Page 27 of The Paradox Club

“Not exactly the same story. There were always differences. I concentrated on the differences.”

After her father died, Tess tried to write the story down, first in her meticulous twelve-year-old printing, later on an old Olivetti manual typewriter she purloined from Vivian’s study, and eventually on a series of computers and tablets. She wrote the story over and over, always trying to hear her father’s voice, always striving to match his words. But she had been a child; she couldn’t remember with any degree of precision. Yet she persisted, believing if she wrote enough versions, one of them might cast that perfect shadow in the moonlight, the silhouette of her father’s story, every word just as he told it. She might never know which story was perfectly synced to her father, but she could live in hope that one of the ninety-six versions that sat in file folders in a Bankers Box in Vivian’s attic was a perfect reproduction of one of those moments, lying snug under a pile of blankets with the cool night air blowing in through the window and the smell of her father’s aftershave tickling her nose as he spoke in stentorian tones.

The story always began with the same responsorial. Harry would say, “There was once an ogre,” and Tess would reply by stating the ogre’s color. Harry would affirm the color and continue with the story, uninterrupted from that point on. As Tess grew older her choices of color expanded from simple green and red and purple to vermilion or chartreuse or lilac. One day she found a fan of paint chips her mother had brought from the hardware store in Madison to pick out a new color for her bedroom, and for the rest of the summer she demanded that the ogre be avocado or seafoam or cappuccino. But on the first night that Tess decided to write the story down, the night she stayed up until two a.m. with a flashlight under the sheets scribbling in her Jimmy Neutron notebook, the ogre had been simply purple.

There was once an ogre. A purple ogre.

The purple ogre lived in a cave at the top of a hill. Don’t ask me what the cave was doing at the top of the hill when caves are usually underneath hills. All I know is that the cave was at the top of the hill and the ogre lived in it. Now the strange thing about this hill was that it was shrouded in fog all the time. Fog clung to the top of this hill like a proton to an electron so that whenever the ogre looked out of his cave all he saw was a white mist. And so, naturally, the ogre assumed that the world was made of fog and that his cave was the only place fit for ogre habitation.

To be sure, there were amenities in the ogre’s cave. There was a deep seam of coal so that he always had fuel for a fire. There was an underwater lake teeming with fish so that he always had food and water. And if there had been a third amenity, I would list it here, because in stories things so often come in threes. But the coal and the lake were the extent of the cave’s comforts. The ground where the ogre slept was covered with sharp rocks. The wall against which he often sat was cold and damp. And the view from his front porch was, as I believe I mentioned before, nothing but fog.

Deep within the cave, on a wall that the ogre could just make out if he carried a glowing ember of coal to light his way, was a strange mural, painted eons ago by an ogre or ogres unknown. Every few days (I might have said once a week, if the ogre had had any concept of a week) the ogre would spelunk into the depths of the cave to gaze upon the mural, always hoping he would be able to make some sense of it. It showed strange tall shapes in a color the ogre decided to call green and a winding ribbon of something that seemed to deserve the name blue. Along this blue stripe stood creatures that looked like poorly designed fish with legs or ogres with small shoulders and more than three fingers. The ogre had no names for these odd creatures, some of which walked on two legs as he did and some of which, inexplicably, walked on four. The four-legged creatures might be considered attractive, the ogre supposed, but the two-legged ones were quite hideous with their skinny arms and legs, hairless bodies, and tiny feet. Strangest of all, at the top of the mural, where the ogre could only see it if he stood on his ogre tiptoes, was a large round object in a color that the ogre chose to call yellow. The ogre knew that if such a large object really were up in the air like that, it would crash to the ground immediately, probably crushing several of the poorly drawn fish. He had seen rocks crash from the ceiling of the cave and the welt on his leg was testament to the damage even a small falling object could do.

The ogre concluded that whoever had painted the mural knew nothing about fish, nothing about falling objects (or what the ogre liked to call science), and nothing about art. But still, when you live in a cave with nothing to do but fish and dig coal, you spend a lot of time staring at your mural, no matter how bad it is, because it’s the only work of art you have.

