Page 27

Artie walked to her; they were in their bedroom. “Where’d you get it?” he asked her; he had broken out in a sweat.

“It must have been in your pants, I found it on the floor of the closet.”

“Oh yeah, a student left it in the classroom.”

“Do you want it?” Evie asked skeptically.

“No, God no.” Artie took it from her and tossed it into the wastebasket next to the bed. And then, to cover his state of anxiety, he said casually, “I lied to the class the other day.”

“You did?” Evie was applying her face cream, gazing at herself in the mirror across from the bed.

“They wanted to know if world peace was possible and I said yes, and that it was up to them.” Artie pulled on his pajama bottoms.

“Artie, you already told me that.” Evie stopped, with her hand on her face cream. “Are you losing your mind?”

“Maybe,” he said.

But she continued to look at him for a moment. And then she got into bed.

Two days after his visit with Rob, Artie took his phone during his free period, and he walked out to his car and got into it. Sitting there, he texted his son. A light rain was falling, and Artie looked around: The teachers’ cars were lined up in front of little white signs: Reserved for Faculty. And a little way away were many students’ cars all parked. As Artie sat there, he saw through the trees, which were almost all bare now, the water, far away but always there.

Rob got right back to him: Yeah, call me, Dad! So Artie called him and said, “Rob, help me out with Carl Jung, I’ve been googling him and I can’t figure out his position on free will. I mean, one thing says that free will is ‘what he does most happily’—what does that mean?—and something else says that Jung thinks the phrase ‘Where there’s a will there’s a way’ is a delusion of modern man. I’m confused.”

Rob laughed and said, “I know. He’s a confusing guy.” And then Rob went on to talk about Jung’s theory of the unconscious and Artie sort of understood. It took Rob quite a while to get through it all, he was speaking with excitement.

“You’re not supposed to be working now, are you?” Artie was concerned about this. He watched out his window as a student drove into the student parking lot and got out of his car.

“Don’t worry, Dad. All over it.” After another moment Rob said, “I thought you were calling me to tell me you’d told Mom.”

“No. No, I haven’t.” Artie hesitated and then said, “But you can tell her any time you want to.”

“I don’t want to. Not now anyway.”

“Tell me more about this Carl Jung guy,” Artie said, looking straight ahead through the trees at the water far away, and so his son told him (and this really made an impression on Artie) that Carl Jung had had a near-death experience in 1944, and way before any satellite had ever taken a picture of the Earth, Jung had visualized the Earth from far away, and everything he reported that he saw turned out to be right. But this was the part that got to Artie: Jung had seen, during this near-death experience, that his young doctor was going to die, and when Jung came back from being nearly dead, he tried to tell the doctor that, and the doctor was not interested, but two weeks later this healthy young doctor died of septicemia.

“Amazing, right?” Rob said, and Artie said: Yeah, it was.

As he walked back, it was raining harder, and Artie moved as quickly as he could, taking out his pass to swipe himself into the building and then shaking out his coat when he got back to the teachers room.

When he got home from school that day, Artie saw that the bushes around their house were now wrapped in what looked like off-white sailcloth, stapled perfectly up the sides; the gardener had come. He pulled into the driveway slowly, and the sense of confusion—or wonder—that he had been living with these past few days seemed to increase. What was it about the bushes wrapped in their cloth coverings that made him more confused? Perhaps because for years now this had happened to them toward the end of every autumn? Gazing at them, Artie had a sense of time going by. Twenty-seven years ago, his son had been born.

That night he said to Evie, “How long have we been having the bushes covered?”

“No idea,” she said. “Forever?”

“Say,” Artie said to Ken Moynihan the next night as they sat together at Spud’s. It was dark out now, and the water could be seen only from the lights in front of the restaurant; a few waves were lapping at the dock. “So, say,” Artie said again. He thought he sounded like his father. Ken looked at him, raising his eyebrows. “Turns out my son is not my son.”

Ken stared at him. “Repeat that,” he said, and Artie said, “It turns out my son had a different father. All these years I thought he was mine.”

Ken reached over and stopped Artie, who was about to poke at his salad with a fork. “Hold on,” Ken said. “Now just hold on and stop eating, for Christ’s sake. Your son is not your son?”

“That’s right.” Artie set the fork down and then put both his hands in his lap. Ken kept watching him, and Artie finally raised his red wine to his lips and took a sip, placing the glass carefully onto the white-clothed tabletop.

“Whoa. Whoa.” Ken stared at him.

And Artie told him the story.

Ken barely ate as Artie was talking; he looked straight at Artie the whole time. “I cannot believe this,” he finally said, and Artie said, “I know. Me neither. I thought that telling you would make it true.”