Prospero's Son: Life, Books, Love And Theater Part 5

The hairdresser who had flown in from Florida stood up, just to say that Larry meant the world to him, that they were friends for twenty-five years, and that the best piece of advice he'd ever heard came from Larry: just do what's right for you. A married couple who'd come in from New York recalled how Larry and Renee were such great friends at camp, and, "Renee, remember the camp sing?"-at which point, he broke into "Harvest Moon," but with rewritten lyrics about everyone at camp.

No one who knew him only from San Francisco spoke. Two Turkish brothers stood in the back. One was the man I remembered from the apartment, in his crisply pressed striped s.h.i.+rt, with his carefully trimmed gray hair. The other, over six feet tall, came in a leather jacket, with a mustache and goatee and slicked-back black hair. Khan. That was his name. He'd introduced himself as Khan. No subject, no verb. Khan.

They said nothing during the afternoon.

I stood there, thinking about Larry's socks and driving in the rain, and boats, and camp theatricals, and "Harvest Moon." And then The Tempest came back to me: Down with the topmast! Yare! Lower, lower! Bring her to try with main-course. A plague upon this howling! They are louder than the weather or our office.

Just do what's right for you.

If you can command these elements to silence . . . use your authority.

I lifted up a prayerbook, then, and Hebrew spilled from me like spells. Yitgadal v'yitkadash sh'mei raba. Yizkor elohim nishmat Leb ben Noah sh'halach l'olamo. I said that, in traditional Judaism, you would tear your clothes, or a part of them, to expose the heart and signify a fissure in the family. "Jacob rent his clothes, put sackcloth on his loins, and observed mourning for his son many days." But now, we do it symbolically. And I picked up a remnant from his closet, a small piece of flannel that must have been left after he'd had a pair of trousers altered, and I held it up and said the prayer and ripped it so forcefully that flecks of wool flew off and mingled with the dust against the sunlight.

Graves at my command Have walked their sleepers, oped, and let 'em forth By my so potent art.

And with the service done, I clapped my hands together and invited everyone to eat out on the patio, and Mom stood up and kissed me and said, "I guess I was just tired of playing the beard." And my eleven-year-old son, ill at ease throughout the afternoon, suddenly quieted.

NINE.

Lithium Dreams He had always been antsy child, ill suited for the cla.s.sroom chair or dinner table. Dad doted on him, though, expecting him to love him for his gifts: enormous model airplanes, giant Lego sets, ill.u.s.trated books on dinosaurs and fish and the elements. We tried to take him to a baseball game once, but we had to leave before the seventh-inning stretch, the boy bored and overheated. Instead of stories about sportsmen, we read tales of chemical discovery or strange facts about metals. He loved the Dorling Kindersley books, with their full-color pictures of mineral specimens and the men who founded science. Shortly before Dad died, I'd bought him John Emsley's Nature's Building Blocks: An AZ Guide to the Elements, and we would sit up nights, A now being for Astatine, and B for Boron. We'd read about the rare earths, and names as unp.r.o.nounceable as sauropods hovered in the air as he sank into sleep: Praseodymium, Dysprosium, Rhenium, Ytterbium. Some nights, we'd speculate on all of the unnamed, coded elements beyond those that had been firmly found: Unununium (111), Ununbium (112), Ununquadium (114).

One weekend afternoon shortly before Dad died, he got it in his head to start extracting all the elements. Some we would find; some we would pull out of machinery and products; some we would isolate from chemicals. "Lithium batteries!" he announced after lunch, and so, like knights on an adventure, we drove off to True Value Hardware to buy a handful of batteries, intent on opening them up. Outside, we set up carefully: rubber gloves, respirators, newspaper on the ground. Because of lithium's reactivity, I suggested we cover everything in Vaseline-a process that left us, begloved and masked, looking like two proctologists on holiday. We used a hacksaw to cut into the batteries, a move that released toxic smells and smoke. We spread apart the metal casing, resecting the elemental heart of the anode, and there it was: a coil of silvery-bluish lithium foil. We quickly covered it in Vaseline, put the whole mess into a jelly jar, and kept it, displayed like a captured creature, on the windowsill.

As we cut into the battery, I saw us both as surgeons of our adolescence, getting at the heart of something volatile. For as a child, I knew I had a lithium imagination. My oldest memories are not of events but of dreams: tongues of fire licking up around my bed, each one with a laughing face; my best friend's mother morphed into a monster; hallways, staircases, and elevators going dark and nowhere. One day-it must have been when I was four-I came home after playing cowboys and Indians and, still wearing the headdress I had fas.h.i.+oned out of newspaper, I ran into the apartment, breaking something along the way. "My G.o.d," my mother screamed, "you are an Indian"-the first words I remember her saying to me.

I looked down at the boy, benignly playing with his grandmother at Dad's ceremony, fingering the bit of ripped cloth I had held up with my prayers. I remembered, how, soon after my brother was born, I went into my mother's dresser, pulled out one of her white sweaters, and cut holes in it with a scissors-as if to show her how the fabric of my own life had been torn. If I could tell you of my childhood, I thought, would it make yours better? 'Tis time, I recalled Prospero, I should inform thee farther. Lend thy hand, And pluck my magic garment from me.

