Because … because you can’t. Your grandmother has died, and you had to go to her funeral.
Fair enough. It’s what we call a momentous day. I’ve just spent six hours weeping for my grandmother, and now I’m in my car, heading for the job interview. Which road do you want me to take?
Again, it doesn’t matter. There are only two choices, the main road and the back road, and each one has its good points and bad points. Say you choose the main road and get to your appointment on time. You won’t think about your choice, will you? And if you go by the back road and get there in time, again, no sweat, and you’ll never give it another thought for the rest of your life. But here’s where it gets interesting. You take the main road, there’s a three-car pileup, traffic is stalled for more than an hour, and as you sit there in your car, the only thing on your mind will be the back road and why you didn’t go that way instead. You’ll curse yourself for making the wrong choice, and yet how do you really know it was the wrong choice? Can you see the back road? Do you know what’s happening on the back road? Has anyone told you that an enormous redwood tree has fallen across the back road and crushed a passing car, killing the driver of that car and holding up traffic for three and a half hours? Has anyone looked at his watch and told you that if you had taken the back road it would have been your car that was crushed and you who were killed? Or else: No tree fell, and taking the main road was the wrong choice. Or else: You took the back road, and the tree fell on the driver just in front of you, and as you sit in your car wishing you had taken the main road, you know nothing about the three-car pileup that would have made you miss your appointment anyway. Or else: There was no three-car pileup, and taking the back road was the wrong choice.
What’s the point of all this, Archie?
I’m saying you’ll never know if you made the wrong choice or not. You would need to have all the facts before you knew, and the only way to get all the facts is to be in two places at the same time—which is impossible.
And?
And that’s why people believe in God.
Surely you jest, Monsieur Voltaire.
Only God can see the main road and the back road at the same time—which means that only God can know if you made the right choice or the wrong choice.
How do you know he knows?
I don’t. But that’s the assumption people make. Unfortunately, God never tells us what he thinks.
You could always write him a letter.
True. But there wouldn’t be any point.
What’s the problem? Can’t afford the airmail postage?
I don’t have his address.
* * *
THERE WAS A new boy in the cabin that year, the one first-timer among Ferguson’s old comrades from summers past, a non–city boy who lived in the Westchester town of New Rochelle, which made him the only other suburban dweller in Ferguson’s circle of acquaintances, less boisterous and verbally aggressive than the boys from New York, quiet in the way that Ferguson was quiet, but even more so, a boy who said almost nothing, and yet, when he did speak, the people within hearing distance found themselves paying close attention to his words. His name was Federman, Art Federman, universally know as Artie, and because Artie Federman was so close in sound to Archie Ferguson, the boys in the cabin often joked that they were long-lost brothers, identical twins who had been separated at birth. What made the joke funny was that it wasn’t a real joke but an anti-joke, a joke that made sense only if it was understood as a joke about the joke itself, for while Ferguson and Federman shared certain physical characteristics—similar in size and build, both with big hands and the lean, muscled bodies of young ballplayers—they bore little resemblance to each other beyond their common initials. Ferguson was dark and Federman was fair, Ferguson’s eyes were gray-green and Federman’s were brown, their noses, ears, and mouths were all shaped differently, and no one seeing them together for the first time ever would have mistaken them for brothers—or even, for that matter, distant cousins. On the other hand, the boys in the cabin were no longer seeing them together for the first time, and as the days passed and they continued to observe the two A.F.s in action, perhaps they understood that the joke that was not a joke was something more than a joke, for even if it wasn’t a question of two flesh-and-blood brothers, it was a question of friends, of two flesh-and-blood friends who were rapidly becoming as close as brothers.
