The Answers Read online

  (Matheson seemed to briefly notice I didn’t understand what he was saying, but he continued just the same.)

  For example, let’s say the financial resources of an extremely successful actor-filmmaker who has lived the majority of his life in the public eye are rich, but his ability to connect deeply and intimately with another person has been compromised by the fact that anyone he meets feels as if they already know him from his film roles and media coverage. On top of this, there’s also a pervasive and inescapable surveillance of his public activities that is shared continuously online. Strangers tweet his whereabouts and every movement. Discreetly and indiscreetly taken photos are posted of him standing on a sidewalk or driving a car or eating in a restaurant or walking a dog or vacationing or anything else he might do in view of another person. As you can imagine, this creates an overawareness of the self, even in the most resilient people. Then there’s all the official appearances and interviews he must do for marketing his films: questions about his personal life, his creative life, what movies he likes, what he does in his free time, who he’s dating, who he used to date, where he travels, what he’s done, what he’s doing next. All this privacy is sacrificed already, and anything he intentionally tries to keep private is hounded all the more for it. Can you imagine what this might do to a person?

  But he wasn’t asking for an answer from me. Matheson put his hand, again, to his earpiece, and it occurred to me this might all have been scripted and I couldn’t decide how to feel about what he was saying, whether it was all nonsense or just more evidence that I would never understand this world.

  Because of his films and his perpetually compromised sense of privacy, anyone who meets this hypothetical actor-filmmaker tends to have complex opinions about him and the false sense of already knowing him long before they exchange any words. In this way, he has lost all control over his ability to make a first impression or genuinely meet and interact with another person. Instead he is subject to whatever knowledge a person happens to have about him, regardless of its integrity. But what else can that hypothetical actor-filmmaker do? How does he find meaningful human connection in a world of people who falsely believe they are already connected to him? How does he make friends who don’t just want to ride his coattails toward their own fame or the afterglow of his celebrity? How can he ever really trust someone, and thus, how could he ever safely be in love?

  (Safety seemed, to me, to be the opposite of being in love, though my experience was limited to, maybe, one tangible experience and some secondhand understanding.) I wasn’t sure if this was still part of the interview or if I was now being trained for the income-generating experience. (Chandra had always said accepting uncertainty was the key to happiness so I accepted all this uncertainty, but I still felt as if I were looking over my own shoulder, watching the quiet moment before everything fell apart—this white room, this man speaking in such a strange, written way.)

  Look at TMZ or any celebrity magazine online or at the grocery store and all you’ll see is substance abuse and divorce and meltdowns. And why do you think that is? Could it be the constant pressure of being observed and scrutinized? Could it be the way our culture constantly looks for a way to cannibalize its most interesting, talented, and powerful citizens? It’s just further evidence that this country is always stopping itself from progressing in any way—whether culturally or politically or emotionally—

  I wanted to ask him whether I’d been hired or not or remind him I was the one who didn’t know about celebrity things, but he never seemed to notice my pre-speech inhalations.

  And we all have needs. Don’t we? To be heard and understood, to feel less alone. Those needs don’t go away, no matter how famous or wealthy or celebrated you might become, no matter how many movies or television shows you’re in, no matter how many awards you win …

  His attention fell inside himself for a moment, making his face soft and childlike until he flicked at his bangs and began again.

  Now, let me ask you something—are you familiar with the procedures used in ovum donation?

  Um, egg donation?

  Correct.

  Ah, a little, I guess? (I had once seen a girl self-administer a subcutaneous injection of hormones in our dorm bathroom while explaining to me how she was furthering her bloodline without the risk of pregnancy—like men have forever, she said bitterly. I remembered the bead of fresh blood rolling down her leg.)

  Well, here’s the funny thing about egg donation—let’s say you want to make a person. That used to mean you needed to have sex, get pregnant, survive childbirth, and raise the kid, right? Even like twenty years ago that was almost the only option.

  Sure?

  But now, of course, technology is expanding the routes you can take to create a new person. If a woman can’t get pregnant easily, she might take some drugs. Or if you’re single or gay or your partner is infertile, you can go to a sperm bank. If you can’t carry a baby, you can hire a surrogate. And if your eggs don’t work, you can actually buy eggs harvested from another woman. So, theoretically you could buy eggs, buy sperm, hire a surrogate, hire a wet nurse and an army of nannies, and theoretically you would be the legal mother of that child, but the egg donor would be the genetic mother and the sperm donor would be the genetic father and the surrogate would be the birth mother and the wet nurse would have the milk bond or whatever and the nannies would do the actual parenting—

  I can’t donate my eggs, I blurted.

  Oh, dear—we totally don’t want your eggs. No offense. What I’m saying is that technology now enables us to divide up the relationships and roles that were previously wrapped into one person. The question of who is that theoretical child’s mother has many true answers.

