Thanks to your insomnia, you and this view have gotten to know each other well. Over the top of your computer you gaze at it from time to time while traipsing through cyberspace, as you’re in the habit of doing whenever sleep forsakes you. You search for people you haven’t seen or heard from in decades, classmates and teachers you went to college or high school or even to first grade and kindergarten with.
And you search for him, your eighth-grade English teacher, the man who was your dearest friend, a hero and a mentor and even something of an idol to you, and who you hadn’t seen since the summer of 1980, when he more or less threw you out of his home.
The website on which the obituary appears is that of a local Oregon newspaper, the notice dated January 5, 2006. It describes the deceased’s accomplishments as a university professor, noting his achievements as a champion of human rights and diversity dedicated especially to the causes of indigenous peoples as well as refugees from Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam. The notice explains how as a student the deceased did anthropological fieldwork in Thailand and Laos, how he worked briefly for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, that he was fluent in French, Vietnamese, and Seneca, one of several languages spoken by the Iroquois tribes in what is now New York state. The notice ends with a quote from one of the teacher’s university associates, who relates the teacher’s conviction that “there would come a time when people of compassion would come together from all over the world to help make it a better place, a place where love, peace, and wisdom can survive and flourish.”
Castalia, you say to yourself. The unreachable star.
According to the obituary, your former teacher was born in Bridgeport, Connecticut, in 1943. There’s no mention of his having been a Rhodes Scholar or attending Oxford or Berkeley. Two survivors – a sister and a brother – are alluded to. Nothing about being adopted or having a paraplegic older brother. The cause of death isn’t specified.
The article also states that he was a “member of the Seneca Nation of Indians.” In the photograph that accompanies the article he wears a Navajo-patterned vest. A bone pendant dangles over the triangle of bare flesh exposed by his opened shirt collar. From the khaki baseball cap he wears a scruffy black ponytail protrudes. When you knew him the teacher was blond. His eyes were blue.
You spend the next hour scanning other websites, looking for what you’re not sure, until you find it – another obituary, that of the man the teacher had been living with when he more or less threw you out of his house. Like you, the man had been a former student. Like you, he had been nurtured and influenced by the teacher. Like you, he had been among a very few select people the teacher numbered among his friends.
This man’s obituary is dated February, 2006, less than one month after the teacher’s. At the request of the deceased’s family the cause of death isn’t disclosed.
YOU SHIFT YOUR gaze toward the window, to the unbroken string of red brake lights winking their way toward the toll plaza.
You recall the strange woman at your father’s memorial service.
You wonder: Can we ever really know anyone? Can we even know ourselves?
Who was my father? Who was the teacher? Who were these two men who were so responsible for making me who I am? Dear Past Self, do you know? Can you tell me?
I LIVE ON A LAKE IN CENTRAL GEORGIA, IN A MODEST gray A-frame with large triangular windows framing a view of the water and my dock, where two weather-beaten Adirondack chairs are angled toward each other as if in conversation. The view is partly obstructed by a pair of tall white pines, one of which succumbed recently to the dreaded bark beetle and whose needles have turned brown. Soon it will have to come down.
I start my days with a swim across the inlet and back, a distance of just under a mile. I walk down to the dock, drape my towel over one of the chairs, snap on my bright yellow swim cap and goggles, and lower myself into the tea-brown water via the rusty ladder across which a spider has been busy all night, spinning a web for mayflies.
At that hour the water is warmer than the air. A ghostly layer of fog hovers over it. I dogpaddle to the front of the dock, sight my target – a stand of pines across the way – and head off doing a swift crawl, counting my strokes. Since I moved here two years ago I’ve been trying to determine the exact number of strokes needed to reach the other side of the inlet. No matter how hard I concentrate, at around 150 strokes I always lose track. By my best estimate it takes between 180 and 200 strokes to cross, a figure that’s bound to mean very little to you, though it helps me judge my progress and choose intervals of rest.
At this hour there are no boats out. That’s something lake swimmers have to worry about: powerboats. They don’t always look where they’re going, especially when towing skiers or screaming kids on rafts or tubes. Jet skiers, that exuberant subspecies, are the most worrisome. Still, I’ve made my peace with the possibility of a watery death, preferring that to any death on dry land.
Having counted around 200 strokes I know when I put my feet down they’ll touch sandy bottom. The patch of shore by that stand of pines is a favorite hunting ground for herons. Often I’ll surprise one, just in time to see him spread his smoky wings and alight – with a primordial squawk – across the water.
Then back to the dock, to my chair and towel. There’s enough privacy here so if I wanted to I could swim in the nude. Most of the homes dotting the shore belong to vacationers and retirees. I rarely see my neighbors and they rarely see me – a good thing, since by Georgia standards my skimpy Speedo amounts to indecent exposure.
Back indoors, having changed and hung my goggles and dripping Speedo on a brass hook by the door, I make an espresso and take it up to the loft where I have my desk and where – facing the triangular window with its view through the trees of the dock – remembering, I write.
Description of the Preferred Embodiment
From IMAGE COLORIMETER: “This invention generally relates to colorimeters, and more particularly to a colorimeter for measuring color and spectrum distribution, based on the formation of an optical image for an object prior to measurement.” The illustration is of “a sectional view of a third embodiment of the invention, which illustrates the components at the front-end of an instrument adapted to make color measurements of soft or loose material.” Filed April 4, 1974.
III.
The Blue Door
Bethel, Connecticut, September, 1970
THE RUMORS ARRIVED BEFORE THE NEW TEACHER DID. That he was young, that he had gone to Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship, that he wore cable knit turtleneck sweaters with bell-bottom jeans and square-toed leather boots with big brass buckles on the side. He wore his blond hair almost to his shoulders, like Illya Kuryakin in The Man from U.N.C.L.E. He planned to teach a special class, an experimental class for gifted students that he would hand pick. When the time came you, your brother and your mutual friends waited anxiously to learn which of you had been chosen.
The others made the cut. You didn’t. You got stuck in Mrs. Schnabel’s fifth-period English class, Mrs. Schnabel with her