as if the three were synonyms. The curry arrived and I focused my
attention on it. Mother had grown tired of the lecture, and asked Dad
to talk about something else.
“But the world is about to end!” he said. He was shouting now.
“Of course it is,” Mother said. “But let’s not discuss it over dinner.”
I put down my fork and stared at them. Of all the strange statements
from the past half hour, for some reason this was the one that shocked
me. The mere fact of them had never shocked me before. Everything
they did had always made sense to me, adhering to a logic I
understood. Perhaps it was the backdrop: Buck’s Peak was theirs and it
camouflaged them, so that when I saw them there, surrounded by the
loud, sharp relics of my childhood, the setting seemed to absorb them.
At least it absorbed the noise. But here, so near the university, they
seemed so unreal as to be almost mythic.
Dad looked at me, waiting for me to give an opinion, but I felt
alienated from myself. I didn’t know who to be. On the mountain I
slipped thoughtlessly into the voice of their daughter and acolyte. But
here, I couldn’t seem to find the voice that, in the shadow of Buck’s
Peak, came easily.
We walked to my apartment and I showed them my room. Mother
shut the door, revealing a poster of Martin Luther King Jr. that I’d put
up four years before, when I’d learned of the civil rights movement.
“Is that Martin Luther King?” Dad said. “Don’t you know he had ties
to communism?” He chewed the waxy tissue where his lips had been.
They departed soon after to drive through the night. I watched them
go, then took out my journal. It’s astonishing that I used to believe all
this without the slightest suspicion, I wrote. The whole world was
wrong; only Dad was right.
I thought of something Tyler’s wife, Stefanie, had told me over the
phone a few days before. She said it had taken her years to convince
Tyler to let her immunize their children, because some part of him still
believed vaccines are a conspiracy by the Medical Establishment.
Remembering that now, with Dad’s voice still ringing in my ears, I
sneered at my brother. He’s a scientist! I wrote. How can he not see
beyond their paranoia! I reread what I had written, and as I did so my
scorn gave way to a sense of irony. Then again, I wrote. Perhaps I
could mock Tyler with more credibility if I had not remembered, as I