One of the odd things about being himself, Ferguson had discovered, was that there seemed to be several of him, that he wasn’t just one person but a collection of contradictory selves, and each time he was with a different person, he himself was different as well. With an outspoken extrovert like Noah, he felt quiet and closed in on himself. With a shy and guarded person like Ann Brodsky, he felt loud and crude, always talking too much in order to overcome the awkwardness of her long silences. Humorless people tended to transform him into a jokester. Quick-witted clowns made him feel dull and slow. Still other people seemed to possess the power to draw him into their orbit and make him act in the same way they did. Pugnacious Mark Dubinsky, with his endless opinions about politics and sports, would bring out the verbal battler in Ferguson. Dreamy Bob Kramer would make him feel fragile and unsure of himself. Artie Federman, on the other hand, made him feel calm, calm in a way no other person had ever made him feel, for being with the new boy brought the same sense of selfhood he felt when he was alone.
If either one of the two A.F.s had been a slightly different person, they easily could have wound up as enemies. Ferguson in particular had every justification to resent the newcomer’s arrival on the scene, for it turned out that Federman was better at sports than he was, and for the past five years Ferguson had been the best, especially at baseball, which meant he had always played shortstop and batted fourth for the traveling team, but when Federman showed up for practice on the first day, it quickly became apparent that he had more range and a stronger arm than Ferguson, that his bat was faster and more powerful, and by the next day, when he hit two home runs and a double in an intrasquad game, eliminating any doubt that his first day’s performance had been a fluke, Bill Rappaport, the twenty-four-year-old coach of the team, pulled Ferguson aside and announced his decision: Federman was the new shortstop and cleanup hitter, and Ferguson was being switched over to third base and would bat one notch up in the order. You understand why I have to do this, don’t you? Bill said. Ferguson nodded. Given the strength of the evidence, what else could he do but nod? Nothing against you, Archie, Bill continued, but this new kid is phenomenal.
No matter how you looked at it, Bill’s new lineup was a demotion, a small drop in the ranks, and it stung Ferguson to have lost his position as supreme commander of the Camp Paradise baseball army, but just as feelings were always feelings, subjectively true one hundred percent of the time, facts were also facts, and in this case the objective, unarguable fact was that Bill had made the right decision. Ferguson was the number two man now. The old boyhood dream of one day making it to the major leagues slowly dissolved into a gunky residue at the bottom of his stomach. It left a bitter taste for a while, but then he got over it. Federman was simply too good to want to compete with him. In the face of such a talent, the only proper response was to be thankful he was on your side.
What made that talent so unusual, Ferguson felt, was that Federman was all but oblivious to it. No matter how earnestly he played, no matter how many games he won with last-inning hits or diving stops in the field, he never seemed to understand how much better he was than everyone else. Excelling at baseball was merely something he could do, and he accepted it in the same way he accepted the color of the sky or the roundness of the earth. A passion to do well, yes, but at the same time indifference, even a touch of boredom, and whenever someone on the team remarked that he should think about turning pro after he finished high school, Federman would shake his head and laugh. Baseball was a fun thing to do, he’d say, but it was essentially meaningless, no more than kid’s stuff, and when he gra
duated from high school his plan was to go on to college and study to become a scientist—either a physicist or a mathematician, he wasn’t sure which one yet.
There was something both lunkheaded and disarming about that response, Ferguson thought, which struck him as a typical example of what defined his almost-namesake and set him apart from the others, since it was a foregone conclusion that all the boys would eventually go on to college, that was the world they lived in, the third-generation Jewish-American world in which all but the most feebleminded were now expected to earn an undergraduate degree, if not a professional or advanced degree, but Federman didn’t understand the nuances of what the others were saying to him, he failed to realize they weren’t telling him he shouldn’t go to college but that he didn’t have to go if he didn’t want to, which meant they thought he was in a stronger position than they were, more in control of his own destiny, and because he was indeed an excellent student in math and science and had every intention of going to college (he was teaching himself calculus that summer, for God’s sake, and how many fourteen-year-olds could grasp the principles of calculus?), he had ignored the compliment and given them a blunt, straight-from-the-heart answer that was so obvious and beside the point (everyone knew he was studying calculus and was inevitably bound for college) that he needn’t have said it at all.
