“I sing,” Walter interjected from a chair amongst the clutter of Shoop Shoop Records, where the owner had been letting him come by with some regularity in the months that followed his final show. Walter would leaf through books on learning guitar and futz around with a couple of the second-hand instruments they nearly never sold. Until one day there was a tall man leaning across the front counter talking with the store clerk about his band, The Chadwicks. He called them Neo-Krautrock.
The tall man, Chico, played electric guitar.
His wife, Shelly, played drums.
But their singer, Marvin Chadwick, had recently left the group due to what they had decided to call “creative differences.” But in actuality, he was a drug addict who had repeatedly lowered what Chico and Shelly had been certain was his bottom until they just couldn’t take it anymore.
Walter’s two words lifted the tall man from the counter. He lowered his serious but vacant gaze onto Walter, guitar in lap and open book at his feet.
“Ok,” he said, after a moment. “Let’s do it.”
A few weeks in, Walter arrived at The Chadwicks’ rehearsal space to find it locked.
He waited on the stoop for two hours.
It was actually a rather beautiful day, perfect for spending outside and on such a perfectly shady street corner, but after fifteen minutes of such beauty Walter started to get annoyed.
Just as he was about to leave, Chico finally drove up in a borrowed van, walked right past Walter without so much as a word or a glance, unlocked the rehearsal space, and walked inside.
As Walter stood up and started inside, Chico came right back out the door carrying some of the band’s modest gear, which he loaded into the back of the van.
“What’s up, Chico?” asked Walter as Chico returned for his second trip back inside.
“Shelly and I are splitting up,” Chico answered, head down and eyes averted.
“What? Why?”
“No love there anymore,” Chico shrugged as he disappeared inside.
“But I never see you guys fight or anything,” Walter conjectured when he reemerged carrying a speaker.
“Exactly,” Chico stopped, set the speaker down, and looked uncomfortably at Walter. “When you can’t communicate at even the basest level so as to be able to disagree, you stunt the emotional growth of your union, man. And everything just settles into a ho-hum, passionless state of pure utility. And love can’t grow there. So it wilts and dies.”
This was a much more insightful answer than Walter had been expecting from Chico and he wasn’t quite able to conjure a comparably respectable response. The best he could manage was, “Wow, man. It’s really over?”
Chico half-nodded and went right back about his business.
“What about the band?” Walter called after him.
“No band,” Chico said, cold, flat, and simple.
“What do you mean?” asked Walter.
But Chico clearly did not feel there was anything more to explain, continuing to load up the van in silence. Walter couldn’t think of anything else to say right now, either. So he shuffled into the rehearsal space, grabbed some equipment, and carried it out to the van.
The two men went on like this in silence until all that was left was a single acoustic guitar leaning against the near wall of the otherwise empty space. “What about this?” Walter asked.
“Don’t want it,” Chico replied. “It’s hers.”
“Doesn’t she want it?”
“Don’t care anymore,” Chico explained. “If she wants it, she can get it.”
He then climbed into the van, sparked the engine to labor its way on, and pulled off.
He stuck an arm out the window as he went, a lazy sort of wave. “Later, singer,” he called out.
Shelly never came by to pick up her guitar, so Walter adopted it as his own. He began practicing with it at Shoop Shoop Records. Until one day, when Walter arrived to find a band setting up in the back corner of the already cramped, unkempt store. By the time they were ready to start, Walter and the store clerk represented the sum total of the crowd, a detail that seemed all but irrelevant to four of the five band members crammed onto the modest, makeshift riser that was to serve as their stage. But the fifth man, holding a microphone in his hand, stared out into the empty rows of cluttered merchandise with quite a bit of consternation upon his face.
“I can’t do all of this for nothing,” the man mumbled just loud enough for Walter to make out before gently handing the mic to the bass player, actually putting both hands around his bandmate’s hand to make sure the mic didn’t drop. Then he hopped the two feet down from the riser. And he left.
“I’m a singer,” Walter approached the stage and explained as the band packed up their gear while apologizing to the store clerk. “I can sing.”
