The book is “The Monk and the Philosopher: A Father and Son Discuss
the Meaning of Life,” recently translated into English (and 18
other languages) following enormous success in France. It records 10 days of
conversation between the renowned iconoclastic philosopher (author of
“Without Marx or Jesus,” “A History of Western Philosophy from Thales to
Kant” and
“Why Philosophers?”) and his son, a molecular biologist-turned-monk from an
inn high in the mountains of Nepal, overlooking Katmandu. The
dialogue — which collides scholarly rigor with spiritual exploration –
covers all the contemplative bases, from secular ethics to faith, science,
activism and even psychoanalysis.

Awaiting a presentation sponsored by Harper’s magazine at the UC-Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism that evening, the two Frenchmen spoke in their
hotel room about their U.S. tour. How — after New York, Boston and San Francisco — did they like Americans? “It is
more important how they like us,” Revel laughed, half seriously. Many
Americans, the men agreed, appeared to be interested for strange reasons.

“The idea of father and son, the sentimentalities — in Europe, it
doesn’t play much. Here it’s more important,” explained Ricard. In France,
he claimed, people buy the book for the ideas. But in America, the familial
element steeps the book in either sentimentality or conflict; more
compelling than a famous philosopher is the promise of another family drama.

“The [American] reporters always ask the same question: ‘How did I feel
when my son left for India?’” Revel mused.

But readers looking for drama will ultimately be disappointed. Ricard
and Revel present a radical departure from America’s archetypal father-son
relationships, and anyone hoping for either tension or tender displays of
affection will find the book Spartan in this regard.

From their quiet tones and careful manners, it’s evident that the two
transcended conversations about curfew long ago. They converse more as
colleagues than filial relations, patiently allowing each other to speak,
and responding with calmness, thought and occasional levity. “Kant was a
great thinker, but his style was worse than the [brochures] on United
Airlines,” quips Revel at one point. “Be careful — in America you might
be sued,” Ricard replies.

“Yes, maybe, I hope so.”

As an avowed opponent of “totalitarian systems of ideology,” Revel was
quick to express his wariness of prescriptive, totalistic visions like that
of his son’s Buddhism. Yet despite fundamental disagreements with Buddhist
principles — “the theoretical background of Buddhist wisdom seems to me
unproved and unprovable,” he writes — he concedes that he finds “very
striking similarities” between his son’s beliefs and “many aspects of Greek
philosophy” — the thinkers who have deeply influenced his worldview.

In contrast, Ricard invokes a down-to-earth ontology, grounding his
ethereal, transcendent views in colorful analogies. Pleasure without
happiness, he says, is “like a burning match, which has a tendency to
consume itself as it burns.” Serious but genial, Ricard emanates an air of
irreverence that seems to ease the snarl of life discussions.

For all the patience Revel and Ricard have mastered, their conversation
had its hitches. Listening to these two men, speaking across religions,
across generations, seriously pursuing a common belief in communication,
there is a poignant sense of ships passing in the night. No amount of
cooperation can reconcile two distinct ideologies at their most radical
divergences. No length of discussion can transcend what is, in the end, too
many words too vaguely defined. Nothingness, the self, truth — these
concepts simply reverberate within Buddhism and Western philosophy too
differently for resolution. One appreciates this book as one appreciates a
drop in a bucket.

And then there was the almost-empty bucket as it was presented at the
Harper’s forum. That evening, Feb. 26, the Berkeley journalism school hosted a panel discussion moderated by Harper’s editor Lewis
Lapham. Revel and Ricard, along with journalist (and Salon contributor) Christopher Hitchens; Rev. Mark
Richardson,
director of the Center for Theological and Natural Sciences; and J-school dean Orville Schell met before a full crowd of
journalism junkies, new agers, skeptics and Lapham lovers to air and
examine a few of the book’s conversations.

The discussion began calmly, with just enough academic panel-style
boredom to make it exciting. Lapham introduced the participants with his
trademark windiness, eventually relinquishing the floor to Revel. “We have
realized that we’ve ignored Eastern philosophy,” Revel said, going on to
trace the Western world’s “sudden and widespread interest in Buddhism.”
Speaking slightly more personally, Ricard framed his turn toward Buddhism
as less of a defection from the West than a continuation of a larger
passion he originally discovered in molecular biology — “an enthusiasm for
explaining external reality.” Ricard went on to articulate his distinction
between happiness and pleasure, suggesting that the West’s interest in
Buddhism might be related to the simple promise of increased happiness.

