Claudia's Brain

By Jeff Baker

"Claudia's Brain" is a philosophical novel about a young woman whose superpower is a clear-eyed view of truth and fiction. Through multiple heartbreaks, her remarkable intellect takes her from Cumberland Gap, Tennessee to positions of authority in the State Department and CIA, where her specialty is ferreting out nonsense. Her story is told by David Miller, who loved Claudia, but was not picked by her.

"Claudia's Brain" encounters themes of reason, post-truth and irony in a compelling narrative. This philosophical novel prompts questions of what truth really is and illuminates the stark realities of the human life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Jan 12, 2021
• ISBN: 9781098345990

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© Jeff Baker.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

978-1-09834-598-3 (printed)

978-1-098345990 (eBook)

For my mother and her quiet wisdom, and for

my father and his unbounded curiosity.

Table of Contents

Part 1: The Gap

1

STORIES

2

WE MEET

3

LITERAL DANCE

4

CUMBERLAND GAP

5

JOO JOO EYEBALL

6

TUTORING

7

THE HIPPIES

8

MISSING

9

AESTHETIC JUDGMENT

10

THE TRIAL

11

HELLO, DARKNESS

12

HILLBILLY BOHEMIAN

13

UNIVERSITY

14

BENJI

15

THIN AIR

Part 2:

Notes From Overground

16

THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING IRONIC

17

PIPER’S PLUCK

18

DOUBTING THOMAS

19

TESSIE’S LAUGH

20

CALVIN’S SINGULARITY

21

SIDNEY AND THE TEE-SHIRT

22

BELIEVING THOMAS

23

WINTER LIGHT

24

LA VIE BOHEME

25

JUST SEXY

Part 3: A Taste of Honey

26

IT’S CRACKBOTTOM, SIR.

27

INTO AFRICA

28

A WEDDING

29

JOKING RELATIONSHIPS

30

TUESDAY

31

INTELLIGENCE

32

NONSENSE

33

THE SIDE OF A MOUNTAIN

34

FIRST PRINCIPLES

35

HAJI

36

NO WORDS

37

STORIES FROM THE OVERGROUND

38

REASON KILLING UNREASON

39

SPRING

40

THEY MADE NO HONEY

41

A FUNERAL

42

CONCLUDING UNSCIENTIFIC POSTSCRIPT

Part 1: The Gap

gap | gap | noun

1. a space or opening in the middle of something

or between two things

2. a low area between mountains that people use to

cross them

3. something missing from a situation or a system that

prevents it from being complete or perfect

4. a large difference between things or groups

1

STORIES

A riddle before you pass: What is the creature that walks in earnestness in the morning, in irony at noon, and in honey in the evening?

Be warned, it’s now only morning.

There was this girl.

I know. There are lots of girls and lots of eponymous books written about girls. There’s that one about the French Madame who destroyed the lives of her husband and their daughter. There’s the Russian, a bright, literate and passionate woman. That passion led her to multiple affairs—a proclivity accepted, if not admired, in a man, but punished in a 19th century Russian woman. There’s the vivacious but deeply ambivalent Mrs. who threw a party. She famously bought the flowers herself.

There are stories about heroic women. There’s that one who grew up poor and abused in 1930s rural Georgia. She wrote letters to God. Through inner strength, she grew into a happy and independent spirit, helping others. There’s the one who volunteered to take her little sister’s place in a deadly game that pitted Tribute against Tribute. That girl was lethal with a bow and arrow. There’s the badass computer hacker who solved an old family mystery of murder and sexual sadism. Even her tattoo was badass.

But my favorite is the one I’ll tell you about. I admit, it’s personal. It might even be judged a Pygmalion story. My protagonist, too, was known to occasionally buy the flowers herself. But my protagonist shot no bows. She had no tattoos. She wrote letters, but not to God. She couldn’t fly. She had no magic lasso. She wasn’t a telepath. Yet, she did have a superpower. Her superpower was that she was disinclined to believe what is not true. Disinclined to believe what is not true. That may not seem like much at first blush, but if you really think about it, there aren’t many mortals, women or men, who pull it off. Though, to my mind, that girl Scout came pretty damn close.

Ever heard of a superhero whose most potent weapon is Ockham’s razor?