The band members looked at one another. A few of them shrugged. And two days later, Walter was rehearsing with Pimplenickel.
Pimplenickel was sort of a moody, atmospheric band. They referred to their sound as Almost-Emo and thought this was an exceedingly clever tag. They shared nearly nothing in common with The Chadwicks. The members of Pimplenickel wore slacks and sweaters. They debated topics they heard on NPR. They ate a lot of salads. A lot of them had girlfriends. One of them was gay. They shared a passion for world music. They also shared a mutual and deep love of Jim Croce. Most of the members of Pimplenickel had gone to college together. They were all quite civil towards one another, their arguments mostly about philosophical implications of decisions as they pertained to the band.
Walter’s first live show with Pimplenickel was one week and all of two rehearsals later. Granted, the show proved little more than a third rehearsal, albeit in a foreign environment, since there was no one at Chubby’s Bar on a Monday night except for a handful of regulars who heard the music, sure, but most certainly were not listening to it. The gig was still a real joy for Walter. But he kept this to himself since the band as a whole seemed pretty deflated by the entire experience. They had paid thirty dollars against revenues from the door to perform there. They had all agreed it was a no-brainer they would make their money back. They had all been wrong.
A few months later, Pimplenickel dissolved. No dramatic explosion. No colossal breakdown. Just a gradual deadening that had begun long before Walter had joined the band but only now revealed itself to have gotten too heavy to avoid any longer. Just like they did everything else, they split amicably. Maynard, the lead guitarist, decided to move on to a solo project. Emma Jane, the drummer, had been itching for some time to get out of town for New York or Los Angeles. Walter never found out which one she decided upon. Paul, the keyboardist, got into law school. And that just left Julius, the bass player to whom the former lead singer had so gingerly handed the microphone that day not all that long ago at Shoop Shoop Records. Julius wasn’t really moving on to anything, but he simply saw no point in arguing for a continued union in which so many parties were no longer interested. Walter had actually forged a bit of a friendship with Julius, crashing on his bandmate’s modest couch a few times when inclement weather drove him to seek shelter from Mayne Ridge Park. The two would get to chatting these nights. Not about much of any particular depth or specificity. But Walter found a sort of kinship there. He liked Julius. He found the guy quiet, practical, and smart. All admirable and pleasant things, in Walter’s estimation. Not hugely rock ’n’ roll per se, but in the context of what lately had proven the incessantly wayward direction of Walter’s life, these traits took on an irreverence of their own. So Walter pitched the idea that the two men start a band.
And a few conversations later, Knucklechuckle was born.
Knucklechuckle’s early rehearsals were little more than meandering musical explorations, loose noise sessions that eventually found their way into something that sounded maybe like the kernels of pop songs. One day Julius off-handedly declared that Knucklechuckle needed at least ten songs before they were really ready to gig.
Walter, equally off-handedly, agreed.
Knucklechuckle, they decided, would be all about energy. Getting people moving. Power pop. But with an underlying weight that seeped out of the irony of the lyrics. Not that they had really written any lyrics yet. That wasn’t Julius’ thing. And Walter had some basic ideas, but nothing he had fleshed out. One of his ideas was for a song he called “My Career in Sales.” It fit nicely with one of the riffs they had created during rehearsal. But all of his lyrics just kind of lay there flat. Words about bars of soap and ironing boards, and nothing more than that at all, really. He wanted the song to be about more than just literal details. He wanted it to transcend the mere breathlessness of selling irons to a Motor Lodge Inn in Dubuque, Iowa. He wanted it to be about the foundational and seemingly terminal mismatch of a man’s outward circumstances with his soul. But he just couldn’t figure out how to get that into the words. He kept at it, though, opting to believe in his deepest heart and contrary to any evidence to such end, that somehow he would find his way to the bigger song he sought.
Then came the job offer.
“It’s another interest of mine,” Julius explained, but to Walter it sounded a bit more like insisting. “And it pays pretty well.”
“What about the band?” Walter insisted right back, although to Julius it sounded a bit more like asking.
“Are we really a band, anyway?” Julius casually dismissed.