“Happiness should have a more lasting quality,” he said, “so that once
you have discovered within yourself this sort of inner peace, a sense of
fulfillment, a sense of meaning, it doesn’t really depend too much on
outer circumstances. Whether they are good or bad, we can somehow use
them.”

The panel responded. Schell, Lapham and Richardson weighed in with
words about harmony, peace and the search for meaning.

Finally it was Hitchens’ turn. He leaned back, ran a hand through his hair and hit the ground running: “Many of us … do not think that harmony is
the great goal, or unity or peacefulness, [and] actually quite like hard
questions for their own sake, and enjoy … the life of the mind. I just
thought if I didn’t say this, it’s just possible nobody would.”

Hitchens, who recently testified for Ken
Starr about the lunch-time Monica-laden commentary of his former friend,
Clinton aide Sidney Blumenthal, seemed anxious to confirm his contentious reputation. For all his
graceful British badinage, Hitchens played the part of American jackass to
an obnoxious T. As though parading his own notoriety, he spoke with
breathtakingly hostile resolve. He called reincarnation “a pathetic
belief,” nirvana of the mind “a kind of hell,” and to the
question of how to live responded, “by disagreement.” He was funny and caustic
and upset. He offered Buddhism little in the way of patient inquiry.

And yet Hitchens — disharmony incarnate — deserves a place in an
article about Revel and Ricard. Hitchens articulated the unspoken critique
hovering above their discourse; his was the voice pausing to ask, “Is this
even legitimate? Can this discussion occur?” While Revel may differ with
Ricard as consistently as Hitchens does, he has consented to a dialogue –
perhaps, for Hitchens, this is something like surrender. Perhaps the true
and stalwart cynic refuses to discuss, as he indeed did by the end of the
evening.

It’s unclear whether Hitchens was a wonderful or a terrible selection.
His was an entrenched, and arguably brave, resistance to the fuzzy vibe
floating above the panel discussion. His quasi-nihilism functioned as a perfect
foil to Ricard’s impassioned devotion, but then maybe a foil wasn’t in
order this time. Revel, despite profound disagreement with his son,
modeled his portion of the dialogue in a spirit of understanding and
curiosity, rather than one of antagonism and critique. On a strictly
pragmatic level, as both Hitchens and Revel would surely have it, the
former proved far more productive; not once did Revel refuse to answer a
question or address a point, not once did he substitute venom for
content.

Interestingly, Hitchens’ tight argument brought him more than once to
fifth century B.C. Athens. He admitted to this being his favorite universe,
and spoke of it with surprising warmth. It was here — citing Athens’
perfect ideology, its egalitarianism and freedom and beauty — that
a truth about Hitchens seemed to coalesce in the evening. From his love
for Classical Greece emerged, conversely, a kind of antipathy for the
modern world. At least for an evening, his sole investment in the
present day seemed to be the reveling in its failures, being the first
and wittiest to pull back the curtain here and there. This was not a man
to accept a tradition built upon faith. Ricard watched him
calmly, but with a funny look. Maybe the look said, “I pity you, you who
hate yourself and everyone else,” but maybe he was just looking.

“Do you disagree with everything, including yourself?” Ricard asked at
one point.

“Yes,” snapped Hitchens.

It had turned ugly. Revel, with his big red impressive face, looked
exhausted. Richardson looked angry. Ricard’s grin had faded, and Lapham
and Schell seemed uncertain as to whether all this was OK. The
audience, in its gentle Berkeley way, seemed on the verge of either riot
or a standing ovation.

But this worked. This was discord, and this was entertainment, and
pleasure, and something less than happiness. There was vindication in
the air for Ricard, had he been the man to appreciate vindication.
Hitchens was the cynic at the love-in, the joker at the moment of
silence, and people seemed to sense that all the wit in the world wouldn’t
get them anywhere deep. And while he may well have been the voice of
reason, the mind unwilling to be “blissed out,” as he once put it, by the
warm glow of
Ricard’s attractive, extra-rational vision, one couldn’t help picturing
him in his next life, a mean little ant, scurrying around in a roomful
of Buddhas.

This was music class. This was for freshmen, maybe sophomores. I was a
senior and an British major, feeling great, sad things about Proust and
graduating. I had found an exciting life in the English department,
sometimes in the philosophy department, the sublime and quick worlds
where life itself seemed to be under the microscope. Things that
mattered were what mattered. I had a half credit to fill.

Music class was not my life. It was far from things that had to do with
me. With its worksheets and quizzes, it seemed oblivious to the
classrooms across campus revering truth, or poking at it, forming words
for the sad, rich, best parts of life. It was a funny room with linoleum
floor, on the quiet end of school property near the woods, something
tacked on to my life at the edges.