But that was one of the things Ferguson liked best about the other A.F.—his innocence, his unworldly remove from the ironies and contradictions of the society he belonged to. Everyone else seemed to be trapped in the throes of a perpetual agitation, a chaos of clashing impulses and turbulent inconsistencies, but Federman was still, pensive, and apparently at peace with himself, so locked into his own thoughts and his own way of doing things that he paid little attention to the noise around him. An uncontaminated being, Ferguson sometimes thought, so pure and rigorously himself that it was often difficult to make sense of him, which was no doubt why he and Noah had formed such different impressions of their new cabinmate. Noah was willing to grant that Federman was both highly intelligent and a superb ballplayer, but he was too sincere for his taste, too lacking in the humor department to qualify as good company, and the stillness that emanated from him, which had such a calming effect on Ferguson, was altogether unnerving to Noah, who felt that Federman was something less than fully human, a weird ghosty-boy, as he once put it, a specter who had been born with parts of his brain missing. Ferguson understood what Noah was trying to express with those comments, but he didn’t agree with him. Federman was different, that was all, a person who lived on a separate plane from the others, and what Noah saw as weaknesses of character—Federman’s shyness with girls, his inability to tell a joke, his reluctance to argue with anyone—Ferguson tended to read as strengths, for he spent more time with Federman than Noah did, and he understood that what Noah perceived as shallowness or even emptiness was in fact depth, a largeness of soul that was not present in anyone else he knew. The problem was that Federman didn’t do well in groups, whereas alone with a single counterpart he was a different person, and now that three weeks had gone by and the two A.F.s had walked back and forth to the baseball field together dozens of times, Ferguson had come to know that other person, or at least was beginning to know him, and the thing that impressed him most about Federman was how observant he was, how remarkably attuned his senses were to the world around him, and whenever he pointed to a cloud passing overhead, or to a bee alighting on the stamen of a flower, or identified the call of an invisible bird crying out from the woods, Ferguson felt he was seeing and hearing those things for the first time, that without his friend to alert him to the presence of those things, he never would have known they were there, for walking with Federman was above all an exercise in the art of paying attention, and paying attention, Ferguson discovered, was the first step in learning how to be alive.
Then came the exceptionally warm Thursday afternoon toward the end of the month, more or less the midpoint of the summer, just two days before the start of parents’ weekend, with a basketball-baseball doubleheader scheduled for Saturday morning and afternoon against much-feared and much-hated rival Camp Scatico, whose teams would be visiting Camp Paradise for the day, games that would be watched by the mothers and fathers of the Paradise boys, the roly-poly women in their sleeveless cotton dresses, the chunky men in their Bermuda shorts, the sleek and formerly sleek women in their pedal-pusher slacks and stiletto heels, the men with thinning hair in their white business shirts with the sleeves rolled up to the elbow, it was the biggest sports day of the summer, which would be followed in the evening by a performance of the old Marx Brothers play The Cocoanuts, which had been turned into their first film in 1929, and bizarrely and yet most fittingly, Noah, who was widely known throughout the camp as Harpo, had been cast in the role of Groucho, a part for which his talents were far better suited, and not only was Ferguson looking forward to the games he would be involved in two days hence, he couldn’t wait to see his cousin walk the Groucho walk as he pranced about the stage with a cigar wedged between the second and third fingers of his right hand and a greasepaint mustache smeared across the skin between his nose and upper lip. So much anticipation leading up to the events of that day, and because Camp Paradise was almost certain to lose the basketball game (they had been trounced on their visit to Camp Scatico ten days earlier), Bill Rappaport was determined to repeat their victory in baseball, and to that end he had put the boys through several grueling practices over the past days, with endless precision drills in fundamentals (bunting, hitting the cutoff man, holding runners on base) and