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8.

My father had an old photo of himself from his Harvard days, and it was hard to believe it was the same person I knew: The baby-faced boy, clean-shaven and short-haired and pale in a crisp white shirt, seemed like an utterly different species of human. I couldn’t quite fathom how the jagged father I knew had emerged from that soft, malleable face; and yet there was still something about his eyes that hadn’t changed, their corvine gaze. In the photo, he was giving the photographer a sharp sideways look, as though about to instruct them to put the camera down. I knew that look.

I asked my father once who the photographer was: I was always desperately curious about details of his life before, his life out there . “No one of importance,” he replied. “A classmate. They were all the same: striving, greedy, and empty.”

This photograph was one of only a handful that my father possessed. When I asked where the rest were—why there weren’t albums from his years before—he shook his head in apology. “Lost in a move years ago.” Besides the college photo, there was a photograph of him as a little boy, sitting on a brand-new Schwinn five-speed with a red tinsel bow on the handles. Another photo was of eight men, bespectacled and wearing boxy suits, standing on the steps of a glass building—his colleagues, he said, from a job he’d once had. There were names scrawled on the back of this last one, in handwriting that wasn’t my father’s: Nick Raymond Baron Peter Ajay Adam Mike Isaac.

But the photo I was most interested in, of course, was the one of my mother.

My father liked to talk about ideas more than he liked to talk about himself, but over the years he’d dropped tidbits of his biography that I collected like breadcrumbs. I knew that he’d grown up in an anodyne working-class suburb in the San Francisco Bay Area, with unkind parents who didn’t understand him. I also knew that he’d attended Harvard, which he’d paid for by waiting tables for his rich classmates. He’d taught mathematics somewhere on the East Coast, before coming to California for some “high-profile job” that he didn’t want to tell me about. (The CIA? I could imagine him as a spy; maybe this was why we hid from authorities now? Or maybe he’d been a politician, a businessman, a journalist?)

California was where he met my mother. She was a kindergarten teacher named Jennifer who played the guitar and grew roses. They fell in love after a conversation at a restaurant—he was vague on the details about this, and I was too shy about love to ask how that worked—and quickly got married. There was a house that was painted blue, somewhere on the West Coast—San Pedro? San Jose? San Diego? One of the Sans. And then there was me. Four years later, my mother’s convertible Cabriolet was T-boned at an intersection by a speeding bus. She died instantly.

My father found it painful to talk about her: I could tell by the way he winced, and then looked away, whenever I brought her up; the way his words came out haltingly, each one requiring immense effort. “Jennifer was…always so…joyful. She…loved you…so much.” More often than not, he shut down my questions with a “not now, Jane” or “why do we need to talk about that?” At some point, in my tween years, I just stopped asking. Instead, I stole my father’s photograph of her and kept it hidden in my room. He never looked at it anyway.

The photo was a faded snapshot with rounded corners. In it, her hair was long and wavy, with a neat center part that divided her into matching halves. She was wearing a knit vest and a shiny pendant on a long chain around her neck; and even though the snapshot had that regrettable sepia-yellow-brown overtone that characterized so much early-eighties photography, you could still see how poised she was, as graceful as the drawing of Athena in my book of Greek myths. Her smile was lopsided, as if she was trying to communicate with the person behind the camera while simultaneously gazing down at the fair-haired toddler in her arms.

Me. The toddler wasme.

I spent so much time studying that photograph, waiting for the moment of recognition—the moment where I would feel the truth of myself as that baby in my mother’s arms. And all I ever felt was a strange, empty longing: the desire to make that scene real, rather than reliving the memory itself. I couldn’t project myself into the body of that chubby, happy kid. I couldn’t remember at all what it felt like to be held by my mother.