What if the narrator of that Omelas story is right and the pedants and sophisticates are wrong? What if it’s not true that only pain is intellectual? What if it’s not true that only evil is interesting? Isn’t someone who can resist bullshit as rare, and so as intriguing, as nosferatu, lycanthrope, or Homo Necrosis?

Some say heroes are defined by their enemy. The thing was, Claudia grew up and went off to University at exactly the time that nonsense exploded in our culture, exploded like a mushroom cloud, a cloud that spread bullshit far and wide. We had no defense. The very academy that’s supposed to guard against nonsense turned out to be ground zero. Other institutions, from the fourth estate down, suffered noxious radiation from the blast. We all did. Yet, somehow, Claudia resisted, as if protected by Sue Storm’s force field. Pervasive technology was meant to democratize knowledge, but, instead, empowered the ignorant and the prevaricator, and provided the perfect breeding ground for nonsense. Claudia resisted. Media seemed particularly vulnerable. Broadcasters gave us reality shows that were not real. The news gave us no spin zones that were pure spin. We got Ice Road Truckers on our History Channel and were told, as a justification, that history is made every day. Whatever. Apparently, part of that history is also Ancient Aliens, a master class in the inclination to believe what is not true. Is it possible . . .? Wrong question. Claudia resisted.

Conspiracy theories became pandemic. Someone showed up at a pizza parlor bearing arms. Post-truth was ushered in. Claudia resisted. One major news outlet felt compelled to show an apple and declare that it was NOT a banana, that it was, in fact, an apple. I suppose the 30 second promo was meant to provide reassurance, but first seeing it nearly sent me into a panic attack. It’s come to this? Even efforts at approximating objectivity were scorned as naïve.

Robert Frost wrote: We dance round in a ring and suppose/ But the secret sits in the middle and knows. It seemed to me that Claudia sat somewhere in the middle with that secret. I dance. I’m hoping you’ll dance with me. It became popular to deny the existence of the secret. Lately, the music has all but stopped. She sat in the middle.

A confession: I would’ve loved Claudia no matter where she sat. And we did dance, occasionally.

That French Madame, she died from self-ingested arsenic. That Russian lady, she stepped deliberately in front of a moving train. The woman who wrote about that Mrs. and her party, she filled her pockets with rocks and walked into the River Ouse. I’ve always believed that Claudia took a deliberate step towards her own death, but that may not be a fair assessment. She . . . well, you’ll see. It’s more complicated than that. Judge for yourself. Some lives are heroic. Some deaths are heroic. Some aren’t.

One must rise up to leave Cumberland Gap, Tennessee. The tiny town where I first met Claudia is surrounded on all sides by steep mountains. Those peaks cast a shadow over narrow streets for a lot of the day. Sunlight has a second adversary in a lazy fog common most mornings. Getting there is a kind of helical descent. So, in effect, we lived in the bottom of a sort of hazy tumbler with a crazy straw stuck in as a road in and out.

I learned some stories and a little history from Claudia the eight years I lived in the Gap. Hundreds of feet above the town, over thousands of years, seeking access to fertile meadows, buffalo beat a trail through the first break in a hundred-mile impassable range. Cherokee, Shawnee, and Delaware shed each other’s blood for access to those buffalo. Two and a half centuries ago, in the same Gap, white men and Shawnee shed each other’s blood as the white man pushed for what he called his manifest destiny. In 1862, Union and Confederate soldiers spilled each other’s blood in a dispute over the selling of human persons as property. All that blood still nourishes the soil that trickles from Wilderness Trail down into the town. Or, I like to think it does. I like to think some good came of all that bloodshed, but, of course, the secret doesn’t care what I like.

There was a story that Daniel Boone killed a black bear with his bare hands somewhere near Cumberland Gap. We weren’t there, but Claudia and I didn’t believe that story. We weren’t there either, but we did believe the story that, while pushing west, Boone was captured by the native people. They confiscated his animal skins and told him to leave the area and never come back. We also believed the story that, a few years later, he lost a son in another skirmish with the native people.

Why believe some stories and not believe others?

