Abby is the daughter of Stuart Wagner’s old age. And of his trophy wife, Wendy. The first Mrs. Wagner succumbed to the temptations of prosperity and alcohol—the first figuratively, the second literally. The next Mrs. Wagner avoided the latter and better managed the former. And she produced a daughter—Abby—twenty-five years ago, when Mr. Wagner was fifty. The first Mrs. Wagner had produced a son, adorned with the next Roman numeral and now groomed to take over the family empire when and if the reigning Stuart Wagner relinquished his death grip on it. Sort of like an aging English prince waiting for the aged monarch to move aside (yes, think Charles, the wrinkling Prince of Wales).
The executive director then turns the meeting over to Bo. He hands out a list with the heading “Search Teams.” There is a team for every building and two teams for different areas of the grounds.
“You can see what team you’re on. The first name listed with each team is the captain. When we finish here, please find your captain and gather in this room. Then proceed to your assigned building or area. Search every room, closet, or other space in every building. Then search the area immediately around your building. Your team captain will immediately fill out a written report on your findings and give that report to me. I will collate them and give them to Ms. Pettigrew, who will have them available when she meets with the parents and the police.”
I look on the list and see that I am not on the team to search my own group home. Instead I am partnered with Sam Raven to search the grounds along the front of the New Directions property between the buildings and the highway. Sam Raven is the old groundskeeper. He looks to be either black mixed with something else or something else mixed with black. I know enough not to ask.
Sam and Mrs. Francis are the only holdovers from the Nuns Era. I’ve talked to him before about the Medieval Period, when the nuns were in charge. I use the term respectfully, quite sure that the current Enlightenment regime thinks of that time as the Dark Ages. Sam doesn’t. He liked the nuns better than the technocrats. He is especially reverent toward the memory of Sister Brigit, as was clear when we once talked about her.
“She were a wise woman. She understood things. She kept things right, if you know what I mean. She knew the people here and they knew her. She knew where they come from. Back then, none of them had last names. Families didn’t want anyone to know they had people here. Most of them never had a visitor. The sisters were their mothers and fathers and the other people like themselves were their sisters and brothers. Sister Brigit—she was tough with them but she loved them and that’s how it ought to be. You know what I’m saying?”
I think of that conversation now as I’m looking at the list. Sam and I are assigned the front of the property, Bo is taking the playing field and the back of the property, and everyone else is searching a building. I see that Sam’s name is listed first, so I look around the room for the captain of my two-man team. He is standing at the back, not looking at his sheet, which, it occurs to me, he may not be able to read.
I walk up to him.
“Well Sam, looks like we’re on the same team. I guess we’re supposed to search the area between the buildings and the highway.”
Sam nods and heads outside, me trailing.
Actually, there’s not a lot to search. It’s only about a hundred feet from the entrance to the main building to a frontage road, and the highway is just beyond that. There are some trees here and there, and some landscaping shrubs that should be looked through, but it’s mostly open space and easily surveyed.
I ask Sam what he knows about Abby Wagner.
“She came here when the nuns were still in charge. Near the end of their time. She was a teenager I think. Her brain got messed up in an accident. That’s all I know. She looks regular, but she ain’t regular. She’s got problems.”
Don’t we all. But he’s right about her looking Normal. I recall the hand on the knee the first time I saw her and thank the Big Bang that it didn’t get me in trouble.
Sam and I don’t find anything. Neither does anyone else. I fill out our report in two sentences and hand it to Sam who hands it in. We are told to go back to our Normal Routine. We will be updated As More Information Becomes Available. Since my work is done for the day, I head for my car. As I open the door, I see the Stuart Wagners pulling up in front of the main entrance, with two police cars not far behind. I’m glad not to be an executive director of anything.
five
My brain and I are glad to be going to what I euphemistically call home. Home is where the snacks are. Where your finger automatically goes to all the right buttons on the remote control. Where the ratty easy chair is more desirable than any throne. Where you scratch any place that itches. And the common denominator to all this is familiarity. Not health, not wholeness, not peace—just the familiar. The devil you know and all that.
Funny how “broken” feels right when you’re used to it. We talk about comfortable shoes being “broken in,” which actually is just an intermediate step toward “worn out.” I think it’s the same with lives. We make a thousand little choices that collectively give our lives a certain shape. For some of us, too many of those thousand choices are little cracks in how things ought to be. (The “broken” in “broken in,” perhaps.) They’re small distortions that add up to a misshapen life, like how gaining a pound a month will eventually give you a belly the size of the Hindenburg. (“Oh, the humanity!”) Just as you get used to each new pound as it finds its place on your globe of a gut, so you strike up a friendship with each new distortion in your increasingly defective but familiar life.
When I say my brain wants to go home, I also mean it misses its old broken self. It’s not comfortable, not “at home,” with my recently improved mental state. It’s not that my brain wants the voices back; they were nasty to live with and hopefully gone for good. It’s just that pathology can be a kind of friend, an old buddy, a soft pair of slippers.
Not that I’m now a poster boy for mental health. I got yanked back from the precipice, but I can still see the pit edge from here, not all that far away. I’m like an alcoholic who’s been dry for some months, maybe even a year or two. I’m 100% cured right up until the moment I’m 100% relapsed. I’m just one little stimulus away from a free-fall response. My brain knows it, and some of its lobes are nostalgic.
But why do I say “my brain and I” instead of just sticking with “I”? I mean, who’s the “I” asking “Who am I?”—the dusty old question, beloved of writers and thinkers and commuters staring out windows. Am I my brain or am I my mind? Or my consciousness? Is consciousness the same as mind? Are both mind and consciousness wholly produced by brain? Is my foot part of my “I” or is this “I” of mine just a mind jockey riding this old nag called the body? And how do you get something as seemingly immaterial as consciousness out of something as unconscious as pure matter? And if you say consciousness is material, then explain to me how a molecule can store a memory of Zillah’s perfume. Pretty soon you’ll be blowing smoke. Pile up enough quarks and you get a tiny closet for a memory to live in? How charming. How unconvincing. The gap between micro and macro is as wide as the cosmos.
And don’t even talk to me about soul. That’s an eye-rolling word among Those Who Know. In the same forgotten parking lot for mothballed ideas as astrology, bloodletting, and slavery. The soul—titter, titter—how quaint. Next thing you know you’ll be believing in resurrections.
(I once believed in resurrections. I found the idea very encouraging. When Judy and I lost track of our mom and dad, I was ravenous for resurrection—or at least for afterlife. If not resurrection, at least reunion. But like most of the hopes of childhood, it faded. I haven’t found a way back to believing it since. Not that I don’t see the attraction.)
Anyway, I’m okay with ditching soul. Having one didn’t do me much good all those years, so let’s deal the deck with no soul card in it and see how the game turns out. But I would certainly appreciate an “I” card, and it seems like it’s next to go. If “I” am just my