It’s not like I didn’t have any memories of her. They would slip in and out sometimes, like momentary shadows: my mother at a sink, peeling carrots while I stood below her with my arms flung around her leg, catching at the orange curls that flew off her paring knife. The memory of her smell, jasmine, as she pulled a blanket up under my chin. A flash of her with a pile of Legos, the clicking of the bricks as she stirred them with a graceful hand.

I read somewhere that explicit memories—the autobiographical memories of moments and experiences—begin when you are two and a half. So if my mother died when I was four I should have had at least eighteen precious months of material to summon; but all I could conjure were these few implicit memories, mere emotional impressions. I had to wonder sometimes: Did I truly remember anything at all or were all these memories just falsehoods, images and stories and feelings that I’d purloined from novels I read or advertisements I saw in newspapers and magazines? How would I even know? How much of our childhoods can anyone really remember, anyway; and how much do we just piece together from the photographs in our family albums, the stories that our parents tell us about ourselves, until we have enough detail to color them in in our minds and claim them as our own?

If you don’t have any photographs, or any family stories, you’re left with nothing but wisps of fog, impossible to grasp.

—

A few days after my birthday, as I was finishing my morning studies, my father came to stand over me in the kitchen. He put his finger on the page, stabbing a sentence with a mud-rimmed fingernail. “ Optimism is the obstinacy of maintaining that everything is best when it is worst, ” he said. “What is Voltaire trying to tell us?”

“That he thinks it’s intellectually lazy to say that everything will turn out just fine.”

“And whose teaching is this book arguing against?”

“Leibniz. Who believed that because God is inherently good, everything that happens has to be intentional and positive. Voltaire disagreed with his premise.”

“And you? What’s your position on that?”

I hesitated. It was a trick question. I knew where my father landed on the spectrum of optimism versus pessimism—there was a reason he had me reading Candide —and if I didn’t agree, we would end up in an endless philosophical debate that I would, inevitably, lose. “I don’t believe in God,” I said carefully. “Therefore, Leibniz’s central thesis is based on a meritless argument. Irrelevant question. Q.E.D.”

He laughed. “Well put. Now: What does Candide argue are the three greatest evils?”

“Boredom, vice, and poverty.”

My father smiled. “Which can be resolved through the embrace of the pastoral life. Which is what we are doing here, of course.” He gave me a half hug, his arm flung around my neck, his chin resting on my head. It was then that I noticed that he had his backpack in the other hand.

“You’re leaving again,” I observed.

“Just for a day or two. I’ll be back before it snows.”

“Delivering magazines?” I asked. This was the charade we’d settled upon a few years ago, when he first began self-publishing Libertaire . I was perfectly aware that he did not need to hand deliver magazines to the half-dozen bookstores in the Mountain West that carried Libertaire on their zine racks. That could have been handled with a few phone calls and a trip to the post office. Besides, these trips predated the magazine’s existence.

He’d been leaving me alone at the cabin since I was old enough to cook dinner for myself (and I’d been adept at boiling spaghetti for as long as I could remember). I had never been quite sure what he was doing after he left. I suspected it had something to do with money. My father had never worked an actual job since we’d been in Montana. And while we lived frugally, still, there must have been money coming in somewhere. Did my father have a secret bank account, a trust fund that we were living off of? But that didn’t square with the image that I had of his parents and their working-class roots. Perhaps he had an agreement with an old friend and was going to do odd jobs. Perhaps he was selling his plasma, or his semen, or renting out his body for medical experiments.

He sure as hell didn’t make much of an income from his writing, I knew that much. Other than the copies that he sold off the zine racks in a half-dozen college-town bookstores, Libertaire ’s subscription base consisted of roughly four dozen readers, each of whom sent him a self-addressed envelope with a ten-dollar bill for an issue. Many had addresses in Montana and Wyoming, but others lived in cities like New York and Dallas and St. Louis; a few were as far away as Mexico and Canada. I was never quite sure how they had found his writings: Had they plucked an issue off a bookstore shelf during their travels? Had someone handed them a dog-eared copy? Was there a whole underground network of Luddite radicals somewhere out there?

