Q: A Love Story. Evan Mandery

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СКАЧАТЬ doubt originates in high school. My parents move from Brooklyn to Long Island the summer after ninth grade and I am forced to change schools. I don’t know anyone at the new school. I spend most of tenth grade trying to make friends, with limited luck, and trying to meet girls, with no success at all. Then, miraculously, on the last day of school, Amy Weiss and Rebecca Perlstein independently invite me to go to the beach. I glide home only to notice that my psoriasis has become enflamed. I cannot imagine how anything like this could happen by coincidence and conclude that everyone around me, including my friends and parents, are automatons, characters in the play that is my life.

      I begin to note similarities in appearance between ostensibly unrelated individuals like Mr. Mudwinder, my calculus teacher, and the guy who gives out the shoes at the local bowling alley. Some figures appear to be recycled. The boy who delivers our Newsday bears a close resemblance to one of my old camp counselors. The guy who runs the hot dog cart outside our high school looks eerily like my second cousin Zelda’s first husband. From this evidence I conclude that the Grand Manipulator has only a finite number of robot models at his disposal. I only waver from my complete conviction in this belief when I read, many years later, that a quarter of the planet is descended from Genghis Khan. Still, I think my hypothesis is just as likely to be true as not. Often when I walk to school or work, I wave to the imaginary audience that I envision to be observing my life.

      I am enormously disappointed when these metaphysical anxieties later become, more or less, the plot of The Truman Show. This suggests that I am not the only person to wonder about the possibility of a contrived existence. Sure enough, as I enter university and my intellectual horizons broaden, I learn that this idea has occurred to many people, including Ludwig Wittgenstein, Woody Allen, Kurt Vonnegut, and Bob Barker. At first blush, it seems implausible that if life had indeed been orchestrated as an elaborate deception of me, that the planet would be sprinkled with philosophers, satirists, and game show hosts asking the very same sort of questions that I myself am asking. Upon further reflection, though, I conclude that this might itself be part of the deception, the sort of misdirection that the shrewdest of puppeteers would employ.

      So, over the course of my young adulthood, I search unceasingly for examples of inconsistencies that could expose the fraud. I scrutinize the comments of my friends to see whether they reveal facts that they could not have known, search for bargains that are too good to be true, and, of course, keep a sharp eye out for recurrences of the visage of my calculus teacher, Mr. Mudwinder.

      I find no hard evidence to support my suspicions but nevertheless remain leery. Optimists confuse me. How could Evel Knievel and Amelia Earhart think for even a moment that they would make it? People with religious conviction make no sense to me whatsoever, except the Baptists, who seem resigned to enduring the worst that life has to offer. I am especially mistrustful of other Christians, particularly Jehovah’s Witnesses, Mormons, and those insufferable Quakers, who maintain an unrelenting faith in the positive direction of life that seems, to me at least, fundamentally incompatible with independent, rational thought.

      It was with this sensibility and experience, call it expertise if you will, that I set out to evaluate I-60’s authenticity and investigate the possible fraud. Following our dinner at Bouley, I clandestinely follow I-60 to his hotel and determine that he is staying at the W. This is further cause for suspicion. W’s are swanky, and the one in midtown is as nice as they come. How can I-60 afford such luxurious accommodations on what he professes to be a limited budget? Standing on Forty-ninth Street, off the side entrance of the hotel, I develop a plan to resolve my doubts about I-60 one way or the other once and for all.

      The following morning, I rise early and return to the W. It is not a teaching day, and I am free. I stand again on the corner of Forty-ninth and Lexington and wait for I-60. He emerges just after seven thirty, on his way for a run. After he jogs off, I enter the hotel lobby and tell the concierge that I have forgotten my key. He asks for identification. I hand him my driver’s license. Fortunately he does not scrutinize the photograph. He simply hands me a plastic key card.

      “You have to forgive me,” I say, “but I have also forgotten my room number.”

      “Room 609,” he says. “Make a right turn after exiting the elevator.”

      I head up to the room and take a quick spin through I-60’s things. Nothing is out of the ordinary. He has traveled light. Aside from the running outfit, which he is wearing now, he has packed two sets of clothes: two pairs of socks, two pairs of underwear, two shirts, and two pairs of pants, one nice, one casual.

      The new trousers are unfamiliar to me, but the latter pair I know. These are my favorite pants, have been for years. My grandfather used to wear brown corduroys, so I have always had a thing for them, and this pair from Eddie Bauer fit just right from the very first day. These are the pants I put on when I want to feel better after a rough day or when I am settling in to watch a big game or when I am about to do something difficult or important.

      I am wearing them now.

      His are more faded than mine. The cuffs have frayed, and the waist button has been sewn on too many times, perhaps let out a little bit over the years. But it is undeniable that these are my pants.

      Suddenly, I become conscious of the time. Who knows how long a sixty-year-old can run? I take a look out the window, note that the room faces Lexington Avenue, and make a quick exit from the room. Downstairs, I walk out the side door and across the street to the Marriott, where I inquire about a room. I tell the desk clerk that I would like a unit facing Lexington Avenue. They can accommodate me, he says, though check-in will not be possible until later in the afternoon. This is fine; I don’t intend to check in until the next morning, but the room is expensive, which gives me pause. Happily I am able to use frequent-flier miles and redeem a coupon for a second night. I book the room, return home, and wait for Q.

      She is frazzled when she gets home from work. The battle for survival of the garden has become more serious, she tells me. The prospective developer is asking the city to take the property on which the garden sits by eminent domain so that the massive skyscraper can be erected.

      “The mayor will never go for that,” I say.

      “He may,” says Q. “We still don’t know the true identity of this developer, but whoever it is, he or she has good connections. Our initial calls to city councilors were discouraging. The project has political momentum.”

      “What are you going to do?”

      “I don’t know. We’re starting to have meetings about it.”

      “Good.”

      “Can you help?”

      “I’d be happy to do whatever I can.”

      “Thank you,” she says, as she gives me a kiss. “It means a lot to have your support.”

      I tell Q that a good friend of mine from high school is visiting from out of town. “We’re going to spend the day together tomorrow and have dinner in the evening. I might be home a bit late.”

      I might not be so understanding of Q spending a night on the town with a mysterious friend, but she simply says, “Fine” and “Have fun” and returns to reading her copy of Keepin’ It Relleno: The Complete Guide to Chili Pepper Farming and Organic Political Advocacy.

      Nothing bothers Q. She is undemanding and generous and accepting of others, qualities to which I cannot relate.

      In the morning, around six o’clock, after Q has left for the garden, I head over to the Marriott. I take with me a pair of binoculars, which Joan Deveril bought me for a СКАЧАТЬ