Like, you, I was intractable. I spent the bulk of kindergarten in the corner, crying "I'll be good" to a teacher so old and so ugly I was sure she had a tail. When we did h.o.m.onyms in second grade, I proudly stood up for my own, and offered, in my Brooklyn English, "orphan" and "often." I was sent to the vice princ.i.p.al. The Brooklyn of the early 1960s was a place where children played outside, where you could ride your bike all day as long as you were home for dinner, and where you could stand on a street corner waiting for adults to come by. "Would you cross me, sir?" I was taught to ask, and unsuspecting children of my generation gratefully took strangers' hands and walked across the street. On such streets, I was menacing. Stickb.a.l.l.s would carom over winds.h.i.+elds; mothers would come out of doors to curse us out in Yiddish. When I was six, I found a fiver in my pocket (perhaps it had been given to me by my grandmother), and I waltzed into Phil's corner store with my friends and ordered up a whole mess of pretzels and red licorice, each piece, a penny. "What are you doing with that five-dollar bill?" Phil chastised me. "Now, you go home and give that right back to your mother."

As if to pay me back for my six years of Indian exuberance, Mom put me into therapy. Each Wednesday afternoon, she would take me in a taxi to 39 Park Street to see Dr. Lisbeth Sachs. She had a vaguely European accent, which in those days was a mark of medical authority, and we'd sit there for an hour, talking about dreams, or having tea, or making things with popsicle sticks. One day, after my mother gave the cabbie the address, he turned around and said, "Lot of doctors on that street, eh?" "Just mind your own business," my mother snapped back (with, of course, the implied "G.o.dd.a.m.ned" hovering between "own" and "business"). I never really got much out of these appearances, save when my mother would herself come in, and Dr. Sachs would ask some piercing question and Mom would break down in tears.

We all went on drugs. Mom lived on Milltown and Librium for the better part of the Kennedy administration, and while Jackie's pillbox hats absorbed a nation, Mom's pillboxes spilled over the kitchen table. I was given Thorazine, much stronger than the sedatives Mom took. Thorazine is now one of those relic drugs out of the age of thalidomide and lobotomies, something that, I am told, they no longer prescribe even for homicidal schizophrenics. Whole stretches of my childhood have evaporated from me; I have no memory of third grade. When people of my generation sit down and recall where they were when John Kennedy was shot, I say nothing-if only I could shoot back that I was so medicated that I could barely dress myself, as if my 1963 had been a.s.sa.s.sinated by a pill. When I recounted this experience to a psychoa.n.a.lyst in Palo Alto and asked him if they still used Thorazine anywhere, he said, "Oh, probably in some prison in Mississippi."

In the Mississippi of my childhood, I took refuge in the things of nature. There was a book in the Time-Life Nature series that had pictures of all of the elements, with evocative descriptions and arresting chapter t.i.tles-I remember one, "A Deceptive Facade of Solidity," a phrase that, in retrospect, could well have stood as an epigraph for my entire family. Weekends, we trooped off to the American Museum of Natural History, with its minerals and meteors. I memorized all that I could, and began to collect whatever elemental objects I could find. From there, I moved on to rocks and gems, once forcing my father to accompany me to some ancient jeweler's hovel on Ca.n.a.l Street to beg for samples. Crystals and cut stones arrested me. Light seemed to disappear inside them, only to emerge more brilliant and more colorful than when it entered. I would spend hours staring at the Star of India in the museum's Morgan Hall, watching how the asterism moved as I moved, wondering whether the faint star was really there or was just a trick of light. There was, at the museum too, an emerald crystal the size of a fist and a topaz larger than a suitcase. At home, I built my own collection out of jewelers' chips and castoffs. We went to the New York World's Fair in 1964, where I spent an entire day at the Brazil pavilion, gawking at amethysts and geodes. I bought a few broken pieces of citrine, of smoky quartz, and of amethyst there (probably for no more than fifty cents), and thirty-five years later, when I learned to facet gemstones, these were the first pieces I cut.

But the most beautiful of all were tourmalines; rich reds, dark greens, fluorescent purples. My favorites were the watermelon tourmalines, crystals that moved from green to white to pink, as if they were plugs cut from some stony, seedless fruit. They were like candy, and I soon learned that their many colors came from lithium. Lost in the silicate, trace metals made them beautiful. What trace metals could enter me? Was there some strange impurity that would enable me to trap the light, to make it s.h.i.+mmer as it left, to help me move from rind to sugary inside?

The word "lithium" comes from the Greek lithos, meaning stone, and for the early nineteenth-century chemists who found it-and its elemental peers-it must have seemed almost magical to conjure little blobs of metal from these rocks. Men such as Sir Humphry Davy, or Johan Arfvedson, Jns Berzelius, or Robert Bunsen would place the rocks in acid, leach out the metallic salts, and then recover them as crystals. They heated these compounds to what must then have been unheard-of temperatures (common table salt, for example, melts at a temperature greater than copper, silver, or gold) and ran electric currents through the melt. G.o.d knows how they got their electricity. I imagine great banks of wet batteries, slabs of copper and zinc in jars of acids, bubbling away and putting out raw voltage that would split these compounds into elements. And at the anode, there would be a little gleam: lithium, sodium, pota.s.sium, calcium. Chemistry was more than a science; it was theater, and seeing the results of such electrical and coal-fueled power must have been like watching Vulcan walk out of the forge with gleaming steels.

Remember (I would turn to him) how much you loved Uncle Tungsten, the memoir by Oliver Sacks? That's where we read how Humphry Davy isolated alkalis and how, as a young boy, Sacks took great pleasure in repeating Davy's old experiments. He would take bits and pieces of the metals and throw them in water, watching them sputter and burn. Once, he writes, he secured a three-pound chunk of sodium solely for the purpose of tossing it into a nearby river and creating an explosion. "This," he writes, "was chemistry with a vengeance."