My father corresponded with a few of them, slipping handwritten letters into the envelopes when he mailed off their copies. Letters were returned from a handful of readers—letters that were dense with smeared ink, written with a frenetic intensity that matched my father’s. When he found one in our mailbox, he’d brighten, and vanish into his study to read it. I studied the names, wondering who these men (and they were always men) actually were: Malcolm Torino, from North Dakota; Benjamin Fenniway, from Texas; Jim Johnson, from Arkansas. I wondered, when my father left to “deliver magazines” once or twice a year, if he was actually going to visit some of these correspondents. Whether a vein of community ran below our lives, invisible to me, but rich and vital to my father.

“I hear there’s a new bookstore in Salt Lake City,” he answered, his eyes squinting at a spot just above my head, a tell that he was lying. “Might see if they’re interested in Libertaire .”

“Well, don’t worry about me,” I said, trying not to sound eager. “I’ll be fine.”

“That’s never in doubt.” He squeezed my shoulder once, turned, and was gone. My father was never very big on goodbyes.

—

I waited two hours, just to be safe, before breaking into my father’s study.

It wasn’t large—six feet by six feet—but every square inch of it was jammed with crap. Tangles of fishing wire and scraps of wood and jagged bits of metal, sitting on stacks of books about ethnology and dendrology and ornithology. Old alarm clocks that he picked up at the thrift store in Bozeman, dismantled and spilling their gears. Batteries and rusty pliers and an electronic multimeter whose function I couldn’t fathom. Newspapers cut into pieces, crumpled pages from his typewriter, and cups of tea that had been long forgotten and were growing a thick scum of fuzz. Empty oatmeal carton full of bent nails.

My father’s desk sat in the middle of this mess, a scarred old beast with ink stains across the top and a brick holding up one missing leg. Its drawers were locked with an old iron key, which I’d never managed to locate, though I’d tried.

The room smelled like my father’s sweat and something else I couldn’t identify, something chemical and sharp. It was a window into my father’s secret mind, one he didn’t want me to see; and my presence in the room was like a splinter in the sole of a foot. I would never have gone in there if it weren’t for the television.

The television sat on a bookshelf, directly across from my father’s desk and on top of an empty milk crate. It was an old black-and-white set that surely dated back at least twenty years. My father had rescued it during a trip to the thrift store, where it had been sitting outside the back door with a FREE, brOKEN sign taped to the top.

I’d nearly keeled over when I saw him picking it up. “What are you doing?”

He turned it around so he could study the back. “Going to repair it. These old televisions have pretty simple engineering, assuming it’s not a broken cathode-ray tube.”

“That’s not what I meant,” I said. “You said, and I’m quoting here, that television is ‘just a conduit for corporations in their quest to control social and political thought. It’s an opiate, worse than organized religion.’?”

“?‘The Cathode Wasteland,’ right, that was in issue two.” For once, he did not look pleased to be quoted back to himself. “But I also need to understand what society is up against if I’m going to write about it in an informed manner. It takes too damn long to get periodicals out to the cabin, and the news shows are the root of society’s problems anyway. It’s for research only. Don’t worry, I’ll keep it in the study, so it doesn’t poison you, too.” He placed the television set in the truck bed and smiled.

It had taken me less than a month to figure out how to pick the lock to my father’s study with a rusty paper clip. Whenever he left me alone to go on one of his trips now, I’d binge television to my heart’s content, on the three fuzzy channels we managed to pick up. Cartoons, romantic comedies, soap operas, science fiction: the more florid and sentimental and outrageous, the better. Sabrina the Teenage Witch and Star Trek: Voyager and Days of Our Lives and Friends . Filled with guilt the whole time; wondering if I was slowly destroying my brain with empty ideas. Quotes from “The Cathode Wasteland” running through my mind: Modern society uses television as a form of mind control, to blind man to the feelings of stress and dissatisfaction. Rather than absorbing himself in quiet and solitude, and learning how to be at peace in his environment, the modern man requires constant entertainment and stimulation. Thus, society keeps its citizens drugged and listless, sitting on their couches without engaging their minds .