But those days I was sometimes out at my own edges. Graduation hovered
nearby, its threat pulling me from the life I had and turning me back to look. Is this me? Is that me? What do I do? Sometimes I didn’t mind a music class looking out at flowers.

Mr. Rowe was English but not charming. He spoke earnestly and intently
but also stared off into space sometimes. He didn’t appear to be staring
at the idea of music. Usually it was a bee or a fly. He would stare and finally swat at it, or back away a little, then resume his lesson.

So he was fine, and good. He did not speak about things relevant to my
soul, so far as I could tell, but I learned my scales and chord
progressions. I enjoyed class the way stoners do in movies — the
pleasantness of sitting quietly, the joy of disengagement. In March, he
told the Tchaikovsky story. I liked it — the jumping, the cold, the
shallow, the pneumonia.

But in May he told it again. It was the last day of classes. He used the
same words and put the same pauses in the same places. Everyone in the
room seemed to feel the same question: Why is he saying this again? A
few students shrugged, some smirked. Mr. Rowe, if he noticed, paid no
mind. It was very much spring outside. He finished the story and soon we
were reviewing pentatonics. People stopped shrugging and smirking.
Still, his repetition of the anecdote — senility? a joke? a test? — had
given me pause. I looked out the window some more and then the semester
was over.

Grades came the following week and I received an A for the class. Surely
he’d seen that I was often elsewhere, that my attention was sincere but
peripheral. Surely he saw it because he was like this, too. There were
moments, after all — at the chalkboard, watching his own hand trace a
bass clef for the 2,000th time — when he, also, seemed to leave briefly.
He had bigger things in other places. Why is one at a chalkboard when
one is thinking of a symphony or a lover or a bee?

Walking home after getting my grades, I saw my mind wander. I thought
the things that people graduating think about. I looked at the campus
the way people graduating look at a campus. I ran into friends and we
walked and talked and worried some. I was with these friends when I ran
into Mr. Rowe near the library. He looked strange outside of the music
room, lost and small.

“Mr. Rowe,” I said. “Mr. Rowe.”

He stopped and looked around. I reminded him of my name and he shook my
hand. We discussed summer plans, him looking at his watch once or twice.

“Well,” I said. I looked at him and thought of him staring off into
space. There is comfort in a face that will launch itself into a
separate world now and then. Executed in the right way, it’s the brief lull of moments made simple. “I enjoyed your class.”

“Yes,” he said and smiled.

I caught up with my friends and we walked home. I told them about
Tchaikovsky, though I’d told them before, because it was a good story.
It had suspense, and intrigue, and closure. These are things that lift
one out of more complicated places — periods of confused futures, moments
of time passing too fast. I thought about how complicated places puff
themselves up, and how a twice-told story with a man in a shallow river
can be just pretty.

But also at 10, something happens. A thought arrives, a dogged stowaway
from the classroom looking for air. The thought is Everythought for the
recent grad — an idea puffed up and recondite involving Heidegger and
cubicles, or Woolf and bosses, maybe the meta-narration of data entry. It
flurries in like thoughts do, all quickness and excitement, that feeling
of being alive on a bike on a hill. Connections flash like a copy
machine but, suddenly, as suddenly as it appeared, the bike vanishes
behind a startling realization: I really ought to be filing.

If temping is anything, it’s structured time to think about temping.
Temps love nothing more than considering the nature of their non-career.
Me, I’ve even learned stats: More young people — and more college
grads — are punching the temp clock than ever before. Seventy-two percent of America’s
temp population is under 35, and the percentage of temps with a college
degree has risen from 33 percent in 1994 to 42 percent in 1997, according to a study
released in April by the National Association of Temporary and Staffing
Services. What’s more, one in five temps is currently enrolled
in school. Why are recent grads so enamored of the unstable and
short-lived? They’re not, a 1997 Department of Labor survey reveals: 59 percent
of all temps would prefer to have permanent, full-time work. So as a
growing number of ex-students clamor to find temp jobs they’d rather not
have, I wonder, between faxes and amid dictation, how this business
can be made more palatable.

The day slows down for a while and I’m free to wonder more. With the
rising popularity of a “blended work force” — corporate America’s cozy
term for an office temped to the gills — the structure of contingency
work could settle itself permanently into the ex-student’s life. More
and more, temp culture is spilling out of the cubicle and into the
world. And the Department of Labor’s numbers aren’t the only evidence of
overarching discontentment here; the proliferation of temp zines — Temp
Slave, Urban Tempo, Temp Tales — evinces a frustration that runs deeper
than grumbling ennui. The nation’s dispensable staff, indispensable in
our new global economy, is poking around for a new way of being.