Sacks had as much of a "chemical boyhood" as we did: the fascinations with the elements; the love of organizing life into clear categories; the power of chemical reactions. And yet, he had a childhood ripped from home. Sent off to boarding school in 1939, he found a break from all the bullying and terror of the cla.s.sroom in observing nature. The winter was "exceptionally cold," with "long glittering icicles hanging from the eaves of the church. These snowy scenes, and sometimes fantastic snow and ice forms, conveyed me in imagination to Lapland or Fairyland." He goes on: It was during the same winter that I remember finding the windowpanes of the rectory doors covered with h.o.a.rfrost, and being fascinated by the needles and crystalline forms in this, and how I could melt some of the frost with my breath and make a little peephole. One of my teachers-her name was Barbara Lines-saw my absorption and showed me the snow crystals under a pocket lens. No two were ever quite the same, she told me, and the sense of how much variation was possible within a basic hexagonal format was a revelation to me.

We read this pa.s.sage one night, and when you are older I will tell you how it called to mind so many other versions of the story. One day, I'll read to you from Adalbert Stifter's Indian Summer, a lovely nineteenth-century story of a young boy's fascination with the plants and animals, the rocks and minerals of nature. Like us, he built collections ("Since childhood I had tried to get many a sample for my collection") and saw landscapes in the frames and fissures of crystals. When he climbs the Alps and looks out on their frosty peaks, he recalls what it was like to look out of frozen windows: When moisture in the form of tiny droplets that can be scarcely seen even with a magnifying gla.s.s comes onto our window panes from the vapor in the air, and the necessary cold temperature also sets in, then the whole sheet of lines, stars, fans, palms, and blossoms that we call frosted windows is created. All these things come together as a whole, and the rays, valleys, ridges, and knots of ice are wondrous to behold when examined through a magnifying gla.s.s.

Like looking at snowflakes under a magnifying gla.s.s, Stifter subjects bits and pieces of the child's life to close scrutiny. The brilliance of Sacks's similar reminiscence lies in its filtering through this device: as if the magnifiers of his memory were not the facts of life but the tropes of fiction.

My Dr. Sachs had no such insight, but when she would say things like "Your dreams are windows to your psyche," with her rich rolled r's like Viennese whipped cream, we believed her. I think I always trusted people with an accent: something authentic about it, something that took us back to the deep past of our European roots. Maybe that's why so many Americans love Oliver Sacks, with his perfect English colored only by those slightly "wabbit" r's. Maybe, too, that is why you find the books of W. B. Sebald on my nightstand. His characters are displaced and disturbed; but so, it seems, was he. "Memory's Einstein," Susan Sontag christened him, as if to evoke not just the obvious a.s.sociation with the genius of relativity but, more subtly, to make Sebald-with his wiry gray hair, rich mustache, and emigre's affect-the accented authority of our time.

In Sebald's Austerlitz, the hero of the novel recalls how, as a young boy in the 1930s, he was sent off from Europe to England on the Kindertransport; how he lived with a Welsh couple; how he attended a boarding school; and how he forgot his name and language. One day, "during the coldest winter in human memory," he returns from that school to his adoptive family in Wales, where the mother is dying: There was a coal fire smoldering on the hearth of her sickroom. The yellowish smoke that rose from the glowing coals and never entirely dispersed up the chimney mingled with the smell of carbolic pervading the whole house. I stood for hours at the window, studying the wonderful formations of icy mountain ranges two or three inches high formed above the crossbars by water running down the panes.

This scene recalls precisely Stifter's prose. It also recalls a moment earlier in Sebald's novel, when his narrator visits the eye doctor. Something has impaired his vision, and one gray winter day he takes the train to London to visit a Harley Street specialist. Sitting in the overheated waiting room, the narrator antic.i.p.ates the angst of Austerlitz in the death chamber of his Welsh adoptive mother: From the gray sky that lowered over the city outside a few isolated snowflakes were floating down, and disappeared into the dark chasms of the yards behind the building. I thought of the onset of winter in the mountains, the complete absence of sound, and my childhood wish for everything to be snowed over, the whole village and the valley all the way to the mountain peaks, and how I used to imagine what it would be like when we thawed out again and emerged from the ice in the spring.

Artistic memory replaces lived experience: as if the only way to grasp the glitter of our childhood or face our fears in doctors' offices is to retreat into allusion. Childhood gets filtered through the snow of books. The white page and its letters look for all the world like snowy streets. Our schools are filled with Mrs. Lineses, showing us all how to lineate our lives. And in our coldest winters, we seek to be transported out of our rooms.

My parents must have hoped that we could transport ourselves out of our city rooms, but little changed after we followed Dad to Harvard. We lived on quiet streets, with lawns and lots. I visited the Peabody Museum, whose collections lay in dusty cabinets, the minerals and cut stones lying on their sides, the old handwritten labels foxed and curling up around them. I dragged my parents off to quarries, where we'd pick around the tailings looking for crystals in the dross.