Most days, when I knocked on the back door of the little red house on Roslyn Street, Time magazine’s future most powerful woman you’ve never heard of simply yelled, Come on in, David. I’d often find her prostrate on the kitchen linoleum, chin propped up, elbows solidly on the floor, copper hair falling towards the delicate page she studied. She might be wearing one of the many tie-dye tees that the hippies, Jennifer and Shawn, made for us. Claudia and I would choose the dye colors, strategically place the rubber bands, then grin at the result. The front of Claudia’s tee, at least in summers, was pulled under her chin so that the linoleum cooled her stomach in the little house with no air conditioning. She’d audibly suck the collar, one of the many unrefined habits that charmed me to no end. Her Webster’s Twentieth Century Unabridged would be at one side. If it was morning, a honey-soaked biscuit, made by her father, sat partially eaten at her other side. Often, a biscuit with honey was left for me. I was to eat at the table. Honey and books are a treacherous mix, Claudia frequently warned.

The books she pored over while lying on that linoleum always looked the same; only the volume number changed. She loved telling the story of the day the salesman came to her house peddling the encyclopedias. Something about that day left a permanent impression on Claudia, but she loved stories generally, the transmitting or the receiving. Stories. When I think about it, stories were the sine qua non for us. Stories supplemented the experiences that gave me glimpses into Claudia’s brain. My own stories eventually got me what I most wanted in this world. Stories are the subject of one of my favorite poems. It’s by the Persian Poet Rumi.

A story is like water

that you heat for a bath.

It takes messages between the fire

and your skin. It lets them meet

and cleanse you!

The events underlying the story of the encyclopedia salesman took place before I moved to the Gap. According to Claudia, she answered the door on that Saturday morning. Watching Looney Tunes was her ritual. Her father worked at the sawmill, and Barbara Taylor Verstand let Claudia watch TV while she did whatever it was she did. Claudia jumped from her rocking chair and hurried to the door. A knock on the Verstand door in those days held more interest than Bugs Bunny.

She opened the door to find Charlie Blackburn and all his puffery. Charlie wore a light blue suit that shimmered with every gesture. His broad, bright tie was the color of orange sherbet. Something greasy coated Charlie’s coal-black hair. He had a tanned, square jaw and the biggest, whitest teeth Claudia had ever seen. Looking at him, she told me, she thought the salesman belonged on the TV with her cartoon characters. His silver tongue only reinforced that impression. Claudia called him a real-life Foghorn Leghorn.

Well, hello, little lady. Don’t you just have the most beautiful red hair God ever put on a little girl?

My hair ain’t red. It’s copper.

And pretty green eyes to go with it. One day I see you vexing boys the county over.

Detecting something false, Claudia said, she instantly disliked the man, but the brown volume he gesticulated captured her interest.

Who is it, Claudia? her mother asked, darting into the room.

A kinda’ man.

A what?

A kinda’ man.

What do you mean, ‘kinda’ man’?

(I know what she meant. Compared to her solid father, Ernst Verstand, Charlie Blackburn could only be thought a kinda’ man. But this isn’t my story.)

Her mother pulled Claudia from the doorway by her sleeve.

May I help you? Barbara asked, primping her own copper hair.

Well now, I see where the little girl gets her beauty.

Barbara giggled childishly for the first of many times in Charlie’s presence.

You’re too kind. I’m a mess just now.

Barbara used her palms to iron the front of her floral print house dress.

"My name’s Charlie Blackburn. I represent the venerable Encyclopedia Britannica."

He raised the book to his chest and wore it like a badge.

May I have just a few moments of, what I know is, your very precious time?

Why, yes. Where are my manners? Please, do come in.

Charlie picked up his brown satchel. He entered the house and bowed to Claudia, who crawfished to the middle of the room, looking skeptically at the kinda’ man. She crumpled her nose at the smell of burnt oranges that whirled around the salesman.

What lovely furniture you have, Charlie said, running his fingers along the coffee table.

It’s nothing, Barbara answered.

My daddy carved this furniture with his own hands.

(The furniture in the little red house was exquisite. There was a walnut coffee table with feet carved into blooming tulips hand-painted yellow. A pair of ash rockers had tulips inlaid in their twin backs. The sofa had worn yellow cushions and tulip feet. It seemed to me the furniture belonged with more spacious walls and ceilings. The result was a room that felt cramped. I always thought that if the exquisitely carved feet on Ernst’s furniture had locomotion, they’d have run off to some place like Versailles—the one in nearby Kentucky, not the one in France. That would be silly.)

A very talented man your daddy is, Charlie said.

Hardly, Barbara answered.

Claudia detected judgment in her mother’s tone—judgment about Claudia’s father.

"My daddy is talented, but he got the arthritis."

Go outside and play, Claudia.