From the temp rumor mill — we don’t do memos — comes word that some might
have found the new way of being. Zen, they say, can help us temps.
The being’s in the being. I imagine the inevitable Time article, something about Zen and
the Art of Employee Maintenance, but I am also curious. Throughout
California and even America, Zen priests are taking their show on the
road and into the office. They publish books, organize corporate
retreats and lead workshops at such high-stress venues as Mountain View (Calif.)
City Hall and Apple Computers. Zen is offering the possibility of
being in even the most tedious moments.

It’s noon now and I’d rather be being. I get into research mode and
make some long-distance calls on the company dime — if I’m going to work
for the man now and then, the least I can do is run up his phone bill.
For the next half hour, abbots, sitters and meditation center
receptionists spread the good word to me. They anticipate my little
skepticisms. If the politicians and geeks of City Hall and Apple seem
unlikely candidates for enlightenment, I’m told, think again. Zen, in
its various incarnations, makes room for everyone everywhere. Even
temps? I ask, glazing over the now-familiar photos tacked in front of
me: a dog, a man on a beach, two women laughing in cocktail dresses.
Even temps, they say.

Someone hands me a memo now. Five hundred copies, she says, lightly, and
I take a break from daydreaming. Five hundred. I wonder about my sense
of scale; is this job unhealthy? The copy machine jams, of course, and
my question is forgotten. I straighten a tray, extract some chewed
paper, restart the job, add paper when it runs out, watch it finish.
Where is the Zen?

Back at my desk, I learn it’s all over cyberspace. I shuffle around the
Internet. Most of a temp’s work amounts to shuffling around anyway. I
learn that Gerry Shishin Wick Sensei, director of software development
at Merriam-Webster, wants me to change. In his essay “Zen in the
Workplace: Approaches to Mindful Management,” Shishin Sensei urges
members of the work force to “see everybody as the Buddha,” “hear
everything as the dharma” and “reveal every place as nirvana.” I sort
of look and listen for a moment, then distribute faxes until 1:30.

By 2, a hasty lonely temp lunch over and forgotten, I’m filing again.
Numerical ordering leaves little brain space for thought. I no longer
wonder whether they do this on purpose; considering corporate conspiracy
is only one degree less boring than temping itself. Where is the Zen? I
ask, then remember I already asked that.

I talk to other temps now and then. We compare notes, anecdotes and on
our poorer days, salaries. These conversations have the grade school
feel of something illicit: What did you get for No. 3 on the social studies quiz? The temp
agencies don’t encourage our fraternizing and do their best to maintain
a team of strangers. When we do talk, it’s easy to see the ideas they
don’t want us getting. We are a people in need of a revolution, or at
least some good old-fashioned Eastern philosophy.

“The advantage of temping is that nothing matters,” former temp and
recent graduate Jessi Klein says. “The disadvantage: the unshakable
malaise that results from weeks of thinking that nothing matters.”

“It’s hard to get out of the school mentality of being the one who
creates, who designs. You’re demoted into this position where you have
no responsibility,” says Jed Livingston, who temped in London after
graduating. “In your most arrogant moments, you may feel like you’re the
smartest person there, but in other moments, you realize that this is a
completely different kind of thinking than you’re used to, and you
deserve to be where you are.”

If graduation inaugurates a kind of paradigm shift, temping condenses
this shift into a tidy, mind-numbing event: I’m not in school, I’m in
life, and I am my typing speed. Once the cultivated plunder of a good
liberal arts education, the headful of thoughts suddenly becomes a
hindrance in the copy room. Ideas, exiled from the intellectual sympathy
of the classroom, assume the ridiculous and naive air of luxury. They
are the blond who packed heels instead of sensible walking shoes. They
put 8,329,835 before 7,932,862.

From Shishin Sensei, we uncentered temps just might take a memo. I don’t
know if I’m shooting for enlightenment or just some temporary grounding,
but I could stand to resolve — or transcend — that inner tension that
seems to flex with every cup of coffee fetched. And the intersection of
Buddhism and temping may not be as far-fetched as it sounds. In many
ways, something like Zen is already structured into the temp lifestyle.

“I always felt like it was a desirable state of nothingness, my brain
congealed like a jello mold,” former temp Amy Standen says. “Temping is
something you just show up for: I’d leave a temp job exactly the same
as I started, as if the last eight hours had been spent in a coma.”

“When you start thinking about how you can possibly go on typing, you
distract yourself from that thought by typing a little more,” Livingston
says. “There were moments when I was in some sort of mindless state — a
half hour would pass by and I wouldn’t feel like a person, more like a
machine.”