I fell in with a friend whose father was an optical engineer for Itek, one of the many research firms that sprouted around Boston's Route 128 in the 1960s. He'd bring home electronic gear from work and set up strobes and lasers in his bas.e.m.e.nt. One day we developed a project to photograph a drop of milk. My friend, his father, and I took a thin aluminum pie pan and attached a wire to the rim. We ran this to a battery and then to a strobe light. The connection then ran to a strip of metal that we placed underneath the pan, so close as to be just not quite touching. We filled the pan with milk so that the bottom of the pie pan bowed within a millimeter of the metal strip. We turned off all the lights, and opened the shutter of a camera focused on the pan. Standing on a ladder, I held a medicine dropper full of milk. I let a large drop come down, and as it plopped into the pan, the bottom bent just enough to complete the circuit, fire the strobe light, and catch the splash of milk in the fractional second of its flash. The open camera captured it, and when we had the film developed we could see the crown of flying milk, the big bulge in the middle of the circle, and the smaller droplets flying out like jewels in a tiara.

We sent away for model rockets, and on winter days in Ma.s.sachusetts we would trudge out to snow-covered fields and set up launching pads. Each rocket came with a self-contained engine, a firing device, and a parachute designed to deploy at the top of the arc of flight. I had my friend take a picture of me standing next to our creation, and I posed like Robert G.o.ddard posed in the famous photograph, taken in a Ma.s.sachusetts winter in 1926, just before he launched the first liquid-fueled rocket. Like G.o.ddard's, our rockets often crashed and burned. Most times, the parachute would fail to open, or would partially deploy, only to flail as a burning plastic streamer behind the cardboard and balsa rocket body as it plunged back to the field. Only once did our parachute open, and then the wind caught it, blowing the rocket a quarter mile away into a stand of trees. We stood there, helpless but happy that the thing had worked, and yet we never would recover it. And I imagined what it would be like in the spring, when the snow thawed and the trees bloomed and someone would stop by and see this strange fruit hanging beside hemlocks.

One winter later we were gone. The bas.e.m.e.nt in the Pittsburgh house became my lab. There I a.s.sembled retorts and reagents to extract radioactive elements from my rock collection. I ground up bits of pitchblende and mixed them with acids, generating brilliant green solutions that fluoresced under my ultraviolet light. I laid specks of my distillates on paper-wrapped sheets of photographic film. After they were developed, the films showed stray black marks, exposures from the radioactivity. I broke up handfuls of thermometers to collect blobs of mercury. And I read deeply in the "Amateur Scientist" column of Scientific American, trying in vain to follow their instructions for such things as a magnetic resonance spectrometer and a Van de Graaff generator.

About the only bit of equipment I mastered was a cloud chamber: a pickle jar, the cover lined with black velvet, a bit of alcohol dripped in, and the whole thing inverted onto a block of dry ice. With the lights out and a flashlight beam set tangent to the jar, we saw the fronds of vapor trails left by stray particles as they pa.s.sed through the alcohol-infused air, ionizing as they went.

Twenty years later, in the fall of 1986, I fell apart. Days pa.s.sed and I could not get out of bed. I didn't shave for a week. At the time I told myself it was the stress of coming up for tenure, or the tensions of five years of marriage. I lay in bed, replaying my interview with the department chair, remembering how he would coddle his a.s.sistant professors into complacency, only to let them drop. I thought about that afternoon upriver, in the library with Elias Boudinot's books, steeling myself for the humiliation of losing my job. And what would Dad say: we don't think he'll get it. What would he think if I turned out to be what one of my predecessors had been: a brilliant junior medievalist who, two years after being denied tenure, was found by a senior professor selling ties at Brooks Brothers in Manhattan.

I'd given up my lab for the library. All of the things I'd hope to do in childhood, the person I had wanted to grow up to be-all that was over. At thirty-one, I had accomplished only one thing in my life: to stay in college and wear tweeds. I lived in the afterglow of Dad's Harvard afternoon, when men who'd known Henry Adams tottered up to ask directions. I thought of Grendel groaning, of my Iceland summer. I thought, if I just got dressed I would feel better. And then I recalled the story of my predecessor selling ties.

My bedside books that autumn were the ones I'd taken from Dad's study. There was Maynard Mack's Modern Poetry, still with the Barron's Textbook Exchange slip inside it. And there was F. O. Matthiessen's Oxford Book of American Verse, with a few dogeared pages in the Frost section. I split the book open at "My November Guest": My sorrow, when she's here with me, Thinks these dark days of autumn rain, Are beautiful as days can be; She loves the bare, the withered tree; She walks the sodden pasture lane.

I got up and called the hospital. Give me a pill, find me a solvent for this sorrow. They referred me to a psychiatric pharmacologist, a man my own age, confident, well-spoken. Why are you here, how do you feel, is this a sadness or a true depression?

Her pleasure will not let me stay.

She talks and I am fain to list: She's glad the birds are gone away . . .

Count backward from one hundred by sevens, he instructed. Ninety-three, eighty-six, seventy-nine, seventy-two. I spit the numbers out without reflection. The doctor said, "Red boat, blue boat, green boat," and then he asked me to repeat the sequence. He asked me about my weight, if I was regular, if I had ever done the stamp test (you take a roll of stamps and adhere them around your p.e.n.i.s at night, and if the roll has broken in the morning, you know you've had a night erection and you're not impotent). He asked me, once again, to list the boats in the same order that he'd said them.

Red boat, blue boat, green boat.

"Let's go with lithium," he said.

