Lost In Place Read Free Page B

duration, and sounded more like something tearing. Oh no! One of the welded seams of the capsule was opening! If it got any wider, I would lose all air pressure! My body would pop like an overinflated balloon, then freeze instantly in the absolute vacuum of space.
    “Mayday, Mayday!” I shouted. “Mission Control, this is Mission Commander. We have a problem.”
    “Honey, I’m teaching now.”
    What?
    “Where did that voice come from, Mrs. Salzman?”
    “Oh, from that box over there near the TV. My son’s in it.”
    Mayday! Mayday! I turned the periscope around and saw, instead of the earth or moon or the limitless void, a sight that confused me. It was my mother, giving a piano lesson in our living room, and her student was sitting on the bench, staring in my direction.
    “He’s practicing to be an astronaut,” my mother explained in a stage whisper. “He puts those pictures of the stars in front of the box and looks at them through the little periscope. He’s been doing it for weeks now.” She looked toward me. “Oops! Honey, I think your box is starting to fall apart. Your rear end is sticking out.” Her student giggled.
    My butt had popped out of the spaceship, right in frontof one of Mom’s teenage piano students. I was seven years old again.
    I pulled the toy periscope down, climbed out through the top and carefully avoided looking at either my mother or her student. My face was tingling, which I knew meant that it was red as a baboon’s ass. I went upstairs to my room, lay down on the bed and prepared for the arrival of what I called the Black Fog, which descended whenever I came out of an outstanding daydream and realized that I was still a little kid in Connecticut. This time the Black Fog hung over me for weeks. It lifted only when my father brought home a book called
Mammals Do the Strangest Things
, which inspired my next unrealistic project: turning the swamp in our front yard into a platypus, fruit bat and armadillo sanctuary.
    In spite of my failure to become an astronaut, I continued to enjoy astronomy lessons with my father, and our stargazing chats ensured my never losing touch with his dark sense of humor. By the time I reached my teens I had learned the secret of his way of thinking, which was to acknowledge, as Tolstoy had, that the only thing we can really know is that we know nothing. Tolstoy considered this to be the highest flight of human reason, whereas for my dad it was just another grim fact and the only possible explanation for the success of phenomena like the Spanish Inquisition, paintings on black velvet of sad clowns and country-western music. He regarded Woody Allen as a sociologist first and a comedian second; he felt that Edvard Munch would have made a better psychiatrist than Sigmund Freud; and he agreed with Arthur Koestler, who wrote that the human brain was perhaps the only exampleof evolution providing a species with an organ it does not know how to use.
    My only complaint about my father’s pessimism was that he didn’t get more pleasure out of it. This revealed the biggest difference between him and me, the one gap that not even a lifetime of conversation could bridge: my father was a natural pessimist who expected the worst as a matter of course, while I am a synthetic pessimist, someone who tries to protect himself from disappointment by convincing himself that pessimists have the right idea. Natural pessimists suffer when their harsh predictions come true, whereas synthetic pessimists get a kick out of being right for a change. I felt more alive talking with my dad about death than I did listening to other people speculate about immortality, and the satisfaction I felt when he helped me find the right words to articulate a problem buoyed me up higher than any pep talk could have. From my own experiences as a manufactured curmudgeon, then, it seemed to me that my father should have been the liveliest, most buoyant man in the world. The reality was that he was