“Yes!” Walter shot back. “What else would we be?”
“I mean, a band plays shows. A band has fans.”
“Not necessarily.”
“A band is…” Julius trailed off.
“A band is us,” Walter answered what Julius had not finished.
But Julius just sort of crinkled his brow and pursed his lips before offering, “You can still crash here, if that’s a thing…”
“That’s not a thing,” Walter snapped. “This is about the band.”
“I gotta take this job, Walter. I need to do more than just…” Julius motioned to the surrounding apartment, “…this.”
“All of the sudden you’re fucking ambitious,” Walter scoffed as he gathered his things and headed for the door.
Walter slid $200 underneath the thick, plastic window that protected the ticket agent from the outside world. The agent slid a paper ticket and change back. Walter climbed onto the 9:17 p.m. train to Cambridge, placing his guitar, whom he had named Millie, into the overhead storage space right atop him. He found a seat against the window, wadded up a shirt, and propped it as a pillow against the glass. He closed his eyes. But he worried about someone walking off with Millie.
So he took her down and propped her on the ground in between his feet.
He closed his eyes again and trailed off to sleep until the train jolted into motion ten minutes later and jarred him awake.
“Aren’t you that guy?” a woman’s voice stopped to ask Walter at the very same moment.
He looked up to find an auburn-haired woman bobbing in the aisle beside him.
“I don’t think so,” Walter answered, unsure as to which guy, exactly, she was referring but nevertheless uninterested in identifying with whichever one she had in mind anyway.
“My friend showed me your site. She saw you play once,” she explained. “Are you touring again?”
“No,” Walter said flatly. “That was another person.”
“She said your music was beautiful.”
Walter offered a slight smile before explaining, “That’s kind of her. But that’s not me.”
The woman walked on, casting several glances back over her shoulder as she went, her infatuation seeming to merely deepen with each of Walter’s denials.
The knock of the train quickly settled Walter right back to sleep.
When Walter woke up two hours later, the woman was seated across the aisle from him.
She gave him a few seconds to stir before leaning in and asking, “How far are you going?”
Walter, still out of sorts, wasn’t able to conjure any sort of reply yet.
“I’m going to Hartford,” she answered Walter’s unasked question before extending her hand. “I’m Eleanor.”
That name seemed so very long ago to Walter. Nevertheless, he reached out and shook her hand. “Walter,” he said before thinking better of doing so.
“She said that would be your name,” Eleanor explained. “I called her to ask. She wants to know when you’re going to play again.”
“Look… Eleanor…” Walter struggled to say, the name odd across his lips. “Can I call you something else?”
Eleanor grimaced, understandably confused.
“I knew someone,” Walter explained. “I’d just as soon not revisit the whole thing.”
“My middle name is Liza,” Eleanor nodded, smiled, and shrugged all at once.
“Liza,” Walter said in affirmation. “Look, I’m really not the person your friend thinks I am.”
“I just really admire the ideals you stand for,” Liza went on, unflappably adhering to her presumptuous, secondhand opinions of a man whom she seemed to forget was in actuality a total stranger to her.
Walter could see this was pointless.
Liza could see that Walter, for some strange reason, thought this was pointless.
“Don’t you want me to like your music?” she asked.
“I’m not exactly making music anymore,” Walter explained.
“But you can’t stop,” Liza gasped.
“If I can find the right band, maybe. But you’ve never even heard me perform.”
“Exactly. I want to.”
Walter fell silent. So Liza fell silent, too.
But he could tell from her expectant and unyielding gaze that she had no intention whatsoever of abandoning their conversation. “Look,” he offered up, “if we’re going to talk, can we at least talk about something else?”