I picked up the prescription at the hospital and swallowed. Within days, I felt my fingers twitch, my memories blur. The final lines began to disappear, and as I prepared for my cla.s.ses, I was terrified that I would forget something. Weekly, I would show up at the clinic just to see if the t.i.tration levels were correct: too much lithium, and I would fade; too little, and I'd sorrow. After a month, a mineral crust covered me. I carried Dad's anthology around, my finger stuck in "My November Guest." I'd wander around Princeton, poking into Einstein's yard or loitering in the physics building. Some afternoons, I'd walk the mile or so to the Inst.i.tute for Advanced Study.

The desolate, deserted trees, The faded earth, the heavy sky, . . .

Thirty years before, J. Robert Oppenheimer ran the place. The director's house still had the white corral that Oppenheimer had put in for his young daughter's horse-an animal that, Princeton legend had it, she fed chocolate milk out of a porcelain teacup while her parents argued in their alcohol-fueled anger.

Before the coming of the snow . . .

Oppenheimer's ghost still walked those lanes, arguing over policy or protons, still locked with Edward Teller over what they called the "super."

Teller's hydrogen bomb would never have been built without lithium. For what he realized (or what he would always take credit for realizing) was that in order to get hydrogen atoms to fuse and thus release the ma.s.sive energies of thermonuclear explosion, you had to use the element's heavier isotopes. Deuterium and tritium would fuse, theoretically, at lower temperatures than simple hydrogen. So, on an afternoon somewhere in the Pacific, in the year before my birth, Teller and his minions supervised the wrapping of a regular, atomic bomb in a casing of lithium deuteride. This compound, when exposed to the immense heat of the atomic blast and the release of radiation, would do two things: first, it would trans.m.u.te the lithium into tritium; second, it would fuse the tritium and the deuterium in the compound together. It worked.

She's glad the birds are gone away . . .

I walked the sodden Princeton streets, remembering the duck and cover drills of elementary school, the fallout shelter in the bas.e.m.e.nt of the fire station, the doomsday clock twitching to midnight. I remembered the terrifying television ad for Johnson's presidential campaign-the little girl, the flower, and the countdown. Ten, nine, eight . . . and then the blast. I took my lithium, walked through the Inst.i.tute, and waited for the end. It never came. I got my tenure that spring, with a phone call from the chair, who said, in one breath, "Congratulations. Don't disappoint us." I went into the bathroom, opened up the bottle full of lithium and dumped it in the toilet. It didn't spatter like the metal, didn't flame out colorfully. It just dissolved.

"I guess I was just tired of playing the beard."

And with Mom's kiss, the funeral was over. I smiled and looked at you, and thought how blessed you are that, with a California childhood, there would be no frosted windows to get in the way; how you would always be our prince; and how your only lithium would be in batteries.

TEN.

Beauty and the Beast Years pa.s.sed after the funeral. We settled Dad's estate, sold off his things, and took the pictures down. I taught my cla.s.ses, wrote my books, and watched our son's chemical imagination blossom. He built a laboratory in the garage, stocked with chemicals I helped him purchase off the Internet. He put together equipment for pyrotechnic displays, thermite reactions, electric dazzlements. I raided the old physics laboratory at Stanford just as they were moving out: Tesla coils lay in dumpsters; piles of diffraction gratings sat outside offices, waiting to be trashed; lenses and light boxes spread themselves across floors, like Prospero's detritus. I thought-I can control this beast, I can tame his impulse to explode. When friends visited, we would sit in the backyard, and after barbecue and biscuits, he would come out, like a showman, and turn an upended trash can into his podium. He'd place a little powder on a plate and drop some liquid glycerin on it. Smoke would appear, and then a lilac flame. He'd take a handful of steel wool, an ordinary battery, and some wires and burn it up before our eyes. He'd throw some chemicals on to the still hot barbecue, and flames would spectrum out: strontium carmine, lithium red, copper green, sodium yellow. And for his final act, he would ignite some powdered metals on the trash-can lid. Blinded into bliss, we applauded every trick behind his chemical theater.

But howsoe'er you have Been jostled from your senses, know for certain That I am Prospero.

The garage was his court, and his teenage attendants waited on him as he lectured on reactions and reagents. One afternoon, he brought a friend home from tenth grade, a fellow member of the science bowl team. He pressed the b.u.t.ton on the garage, and as the door rose he stood there, arms thrown wide out, and announced, "This is it."

Pray you look in.

School fell apart. We had him tested. "But he's brilliant," I would protest, as if simply loving him would make him work, as if my desire was enough to bring him to my fold. I would come home from teaching or the library and smell the weed on him. I'd drop him off at playgrounds where he used to ride the swing and watch him meet his buddies, young men now, with their first beards shadowing their smiles. His government I cast upon my wife, and to my state grew stranger . . .

And my trust, Like a good parent, did beget of him A falsehood in its contrary as great As my trust was . . .

Finally, after stabs at therapies and private school, we realized that we'd have to have him taken from us, "involuntarily transported" to a place to get him clean, to keep him safe, to teach him how to be. Like Caliban in exile, I thought, thrown out of his bed. I'd wake up in the middle of the night and walk in his room where he would sleep, encircled in his sins.

this thing of darkness I Acknowledge mine.