  I don’t see how this connects to what you were talking about—

  Well, it’s in the fact that our project is also concerned with evolution—emotional evolution—specifically the development of a more honest, nuanced view of human pair-bond selection, behavior, and maintenance. We know marriage started as a way to control land and wealth, but that’s not how we ideally think of it today—we want our spouses and partners to be everything to us: a lover, a best friend, a confidant, a nurturer, an intellectual equal, sometimes a coparent, sometimes even an oblique replacement for a lost or failed parent. Furthermore, it’s more accepted now than it ever has been that love and attachment don’t always fall along heterosexual gender lines. We have reached a point, as a culture, where the predominant view of romantic partnership is no longer about survival or wealth or creating progeny. Ideally a marriage or long-term relationship should be built upon a profound feeling of love between two people; however, the presence or intensity of this feeling is extremely difficult to accurately measure or explain. What we are trying to research here is the physiology of that sort of emotional equilibrium. What is happening within the brains of a truly happy couple and how can we know if a couple is actually happy? Are there habits and practices that could actually create this contentment from the inside? And when people say that when they met their partner “they just knew,” what is it that they knew? And what does it mean if a person is continually trying and failing to reach this sort of emotional steadiness with one person? Might it be impossible for some people to only rely on one person for all of one’s emotional, social, sexual, and daily support? Might there be a kind of technological, therapeutic, and/or medical solution for those who continually try and fail to find contentment in a romantic pair bond?

  I stared at him, utterly lost.

  Basically, he continued, our bodies evolved from animal to human. We evolved from nomadic tribes into structured civilizations and now we are continuing to evolve, to make the human experience a more harmonious thing.

  I guess that I’m still just wondering what this has to do with this … job?

  What I can tell you at this stage is that I work for a very prominent film artist—he’s a director and actor, but he’s truly so much more than that. A real artist. And
based on the last couple interviews, it seems you’ve never heard of him and that’s great. What I can say is that you’re in the final running for a very exciting opportunity. He’s quite the idea man, brilliant but very humble about his success. But this is why we had to be so obtuse in the ad—if we mentioned the fact that this involved a high-profile personality, we would have had a billion applications from fangirls—which is exactly what we are not looking for. But, Mary, we really do appreciate how patient you’ve been with all these interviews—he slid an envelope of what felt like cash into my hand—so here’s a token of our appreciation. I tried to accept it with nonchalance, suppressing the feeling that a bag of snakes had just been shaken up and set loose in me. The tendons in my neck and behind my ears tensed. I thought of the money I already owed Ed.

  The same silent man in the white lab coat who had applied a dozen sensors to my body came back in, removed all the sensors, put them in a special case, and left. I had to wonder how much he might know or whether he might be the actor Matheson was talking about, happy to look at someone who didn’t know who he was.

  We’ll be calling you very soon, Matheson said, escorting me to the door, then to a waiting elevator. He pressed a button and waved as the doors shut.

  Seven

  I felt well and wealthy enough (the envelope held ten new fifties) to buy real food—roast chicken, mashed potatoes, and creamed spinach—at the deli for rich people near my office. I even got a bottle of wine, though the corkscrew, I realized later, had gone in the stoop sale. Sitting against a wall in my living room, I ate straight from the paper box while staring at the unopened wine—a nonessential, a luxury item. It was a victory to buy (with cash) even the cheapest bottle at the nicer store (bespoke wood shelving instead of bulletproof glass), and they carded me, too, the first time I could remember (though it had been a long time since I’d bought anything or been anywhere to warrant it).

  As the clerk handed back my ID, hard-won at a midtown DMV, I thought back to my first driver’s license in Tennessee, long expired, though I still kept it in the small box of objects I’ll always keep. In the photo I am seventeen, my skin wan from years of long-sleeved dresses, forest shadow, and wide-brim hats. I used to think, Junia, when I looked at the photo, as if Junia were someone else, not me, not the name I’d first been given. It seemed that my identity had necessarily split, that I’d turned into a different person. I could look at her now and see all that stoic ferocity in her eyes, how she wanted to do something that could never be undone. Something permanent. Some little forever. But I’m not interested in forever. Not anymore.

  What kind of name is Junia anyway? Aunt Clara asked as she drove me away from the cabin for the last time. That’s just Merle for you, a name like that. I mean, what’s wrong with Julia or Julie? Too normal for him, I guess.

  She laughed, trying to get me to laugh, it seemed, but I couldn’t. In the car she renamed me Mary, and when I later saw my reflection in the glass door of the courthouse in Knoxville, I didn’t know whom I was looking at, didn’t know where I was in all of this.

  Good Christian name, Clara said. You could be anyone you want with a name like Mary.

  Aunt Clara’s house was listed as my home address even though it was never quite my home, just a house I slept in for a few months. I took her last name, Parsons, instead of my parents’ name, Stone (though I still don’t know which name is more mine than the other). Parsons had been her husband’s last name, dead then for longer than he’d been alive. All she ever said to me about him was You can only love a person that much once in your life, and I didn’t know enough to agree or disagree with her. What a terrible and beautiful delusion, and how sad if it’s true. I wouldn’t know, might never.

  That afternoon I went to the DMV, drove around a block with a man riding shotgun, and a half hour later I had the very first picture I’d ever seen of myself in my hands, still warm from the machine. I kept my ID displayed on my desk at all times, and as my other documents came in—my Social Security card and birth certificate and SAT scores and GED—I added them to the spread. Here was this person. Mary Parsons. Here was proof that she existed.