She struggled with this mightily, a deep scowl overtaking her whole face and seeping into her posture. But eventually she conceded and launched into the first of several inconsequential and nonlinear topics from which the following mostly irrelevant information emerged…
She was an artist. She came from a family of artists. She had no concrete application of this art. Some sculpture, some installation, some fashion, some graphic design. In similar measure, she hadn’t much of a concrete direction to her life. But she suspected that she wanted one. Something more stable than the hybridized life she’d been living for almost a decade now. She had a cat. Wanted a dog, but wasn’t home enough. She felt great affection for her father. She had some half-siblings or step-siblings or both. And a stepfather she was quite fond of as well. She liked strong colors. By way of example, she pointed out that she was wearing bright blue tights underneath a vibrant yellow skirt. Colors that, Walter presumed, she must have considered strong. She went to art openings, enjoyed the scene. She liked movies but she was coming to them only recently in her life and hadn’t seen several staples of the art form.
It was cold as fuck outside the Back Bay train station at 1:00 a.m. when the train arrived. Walter pulled out some layers from his bag and bundled up, but it only marginally helped.
So he went back inside the station.
He would walk the five miles to Cambridge in the morning.
He found a bench. He reclined, putting Millie and his bag underneath the crook in his knees. He knew he wouldn’t sleep. He wasn’t tired and Millie would keep him unsettled. He stared up at the ceiling for a good solid ten minutes before he struggled to come up with something to do to pass the time. Walter rummaged through a nearby trashcan for a scrap of paper, which he found. He returned to the bench, and started to scribble.
In the morning it was still fucking cold.
So he tried not to think about it as he walked the odd, meandering, un-straight streets of the city. He tried not to think about anything. Not about the layers of clothes he had on. Not about how the deepest parts of his pockets were, for some reason, the warmest. Not about how unbearably early in the morning it still was. Not about Chico, or Shelly, or Chico and Shelly. Not about Julius. Definitely not about Mark Clark. Not about how much longer it must be to Cambridge.
“Excuse me,” said Walter, his nose and hands still stinging from the cold as he peered into the first open office door he could find in the building he’d been directed towards, “but do you happen to be familiar with a small, kind-of-unusual looking savant genius who goes to school here?”
A tired-looking woman, whom Walter figured for late sixties, looked up from a slightly mussed desk, her dire face suddenly lightening with a smile. “You mean Wallace Braum?” she asked.
Walter presumed that Wallace must not have needed to assume an alternate identity after all. This apparent truth brought with it a surprising amount of unexpected disappointment.
“Yes,” Walter answered. “Wallace Braum.”
“And who are you?” the woman asked, a scowl threatening to replace her smile.
“Me?” replied Walter. “I’m his brother.”
The woman sharpened her glare on Walter’s face a moment before simultaneously standing and lighting up. “Come with me,” she instructed as she passed by Walter, wrapping her hand around his wrist and pulling him out of her office. She steered him down the hall, peering back at him every several clopping steps with an almost mischievously inquisitive glance. At the end of the hall, she opened a door like any other and brought Walter outside, across a courtyard, and into a second building. Once inside she opened another door like any other and pulled Walter into a lecture hall like any other with tiered seating sloping down toward a most distinct, round-postured, and frail gray man in a navy-blue cotton suit and a red bow tie. The expanse of seats were but speckled with ten, maybe twelve, bodies, the head on each turning now to define the disturbance coming down the stairs.
“Benjamin,” said the woman towing Walter. “You’ll never guess.”
The brittle-looking man at the front of the room, whom Walter now figured for Benjamin, peered up from his lecture notes and stared, mouth agape and eyes confused.
“Benjamin,” the woman repeated. “It’s Nancy. You’ll never guess who has come to campus.”
“What?” barked Benjamin, still not able to assign even so much as a loose context to the nature of this unexpected occurrence.
By now they had reached the front of the room and the woman placed Walter but a foot in front of Benjamin, which was apparently the range at which his vision was sharpest as only now did he seem to fully understand that outsiders had entered his classroom. “I’m in class, Nancy,” he complained bitterly.
“But someone very special has come to campus,” Nancy explained for a third time.
Benjamin focused his gaze intently upon Walter now, but his bewilderment did not budge.
“Who are you, then?” he demanded accusatorily.
“This,” Nancy answered, “is Wallace’s brother.”