But Zen, of course, is not about congealed brains and machinery. It’s a
way of cultivating an awareness of reality, my informants tell me, a
harmony. They are quick to correct the grinning idiot myth. Did college
cultivate an awareness of reality? I wonder. It cultivated something.
But those critical faculties honed over four years can end up too sharp
for temp success. Harmony for the temp requires a sublime dulling of
certain senses that college only refined. The happy worker, after all,
doesn’t cut through to the subtexts of a phone message, the double
meanings within a shipping invoice. In fact, Zen suggests, the happiest
temp, well, just temps.

With Zen I am to ask, “What is in front me,” to acknowledge only the
present. I look at the permanent employees around me, and the permanent
photos tacked in front of me. These people don’t seem to be calling Zen
priests. They seem content, or content in their discontent, or some
other nuanced way of being, but they aren’t complaining. Maybe temps are
whiners.

By 4:30 I’m winding down (ha!) and lining up tomorrow’s assignment. A
two-week position at an investment house falls through, but I get
something for a day at an ad agency. Do you mind working uptown? Jenny
from my agency asks. She’s perky. I’ll work anywhere, I say. Terrific,
she chirps. Now tell me your name one more time and we’ll be all set.

I call a couple more agencies in the remaining minutes of the workday. I
want to hear them talk about temping. They are places I’ve worked,
places for whom I’ve logged hundreds of hours, but to them I am a
stranger with strange questions. They answer like talk-show hosts, like
cheerful robots. They cannot fathom a dissatisfied temp.

“It’s just a great way for recent grads to gain exposure to certain
industries,” says Laurie Palau, staffing consultant at Advantage
Staffing in Manhattan. “We’re not looking to make people slaves.”

A staffing consultant from Best Temporaries in Washington, D.C., who
wished to remain anonymous, speaks of students-turned-temps with
equal confidence. “They’re definitely pretty satisfied, I’d say … They
stay with us for at least a few months, usually.”

I pack up at 5, shove some pens in my coat pocket and take one last
look around. My exit will go unnoticed, much like my presence over the
course of the day. That’s OK, I decide. What matters is what’s in
front of me. In front of me are the dog, and the man on the beach, and
the two women in cocktail dresses, all of them sort of winking at me.

My younger brother rehearses ninth-grade geometry like a parody of a bad
actor — all monotone, no recognition: rhombus parallelogram secant arc. A
sphere’s volume is 4/3 pi times radius squared. Cubed. Radius cubed. He
would like to hate his mistakes, I imagine, but he doesn’t believe what
he’s saying enough for that. He’ll take a quiz Monday, the first of 15 this
quarter. On the last quiz, 11 of the 25 answers he scribbled in were
wrong. On the quiz before that, 13. Before that, nine. I daydream about
patterns. I scrape at something on my shoe when he looks up, casual and
unconcerned scraping, but I consider F words: flounder, flightless,
flunking. My brother hands me index cards and I quiz him on formulas.

“You’ve got those down cold,” I say cheerfully after he stammers
through a dozen.

“I had them down cold last time,” he says. He sighs and sinks into the
couch. There’s a pen and he begins designs on his palm. I lose him for
the night.

I can’t sleep. I turn on the computer. It’s a habit. Or maybe I like
it. I don’t know. I would read but I dropped my book in the subway
tracks today. Someone jostled me and I thought Undo. Maybe I ought to lay off the computer for a while.

The Web site about Asian bondage boasts three galleries, each the
hardest core, the XXX nastiest, updated four times an hour. It’s quarter
till midnight, which means I’m looking at brand new Asians in brand new
bondage. I don’t know where the old ones went. They had their 15
minutes. Fans of porn like porn fresh. I click a couple places and there
is a woman spread like a star over black sheets. Each limb pulls out to
a bedpost, roped tight, and her face is saying no no no yes no. I have a
lot of questions. I click more places and more women pop up, tied down.
Sometimes someone’s having sex with them. Mostly they appear to be
waiting for me. I will disappoint them once again.

I’m visiting home for the weekend. I brought some clothes, a
toothbrush, my laptop computer and a book. Kevin is about to fail
geometry. My parents have hired a tutor and conferenced with the
teacher, but he’s shown no improvement. A symptom, I’m told in
confidence, in italics. Maybe you can, you know, talk to him while
you’re here.

My parents have something like a slouch about them lately. They look
like hell. They don’t joke about the neighbor’s lawn boy anymore or
fiddle over soufflé recipes after work — we have scrambled eggs a lot,
pretty quietly. Dinner is grim business. At the table earlier this
evening, I tried an impression of Jerry Lewis. Nobody really laughed.