It was a rather dull and boring life for the ogre with nothing to do but eat fish, drink water, dig coal, gaze into the fog, and stare at the mural. Sometimes the ogre would try to re-create the images of the mural on the walls near the entrance to the cave, using the blood of fish as paint. But every time he did this, the damp from the fog seeped into the cave and washed the walls clean of the blood—erasing the ogre’s efforts and quashing his nascent artistic aspirations.

There were two important days in the ogre’s life that happened shortly after this story begins—we’ll call them a Wednesday and a Thursday, even though the ogre had never heard those words and knew nothing of the gods Woden and Thunor.

On Wednesday, the ogre happened to glance into the still surface of the lake while holding a coal ember, and he saw something he had never noticed before. In the past he had always splashed out into the water to chase after fish; he had never stopped to look at the lake when its surface was undisturbed by his ogorial thrashing. But that Wednesday, the ogre saw, staring back at him from the lake, the face of an ogre. He did not realize it was the face of an ogre, because he had never seen either his own face or anyone else’s, but he did immediately recognize the beauty of the face that looked up at him from the depths. The protruding brow erupting in a forest of spiky hairs and glowing pustules; the bounteously bulbous eyes; the pointed nose elegantly bent to one side; the jagged, stained teeth overhanging the charmingly chapped lower lip; and all covered in a shimmering sheen of nostril slime. What could be more beautiful? The ogre tried to speak to the stunning creature in the water and as he spoke, the beauty moved its lips, but no sound came. The ogre waved a hand at the vision. The vision waved back. The ogre felt a stirring deep within himself and a single word welled up inside him. Love. He dove into the water, but the creature instantly disappeared.

Every day from that fateful Wednesday, the ogre would visit the lake, staring at the exquisite creature for hours on end like some Neanderthal Narcissus. But the ogre had never heard of Narcissus, nor did he know any of the laws of the behavior of light on a reflective surface, such as that the angle of incidence equals the angle of refraction—that sort of thing.

Now, it so happened that the ogre decided to pay a visit to the mural one day—a Thursday in fact—to see if he could find any creature upon that wall as stunningly beautiful as the one beneath the surface of the lake. And on that fateful Thursday, after a careful examination lasting from ten in the morning until a quarter past three in the afternoon—that is to say roughly the amount of time it takes a point on the equator of the earth to rotate through sixty-four degrees—the ogre discovered two things he had never noticed before.

The first was a creature, all alone at the far end of the panorama, who looked very much like the object of his affection in the lake. Even the shimmer of slime had been captured by the artist. Gazing upon that flawless figure, the ogre began to reconsider his previous evaluation of the artist. This creature stooped beside the ribbon of blue, staring into an equally lovely face that looked up from what the ogre now realized must be a body of water. And then the ogre noticed, high in a corner of the wall just above this stunner of a creature, a drawing of a hill with a cave at the top. Could this be his own hill? And if so, what was the meaning of the fluffy whiteness that ringed it just below the cave’s entrance?

Now what do you suppose the ogre did next? Did he realize that the mural depicted a glorious world outside the cave and beyond the fog—a world of diversity and beauty and light? He did not. Did he use the evidence of the mural to formulate a hypothesis about the world and then test that hypothesis by venturing beyond the fog? He did not. Did he consider the depiction of a beautiful creature staring at another beautiful creature within a body of water as vindication of his own behavior at the lake deep within his cave? He did.

And from that day forth the ogre spent every spare moment—which, in all honesty meant most of his moments—gawking at that visage in the lake. He did not, as Narcissus did, die staring at his own reflection; he still took time to eat and drink and sleep. But the rest of the time, he gazed silently into the deep, completely convinced, against, one might say, all evidence to the contrary, that he was happy.

The story was never the same and always the same. In its essentials it never varied, but in its details it always did. Some nights, especially if Harry had been fishing that day, the story would contain long digressions about the angling successes of the ogre. Other times the ogre would go on extended spelunking expeditions, discovering other paintings, other seams of coal, and other lakes. As Tess grew older, Harry would incorporate more complex vocabulary into the story, so, while the story he told seven-year-old Tess included nascent and vindication and panorama, by the time she turned nine the narrator had peppered in words like ambidextrous, pusillanimous, and antediluvian. Nor was Harry afraid of invented words—though he did caution Tess never to invent words when a perfectly good one for the purpose already existed. Tess’s favorite of her father’s etymological creations was: ogorial, adj., of or pertaining to an ogre or ogres.