This simple bit of information lit up Benjamin’s face instantly, all of the heretofore seemingly permanent creases proving quite contrarily near weightless as they lifted into an expansively broad smile. At the very same instant a sound emanated from the man’s mouth, a noise somewhere between an “oh” and a warm, relaxed sigh. Benjamin reached up then and put both of his shaky, jagged, freezing cold hands onto Walter, one on his shoulder and one patting the side of his face.
As though they could sit idly by no longer, the entire class began applauding.
“Hello there, boy,” Benjamin said, pulling himself forward and into Walter and Walter forward and into himself, the two men meeting awkwardly in the middle in a tentative hug. “How are you?”
While Walter had absolutely no idea what the hell was going on, he nevertheless presumed that there was really no other way to react to a frail old man hugging you than to hug him back, particularly when standing in front of a room full of onlookers.
“Fine?” Walter answered, confused and mid-embrace.
“Okay,” Benjamin muttered, squeezing Walter’s shoulders and taking a step back to look his visitor up and down.
“I’ll leave you two,” Nancy offered excitedly, apparently forgetting the presence of the dozen or so others she was leaving, too, as she headed back up the stairs.
“Your brother spoke so fondly of you,” Benjamin explained. “How is he?”
Walter frowned and wondered if he had misheard this all but senile man.
“He’s not here?” Walter asked, confused.
“No, he…” Benjamin’s confused scowl returned. “He hasn’t spoken to you?” he added, more to himself than to Walter.
“Why isn’t he here?” Walter clarified his initial question further.
But Benjamin did not answer. Instead he tilted his head and angled his stare off into the antiseptic gray tiles of the floor. He pursed his lips as his face soured with conjecture.
“Why isn’t he here?” Walter asked again, any pressure he felt to be sweet to this little old man dissipating.
“He’s always been hard to predict, thinking at such high levels and all,” Benjamin yammered again more to himself than to Walter or any of the students still staring on.
“What are you talking about?” Walter spat. “Who are you?”
Reacting more to the sound of Walter’s voice than to the actual content of what he was saying, Benjamin glanced up and shot a brief, blank smile in Walter’s general direction before settling right back into contemplation.
“Does anyone here know my brother?” Walter called out, broadening the scope of his inquiry to include the smattering of silent students.
Everyone raised a hand.
“Does anyone know where he is?” Walter followed up.
All of the hands went down.
At which point he felt Benjamin’s hard, cold hand wrap around his wrist.
“Class is dismissed for today,” Benjamin explained as he pulled Walter through yet another door that looked like any other at the base of the lecture hall.
Benjamin’s office was largely fixed in time. Or, more accurately, was fixed in a span of time that reached over four decades, dust layers of varying depths, and subsequent gray values, presenting a strange spatial chronology of the man’s activity over ever so long. The molasses crawl of time suggested by the environment led Walter to turn down an offer of tea, assuming that it would take an inordinate amount of time for this man to pull off such an endeavor. It took the man several minutes just to make it to his chair and somehow even longer to find his way down into it.
“Can I help you?” Walter finally asked, taking the man’s bone-thin arm in his hand and guiding him down. Once settled, Benjamin gestured a shaky, jagged hand with fingers curled, towards the chair across the desk from him.
“Just on the floor,” Benjamin said, in regards to the stack of books currently occupying the seat.
It took Walter three rounds to relocate the books before he could finally sit.
“Your brother has an amazing mind,” Benjamin finally started in.
“I don’t understand why he’s not here…” Walter interjected, hoping to avoid whatever surely gradual path Benjamin would take to the actual topic that brought them here.
“That’s the funny thing, you see,” Benjamin shot back. “I assumed he would have been in contact with you. He always seemed so deeply invested in your relationship.”
“Can we slow down a moment?” asked Walter, well aware of the irony of his choice of words but nevertheless needing to start back at the beginning, a point in this story that everyone at Harvard seemed to forget needed to be covered. “Who are you, exactly?”
“At the risk of arrogance, I would call myself his mentor,” Benjamin replied. “Not that there’s much to teach that boy about business. But he does still have a lot to learn about fitting all that he knows into the real world around him.”
“What are you…” Walter began before deciding to keep things as simple as possible. “Why isn’t he here?”
