Page 114 of What Boys Learn
“Yes. And we deconstructed the ‘men as visual creatures’ myth. Both genders respond to visual stimuli equally. No matter, it’s a canard.”
I try not to laugh. He uses that word a lot.Canard. I looked it up. It means duck.
“Visual is nothing compared to actual,” he says, stroking a metal pole that connects the saddle thing to an overhead frame attached to some other parts that are hanging down, with circle things at the end. Not handcuffs. I look closer. Yes, handcuffs.
“Men are stubborn in their misunderstandings of women,” he lectures in that pompous way that almost sounds British, except he’s not. “If you want them to do exactly what you want, it’s better to understand them. Not obey them—I never said that. Get inside their heads. Physical control is one thing, but mental control is much more powerful. Many of my patients have extremely simple desires. Domination. But there are many ways to dominate. Make it a game. Make her do whatyouwant. Make her forget whatshewants. Make her forget that she has any choice in the matter. Isolate, confuse, dismiss, refute. That, my friend, is better than any physical restraint in the world.”
A few feet away is a gigantic cardboard box I’m supposed to put all the disassembled parts into. Lots of bolts and nuts. Lots of screws. The dildo thing attached to the saddle is only one part of the job.
“I’ll be upstairs getting dinner ready,” he says. “Mac and cheese?”
It’s all pretty funny, I keep telling myself. It’s a story I’m going to tell when I get back to school. The fancy car that he finally let me drive for the last twenty miles into Fond du Lac. The Addams family mansion. The superhero fuck machine in the basement.
And no, he didn’t come on to me, I can already see myself saying after people start laughing. It wasn’t like that.
So what was it like?
It was like spending a week with a supervillain who wants to tell you about all the minivillains he trained. The Christopher Webers and the John Darbys and the Benvolio Rizzos—yeah, that guy. The one who picked up girls at bus stations and left them all in dumpsters, and yet, even though he did the same thing over and over, the cops took eight years to smoke him out.
He keeps telling me that I’m smarter than them. He keeps telling me that everything I’ve ever been criticized for is actuallymysuperpower. I get bored easy. I don’t care if a girl is upset or crying. I get mad when someone talks shit about me. I think I’m better than most people.
“You are, Benjamin. There’s nothing wrong with thinking that.”
We’re up in the dining room now, eating mac and cheese on these fancy gold-rimmed plates at a big table under a chandelier. It’s dope, but it would be a lot more dope with better food.
He starts lecturing me about all of the famous, successful people who are the way we are, and I nod and try to look interested, which is easier because I can nod while I’m eating and he doesn’t get mad and say, “Use your words.”
I’ve heard this lecture twice now.
Stock traders. Surgeons. Pilots. The best of them are like us.
CEOs. Chefs. Top salespeople. The best of them are like us.
It took me this whole road trip to realize he doesn’t want me to be good. He wants me to be the right kind of bad—which isn’t really bad, he keeps saying. It’s just different in a way that most people won’t ever understand. He compares it to how people used to think of other people with different brains. Even if they were good at things—good at math or artistic or whatever—they were still locked up or mistreated. But the world was changing.
“Someday, Ben, you’ll give a TED Talk about the societal contributions of people like you and me. But not yet. For now, we hide our lights under a bushel.” He looks at me and sighs. “That’s from the Bible. You haven’t read the Bible, have you? Just as well.”
He tells me we need more time together—that things can’t be rushed. I mustfind my extraandcome to appreciate my gifts. He doesn’t think I’ll make as many mistakes as some people do. He has togive me space to learn.
He says, “Kittens must catch their own mice.”
Half the time I get what he’s saying and half the time I don’t. I haven’t seen any mice scurrying through the mansion, thank god, because mice, rats, and cockroaches all give me the creeps.
We finish dinner and he makes me do the dishes, both washing and drying. He wraps each one in bubble wrap and puts them into a cardboard box, so now the cupboard is a few plates less full. I still keep thinking his father is going to come down in an elevator at some point, maybe with a maid pushing his wheelchair.
We’re getting ready for bed—I’m in a room with a twin bed that smells dusty, but I don’t care—when he says, “I can’t stand this place. We’re leaving tomorrow.”
“Your dad’s not here?”
“No. My father’s not here.” After a minute he says, “He’s in a nursing home.”
I thought the whole point was fixing up the yard and clipping bushes and stuff to make his father happy, but I guess it’s really only to sell it, and it’s almost sold. I was supposed to be here for two weeks. But maybe we’re done. My shoulders are killing me from the yard work. There’s no swimming pool and I haven’t seen a lake. I’m okay with heading back, actually.
“We’re going to Oshkosh, tomorrow,” he says. “Have you been to Oshkosh?”
I start shaking my head and then I remember he doesn’t like that. “No. I’ve never been.”
“There’s an interesting lighthouse out there, called the Asylum Light. We’ll sail past it.”