“What’s that?” my father asked, salting his eggs.

“Jerry Lewis,” I said. “Jerry Lewis.”

“Oh. Oh, right.” He chuckled and salted.

A woman called Cherry Lewis can have sex with three men at once, and I
don’t mean one of them waits on the sidelines. She stars in a
three-photo series — “Series B3″ — performing this very feat. The three
suitors look mad as hell. Maybe they’ve had a hard life. They seem
content, though, to take it out on Cherry’s mouth, ass and vagina. She
doesn’t seem as content, but she doesn’t seem discontent either. For the
subject of a photo, she fades nicely into the furniture she occupies.
Cherry Lewis is a good name. Her hair is cherry red, of course, and
what’s more, how ironic to name a whore Cherry. There is a place in
pornography’s heart for irony. I once saw a Web page called Paradise Found — wasn’t this how we lost it in the first place?

The Net doesn’t always catch me and I retire for the night. In bed I
skim books with names like “Crying for Help,” “The Troubled Teen” and
“Please Hear Me.” The writers of these books want the world to understand
people like my brother. I try to learn their language. “Understand,” in
the parlance of understanders, means something like “accept.” From what I
gather, if you explain the Pythagorean theorem to these writers and they
say, “I understand,” what they mean is that they hear you and gladly accept
your desire to teach them. Reading these new rules, something embarrasses me. I wouldn’t want Kevin to know. I turn off the light and hide the books under my mattress.

At breakfast, for Kevin’s benefit, my father launches into infomercial
mode. It’s Saturday morning and his campaign for a weekend of studying
has begun. He’s taken the reins lately while my mother backs off. I
gulp some coffee and force myself to follow.

“What are you going to do today?” he asks me, intent as an anchorman.

“I thought I’d go to the library for a couple hours,” I reply, natural
as sunshine.

“Do you find it easier to get work done there?”

“Definitely,” I say. “It’s nice and quiet.”

“Sounds good,” he says, glancing my brother’s way for a reading. But
Kevin’s eyes have glazed over, staring at a squirrel out the kitchen window. He’s no simp — he can play a role, too, if necessary. It’s the part of the
wayward son, oblivious to absurd and condescending lessons in work
ethic. He won’t return until he’s ready, Saturday morning infomercials
notwithstanding. I admire his fortitude.

But this is not in my father’s script. Flustered, he moves in at a
different angle.

“Kevin,” he begins like a pal, “are you ready for that geometry quiz
Monday?”

“I guess.”

“Hmmm. It’s on proofs?”

“Proofs?” my brother asks.

“You know, what you were working on the other night. Weren’t those
proofs?”

“Proofs?”

I jump in. “Kevin, why don’t we go down to the park with the basketball
later? Around 2 o’clock maybe?”

“OK,” he says. “They just put new nets up.”

“Good,” I say and clear my plate. The squirrel outside notices us and
stares. His black eyes seem to bug out of his head.

“Maybe I’ll go to the library for a while until then,” Kevin says and
finishes his pancake. My father, I imagine, thanks some god.

The Fletcher County Library, I discover, has been remodeled. The
unimposing brick building I knew as a child is missing, and in its place
I find a sort of geodesic Plexiglas book center. There are weird chairs.
There are 15 computers. There are ergonomic reading desks facing giant
windows, behind which wave daffodils and impressively green grass. In
the old library, cafeteria-style tables lined an ugly beige windowless
wall: One read. I see two kids running through the biography section.
The first, it seems, has a note that the second wants. Some books get
knocked off their shelves.

“How often do you do your work here?” I ask Kevin. Perhaps — I fantasize the instant before his answer — the problem is but a matter of work environment. Who could possibly calculate circumferences in a funhouse
like this? The solution was so simple, I imagine him chuckling to his
former teachers years from now, gathered around him in appreciation of
his slow-starting but unparalleled success, “I was studying at the wrong
library.”

But these fantasies never pan out. “I hardly ever study here,” Kevin
answers, picking up the books that were knocked over. “It’s kind of hard
to concentrate.”

We manage to concentrate, finding a
secluded little hideaway in a
corner. For the next hour, I deliver a silent lesson in discipline,
veiled of course; for me, even our most relaxed moments together these
days are shamefully calculated. Kevin flips through his geometry
textbook while I write letters. I try not to worry about whether he’s
flipping too fast. At noon, he announces he’s left an important notebook
at home. Can you study without it? I ask. No. We go back home.