“He graduated early,” Benjamin explained, seemingly baffled that Walter did not know this.
“So now he’s just…what? Where?”
“That’s the funny thing of it. He gave me very explicit instructions regarding the sharing of information involving his whereabouts and future plans.”
“What were those instructions?” Walter frowned.
“Not to share any such information with anyone under any circumstances.”
“I’m sorry,” Walter circled back to a point he thought had been resolved, but clearly had not, “but who are you, exactly?”
“I am exactly Dr. Benjamin Wilkes-Guipp. I am an economist and a philosopher. Some would say one of the world’s most influential. But some would say I’m just a crusty old lout. So I guess you’ll need to make up your own mind in that regard.”
“Well, Dr. Wilkes-Guipp, what my brother and I have been through together is not something one just disregards…” Walter trailed off.
“You understand my astonishment, then, at the fact that he did not share his plans with you.”
“I am family,” Walter smiled dismissively. “I am his brother.”
“As such, I assumed he would have spoken with you.”
Benjamin grimaced, then, and pursed his lips. He cast his stare off in thought for a few seconds before reaching slowly into his desk drawer and fumbling about, eventually and inelegantly retrieving a familiar gray envelope and placing it in one of the few open spaces on his dusty desk.
Walter stared at the envelope a moment before clarifying, “He told you to give that to me?”
“He did not,” Benjamin said curtly. “He gave it to me. And he told me not to open it unless I felt that I had to.”
Now Walter cast his stare off a good long moment before asking, “Why would he do that?”
“I don’t know.”
“Exactly. It doesn’t make any sense.”
“Well, surely we don’t know that. Besides, Wallace more or less always makes sense. Which is precisely why I would have to assume that this makes sense even if it seems not to.”
“I’m sorry, but who are you, exactly?” Walter circled back yet again to this same question, clearly still not satisfied with the answers he had received to it.
“What I can tell you,” Benjamin went on, “is that Wallace is doing exceptionally well.”
“Can you repeat for me what, exactly, the guidelines were that Wallace left you?”
“What is it that you’re really trying to know here, Mr. Braum?” countered Benjamin, a strain of exasperation finding its way into his tone.
“I want to know why,” Walter fired back, countering Benjamin’s exasperation with his own.
“Why what?” Benjamin insisted. “I require that my students be specific with their lines of inquiry. It generates more meaningful results.”
“I’m not your student.”
“That is dependent purely upon whether or not I have something to teach you, now isn’t it? And, I suppose, upon your openness to learning.”
“With all due respect, Dr. Wilkes-Guipp…”
“Benjamin is fine.”
“Fuck you, Benjamin! He’s my fucking brother!”
“Just please don’t use any of the diminutives associated with my first name,” Benjamin stated warmly. “I find those so terribly pedestrian.”
An awkward silence set in.
“Do you have any family, Benjamin?” Walter seethed.
“I will ask you again, Mr. Braum, in the interest of efficiency, what specifically do you aim to come to know here?” Benjamin answered politely.
“I want to know where my brother is,” Walter could not help but yell.
“I suspect that the question you are asking, if answered, would not provide the answers you are truly seeking,” Benjamin matched Walter’s yell.
“How do you know anything about what I’m seeking? We just met!” Walter kept yelling.