We had him taken just before he turned eighteen. Faced with his erratic behavior and the threat of an arrest record, my wife and I met with an educational consultant and together planned his transport. This woman, in her seventies, spoke to us in a blend of care and pity. She would make the calls, arrange the transportation, and make sure that when he arrived at the euphemistically named a.s.sessment facility in Utah, all would be in order. We sat there in her office, and I thought of Dr. Sachs. I half-expected that she'd lead me to a little room and we'd make popsicle-stick houses together, and she'd remind me that our dreams are windows to our souls. But she gave us the names, and one night in early April my wife and I drove to a motel outside the Oakland airport and met with the two moonlighting cops who would take him. They explained to us the procedure: they had done this many times; just be prepared for his attempt to bolt. I let them know that he slept with his pocket-knives next to the bed, and they said, "Get them out." They helped us script this dreaded night: they would arrive at 5 a.m. We'd say good-bye, tell him we loved him, and then leave the house. If all went well, he'd be at the facility in rural Utah by dinnertime.

He fell asleep in a bedroom still filled with picture books. There was Goodnight Moon, with its litany of the green room, the pictures on the wall, and the bunny. There was Pat the Bunny, its fur mottled by years of stroking. There was Carl's Masquerade, his favorite at three: a picture book with no words, with the Mom and Dad dressing up for a costume party and the baby left in the care of the dog, Carl. See how the baby rides Carl to the party, I remembered saying to him. n.o.body recognizes them, because they think they are in costume, too, and there are Mom and Dad, Mom beautiful as a princess and Dad das.h.i.+ng as a pirate, and the baby and Carl win the prize for the best costumes at the party, and then they go home, just in time to be in bed when Mom and Dad return.

What costume would he wear now?

They came, as planned, at 5 a.m. We woke him up. We sat there in his bedroom, telling him we cared, telling him how it was all for the best. And then we left and sat in the car a block away, watching them bring him into their car, watching them drive off, knowing that soon they would be in an airplane en route to the Utah desert.

After we had him taken, I went through his lab. There were shrink-wrapped containers of compounds I knew we hadn't bought together: reagents for drugs, a setup for chilling the heated mixture. There was a stash of marijuana and some pills I dared not recognize. I thought of how I'd done this all before, how I'd rifled through Dad's closet only to find things that made me wonder: did I know you? I sat there on the concrete floor of the garage, surrounded by substances, and wished Dad back, less to ask for advice than for approval. I thought of Sebald's stories of the Kindertransport, little children taken from their homes and set on railroads to supposed safety. And in my thoughts, I rewrote pa.s.sages from Austerlitz to match his days: I thought of the onset of winter in the mountains where we'd sent him, the complete absence of sound from him, and my childhood wish for everything to be snowed over, the garage, and the lab, and the late nights, and the slammed doors, and I imagined what it would be like when we would thaw out, when we would speak again and I would tell him of my father, and of how he'd read me "Rumplestiltskin," "Ali Baba," "Beauty and the Beast," and we would remember that the bedtime stories all resolved to happy ends.

In "Beauty and the Beast," a merchant, having lost his fortune, seeks news of his s.h.i.+ps. He travels far from home, leaving his daughters, and gets lost in a forest. He takes refuge in a castle, is treated to great hospitality by a mysteriously absent lord, and then meets that lord-the Beast-when he plucks a rose to take home to his daughter, Beauty. In compensation, the Beast must have Beauty with him. She comes, and he treats her with great elegance and courtesy. He makes her promise never to leave him, but when she begs for a week's leave to visit her poor father, he agrees. "Do not forget your promise." But she does, overstaying her time at home. Almost too late, she remembers, and she has a vision of the Beast dying in his garden. "Forgetting all his ugliness," the story goes, she throws herself upon him. "You forgot your promise," Beast replies. But Beauty, moved by the inner n.o.bility of the Beast, pledges herself to him as his wife. With this, the Beast is magically transformed into a handsome prince, released from a spell cast by a wicked fairy.

The story worked a magic on me as a child, a magic that materialized one evening, at fourteen, when my parents and I saw Jean Cocteau's film La belle et la bte at the Carnegie Library in Pittsburgh. The library was running a historical film series, and it was Mom's idea to go. She wanted to see something in black and white. And it was beautiful: Jean Marais with his shoulder-length blond hair, Josette Day looking like a porcelain G.o.ddess, and the Beast with eyes like hot coals. People slipped in and out of walls, arms stuck out holding candelabras. At the end, Marais, as Avenant, the human suitor of La Belle and a crony of her brother, goes after the riches of the Beast's Temple to Diana. He has the magic key to let him in, but he opts instead to break through the temple's gla.s.s skylight. Du verre, c'est du verre, gla.s.s is gla.s.s, he says, as he pushes his foot through. And yet, it is not, for in fairyland the gla.s.s is always something else: a mirror is a portal to a hidden world, or a deceptively transparent barrier between reality and fantasy. When he breaks the gla.s.s and tries to get in, Diana shoots him and he is transformed into the Beast. At that precise moment, the Beast rises before La Belle and we see him as Prince Charmant, played by the same actor who played Avenant, Jean Marais. Ou est ma bte? "Where is my Beast?" says Beauty. He's gone, and the prince explains: my parents never believed in fairies, so the fairies punished them through me.

Du verre, c'est du verre. We'd led a mirrored life. Mom sits forever at the vanity before her wedding. Dad leaves me at the airport with the broken gla.s.s beneath the car door. When memories come back to you, it says in Austerlitz, "you sometimes feel as if you were looking at the past through a gla.s.s mountain." Du verre, c'est du verre. I look through the gla.s.s and see the forks and knives that seemed to come alive. I slip through doorways to forgotten libraries. I see all the books I've read and written about, trying to imagine myself in them. Like Alice, I go back to get the little golden key. Like Scrooge, I want to go back to school. "You recollect the way," says the spirit. "Remember it!" Scrooge cries, "I could walk it blindfold." And yet, when he visits Christmas Yet to Come, he sees himself forgotten by all but the gravestone.