  But it was everything Merle had taught me to fear. I’d been at the center of his life’s work, though not his life, as he had and would always have a love for the Lord greater than any he could have for me or my mother. This was not a secret, and I’d been told to do the same, to love the Lord above all others, been taught that love belonged only to the divine, not here on this broken world. I’ve found it difficult, maybe impossible, to undo this way of thinking. Maybe I will always have to love the idea of love or a concept of God more than I can love a person. But then, these things are so difficult to measure—how could you even quantify or compare one love to another? By weight? By volume? And who is to say that loving a person isn’t just loving the idea of that person and not the actual person, all these incomprehensible clots of flesh with all their years gone by and vanished, all their history stored in basements even they cannot reach?

  So it makes sense that so many people decide to love God so much, as that’s the only love that has a chance of never changing, never leaving (though even a person’s love of God isn’t guaranteed to last). When I think of Merle this way, I can almost forgive him, can almost understand how intensely his devotion to loving God directed everything in his life, fueled his hands to type and burn and retype all those pages—a purpose he was sure the Lord had given him. This one certain thing.

  He was writing a manifesto, of sorts, a creed on the impossibility of living a truly Christian life at the behest of any government. He believed that all forms of government were spiritually bankrupt, that the only true way to follow Jesus was to be radically self-reliant—off every grid. The energy grid was wasteful and corrupt, and the food grid devalued and destroyed the planet, and the culture at large was full of pain and deceit, and money itself was truly evil, and even the church (or, as he would say, the corporation that calls itself the church) was the most corrupt—contaminated by money and political greed and widespread land ownership. Worst of all, they called themselves holy.

  His plan was to raise me in a state of complete purity, to protect me from the terrible world, and my life would prove his point. I suppose he expected me to be a prophet, but I had nothing to say. Eventually, with Clara’s help, I left and joined this broken country, began following its rules, breathing its air, began my debts, joined all these terrible grids.

  My birth certificate came seventeen years late, so the official word on my beginning is murky—my time of birth, mother, father, and location are all unknown. But finally I was born.

  * * *

  When it was decided that Merle and Florence would come visit Clara and me for Thanksgiving, some months after I left, all my days sank toward that day like water toward a drain. Then the day arrived and they arrived and they came in through the same door that all my Mary Parsons documents had come through. Florence hugged me as if I were too delicate to really touch and Merle’s eyes refused to meet mine, opposing magnets. He sat in the living room reading his Bible and I passed some time in the bathroom, dry heaving, throwing water on my face, practicing a calm smile into the mirror.

  Over supper Florence spoke about the beet crop and how the string beans had gotten so tall she had to build new scaffolding.

  Our vegetables just haven’t been like this in years, she said, and Merle said almost nothing the whole afternoon, until just before they left, all of us refusing pie despite Clara’s insistence, and in the moment Merle could have said goodbye to me, he just said, You’re a fool, and left.

  Later, as Aunt Clara and I dismembered the turkey into plastic containers, I couldn’t stop wondering if he’d intentionally been referencing that scene in King Lear where Lear calls Cordelia a fool. He’d been so proud of the essay I’d written about Lear’s materialism being intrinsic to his insanity, that the play dismantles the lie of acquisition, how the spirit is at odds with the accrual of wealth and p
ower. He would bring up that essay out of nowhere sometimes, interrupting anything to compliment it again. While tutoring me in a subject I was having trouble with, he’d cite it as evidence that I was gifted, capable of creative thought and would therefore soon be able to understand whatever algebra or chemistry I was struggling with. We had staged King Lear several times, the three of us cast in every role, which sometimes meant we’d have to speak both parts of a dialogue. Florence would read one part in a high voice and the other in a low voice, but Merle would just shift his weight from leg to leg, never breaking pace or altering his diction, every line cascading directly into the next, rushing like fire across a field. His voice, for some reason, never let on that he’d been raised in the shadow of Lookout Mountain, the way that Florence’s and Aunt Clara’s long vowels gave them away. Clara once mentioned how she thought Merle moved out to California for a few years before he met Florence, but I never found out, for sure, what happened out there or why he’d gone or why he’d returned.

  * * *

  The Thanksgiving dinners never got easier, just, for a few years, quieter. After I’d gone away to college, returning each fall, it seemed we had reached an almost-comfortable stasis, that we could go on like this indefinitely. But then Merle said something about me living so far away, something about me forgetting about my roots and I snapped.

  New York wouldn’t seem so far away if y’all just got a phone already. Really, you’re not making a statement about anything by not having a phone. It’s not going to eat your soul or whatever it is you believe.

  I thought I had the right to argue. I thought I knew more. No one answered me for a while and that sentence hung there—It’s not going to eat your soul or whatever it is you believe—and I had to confront the caustic inanity of what I’d said. I mashed the stuffing into the asparagus casserole with the back of my fork, and when I looked up, Florence was pale and still and Clara had bowed her head. The only movement at the table was in my father’s jaw, his face looking unnourished and hollow, his fork hovering over his plate. Sometimes I remember him with his eyes shut. Other times I see him staring through me.