The Candy House(9)
“What is Alfred doing?” a grandparent would ask.
“I’m wearing a bag over my head,” Alfred would reply from inside the bag.
“Is he unhappy with his appearance?”
“I’m right here, Grandma, you can ask me.”
“But I can’t see him…”
Certain rare individuals had the gift of inducing naturalness, and these were the sole recipients of Alfred’s regard. Chief among them was Jack Stevens, the best friend of his brother, Miles. “Wear the bag, Alf,” Jack would beg, chortling in anticipation, but the bag was unnecessary with Jack present—he made the whole family relax. Jack spent many nights at the Hollander home, his mother having died of cancer when he was young. Alfred describes Jack as having been rowdy, spontaneous, greedy for stimulus, a bringer of kegs to “the beach,” a shingle of sand on the site of a defunct summer camp that was a popular party spot for local teens. Jack was known for deflowering cheerleaders in the old camper cabins, but broken hearts were assuaged (to Alfred’s mind) by Jack’s goodwill, high spirits, and occasional flashes of motherless heartbreak, discernible (again, to Alfred) in his tendency to gaze out across the lake, which was deep and cold, formed by glaciers, and populated by thousands of Canada geese in fall.
Miles and Jack Stevens remained close through college but had an angry rupture soon afterward. With his brother and his idol no longer speaking, Alfred lost touch with this fixture of his childhood.
As an undergraduate at SUNY New Paltz, Alfred formed a small cohort of friends who shared his contempt for the “bullshit” surrounding them. But after graduation in 2004, he grew disillusioned with these same friends’ “pseudo-adulthood.” On completing law school, they pretended to be lawyers, or to work at marketing firms or engineering firms or Internet firms that were just getting back on their feet after the dotcom bust. When a friend from college lost weight or got a nose job or began wearing colored contact lenses, Alfred corrected for these “disguises” with queries like: “Do you see yourself as a fat person who just happens to be thin right now?” or “Do you ever wonder if you chose the right nose?” or “Does my skin look green through those contacts?” Name changes were null to him; “Anastasia” was still good old Amy despite her threats to disinvite Alfred from her wedding if he persisted in calling her that, which she finally did after several warnings.
College friends drifted away at high speed, and Alfred was relieved to be rid of them and bereft without them. He’d taken a room in the apartment of an elderly couple on West Twenty-eighth Street in exchange for organizing their weekly pill dispensers, reading aloud their email, and typing their dictated replies. He worked in a bicycle repair shop and poured his every resource into making a three-hour-long documentary about the migratory patterns of North American geese. Entitled The Migratory Patterns of North American Geese, it was narrated in a voice completely free of artifice—that is to say, devoid of all expression. The film proved coma-inducing to all who attended the private screening Alfred paid for in Manhattan. Miles, a notorious insomniac, had to be forcibly roused when the film ended. Miles begged Alfred for a DVD of Geese to bring home to Chicago and watch at bedtime. Enraged and crushed, Alfred refused.
2
I first learned of Alfred Hollander in 2010, a year after The Migratory Patterns of North American Geese was completed. Alfred’s father, Ted, hosted a discussion group with his second wife, Portia (Alfred’s parents divorced the year he left for college), that I participated in while I was in graduate school at Columbia. I emailed Alfred several times requesting an interview for my dissertation, an examination of authenticity in the digital era. When he failed to reply, I sought him out at the bike shop where he worked. I found an affable strawberry-haired guy whose cheeriness had a hostile edge.
“With all due respect, Rebecca Amari,” he said in a tone that made me wonder whether I’d invented that name, “why would I let you co-opt my ideas into some phony academic bullshit, just so you can get tenure?”
I explained that I wasn’t at the point of seeking tenure, just my PhD and hopefully a teaching job somewhere, and assured Alfred of my intention to acknowledge his story as his own even as I worked to codify and contextualize the phenomena he described.
“No offense, but I don’t really need you for that,” he said.
“With all due respect,” I replied, “I think you do.”
“Why?”
“Because the only thing you’ve managed to produce so far is an unwatchable film about geese,” I said. “No offense.”
He put down the tool he was holding and tilted his head at me. “Have we met before?” he asked. “You seem familiar.”
“We both have freckles,” I said, and got a first genuine smile out of him. “I’m guessing I remind you of yourself. Plus, I’m the only person in the world as obsessed with authenticity as you are.”
It was a year before I heard from him.
* * *
I already knew, from Alfred’s father, that he had embarked on a project even more alienating and extreme than his middle school paper-bag-wearing had been. Its impetus dated to a morning in late summer when Alfred walked his dog, an adopted dachshund named Maple Tree, to a local elementary school on enrollment day. He informed two women who worked for the Department of Education that he wished to enroll Maple Tree in pre-K, then settled in to relish their bewilderment.