“Well, by way of demonstration, I know your brother said he would contact you three months after your last concert,” Benjamin explained as he brought his voice back down to a civil tone. “But it has been more than eight months since you last spoke. And yet, you’re only just now showing up here to find him. At first I thought this might suggest you felt guilt or shame that so much time had passed. But given the nature of our conversation thus far, I no longer suspect this as the core motivation that brought you here.” As Benjamin went on, his voice lowered even further into a gentle tone. “When I factor in, however, the knowledge that you’re likely still quite conflicted as to how to define your individual creative identity in relationship to market forces, your potential motivation starts to take on some color for me. You fear that leveraging marketing and communication strategies to build an audience for your creative work might be disingenuous. But you also suspect that perhaps most everything in our world is ultimately disingenuous anyway, so it might make no difference at all that this is, too. But I find it doubtful that you would come all this way to ask your brother for help. That simply is not in your nature at all. Now, I also know that you have a history of treating those around you with an outraged hostility similar to that which you have displayed here today. I know that this recurs in a somewhat circular pattern for you, a pattern that has slowed a bit since stripping your life of nearly every complicated element, but it’s a pattern nevertheless. However, this anger causes you to isolate, not to reach out. So you have not come here out of anger.” Benjamin’s voice was downright placid by now. “Lastly, then, I know that you want your music, and in turn your life, to feel authentic but you fear that nothing exists without at least some element of edifice. So you fear that you, too, might be nothing more than edifice, when stripped down to your core. Now, by way of deduction, induction, and reasonable speculation based on the aforementioned elements alone, I can pinpoint only one truly plausible, albeit surprising, explanation. Much to my astonishment, I’m confident that you travelled from the city with which you so identify to find your brother, from whom you want so desperately to remain distinct, to satisfy a burdensome longing to participate in the admittedly quite unique version of family that the two of you share. I further suspect that this bond provides much, much more than just a simple sense of belonging for you two as it is rooted in a commonality of experience that literally no other two people on this planet can truly understand. Now, some might argue that your motives could be a multifaceted, nuanced, and undifferentiated amalgamation of thoughts and feelings, but inasmuch as you have a tendency to want to view the world as a place of absolutes, this explanation seems too cute for me. I do think you are tangled up in a nebulous cloud of uncertainty on this topic, which is why you’re so defensive when asked to simply hone your point of inquiry in an effort to understand what you really seek. But an unexpectedly admirable and consistent aspect of your person, Walter Braum, seems to be that you will act so as to discover. Most people will only act upon what they think they know. And for this reason, I find my singular interpretation of your behavior a far more compelling and fitting explanation. “So,” Benjamin summed up tidily, “that is what I know. I do apologize for the parts that were curt. I can be a little arrogant when challenged.”
As much as Walter wanted to deprive Benjamin the satisfaction of the silence that was currently spreading into every last particle of air around them, Walter nevertheless failed to conjure so much as a single word to mind by way of a response to this painfully detailed analysis, even though there were countless points within it that he cared deeply to address.
Benjamin gave the desk a playful pat and declared, “I will make us tea while you think all of that through.” He then began a wrestling match between his chair, gravity, balance, and his atrophied muscles.
By the time Benjamin made his eventual way past Walter’s chair, patting his visitor on the shoulder affectionately, Walter was still losing his battle with the silence. And sadly, this same silence persisted all the way into the clang of two cups and saucers placed upon the desk and the start-stop of hot water being poured by a frail hand. Right about then, after what very well could have been several days passed, a question solidified in Walter’s mind. So he spoke it out loud.
“Why did he choose not to tell me where he is?”
“An interesting and far more specific question,” Benjamin delighted, as he took a sip of his tea and started the glacial journey of returning the cup to its saucer. “But one we can merely speculate upon, as we have no concrete answers.”
Benjamin gave Walter an excited smile before continuing.
“Wallace’s core shortcoming is his inability to identify his own motivations and psychology with anything even approaching the precision and power with which he can see the desires and behaviors of others both individually and in aggregate. This is why understanding the world is so easy for him, but living in it is so difficult.”
Walter took these words in with a frown. “Wallace doesn’t struggle with anything in life,” he corrected.
Benjamin stopped to carefully consider this point before eventually emitting a contemplative and inquisitive noise that sounded like “hmm.”
“What?” asked Walter.
“What what?” Benjamin provoked, a sharpness snapping back into his tone.
“What is that reaction about?” Walter amended his question.
So Benjamin acquiesced. “I am contemplating the potential significance, to our current line of conjecture, of the fact that you don’t see one of your brother’s central fallibilities as a person.”
“Why?”
“Why what, Mr. Braum?” Benjamin barked, again quite frustrated with his new student’s lack of intellectual discipline.
“Why do you find that telling?”
“Because it suggests a highly plausible reason why he has not contacted you regarding his whereabouts.”
