeling we make decisions. That doesn’t bother me. I don’t need angels playing harps. I enjoy the intricate beauty of physics. Molecules. Entropy. Biological imperatives and so on. Why isn’t that enough for people? The glory of a sunset and so on. Because they’re stupid, that’s why. I’m not telling you anything you don’t know, working at the Primate Center among nature’s remarkable apes. You know? A sunset can be explained quite rationally without taking away the wonder of it all. Why must mankind turn it into a chariot borne aloft by winged horses? Preposterous! My brain allows me to accept the fact that the Earth revolves around the sun and so on, thus producing the lovely sunset. And various meteorological conditions and so on. Is a sunset any less lovely thereby? Of course not. And so, because I side with Galileo or Copernicus or whomever, the village priest is going to ram a hot poker somewhere unpleasant? I am quite relieved to be out of the Dark Ages, thank you very much. But in a way I’m a prisoner of my own wonderful brain, this fantastic computer that no one can understand. Take art. Art is a function of the mind. You know? Expressed through the body. The senses. There’s no need to drag religion into it. Soulful. What does that mean? It’s a word. And all these are words, these various vocally intoned grunts and inflections and so on that I’m using right now. Or are they using me? You know? My brain is just dishing them up, one after another with an implacable logic that I am not able to comprehend. And my body is responding by using my vocal chords and tongue and so on, my soft palate, et cetera, my uvula I suppose—you as a science major would know better than I!—to manufacture the appropriate physical semblance of the words that my brain is now automatically producing. It’s mechanical, is what I’m saying. They’ve proven it at Harvard. A guy wrote a book. I’m going to get you that book as a personal gift from Amazon dot-com. It just made me think of you somehow. I haven’t read it. There was a great article about it somewhere. Hey, maybe I could get us both a copy and we could read it together. Duffy’s Book Club! Move over, Oprah! No, I think she’s done some remarkable things. We could go somewhere cool and shady and read passages aloud to one another, is what I’m saying. As part of our tutorial. Wouldn’t that be pleasant? And this other guy, the one who wrote The End of Faith. Have we talked about that one? What’s more important, he asks us, the art and poetry of an irrational kook like William Blake, or the achievement of the guy who invented a lotion to soothe foot fungus with the wonders of scientific reasoning? Foot fungus, baby! Ding ding ding! Right answer! Now give me a hard one. I’m paraphrasing, I haven’t read the book. Either book, actually. I’m using ‘baby’ colloquially, as a lark, I hope I didn’t offend you. What was I talking about?”

“I don’t know,” said Josie.

“This Harvard guy, Dr. Wegner, wrote a book proving that there’s no free will. That means his body robotically, automatically discovered that it did not possess free will and helplessly, automatically wrote a book about it and somehow found a publisher without being willing to find a publisher whatsoever. And this other person, this End of Faith person, Sam Harris…Hey, wasn’t he the guy who won Star Search?”

“I don’t know what that is,” said Josie.

“Of course not. You’re a child. A gorgeous, amazing human child. Star Search was like American Idol, but marginally more nightmarish. Hey, guess who I am. ‘That was appalling.’ No? Simon Cowell, get it? See, I’m up on the ‘gangsta tip’ with you young ‘playas.’”

Nobody said anything. Nobody knew what to say. There was nothing to say. Duffy kind of groaned at himself before starting over.

“Well, this guy, this Sam Harris, if that is his name, he considered it rational, evidently, to try to change tens of thousands of years of history by going on C-Span. Okay. I mean, he’s completely on the mark with his observations, but what’s more rational, writing a book, any book, or blowing your brains out? I’ll give you three guesses. The publishing world’s too chickenshit to even touch my satirical monograph on Gauguin.”

“Can we turn on the radio?” said Vince. Duffy didn’t hear, or pretended not to hear.

“When you make a work of art it doesn’t matter what you believe, quote-unquote,” said Duffy. “What the artist believes, quote-unquote, has no bearing on the physical reality of the object. The guy with the scarecrows, Brother Lampey? God’s not talking to him. There is no God. But because he believes in God he gets to be a quote-unquote visionary, quote-unquote. David Hume compared a black man of learning to a parrot that could simulate human speech, did you know that? The father of rationalism! We—white people—we’re human, he explained with his rationalism, and black people are…something other. And John Brown, the religious screwball—I’m talking about a complete nut—killed and died for his belief in black social equality. You know? Not just legal equality, quote-unquote, like almost all the other abolitionists.”

