The Divide Read Online Free PDF Page B

feelings about your own father. You have a suppressed speech impediment that begins to surface when you talk about your home, which you don’t like to do. You think you like me, but you’re still a little frightened. You—”
    “Stop it!”
    There was a silence. Susan blushed deeply.
    John said, more gently, “I don’t want you to forget what I am.”
    “As if I c-could!” She thought about leaving. She wasn’t sure her legs would hold her. “How can you know all that about me?”
    “Because you’re a book. Not just you, Susan. Everyone. A book of gestures and twitches and blinks and grimaces.”
    “Do you
want
me to be frightened of you?”
    “Only… appropriately frightened.” He added, “I’m sorry.”
    Gradually, she relaxed back into her chair. “Do you still want to talk?”
    “Do you still want me to?”
    She took a deep breath. “Yes.”
    “To you, or to Max?”
    “Talk to me if you want. But only Dr. Kyriakides can help you.”
    “If in fact he can.”
    “If.” She didn’t want to risk lying—assuming it was possible to lie to him.
    “It’s a game of chance, then, isn’t it? Roulette.”
    “I’m not the doctor.”
    “You’re the doctoral candidate.”
    “It’s not exactly my field. I never worked directly with Dr. Kyriakides on this, except for a few tissue studies.”
    He shook his head. “I’m not ready to talk to Max.”
    “Then me. Talk to me.”
    He gave her another long, speculative look. Susan could not help wincing. My God, she thought, those eyes! Not the windows of the soul… more like knives. Like scalpels.
    “Maybe it would be good to talk,” he said. “It’s been a long time since I talked to anyone.”
    “I’m not going anywhere,” Susan said.
     
     
    She asked whether he had been having symptoms.
    “Episodes of fever, sometimes dangerously high. Transient muscular weakness and some pain. Fugue states—if you want to call them that.”
    “Is that what was happening yesterday?”
    He nodded.
    “I don’t know what you mean by a ”fugue state.“”
    He sipped his cappucino. “May I tell you a story?”
     
     
    The formal research project had ended when John was five years old. He was adopted by a childless couple, the Woodwards, a middle-income family living in a bleak Chicago suburb. The Woodwards renamed him Benjamin, though he continued to think of himself as John. From the beginning, his adoptive parents were disturbed by his uniqueness. He didn’t do especially well in school—he was contemptuous of his teachers and sometimes a discipline problem—but he read beyond his years and he made conversation like an adult; which, the Woodwards told him, was very disrespectful.
    “Jim Woodward was a lathe operator at an aerospace plant and he resented my intelligence. Obviously, a child doesn’t know this, or doesn’t want to admit it. I labored for almost eight years under the impression that I was doing something terribly wrong—that he hated me for some fundamental, legitimate reason. And so I worked hard to please him. To impress him. For example, I learned to play the flute. I borrowed a school instrument and some books; I taught myself. He loved Vivaldi: he had this old Heathkit stereo he had cobbled together out of a kit and he would play Vivaldi for hours—it was the only time I ever saw anything like rapture on his face. And so I taught myself the Concerto in G, the passages for flute. And when I had it down, I played it for him. Not just the notes. I went beyond that. I
interpreted
it. He sat there listening, and at first I thought he was in shock—he had that dumbfounded expression. I mistook it for pleasure. I played harder. And he just sat there until I was finished. I thought I’d done it, you see, that I’d communicated with him, that he would approve of me now. And then I put the flute back in the case and looked at him. And he blinked a couple of times, and then he said, ”I bet you think you’re pretty fucking good, don’t