Claudia shook her head. She didn’t usually defy her mother, but something about her mother’s childish giggles and the falseness of the cartoon rooster unnerved Claudia. She wasn’t going anywhere.

CLAUDIA! her mother yelled.

Claudia shook her head again.

If I may be so bold, ma’am, my presentation may hold the most pedagogical relevance for . . . Claudia, is it?

Barbara giggled. Claudia knew her mother didn’t understand Charlie’s big word, but, already at that point, Claudia owned two books given to her by her father, both old and both leather bound. One was an atlas, the other was the Webster’s. She was precocious with words. She could’ve told her mother that Charlie meant that the books were relevant as a teaching tool, but she didn’t dare educate her mother, especially in front of a stranger.

May I suggest that Claudia remain?

Okay. Her mother turned to her, Stay.

Claudia climbed into one of the chairs and rocked forcefully, eliciting threatening glances from her mother. She kept rocking.

Barbara directed Charlie to the sofa. He laid Volume 1 on the table and smiled at Claudia.

Claudia didn’t take her eyes off the salesman. Every detail of the man seemed false: his glistening hair, his shimmering suit, his too big teeth, his exaggerated grin, his counterfeit smell, his overly affected words. Her mother’s childish giggles, and the way she thrust her mountainous breasts towards the salesman added to Claudia’s unease. She loved books, but at that moment, she just wanted Foghorn Leghorn gone. (When she recounted the story years later, Claudia declared that her mother had been flirting with the salesman, right there on her husband’s hand-carved sofa, right there in front of her own daughter.)

I never met Barbara Taylor Verstand. What I know about her I gleaned from Claudia’s stories and from Chester Walker. Chester owned the soda shop where Claudia worked, and where I hung out when Claudia was working, or if I just wanted to get away from one of my father’s foul moods. Chester was solid gold, one of my favorite people in the world, but Chester Walker did like his gossip. Who was it who wrote, No one gossips about another person’s secret virtues?

Barbara Taylor had always been pretty, and she knew it. Her father doted on young Barbara and favored her over her older sister, Edna, who was not so . . . okay, the woman was ugly. Yeah, I said it. I saw her a couple of times. She was a true hag. I know that’s unkind, but it also happens to be an empirical and aesthetic truth. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder? She was a hag. Beauty comes from within? She was even more of a hag. (You get to be the beholder before this is over. You tell me. Never mind. Doesn’t matter. Hag.) After a later than usual puberty, boys were putty in Barbara’s manipulative hands. Following a number of years of heavy drinking and running with this pretty boy and that bad one in the small towns and hollers across three counties, she finally decided it was time to settle down. She wanted more. Ernst Verstand was fifteen years her senior and, apparently, not tuned in to the reputation of Barbara Taylor. Rumor had it, the lone surviving male of the Verstand family had quite a stash in the Savings and Loan. He was said to be quite shy and unassuming about the money, but it was well known and established that the money was there. Barbara laid on the charm.

Once they tied the knot, she pressured Ernst to come clean about his hidden wealth. He didn’t. Barbara thought that, with the birth of his daughter, Ernst would surely want to lavish her with pretty dresses, a bigger house, and finer things. He didn’t. She made public protestations of greedy holding out, but that still didn’t bring forth secret monies from the Savings and Loan. Barbara finally concluded that the well-known and established rumor had been a whole lotta nothing. Afterwards, Chester Walker said, she seemed always in a state of restive discontent.

Only when her mother went to the kitchen for iced tea did Charlie turn his attention back to Claudia and her high frequency rocking. He spun Volume 1 on the coffee table.

Would you like to have a look, Claudia?

The oscillation stopped instantly. Claudia stood and walked to the book. She carefully turned the delicate pages. So many words. So many ideas. So much to learn.

"The Encyclopedia Britannica is a necessity for a young lady like yourself. Any report your teachers assign will be expertly covered in Britannica. You can see the world without leaving Cumberland Gap."

Claudia told me that, even at six, she knew instinctively that Charlie didn’t care if she learned about the world. She looked at Charlie and wondered what he did care about. (I could’ve told her.)

(Selling encyclopedias. Why? What were you thinking?)

What do you think, Claudia dear? her mother asked when she returned with the iced tea. "Would you like to have the Encyclopedia Britannica?"

Her mother never called her dear. Her mother never asked Claudia what she thought about anything. More falseness.