“Uh-huh,” said Josie.

“What’s my point?” said Duffy.

“I really couldn’t tell you.”

“See? My brain is too aware of itself. It’s listening to itself think. Shakespeare could hold two entirely opposite universes in his mind at one time. You know? It’s called a dialectic, not to get technical. Have you taken philosophy yet? You really must.”

Suddenly Duffy banged his fists on the steering wheel.

“Aaah!” he said. “I wish I weren’t so much like Shakespeare!”

It was Henry’s duty as a Christian to witness to Duffy and bring him to the Lord. But Henry’s mouth was stopped as if by an angelic presence. “How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?” He could imagine expounding the gospel in a way impossible for Duffy to dispute. Duffy would pull over and everyone would kneel by the roadside. There was a painting of Jesus and the rabbis in Henry’s ninth-grade biology book. Jesus was a blond kid with an awesome blue hat—Henry wondered if he could get a hat like that at J. Crew—and his robe looked so real you could see the wrinkles and everything.

It looked like that painting in Henry’s head, them kneeling by the van and Henry smiling down at them in a powder-blue skullcap, one hand raised as if describing a dove in flight. “Thank you Henry for bringing us to Jesus” with tears streaming down their faces and they would go off in the bushes, just Henry and Josie, and Josie would yank down her pants and he could imagine her bunched-up white scientist coat snagged in the briars and bits of gummy pine tree bark sticking to her naked behiney.

Gum was like the living blood that came out of a tree.

For some reason that thought made Henry feel tender, melancholy, and compassionate, the way Jesus must have felt, and a torrential light filled his hollows.

“A visionary!”

They were pulling into the grounds of Scarecrow Farm and Duffy was still upset about everything.

“They took away his accreditation because he was beating the faculty with a hickory stick. An actual honest-to-God hickory stick! I’m not making this up, people. I couldn’t be. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, a true visionary. I suppose I never thought of beating my colleagues with a stick because I’m not a visionary. Although some of them need to be beaten with something. Come to think of it, a hickory stick would do nicely. Quick, get me a hickory stick. No, I’m just venting. Violence is never cool. ‘The More You Know!’” Duffy sang the last part, like that educational commercial on TV.

Scarecrow Farm wasn’t a farm. It looked like a high school. Henry saw some kids getting off of a school bus and marching single file into a covered breezeway. But they weren’t kids. And they weren’t marching. They weren’t even moving. They were frozen. They were frozen kids.

The school bus had broken windows and rotten, shredded tires.

Duffy parked next to it.

Henry looked up and saw more non-kids inside with faceless burlap bags for heads.

In the warehouse-like gym of corrugated green tin, a scarecrow coach forced a scarecrow kid to climb a rope while a crowd of other small scarecrows sat on aluminum bleachers, watching, eyeless. Hundreds of scarecrows, mostly child-sized, populated the yards and buildings. The indoor scarecrows were better preserved. Here and there a head had fallen off or such (Duffy explained that part of Brother Lampey’s vision was never to touch the scarecrows after building and placing them, but to simply allow God to manipulate them through natural—or supernatural—occurrences), but their clothes were bright and clean and most of their poses intact and extraordinarily expressive. Duffy pointed out that almost none of the scarecrows had been built with the traditional crucifix arms; they gestured fluidly, urgently, though none of them had faces to give clues to the meanings of their gestures.

Outside, the air felt transparent, blue and urgent, the way it does in the cold part of an Alabama winter. The sun was up high and so was a smudge of moon.

The cheery snap of sunshine made the outside scarecrows scarier—bleached and brittle, they had been torn by animals or birds, trampled by real children, some had fallen like soldiers, their innards spread upon the ground, limbs broken, nests for mice, as awkward as death.

Duffy consulted his Brother Lampey newsletter.

“Smell this,” he said, and held it practically in Henry’s face.

Henry smelled the single, somewhat wadded sheet, dotted with pale purple. He smelled nothing except perhaps a vague wetness and probably not even that.

Duffy removed the paper from Henry’s face and took a deep snort.

“Mimeograph. That smell takes me right back to high school. I bet you’ve never even heard of a mimeograph machine.”

“No sir,” said Henry.

“That’s the smell of purple to me,” said Duffy. “Kind of medicinal, kind of like moldy ink.”

Duffy smelled the newsletter again.

“Lately I feel like I’m back in high school all the time. You know? It’s a rotten feeling.”

He looked back at Vince and Josie, who were dragging their feet, staring at the ground.