Yes, yes, right, of course. But holy Christ, I still loved The X-Files . Even in grainy black and white, on that tiny twenty-inch screen with a crack in the lower right corner, with muffled sound and terrible reception. My father was right, that shit was a drug. The classic fiction my father had fed me— Anna Karenina and The Red and the Black and The Scarlet Letter —hadn’t prepared me for these wild flights of imagination. Aliens and mutants and mass murderers, viruses that came from outer space, and kids who were government-built clones. Vulnerable Scully and swoony Mulder, the festering question of whether they would ever have sex just under the surface of every interaction.

No wonder my understanding of the world beyond my window was somewhat warped.

That evening, I made myself a plate of scrambled eggs for dinner and settled in to watch the latest episode. It was about a serial killer who met his female victims by seducing them online. An internet chat room: I’d never heard of such a thing before. According to The X-Files, this was an anonymous text-based computer conversation that was conducted late at night in a dark room, lit only by the glow of a computer screen, with ominous music playing in the background. And if you arranged to meet the person who had sent you the messages, they would murder you, liquefy your body fat with digestive enzymes, and drinkit.

The serial killer was caught—just in the nick of time—and as they locked him in a jail cell forever, he muttered a line in Italian to Scully: “ I morti non sono più soli .” The dead are no longer lonely.

As the credits rolled, I stretched and kicked my feet up onto the top of the desk, and that was when I noticed that the top drawer wasn’t quite in alignment. When I looked closer, I could see that the catch on the old iron lock was askew; it appeared that my father had turned the key, but not quite far enough, so that it was only hanging on by a thread. I gave the handle a sharp tug, and the drawer immediately popped open.

It was jammed full of paper: yellowing receipts, crumpled letters, handwritten pages that had been torn from a legal pad. There seemed to be no order to it at all, as if it had been yanked out and riffled through, and then shoved back in willy-nilly.

I gingerly lifted the top sheet from the pile, a page that was dense with my father’s cramped, spiky hand. The words were complete gibberish— Ixpde ei bkpwj feayx vqoplit —but I recognized this as a cipher my father had invented. He’d taught it to me when I was eight, and for a time used to leave notes around the cabin written in code for me to decipher; but that had been years ago, and now I was rusty. I painstakingly translated a random line— Peter’s advances in logic programming and neural networks dovetail neatly with her theories about the future of intelligence —before giving up. It would take me forever to decode all this, and based on the mystifying sentence I’d just read it didn’t seem worth the effort or the subterfuge of putting it in code in the first place. Sometimes my father’s thinking was impossible for me to follow.

Disappointed, I put the pages back where I’d found them. I nudged the pile with a fingertip, wondering what else was in this mess. If I disrupted the collection any further, I knew that my father would notice. And yet I couldn’t quite resist: I carefully wedged my hand down along the edge of the drawer, feeling for anything of interest.

Paper, paper, more paper. My father had clearly used this drawer as a place to store every stray thought he’d ever jotted down or letter he’d received from a Libertaire reader. Why, I wondered, was this worth locking up? Surely there had to be something of more value somewhere in here.

Near the bottom of the drawer, my fingers brushed up against something else, a square of paper that was stiff and slick to the touch. A photo? I carefully pinched it out. And then I stared at it, suddenly frozen with shock.

It was a snapshot of my mother and me, one I’d never seen before. I recognized my mother instantly, although she looked a little different in this photo: her hair shorter, brushed back from her face in blond wings; and her dress more conservative, a white blouse with a looped bow tied at the neck. She was sitting in what looked like a big wooden chair, in some sort of office. And I was planted square in her lap, a smirk of delight on my face as I held a coffee mug to my lips, pretending that I was about to drink from it. Above my head, my mother was gazing down at me, her lips parted to say something, a look of bemused pride on her face.

