The Divide

She was that pool. He was the stone.

He talked about his mother.

Her name was Marga Novak and she was working through her apprenticeship at a hairdressing salon in downtown Chicago when she answered a classified ad in the back pages of the Tribune: “Pregnant, single women wanted for privately funded medical study.”

She had recently become pregnant by a thirty-five-year-old shingle and siding salesman who had promised to many her but who left town, or was relocated, a couple of weeks after she a

She passed two screening interviews and was introduced to Dr. Kyriakides, who explained that the treatment—to prevent low birthweight and “give the child a healthy start”—might involve some discomfort in co

She agreed, of course. Was there a choice? The injections were uncomfortable but the delivery was easy, even allowing for the infant’s exaggerated cranial size. Mother and child were installed in a two-bedroom town house near the university district, and John’s schooling began almost immediately.

“How do you know all this?” Susan asked.

“I broke into Max’s office one night. Came in from the Woodwards’ house in the suburbs. I was twelve years old. He kept his files and his notes in a little vault behind his desk. I’d seen it there a few years before. I’d seen him open it.”

“After all that time? You remembered the combination?”

John nodded and continued.

Marga’s parents were Czechs who had come to America before the war. She hadn’t spoken to her mother or father for fifteen years; she didn’t know whether they were still alive. This baby was in effect her only family.

Marga understood soon enough that John was a special child. Even the name “John”—she hadn’t chosen it herself. It had been Dr. Kyriakides’ suggestion. The doctor was polite but firm and Marga acquiesced because she was afraid of offending him. He paid all the bills, after all. In a very real sense, he owned her.

She hardly saw the baby. She tried to be a responsible mother, at least at first. But there were research people always coming to take the child away. He slept in a crib in Marga’s room most nights; they had that time together. But the doctors must have been doing something to him, she thought—something she didn’t understand.

He was a strange child.

He began talking too soon—at only a few months! But more than that. She sensed it every time she picked him up … every time she put him to her breast. There was a discomfort she once described to Dr. Kyriakides as something like the sound of a piano string gone off tune. (“Dissonance,” Kyriakides supplied.) And the baby’s eyes were too observant.

It wasn’t like touching a baby, she said. It was like touching … a dwarf.

After that confession, she saw even less of John. Marga pretended that this made her unhappy, but really it didn’t. … It was nice, having some time to herself for a change.

“I remember Max more clearly than I remember Marga. Marga is just a face. Small eyes. Big body, big shapeless dresses. She wore a perfume that smelled like linden flowers. Overpowering!

“Max was different then. He had more hair. A heavy Joe Stalin moustache and rimless glasses. It was frightening. I trusted him, of course. He was the central force, the operating engine. It was obvious that everything revolved around him, everybody followed his orders.

“He taught me more than anyone else. I had plenty of professional tutors. But it was Max who would really talk to me. If I asked a question, he took it seriously. Child questions, you know: how high is the sky and what comes after it? But he understood that I didn’t want trivial answers. I wanted the true answers.

“And there was the way he looked at me.

“You have to understand how the others treated me. The other research staff, even Marga. I would sit at a little table and they would run a Stanford-Binet or a Thematic Aperception and after a while they would start to register their disbelief—or their fear, or their resentment. I was strange, anomalous, different. I was scary. I learned to recognize it—I thought of it as ‘The Look.’ After I was a year old, Marga would never touch me, never wanted to pick me up. And when she did: The Look.

“But Max was different. Max knew what I was. Took pride in me. That meant a lot.

“I decided he was my real father. That Marga was only some kind of hired nurse. Eventually, of course, they took me away from Marga altogether; and then Max was my father, or the nearest thing.

“I trusted him.

“That was a mistake.”

Susan said, “Why did they take you away from Marga?”

“She came home from the Safeway one morning and found me taking apart the radio. I was doing a pretty good job of it. I had it sorted by component size—quarter-watt resistors on the left, power supply on the right. Desoldered the parts with a needle from her sewing kit—I heated it over a candle. Burned myself a couple of times, but I was begi

“Marga was angry?”

“Marga was frightened, I think, and angry, and she was wearing The Look—which is really a kind of horror. Changeling in the crib, worm in the cornmeal …”

“She punished you,” Susan guessed.

“She turned on the left-front burner on the Hotpoint and held my hand over it. Second-degree burns. I healed up pretty fast. But they took me away from her—or vice versa.”

It wasn’t all bad (John explained). There was more luxury than torture. He was pampered, really. And in some ways, it was an ordinary childhood. He had toys to play with. He remembered the extraordinary vividness of colors and sensations … the radiant blue luster of a crib toy, the pale intricate pastels of a sun-faded beachball; he remembered the letters etched on glass storefronts like black cuneiform (“chicken-tracks,” Max called them), pleasing but mysterious.

He remembered the day he learned to read—acquiring the phonetics and the approximations of written English, puzzling out a newspaper headline to himself. He remembered riding into town on some errand with Dr. Kyriakides, and his amazement that the angular marks on signs and windows had resolved suddenly into words—A P, USED BOOKS, WOOLWORTHS—this pleasure mixed with frustration because, having recognized the words, he could no longer see the lovely strange chicken-tracks. The marks had turned into words and words they stubbornly remained. The abstraction had displaced the concrete. Story of his life.

One by one, category by category, the objects of his perception faded into language. A tree became “tree”; “tree” became “a noun.” Categorical hierarchies exploded around him, somehow more organic than the organic things they named. For instance, the oak in front of Marga’s town house: even when he tried to focus exclusively on the texture of its bark or the color of its leaves, he triggered a network of associative ideas—gymnosperm and angiosperm, xylem and cambium, seed and fruit—that displaced the thing itself. He became afraid that his vision—that the world itself—might dissolve into a manic crystal-growth of pattern and symbol.