strenuous calisthenic exercises to keep them in shape (push-ups, sit-ups, wind sprints, laps around the field), and on that particular Thursday in late July, which was the warmest, muggiest day that had fallen upon the camp all summer, Ferguson’s body had been awash in sweat throughout the entire practice, and now that the two-hour session was over and he and Federman were walking back to the cabin, where they would be changing into their bathing suits for the obligatory pre-dinner swim, he felt exhausted from his exertions on the field, sapped of energy, as he put it to Federman, as if each one of his legs weighed two hundred pounds, and even the normally indefatigable New Rochelle calculus boy admitted that he, too, was feeling rather pooped. About halfway to the cabin, Ferguson began talking about the book he had finished reading during the post-lunch rest hour, Miss Lonelyhearts, a tiny novel by Nathanael West that had been included by his Aunt Mildred in her annual package of summer books for him, and just as he was starting to explain that Miss Lonelyhearts was in fact a man, a journalist writing in the voice of a woman for an advice column to the lovelorn, he heard Federman emit a small, muffled noise, something that sounded like the word oh, and when he swiveled his head to the right and looked at his friend, he saw that Federman was staggering, as if he had been overcome by a fit of dizziness, and before Ferguson could ask him what was wrong, Federman’s knees buckled and he slowly fell to the ground.
Ferguson assumed it was a joke, that after all the talk about how tired they were Federman had gotten it into his head to do a comic demonstration of what happens to a body after too much exercise on hot and humid summer days, but the laugh Ferguson was expecting to hear didn’t come, for the truth was that Artie wasn’t a person who trafficked in jokes, and as Ferguson bent down to examine his friend’s face, he was startled to see that his eyes were neither open nor closed but half-open, half-closed, with only the whites visible, as if his eyes had rolled up into his head, which seemed to suggest that he had passed out, so Ferguson began to tap Federman’s cheeks with his fingers, first tapping and then pinching the cheeks as he told him to wake up, as if a few taps and a few pinches would be enough to rouse him to consciousness, but when Federman didn’t respond, when his head lolled back and forth as Ferguson began to shake his shoulders and his inert eyelids refused to open or shut or even flutter with the smallest sign of life, Ferguson started to grow afraid, and so he pressed his ear against Federman’s chest in order to listen t
o the beating of his heart, in order to feel his rib cage rising and falling as the air went in and out of his lungs, but there was no heartbeat, there was no breath, and an instant later Ferguson stood up and began to howl: Help me! Help me, someone! Please—someone—help me!
* * *
BRAIN ANEURYSM. THAT was the official cause of death, someone said, and since the Columbia County medical examiner performed the autopsy himself, those were the words he inscribed on Federman’s death certificate: brain aneurysm.
Ferguson knew what a brain was, but it was the first time he had come across the word aneurysm, so he walked over to the head counselor’s office and looked it up in the Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary that sat on the top shelf of the bookcase: a permanent abnormal blood-filled dilation of an artery, resulting from disease of the vessel wall.
* * *
THE GAMES WITH Camp Scatico were canceled until further notice. The Marx Brothers comedy would be held back until sometime the following month. The family songfest scheduled for Sunday morning was erased from the calendar.
* * *
AT THE ALL-CAMP gathering that convened in the Big Barn after dinner on Thursday, half the children wept, many of whom had never even known Federman. Jack Feldman, the head counselor, told the boys and girls that the ways of God were incomprehensible, beyond the grasp of human understanding.
* * *
BILL RAPPAPORT BLAMED himself for Federman’s collapse. He had pushed the team too hard, he told Ferguson, he had put everyone in danger with those punishing workouts in that intolerable heat and humidity. What the fuck had he been thinking? Ferguson remembered the words from the dictionary: permanent, abnormal, blood-filled … disease. No, Bill, he said, it was bound to happen sooner or later. Artie was walking around with a time bomb in his head. It’s just that no one knew about it—not him, not his parents, not one doctor who ever examined him. He had to die before anyone found out that the time bomb had been there his whole life.