In the afternoon we play basketball. Kevin plays hard. I take comfort
in his commitment to winning, however brief. I play hard in return; he
can smell a thrown game a mile away. My shots are on, his aren’t so
much. He takes it bad. Dear God, please let him believe in himself. Once
he misses a layup and mutters, fuck, not quietly. I don’t get it.

- – - – - – - – - -

Back home, we sit around for a while and drink juice. Kevin thumbs
through the yellow pages.

“What are you looking for?” my father asks.

“Just looking.”

My father turns to me. He wants sympathy and solidarity plus a little
company: two perplexed souls shaking their heads. His face wants my face
to explain this boy for whom the absurd is often more compelling than
the real. But I clean away all expression. I don’t want to fall into
this.

After the yellow pages, my father wanders off and Kevin puts in 45
minutes with the geometry textbook. I sit beside him. I answer what I
can, he asks what he can. We discuss triangles. Not knowing where the
real problem is, he can only offer token questions. None gets at the
heart of anything, but we manage to make our way through the weekend’s
homework. At one point, I hear steps outside the door. They’re my
father’s, I know, and for an instant I squeeze my pencil and pray that
he not come in. I can tell Kevin is praying the same. Don’t come check
on his progress, I plead in my head, don’t even offer to turn another
light on; we’re getting somewhere. The steps linger but move on.
Kevin’s relief is clear, though he doesn’t say anything. We get back to
the math and eventually finish all 30 problems. His teacher’s assigned a
bonus question, something about planes, but Kevin leaves it. I can’t
solve her problems for her, he says, and I decide it’s probably good to
have a sense of humor about it all.

“Good work,” I say. It’s better to encourage, I’ve decided, than worry
about whether it sounds like I’m talking to a dog. I punch him lightly
on the knee and get up to find a book of my own. As I’m leaving the
room, a couch pillow hits me in the back.

“You just threw a pillow at the wrong guy, buddy.”

I turn. A second pillow hits me in the head.

“You just threw a second pillow at the wrong guy, buddy.”

I pull him off the couch mid-giggle and we’re at it like old times.
He’s gotten stronger, but I manage to get him in a half nelson. The half
nelson has been the terminus of every roughhouse we’ve ever conducted.
Shall we dance? I ask him for the 1,000th time in our lives. He declines
demurely and I release him back to the couch.

“I tried reading the Bible last night,” he says as we catch our breath.
“I got through Genesis.”

“When did you get so bored?”

“I didn’t like the fall of man stuff,” he says, ignoring my question.
“It seems like a weird way of explaining things.”

“The fall of man,” I say. “I used to think it was poetry. I thought
they meant the autumn of man.”

Kevin smiles. I can tell he likes the autumn of man, at least as much
as a 14-year-old can like something he can’t point to. I laugh at
something too, and punch him on the knee, and go to find a book
of my own.

The books in my parents’ shelves look wrong — old, but not old enough. I feel fussy. They are about politics or parenting or French spies. They
give the impression of all having the same ugly cover, the way all cars
from the 1970s seem brown and dented. A book, I’ve learned, is about
the only thing you can judge by its cover. I grab a couple but head
downstairs to the computer.

Checking my e-mail I find a letter from SuziExtreme@hottail.com. She’s
written to tell me about a Web site featuring her giant tits. She’s
probably written to a million guys like me, or a million guys
different from me, but I’m not offended. Nor am I offended that these
people have used their tech sense to figure out my e-mail address. One
visit to a Web site, I’ve been told, and they mark you. For all I know,
they have access to every file on my computer. Still, one’s capacity for
outrage abates looking up a bound teen’s skirt. Can I really complain
about my privacy?

To visit SuziExtreme’s site for her giant tits, of all the giant tits
in cyberspace, is like going to the Redwoods to see a particularly tall
tree. I go, but only because I was invited. Despite my better judgment,
a part of me worries no one will show up to see her naked. I picture her
putting her pants back on after a while, sheepishly, quickly, more
embarrassed than when she took them off.

SuziExtreme, it turns out, doesn’t exist. The site bearing her name
instead contains photos of women named Racquel, Samantha and Julee.
There are always choices in these places, such a funny occasion for
pluralism. I click on a miniature picture of Julee that promises a
larger one. Some whirrings and the promise is kept. Julee’s feet and
legs float askew, thrown up haphazard, a dramatic flail about them:
She’s falling. Not literally, of course — her back is square on a shag
carpet — this is a reenactment, a dramatization of the fall. The picture
gives no clue from where. And maybe in the end, this is where the porn
lover gets his true kicks: One could imagine any number of heights from
which she fell, or was pushed, or jumped. For all that these shots don’t
leave to the imagination, after all, the connoisseur must still provide
context. Without an invented narrative — even the tacit and uncomplicated
kind — a penis inside a vagina is just a penis inside a vagina, flesh
frozen two-dimensionally in a moment the viewer can never penetrate.