Where is my Beast? Where is my Wonderland? Let me remember their lessons. If you hold the strangely written "Jabberwocky" to a gla.s.s, "the words will all go the right way again." And when the White King shouts out that his terrifying moments are ones he will never forget, his Queen notes, condescendingly: "You will though, if you don't make a memorandum of it." But when the King begins to write, furiously, in his memorandum book, the pencil is too thick for him. "I can't manage this one bit. It writes all manner of things that I don't intend." The pencil always was too thick for me. As a child, I scrawled, I blotted. My beautiful words showed up on the page as beastly scribbles.

If only I could make the words all go the right way again.

Let me rewrite his childhood. Let me start again with all his books. Let me read Winnie the Pooh to him and explain the words. Let me teach him. Let me explain how Pooh's line about living "under the name of Sanders" is a joke: he literally lives under a sign with that name on it, but it's an everyday expression to say that someone is living under another name. Let me explain TRESSPa.s.sERS W, the broken sign whose erstwhile threat of prosecution Piglet turns into an ident.i.ty. It is, he says, short for his grandfather's name, Trespa.s.sers Will, which in turn was short for Trespa.s.sers William. And at the story's end, when everyone is ready for a party, the gifts given are the tools of writing: It was a Special Pencil Case. There were pencils in it marked "B" for Bear, and pencils marked "HB" for Helping Bear, and pencils marked "BB" for Brave Bear. There was a knife for sharpening the pencils, and India-rubber for rubbing out anything which you had spelt wrong, and a ruler for ruling lines for the words to walk on, and inches marked on the ruler in case you wanted to know how many inches anything was, and Blue Pencils and Red Pencils and Green Pencils for saying special things in blue and red and green.

Now let me tell my son that we can start to write. "Was Pooh's pencil case any better than mine?" Christopher Robin asks, and the father-narrator replies, "It was just about the same." A man, I'd like to say to him, in my best professorial voice, should be measured by the quality of his pencil case.

I've measured out my life against my pencil case. I've found books in which I could underline myself. That afternoon in Armonk, as I looked for anchorage in an old widow's library, I thought of Henry Adams, finding himself in his father's bookshelves. I remembered how I had studied for my orals, how I knew just how every work of literature had ended, how I'd parried with Wayne Booth as he thrust and feinted with quotations. In what books, now, will I find my solace?

I hold Sebald's Austerlitz in my hands, the underlinings from ten years ago unfaded like the outlines of a face. It is the story of a man ripped from his childhood, who has lost his name, and who returns to his home city. Like Scrooge, he walks the streets again as if blindfolded. He finds records of his parents: a flamboyant father and an actress mother, one who had starred in operettas, who had taken him to her performances, who dressed him up, at times as a player in a fairy tale of her own imagining. The photo on the book's cover depicts a little boy clad in white, with a furred cape, breeches, and a huge plumed hat; when Austerlitz finds his aged nursemaid still alive in Prague, she shows him the picture and tells him the story, six decades old. His mother "had the snow-white costume made for you especially for the occasion. On the back it says, Jacquot Austerlitz, pze ruzove krlnovy, in your grandfather's handwriting." Jacques Austerlitz, page to the Rose Queen. Or better, Jean Marais in Cocteau's film, rising up off the ground with his elaborate plumes and dazzlingly white cloak. There is a prince in all of us, as long as we believe in fairy tales.

Have I stopped? My son always had troubles with his memory. He would forget to brush his teeth, stumble over a.s.signments, fail to recall basic math facts, or sit quietly, lost in a dream world, while the rest of us remembered our ch.o.r.es. He never wrote well. The pencil would slip from his hand, the point would break. I could never read his homework.

At the facility in Utah, he was obliged to write letters home. The staff would take his angry, scrawled pages and scan them into PDF files, send them to us, and await replies. I'd pore over his penmans.h.i.+p, digitally remade on my screen. I'd try to get past all of his forgetting-how he wouldn't own up to his habits, how he led us astray, how he would deny and dispute everything he was accused of doing, and just why he was out in the mountains in the first place.

Where was the prince I played with? When I dropped him at the schoolyard, in those evenings after high school, would he transform into a beast? When he went out on his own, friends with cars picking him up, should I have expected him to come home changed, blood between his teeth and sweat streaming?

In his first letter home, my son asked for one book: Jules Verne's Mysterious Island. I knew immediately why. It is a story of a group of Union prisoners who escape a Confederate camp toward the close of the Civil War. They build a balloon and set off, but the wind blows them off course and they wind up on an uncharted island where they have to rebuild civilization itself. They mine saltpeter for gunpowder, smelt ore, fire pottery, even create the instruments for electricity. When a s.h.i.+pment of equipment washes up on sh.o.r.e, they cannibalize it for both needs and luxuries. And when, in the end, Captain Nemo makes his return appearance, they realize that they were not alone-that all this time, they were under knowing eyes. I believed when I received his letter that I must have taught him something-that if he were going to find his way back, it would be through a book.