If I was one or two in the earlier photo, I must have been nearly four in this one; my hair long enough to wear in braids, my milk teeth fully grown in. So, close to the end. How many more days would I have with my mother?

Why hadn’t my father ever let me see this photo? Had he just forgotten it was there?

A dangerous pressure was building up behind my eye sockets. I pushed a finger into the corner of my eye, holding back an unexpected tear as I flipped the photo over to see if there was anything written on the back. There, in neat black ink, was a caption: Esme and Theresa. February ’83.

Esme and Theresa?

My heart seemed to stop for a moment; and when it started up again, it was beating twice as fast. I read these three words again and again, willing them to make sense. They did not. I flipped over the photo once more, just to confirm, but there was no question: The photo was definitely of my mother and me. But if these two were Esme and Theresa, who, then, were Jennifer and Jane ? And, for that matter, which one was Esme, and which was Theresa?

Was this why the drawer had been locked?

I examined the photograph more closely. The handwriting was not my father’s—it was round and curvy and feminine (my mother’s?)—and there were abrasions on the corners of the photo, perhaps from being carelessly extracted from an album. I stuck my hands back down into the drawer and felt around a little more, but if there were more photos down there, I couldn’t feel them; and I was afraid to disturb the pile more.

I sat there for a good half hour, just studying the photo. Soaking in every little detail that might offer some clue to my childhood: The scab on my left knee, half covered with a dinosaur Band-Aid. The braids: Were those the ones I thought I remembered my mother combing into my hair? The cartoon on the coffee mug I was pretending to drink from: a fat orange cat with a caption, I Hate Mondays.

Finally, I carefully tucked the photo back in the drawer where I’d found it, locked the study back up, and went into the kitchen. I’d seen something I was pretty sure I wasn’t supposed to see, and it left me feeling shaky and penitential, as if I’d been punished for going into my father’s sacrosanct study. As if this was all my fault for bingeing The X-Files episodes when I knew it was strictly forbidden.

At loose ends, I picked up the phone and dialed Heidi.

“Guess what? My name’s not actually Jane,” I said when she answered.

“So what is it, then? Let me guess. Tiffany? Natasha? Oh, no, I got it: Michelle. That sounds like you.” I could hear her radio blasting in the background, playing a girl band that sounded like bubbling soda.

“I’m not sure. It’s either Esme or Theresa. I found an old photo of me with my mom, one my dad had hidden away, and those were the names written on the back. But it’s not clear which one was me.”

The music went suddenly quiet, as she snapped it off. “Wait, you’re serious?”

“I’m serious.”

“But—why? Why would your father hide that from you?”

I’d already come up with an answer, the only one that seemed to make sense. “The obvious explanation is that he changed my name at some point after my mom died because we’re hiding from the feds. I’ve told you how he’s always so worried about them. It would explain a lot.”

There was a telling silence from the other end of the line. “Is that really the most obvious explanation? Your dad’s whole spiel about the authorities—you know it’s all just a paranoid delusion, right? My mom says his convoluted theories are just an excuse to keep you trapped out there in the woods.”

This made me bristle. “Convoluted theories? That’s called philosophy , Heidi. Have you even bothered to read Libertaire ?”

She ignored this, continuing: “Anyway, why would he lie to you about your mom’s name, if that was the case? She’s not in hiding.”

“It’s probably all part of his cover.” Stubbornly, I wanted to believe in this story. It was the one that let my father still be a hero.

“Maybe, but I can think of other, far more logical reasons why he would be hiding your real name.” Her voice was breathy with excitement; I felt a sour pulse of annoyance that my shock was her thrill. “I mean, Jane, if he lied to you about that, then you have to ask yourself if he’s lied to you about other things, too.”

“What do you mean?”

“Think about it. What if your mom isn’t even dead ?”