After each telling, Harry would reiterate the story’s meaning, despite Tess’s protest that “I got it, Harry. You practically hit me over the head with it this time.” But Harry would persist in explaining that the story showed that if we allow our own points of view, assumptions, and biases to obscure the truth, we can never be successful in our scientific inquiries—or in any explorations of the world around us. We might believe we have achieved happiness by hiding behind our prejudices, but it is a specious pleasure founded on ignorance and as shallow and meaningless as the reflection of a purple ogre in an underground lake.

AN ORGANIZATIONAL PARADIGM

Monday morning, Tess awoke to the sound of voices and heavy thuds. She watched from an upstairs window as two burly men unloaded forty-two boxes of books from a panel truck and stacked them on the front porch. As the truck pulled away from the curb, belching smoke from its tailpipe, Tess tried to muster the energy to rise from the window seat on the upstairs landing and face the mountain on the front porch that was, along with the memories of his friends and family, all that remained of Harry Maxwell on this earth. She longed to surround herself with Harry’s books, steeped in the smell of his pipe and overflowing in the margins with his notes and comments. At the same time, she dreaded opening even one box, knowing that the books’ presence would be a constant reminder of Harry’s absence.

She considered several means of dealing with her inertia: asking Vivian for a cup of coffee, standing in a hot shower for a half hour or so, even taking a run through campus or out toward Picnic Point on Lake Mendota. But the voices had other ideas. Before she had stirred from her spot, they began to clamor at her, and while she couldn’t quite make out their words at first, as they spoke over one another, soon enough they gelled into a unison that said, If you don’t organize Harry’s books, something bad will happen to Vivian.

Tess despised the lack of specificity in the voices. They never indulged in details. How should she organize the books? By author or title? By height or color or publication date? And what would happen to Vivian? A car accident or a kidnapping? A heart attack or a robbery? A little more information would be helpful, she said to the voices. But the rudeness of the voices extended to their never listening to her, never responding when she asked for clarification. If you don’t organize Harry’s books, something bad will happen to Vivian.

“Looks like you have a delivery,” said Vivian, discovering Tess in the window seat.

“Harry’s books,” said Tess.

“What will you do with them?”

“Could I have some breakfast?”

“Of course you can, dear.”

There are two parts of OCD, Tess had learned from therapist n − 8. There are the obsessions and there are the compulsions. Obsessions usually take the form of unwanted thoughts or ideas—in Tess’s case, the voices, or the auditory hallucinations as therapist n − 7 insisted on calling them. Those obsessions drive the person to perform compulsions—at times for Tess that meant organizing things. Two days ago, after returning from Marie’s, she had organized a giant pile of old L.L.Bean catalogs by date. And that was when the voices had been fairly quiet. The voices that spoke to her as she opened the front door and emerged next to the mountain of her father’s books were louder and more insistent that any she had heard in a long time.

Tess had spent many happy afternoons of her childhood in a beanbag chair that her father deigned to allow in the corner of his study, quietly reading while Harry worked. After Harry’s death, Marie had forbidden Tess to set foot in that room. Harry’s will had specified that no headstone be erected for him, so his collection of books had been the only monument left to Horatio Maxwell Jr. Tess hadn’t seen these books up close since she was twelve, but they now formed a wall between her and the world and echoed back the voices of doom. Even though her logical mind told her not to, when the voices began, she paid attention. After all, once the voices had been right.

Tess stared at the boxes, not sure how to begin. She couldn’t just pile them up on the floor of an empty room. They needed to be carefully arranged on shelves. She closed her eyes and envisioned the shelves in her father’s study and in his office on campus, trying to count how many bookcases, how many shelves in each case. Fifty shelves all together? Or sixty? In the long upstairs corridor of Vivian’s house, Tess counted the shelves that lined the north wall. Eight shelves in each section; eight sections running from the front of the house all the way to Vivian’s bedroom door. Sixty-four shelves. Probably enough, she thought, and half of those shelves were already empty. The rest were sparsely populated with old paperback thrillers, figurines of animals, back issues of the New Yorker and Scientific American, and a miscellany of dusty, forgotten objects from glass milk bottles to empty picture frames to a moth-eaten Easter bonnet that looked like it had sat in the same spot since World War II.