He took that book with him, eight weeks later, when he went off to wilderness therapy. From northern Utah, with its mountains and its June snows, we drove him six hours south, into the Red Rock canyon lands, and dropped him off in hundred-degree heat. For three months, he would live with a group of boys in desert sands, hiking unblazed trails, cooking for himself, and sleeping without tents or tarpaulins. He had a pack, a bedroll, and a book, and midway through his journey, we drove out to visit him. The therapist a.s.signed to him met us in a small town near the Arizona border, and we drove ninety minutes into nowhere. And there, stopping by a landmark I could never find again, he was. He'd grown a frazzled beard, his hair was long, and he was brown with sun and dirt. When I collected rocks and minerals, I'd look for stones that had been blown by wind and sand so that they had a natural s.h.i.+ne. Desert polish, I called it. That's what came to mind when I saw him, and we sat together, his mother and I, his therapist and him, and we talked about how he'd learned to wipe his bottom with live leaves, how he chewed on the juniper and wildflowers, how the team left jugs of water at each campsite, but how he had also learned to forage for refreshment. One day, he told us proudly, he ate nothing but crickets. And then he took out a ziplock bag of seeds and raisins, and he offered some to me and to his mother, and he said, "This is lunch."

I thought: this is his Iceland, this his time alone, the solitary sky spread out above him like a bedsheet for his dreams. I thought: and let me tell you of my own time, walking across rivers to bring fish for dinner, herding cows, living amid a language not my own. Let me tell you about the sheep-head dinners and the blood-pudding, and the day the relatives came and they bought a tomato. Let me tell you all of this, as we sit here in the dirt, eating your seeds.

But I did not. I sat there thinking only of the move that we would make when we returned: from Palo Alto to La Jolla, a move that had been in the works for over a year but that we'd planned to finalize that fall. I'd wanted so much to be solicited, so much to have an island of my own, a dukedom large enough. My Stanford cla.s.ses had grown smaller in the years since Dad had died. The course I had been teaching that fall never regained its popularity. Enrollments fell away. I found my undergraduates more focused on their resumes than on the reading. No more Mirandas filled the rooms.

And so, when a deans.h.i.+p opened up at the University of California at San Diego, I applied. In the interviews and recruiting visits I bragged about how I knew the area, how I'd been visiting since the late 1970s when I first met my future in-laws, and how much my wife was hoping to move home. I varnished stories of my mother-in-law's family, of Sunday dinners on Mount Sole-dad, of how she had graduated from La Jolla High School before going off for one aborted year at Pomona College, of how her marine husband brought the family back to San Diego County to serve at Camp Pendleton. I told them how my wife had been the valedictorian of Carlsbad High School, of how she'd gone on to college at Berkeley, of how we truly cared about the University of California.

My future colleagues enticed me with stories of the founding of the campus. A former military installation, it became the seedbed for Roger Revelle's idea of a university. emigre physicists would share s.p.a.ce with composers; oceanographers would find solace at the Playhouse. I listened as men who had smoked with Oppenheimer at Los Alamos a.s.sured me of their love of Mozart. They told me of Revelle's accomplishments: how he discovered in the chemistry of seawater the proof of global warming; how he imagined modern universities as the equivalent of medieval cathedrals.

And they a.s.sured me that the place was safe, now. My in-laws' La Jolla was long gone, shattered when Revelle broke its restrictive covenant. "You can't have a university," he said in tones that ultimately cost him the first chancellors.h.i.+p of the campus, "without having Jewish professors. The Real Estate Broker's a.s.sociation and their supporters in La Jolla had to make up their minds whether they wanted a university or an anti-Semitic covenant. You couldn't have both."

La Jolla got its Jews and its university, and I got the job.

In the fall of 2010, my wife moved to La Jolla with me, and we moved our son into an independent living program in Los Angeles. We would drive the hundred miles each month to see him, to convince ourselves that we were doing right, that he was well. But the outcome was mixed, and by the summer he was in another house in LA.

Last chance, I thought.

That summer, I would drive up on my own on weekends, take him out to dinner, and watch him order in a restaurant, eat platters of salads and onion rings, and every now and then, share a dessert with me. Sat.u.r.day afternoons, we'd wander into bookstores, and I'd watch as he selected Moleskin notebooks for his jottings, handbooks for his hobbies, or a novel of adventure.

Thou didst smile, Infused with a fort.i.tude from heaven, When I have decked the sea with drops full salt, Under my burden groaned, which raised in me An undergoing stomach to bear up Against what should ensue.

As his time away drew to a close, we met one evening at Skylight Books in Los Angeles for a reading by my former student. She had been a member of that cla.s.s the day my father died, nearly eight years before. She was the one who wrote about her first story, "cat, dog, zoo," and she had graduated, done an MFA, and published her first novel. There she was in a bookstore surrounded by her family and friends, a girl I still remembered as nineteen, incongruous to me in lipstick and a floral dress, reading from her novel about a young girl in a dystopian future. America has been shattered by an ecological disaster, and a generation has decamped to an offsh.o.r.e island where everything comes from the sea and where dim memories of cities hover in their heads like myths. The mother of the teenage heroine is missing, and as the book begins the girl is fingering a silver charm, a family heirloom of a forgotten world: The charm was silver, a small scaly bullet-shape that her mother had explained was called a pinecone. . . . Darcy had imagined pinecones were fruit and wondered what they tasted like. The charm itself tasted familiar and foreign, like Darcy's own teeth and like some far-off salty earth, and sucking on it gave her a furtive, inward pleasure.

She read, and my son, now nineteen himself, looked at her like an oracle, as if to say, "You know, I've actually eaten pinecones." We bought the book for him and he devoured it in a day. It was, he told me later, like living in the wilderness.