Superstition

9

In the end she decided that not to do a proper in-depth interview with him would be a betrayal of her obligations as a writer, putting personal considerations before professional ones. There was a twisted roundness to that logic, when she arrived at it, which pleased her.

He agreed at once when she brought the matter up, suggesting, rather to her surprise, that they go over to his place, where they could talk undisturbed. Perhaps one afternoon this week, he said, for tea? She said fine, accepting at once the obvious point, which only occurred to her then, that she couldn't hope to write interestingly about the man without seeing where he lived. She could send a photographer along later, if she felt it was a good idea.

Promptly at four p.m. on the appointed Thursday, she stepped out of a cab at the address he had given. Sam lived in a megalithic building way up on Riverside Drive, on the fifth floor with a fine view of the river. The apartment was rambling, shabby, and (most important) rent controlled. He had inherited it from one of his friends from college days. The place had a long academic tradition; half the furniture and a large number of the books that lined every wall still belonged to previous tenants who, despite the best intentions, had never returned to collect them. It didn't matter; everything was used, enjoyed, and nothing thrown out until it absolutely and irreparably fell apart.

Over Earl Grey tea and some exotic petits fours from a Belgian deli on the West Side that he said he would be glad to introduce her to, they began to talk. Joanna's compact tape recorder spooled silently on the table between them, and she had changed cassettes several times before they were finished. By then she knew that Sam's father was a doctor with a practice on Cape Cod. He had been promising his wife that he would retire next year for the past five years, but still showed little sign of doing so. It sounded like a happy childhood, sailing and horseback riding, scrambling over rocks and up trees with his two older brothers, of whom one was now a professor of history at Harvard and the other a heart surgeon in Chicago. Sam himself had a master's in physics and a doctorate in psychology from Princeton.

“A high-achieving family. I'm impressed,” she commented.

“That was Dad. He never made us work, just made things interesting. If any of us asked a question about anything, no matter what, Dad either had a book in his library, or he'd pick one up next day and leave it lying around. It was just a talent for opening up kids‚ minds.”

“And your mother…?”

“Mom's an enthusiast-paints, plays oboe in the local orchestra, and writes novels.”

“Have I read her?”

“I doubt it. She only ever got one published, over twenty years ago, but that doesn't stop her. She also runs a travel group-went to China last year.”

“They sound terrifying.”

He laughed. “Just your average American family.”

“Not where I come from.”

Joanna's parents were by no means unsophisticated, but paled by comparison with the gifted eccentrics Sam had described. Her father had learned to fly with the navy, gone on to be a civil aviation pilot, then become an airline executive. Mom had always just been Mom, and still was: no mindless cookie cutter, but no world-traveling bohemian artist-writer either. And Joanna, as an only child in a nonbookish household, had gotten all her early intellectual stimulation, such as it was, from television. But she'd worked hard, gone to Wellesley and majored in journalism. The nice thing about the job, she always thought, was that learning was part of it; she could make up for lost time while getting paid for it.

“By the way,” she said eventually, and with what she hoped was not an exaggerated casualness, “have you ever been married?”

“No,” he replied equally casually, as though his answer needed no elaboration.

“Do you mind if I ask if there's any particular reason for that, in your view?” she inquired, with the smile of someone trying to draw her subject out on something about which he was being unduly modest.

He shrugged noncommittally. “Luck, I guess.”

“Would that be good luck or bad luck in your book?”

“I suppose the word I should have used was ‘chance.’ More neutral. Came close a couple of times, but it never happened.” Another shrug. “We tend to be late marriers in my family.”

She decided after a moment's reflection against pursuing the topic further; it was not, after all, a matter of great journalistic importance.

“So tell me,” she said, adopting a change of tone and shifting her weight slightly in the deep and well-worn leather armchair, “how did you get started on the work you're doing now?”

He thought a moment. “I'm not sure I can answer that. It just happened a step at a time, with a kind of inevitability, the way things do.”

“But it's an interesting series of steps. You started as a physicist, became a psychologist, then a parapsychologist. Did something happen, or what?”

He shook his head, as though searching for an answer and apologizing for not finding one. “I've always just followed through on whatever interested me most. So far this is where it's brought me.”

“But you told me once that you've never had any paranormal experience, seen a ghost, dreamed the future-anything like that. So it's purely intellectual curiosity?”

Again he paused a moment before answering. “I suppose something did happen once, a long time ago, that might have had something to do with it.”

A distant look came into his face as though he was focusing on some faraway time and place.

“All I remember is that I was walking down a road on the Cape. It was a beautiful day in early June, but nothing otherwise exceptional about it. I was alone, and without any warning, right out of nowhere, I was hit by a thought that took my breath away. It was like an explosion in the head. I don't think I even broke my stride. Nobody looking at me would have realized that anything had changed. But I suddenly had an overwhelming sense of something extraordinary happening.”

He paused, then started to speak again, and stopped, chewing thoughtfully on the corner of his lower lip as though striving to find the right words.

“This ‘extraordinary thing’ was simply the fact of being there-alive, conscious, part of this body that I could see if I looked down, with feet at the end going one after the other along the road. I was somehow inside and outside of this body at the same time. And in a way that I'd never realized before, I was also part of the landscape around me-a landscape that was suddenly strange and new but at the same time totally unchanged. It was a feeling that was frightening and exciting in about equal parts. It couldn't have lasted more than a couple of minutes, but while it did time meant nothing. In a way, it hasn't meant much ever since.”

He looked at her with an apologetic smile, as though hoping that he'd answered her question because he didn't know what else to say.

“Just your plain ordinary moment of oneness with the universe, I guess. The only strange thing about it is that we call it strange, when civilizations we label primitive take it for granted.”

She pondered her next question for a few seconds, then asked, “When did this happen?”

“Oh, a long time ago.”

“How long?”

“Longer than I care to remember.”

“How old were you?”

“Seven.”