“What are you…” Walter raised a hand to create a pause in which to rephrase. “Two questions. Number one: What is that highly plausible reason? And number two: In what evidence are you grounding your findings?”
Benjamin smiled and nodded slightly in approval, or maybe his head was just bobbing a bit as a result of the old man’s general shakiness, before casting his stare off in thought and settling into a pregnant silence that stretched on for at least a minute, maybe two.
Just as Walter could stand the discomfort of this quiet no longer, just as he was pursing his lips to speak, Benjamin took in a long, slow breath and said, “I will answer only one of those questions.”
He then reached out and picked up the gray envelope from atop his desk and tremulously fought it back into his desk drawer, which he locked with a small key that Walter had previously failed to notice was resting in the lock. Benjamin then removed the previously invisible key and placed it in his pocket.
“Finish your tea,” he instructed, looking warmly up at Walter who stared back in full flummox.
“What are you doing?”
“I am sitting in my chair,” Benjamin yelled, quite fed up by now.
“What are you… What is in that envelope?”
“I don’t know.”
“Then why did you lock it in your drawer?”
“Because I think I know what is in it. And if I’m right, I don’t want you to have it.”
“What is in the…” Walter rephrased, “What do you think is in the envelope?”
“I imagine it must be Wallace’s geographical whereabouts,” Benjamin answered plainly.
“But that makes no sense,” Walter shot back.
“It makes perfect sense, actually.”
“You already know his geographical location.”
“I most certainly do not.”
“But you said that he was doing well,” Walter spat, angrily.
“What does the how in this case have to do with the where?” Benjamin fired right back. “That was a stupid assumption on your part, the kind of lazy thinking you will need to unlearn if you’re going to resolve this situation for yourself.”
“Can I please just have the envelope?” Walter asked.
“I think my actions have made my answer to that question abundantly clear.”
“Can I please have the envelope?” Walter insisted this time.
Benjamin did not feel the need to reply any further.
“So that’s it, then?” Walter explained.
“If that is it,” Benjamin confirmed.
Walter stared at the wrinkly, old man a bit longer. Then he got up and headed for the door.
“You are forgetting,” Benjamin declared, annoyed yet again with Walter’s lack of intellectual discipline, “that I have offered to answer one of your questions.”
“Fuck the questions,” Walter replied, pausing at the door but refusing to turn back.
“You are a silly man, Mr. Braum. Your actions so often belie your words.”
“I’m a silly man?” Walter repeated rhetorically.
Benjamin chuckled before continuing. “The first question is the one I will answer by explaining that I find it highly plausible that Wallace did not get in touch with you for the same reason he did not get in touch with anyone but me. Namely, because he feared that you would not know how to accept his future life circumstances.”
“What future life circumstances?” Walter turned back to face Benjamin, even though he knew better than to think that the man would suddenly start providing satisfying answers to his questions.
“Even you know precisely what to expect from Wallace’s future,” stated Benjamin, entirely comfortable with the insulting undertones of his statement. “Success beyond all measure.”
Walter pondered this thought for just a moment before replying, with a similarly condescending tone, “So your grand assessment is that Wallace has disappeared from everyone that cares about him in preparation for being successful?”
“Inelegantly stated,” Benjamin answered, “but yes.”
“That is the dumbest thing I have ever heard,” Walter derided. “Who struggles with success?”
“Well,” answered Benjamin, all but laughing at what he perceived as either naiveté or stupidity, “most everyone. We human beings resent all success that is not our own. That is just plain. And such resentment would drive a gentle soul like Wallace absolutely mad.”
Even though this thought stuck Walter like a sizable thorn and sunk his heart under its weight, he nevertheless disregarded it as a silly little trifle of a generality.
“I will tell you now the same thing I told your brother the last time I saw him,” Benjamin added. “If one wants the answers to his questions badly enough, then he will stop at nothing to find them, Mr. Braum. That is just plain. And simple.”
Walter had no idea what this feeble old man was still going on about. Or he did and he wasn’t interested in conceding even the tiniest fragment of it. So Walter shook his head, turned, and left.