So he imagines the fall. She was a cheerleader, a nurse, a next door
neighbor, a teacher. She was upright, virtuous, chaste, pure. She
flitted girlishly about a world that spun far above the lair of Internet
perverts. But she was also other things: the virgin-whore, the tease,
the coed too innocent to remember underwear. She didn’t see it coming,
perhaps, but felt it when it came. And when it came, when gravity clawed
her body down at 9.8 meters per second, when her own weight
sent her floor-ward all the faster, a man with a digital camera made
sure she never landed.

It’s little comfort that my porn fascination is not really about sex, if there’s even such a thing as not really about sex. I don’t want to be one of those men for whom it is a cultural artifact. I’d rather read a book. Still, these days I turn on the computer and, so often, end up in terrible, weird places. Soon, I know, the disgust that overwhelms me after five minutes in these places will occur before I even get there. I will outgrow this phase and remember it with uncertainty and complicated theories.

The computer off, I go to find something else to do. My father stops me
at the stairs. His face is sad and thin, I notice suddenly, like a man’s
rather than a dad’s. He looks to me again for something. I don’t know
how to give it. I start to tell him not to worry too much, the old advice
standby, but he interrupts.

“He’s my child,” he says. “What else am I going to do?”

“Maybe he needs to hit rock bottom,” I suggest. This little gem is just
as insipid, but maybe with a teen you can’t stray from insipid. What am
I even talking about? I ask myself, having caught this last thought. I’m
in over my head.

“When’s rock bottom? When’s that?” he asks, but I’m already on my way
up the stairs. I can’t solve his problems for him, I think. I leave him
standing there.

We all have dinner together later, a soup I’ve cooked, plus salad, and
we talk about the weather. It’s October, the autumn of man, and outside
another squirrel is rustling around in some bright yellow leaves.
There’s a breeze. We agree it’s a very good season.

“Maybe I’ll be a weatherman when I grow up,” Kevin says. He’s in a good
mood.

My father wants to say you’ll have to pass the ninth grade, but he
refrains. I pour him more soup as a reward.

“I think you’d be a very good weatherman,” my mom says, back in the
game. “You already have that plaid jacket.”

After dinner, we disperse. I double-check the Greyhound schedule and
make plans with friends back in New York. They ask how my homecoming
went. I say the home team’s not doing so hot. Season’s not over, they
offer. No one likes talking about family.

I turn on the computer but turn it off. I remember the first instance
of pornography in my life. I was 10 and I found a torn ad on the way
home from school. The ad, announcing the opening of a strip club
somewhere, featured a naked dancer facing the camera. She had a big
forced smile that made her look sick. See Me Live, it said in big
letters near her mouth. I misread it at first: as a plea for someone to witness her living.

Kevin wanders into my room and it’s nice to see a real person.

“What were you doing?” he asks.

“Thinking. How about you?”

“Same, I guess. Thinking never feels like thinking, though.”

“That’s true,” I say. We’re formal and stiff sometimes. All those
half nelsons, but we’re formal and stiff sometimes.

“Well, I guess I’d better study some more.”

“I don’t know — maybe you should take the night off. You shouldn’t kill
yourself over this stuff.”

“Yeah,” he says. “But I think I’d better study some more.”

“All right. Good luck, then.”

“Thanks for helping with my homework earlier.”

“Don’t be silly.”

“All right. Well, I guess I’ll see you in a while.”

“November,” I say. “I’ll be back for Thanksgiving, if not sooner.”

I decide not to say good luck on the quiz. He says to hug him goodbye
in the morning and I promise to. He goes off to work. I sit there a
minute, then pick up one of the books I took from my parents’ shelf.
It’s a thriller. It promises a tidy and sensible roundup of everything
by the last page. I stretch out and start reading. By the third page
someone’s stabbed. By the ninth page I’m struggling to pay attention.

Some time later, a heavy book shuts in Kevin’s room, snapping me a
little more awake. Julee, with her crazy fake name, pops into my head.
Those girls aren’t falling, I know. To believe they are is to hide from
a scarier truth: There’s no such thing as falling. There are no heights
to account for differences within us, no falls to explain what is profane or just sad in the angles of someone’s life. Nothing quite makes sense of a voice begging See Me Live. Things are arranged laterally and loosely, one big unreasonable plane, with shapes pressed flat and not always connected to each other.