She knew her father would be angry about her mother spending the money. She knew the right thing was to say no and avoid upsetting him. But, as she liked to point out, her mother’s question wasn’t, Should she buy the books? Her mother’s question was, Would you like to have the books? Claudia was always precocious when it came to parsing such details, even when they were to her benefit. Slicked back hair. Shimmering suit. Flattery. Silver tongue. Her mom’s childish giggles. Her mom’s breasts thrust Charlie’s way. Insincerely being called dear. All that clutter unsettled Claudia. But then there were the books themselves. The books contained secrets.

Yes.

You promise to read it if I buy it for you? The whole set?

Her mother was looking at Charlie, not Claudia, when she asked the question, so Claudia directed her response to Charlie.

I promise.

Stories. I heard Claudia tell the story of the day the encyclopedia salesman came to her house many times (after her mother did the unthinkable). Something fascinated her, and it wasn’t just the books. With time, I’ve found more to unpack from the simple story of Claudia, her mother, the encyclopedia, and the salesman. It took learning more about Claudia to really sort through all that luggage, and learning more about people generally. The story is about judgment. Intellectual judgment. Moral judgment. Social judgment. Aesthetic judgment.

Disinclined to believe what is not true. That didn’t mean Claudia knew everything. In fact, her most common position when pushed would be, I don’t know. In a lot of cases, that translated into, No one knows. The idea that the advocate for reason makes claims to perfect objectivity or infallible progress is one of the oldest polemical tricks. Can’t we strike a match to that parched straw? Bertrand Russell, one of my dad’s intellectual heroes, wrote that not being certain is essential to rationality. Even Voltaire, that old voice for reason, admitted that perfection is the enemy of the good. I guess as much as anything, Claudia was the anti-ideologue. Her ideology never ventured much further than her expression on that day my father and I first met her: That’s empiricism, look and see. I like that.

A voice of reason, but don’t be mistaken, she was no stoic. Hers is an earnest story at the start, and life would hit her hard. She felt those blows keenly. Those blows left scars. Some come early. Some come late. One comes right away.

One would take her away.

What Rumi’s poem about stories failed to mention is that heated water can sometimes scald. When Time proclaimed her the most powerful woman you’ve never heard of, how could the author of that piece know her story would harm? Did Claudia know? Maybe I knew. I’m haunted.

I don’t know, she’d say. Honestly, I don’t know what to make of what follows. Perhaps it’s like Macbeth’s take on life: a tale told by an idiot (me). Sound, fury, nothing. The story is mostly true—apart from some necessarily confabulated details.

There’s so much more that I don’t know about the way Claudia thought than I do know. To paraphrase Russell again: A stupid man’s report of what a clever woman says can never be accurate because he unconsciously translates what he hears into something he can understand.

In a lot of ways, then, she’s the secret.

So let’s dance.

2

WE MEET

It was the summer of ‘79 when my father and I followed the moving van down that helix and into Cumberland Gap. I was 10, a time of triple-layer misery for me. First, I was leaving my friends behind in Providence to move to this strange and isolated place. Second, breast cancer had taken my mother eight months earlier. I missed her intensely. She was still my first thought when my eyes popped open every morning: Was it all just a bad dream? She was my last thought as I struggled to close my eyes at the end of each day: When will the hurt stop? Yeah, I’d been a momma’s boy, but my mom was cool. Third, since my mother’s death, my father had wilted from the grief. He barely spoke to me, except for functional reasons. Do your homework . . . It’s time for bed . . . I made TV dinners. Yours is on the stove when you want it . . . We’re moving to Cumberland Gap, Tennessee. The movers will be here in three weeks. Have your stuff packed by then. I think he was up for tenure the following year. I never knew if our leaving Providence was due to his anticipation of their decision, or if he was just fleeing the unbearable memories of his beloved Maddie.

Moving day was an oppressive 99 degrees in a place sheltered from a breeze. My father hadn’t said a word to me the whole day. When the truck pulled in front of the two-story, faded gray shingled house, I had to guess that this was my new home. The house sat cockeyed, leaning a little to its left. The sidewalk had buckled, as if to say: Yeah, you’re not really welcome here. I didn’t care. I didn’t wanna be there anyway.

The movers set aside the lightest boxes for me to carry into the house. Lamp shades. Bedding. Clothing. On one of my turns back out, I saw her copper head peeking into the back of the moving truck. My gut reaction was to do a one-eighty and head back into the crooked house. I followed my gut.

Hey, boy.

I picked up my pace.

HEY, BOY!

Footsteps told me she was already on me. I had no choice but to turn and face her.

Are you moving in?

I guess so.

"You either are, or you aren’t moving in. You shouldn’t have to guess, should you?"

(Damn her logic.)

Yes, I’m moving in.

Is your momma the Lady Lawyer?

What?

I wondered if there was something wrong with the forthright girl.

I later learned that my father had bought the gray shingled house from a woman the people around Cumberland Gap called Lady Lawyer. Many years earlier, Lady Lawyer had taken a place in Knoxville, where she now practiced, or so the story went. Lady Lawyer lore had grown with time and distance. The story was, she hated children and that was why she moved to a town that had almost none. If children came onto her lawn, she chased them off with a shotgun. She hated dogs even more than children. She kept a pot of hot water on the stove to scald any dog that approached the garbage cans by her back stairs. One story claimed she’d scalded a six-year-old boy, whom she’d mistaken for a dog. Some people said it was an accident; others claimed that, of course, she knew exactly what she was doing. Having never actually seen Lady Lawyer, Claudia was agnostic about the veracity of the stories. I preferred to accept them as truth. It was more exciting. Though, once I heard one of the stories repeated in front of Chester Walker, and he flat denied it. Nonsense. She’s a fine woman, Chester had said. But that didn’t change my mind.

No, I said to the girl, raw at the mention of my mother.

She seemed to catch that I was hurt by her question, though she couldn’t have guessed why. She shuffled and stood mute. I ventured more information, wanting to end the encounter.

My father bought this house. He’ll be teaching at the college.

Just then, the movers approached with a gold print sofa, forcing us off the sidewalk.

I can help you move in, she said.

No. I mean, no thank you. We have movers.

I can still help.

We have enough help.

Now it was her turn to be hurt. I felt bad, but not bad enough to be nice. Not bad enough to not want her gone.

Okay. I’ll see you again. I live right ‘round the corner. The Gap is a tiny place, not many kids, pretty much just me. We could be friends. A boy like you will need a friend here.

A boy like me? What the hell does that mean?

I’m a bit of a loner, so . . . I said.

Me, too. I’m a loner. Not by choice. We could be loners together?

That doesn’t make sense.

(See, I could throw down some logic.)

Guess not.

I should go.

Again, she stood motionless and stared.

Thanks for stopping to introduce yourself, I said, still trying to end the encounter.

I didn’t. My name’s Claudia Verstand.

Okay, bye, Claudia.

I turned to leave.

Bye, she said.

At that moment, my father walked out of the house.

Have you made a new friend already, son?

Oh, now he wants to talk to me.

No, sir.

What’d you mean, ‘no’? Hello, young lady.

She turned but was, apparently, afraid to walk back in my direction.

Good.

Hello.

My father walked to her.

I’m Robert Miller, David’s father.

He held out a hand for Claudia to shake. She looked at me accusingly. She was right. I’d deliberately avoided giving her my name. Leave it to my father to blow that.

I’m Claudia Verstand.

Nice to meet you, Claudia.

Watching him with Claudia, it was as if I was seeing my father for the first time in years. Becoming a widower had aged him. At forty-four, his hair was more salt than pepper. He wore round wire-rimmed glasses identical to my own, but his seemed heavy on his face, a burden. He had that kind of prominent forehead my comic books associated with evil geniuses. His chin and jaw had long surrendered to the more distinguished nose and flared ears. Yellow specks dotted sad brown eyes. But those eyes lit up when interacting with the girl, lit up in a way they never did for me anymore.

Nice to meet you. What will you teach at the college?

I teach philosophy.

My father enunciated the last word a little too slowly, then seemed to regret the word, like he should’ve said something else, like he didn’t have time on moving day to explain philosophy to this youngster.

I like Aristotle. He was an empiricist. He thought the best way to learn about the world is to look and see. That’s empiricism, look and see. I like that. He didn’t agree with Plato about forms and innate ideas. But so far, David Hume is my favorite. He was an empiricist, too.

My father stood slack-jawed. Then he started to laugh, really laugh. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d heard that. I should’ve been glad, but I wasn’t. I resented it.

That’s right. Well, you are a delightful surprise. Surely, they don’t teach Aristotle and David Hume in your school. How’d you come to know that?

"Encyclopedia Britannica. I’m reading the whole set. Today I finished Volume 6. I learned about Hypatia. She was a smart and beautiful lady who lived in Egypt a long time ago. She studied everything: mathematics, literature, music, and law, but the Christians killed her. They pulled her from her carriage, stripped her naked, cut out her eyes, then tore the limbs from her body. I think that’s awful."

Claudia shuddered at her own words. (There was judgment in her tone, moral judgment.)

That’s very impressive. David, don’t you think that’s impressive? Reading the whole encyclopedia.

No, it’s not impressive. It’s weird. (Social judgment.)

I knew I was the namesake of some dead guy named David Hume (thankfully my mother had vetoed Immanuel Kant Miller as a name for her son), but otherwise I didn’t know . . . It took a while for me to realize that, yeah, okay, it was impressive to read the entire 24 volumes set of encyclopedias. At the time, though, I just gawked at the girl.

Well, I think it’s impressive, my father said, frowning at me.

I have a long way to go. It’s a lot, Claudia said.

The movers came out of the house to retrieve more furniture.

Is your momma unpacking in the house? Claudia asked me.

She . . . she . . . I mumbled, then looked to my father.

My wife passed away last year, he said, pain gripping his voice.

I’m sorry. She turned back to me, I’m sorry your momma died.

I studied a buckle in the sidewalk and tried not to cry.

I better go, Claudia said.

Shouldn’t take more than a day or two to get settled in. Please, stop in again. We’ll make you a cup of tea, my father said, then thought better of it, I mean lemonade. That’s just the ticket in this blistering heat. We’ll make you an ice-cold glass of lemonade. Won’t we, David?

I nodded to him rather than to Claudia.

Nice to meet you, Professor.

She looked at me. I might have nodded to her. Claudia walked to the end of the sidewalk, then broke into a sprint. I knew I’d hurt her feelings, but I hadn’t invited her.

We watched her race around the corner and out of sight.

Why so unfriendly with the girl, David?

She just seemed odd.

She was a little odd.

More than a little.

Still, that’s no reason to be unkind. You should know that.

I wasn’t unkind.

She’s at least interesting. Reading the whole encyclopedia, imagine that. That little empiricist may be your best shot at a friend around here. Just consider that.

I did consider that, and I considered that my new life in this strange little town was going to be complete misery.

My father and I worked until nightfall unpacking boxes and putting our things into Lady Lawyer’s house. Before long, Lady Lawyer would have cause to come back to Cumberland Gap and to this house. Her client would be Claudia Verstand.

3

LITERAL DANCE

I holed up for the next week or so re-reading my favorite comic books and listening to Madison’s record collection. The upside to my father not talking to me was that, well, he didn’t talk to me, didn’t encourage me to go out, didn’t urge me to make new friends. Out my window I saw Claudia walk by the house a couple of times. Once, I watched her draw a hopscotch board on the street in front of our house. She hopped around, stopping between each turn to look in the direction of our house.

Pretty lame. Hopscotch, really? You think hopscotch is going to pull me away from Jean Grey, or Storm, or Mystique? I’ll take Mystique every time.

My father spent most days at the college preparing for fall classes. Robert Miller was a Kantian to the core. To him, Kant’s synthesis of the British empiricists Locke, Berkeley, and Hume with the Continental rationalists Descartes, Leibniz, and Spinoza was one of the great intellectual achievements in human history, and still represented the pinnacle of philosophy, particularly epistemology. His notion of the synthetic a priori organizing principles laid the foundation for modern cognitive psychology. Kantian ethics was as good a system as was possible if one wanted to provide a rational basis for normative behavior. (I know about Kant, not because of my father. I know about Kant because I wanted to keep up with Claudia. Truth is, much of what I know and think came from trying to keep up with her. But I didn’t venerate Kant the way my father did.)

Robert Miller had the reputation as an impeccable logician. It was when it came to emotion that he got all tangled up. That had been the blessing of Madison Hallie. My mom had dark hair, a jaw that the Kennedys would’ve envied and sapphires for eyes. (I shared the jaw and the eyes. I was told later by Jennifer that that was why my father had such difficulty talking to me after Madison’s death. Every time he looked at me, he saw her, and the emotion of that shut him down. Seemed plausible, but didn’t diminish my hurt.) Madison’s most endearing trait was an unbounded curiosity. She also had the