Martian

lots of errors-
got tired of editing so some things stop midway
got to that point where after having confidence about the story i have all doubts
the beginning is random, doesn't tie into the story
need to do some more research on Russian culture

Martian

It's snowing in the middle of February, and nobody in the city will say why. Maybe the scientists attribute it to global warming, but if that's the case, it's going to suck when it hits summer. I can already feel the waves of heat rolling down my back. Being on one hundred and seventy milligrams of methadone, I should sweat a lot, but I hardly ever sweat. That doesn't mean I like all the side affects of this drug. For instance, I've gained an awful lot of weight on this drug. But that's no excuse for my bust size to increase three sizes and my jeans to get tight and for a new, almost cute fleshiness to appear in my cheeks, when I'd rather they look gaunt and haunted, the way I feel all over. I plan to start working out soon as daybreak hits. People say we live in the present tense, but sometimes it feels like tomorrow is all we got. If today didn't go so right, or even if it did, tomorrow can always be played better. Even if I knew what was coming tomorrow, doesn't mean I would handle it any better. Maybe if we could see the future we would screw it up a whole lot more than we do not knowing the future.

I've had this nagging feeling that I was much more capable in the past than I am now. It's not merely a lack of confidence, but an awareness of how much has been lost. I thought you could add and add without ever having to subtract, but experience seems to be this thing where you have to decide what you want to give up in order to learn something new, and the more experience you get, the more you have to give up.

I used to have a lot of interesting interpersonal interactions with people. I didn't keep them at arms length the way I do now. I had a way of letting go, and not keeping track of my happier moments. (holding on?)

I called Dr. Ignatovan the mathematician at 1:43 am on a Saturday night.

I wanted to see if we were still friends or not. The answer if obviously yes, but we don't talk much anymore. That's because I got tired of listening to him ramble on and on about the most trivial things. It wasn't just that what he said was trivial, it was the way he went about changing subjects.

He didn't pick up the phone right now, but he often calls you back, the same way I don't pick up my calls, and then have to call people back. Some habits of his bother me because I do the same thing, but he does them with less finesse. One day he told me that I overestimated my understanding of other people. That's one of the few things I know about myself that isn't true. To attempt to gain his trust, I'd have to do a lot more than categorize my experiences with people. Hitherto now, I'd have to stop hiding my pity for him until he was constantly reminded by how distasteful his ignorance of human behavior is to me. Only then could my innate understanding about other people be put into a scientific rhetoric Dr. Ignatovan could study.

He does not like to hear stories about other people. Once I was foolish enough to come to him with a question about what to do in a delicate situation with a friend of mine who was blatantly trying to move into my home. She would not pay even a portion of the utilities, much less touch the rent. She lied to me, and would leave without saying so for days at a time, often to do drugs, leaving me to worry about her and her new pregnancy. If pressed to summarize without eliciting sympathy, which was always foremost in her mind, her speech might have gone something like this.
"I've always had unprotected sex with Brian, my abusive spouse who is in jail, and I never get pregnant. Well, only one time, and I had an abortion. No big deal. But really, just because my nipples are cold every single morning now, and I suddenly smell everything, and I have strange cravings and need to pee all the time, and I'm suddenly hormonally challenged? This means nothing. I need to smoke my cigarettes and shoot up speed."
So I saw it coming, I read the signs, I told her to take a test, even though she denied her pregnancy for 15 weeks. I forgave everything except her inability to express the slightest gratitude. When I kicked her out, and she surprised me by not contacting me for a long time, Dr. Ignatovan was thrilled. He considered the fact that I could feel surprise tacit proof that I overestimated my intuition where people were concerned. Just because I considered her behavior a possibility was of no concern to him. The proof was that I could not predict her behavior with one hundred percent accuracy. Thus, I do not have any insights into human psychology.

So often people speak of themselves when they think they are talking about you.

(Ignatovan couldn't give me advice, etc.)

*****************

Ignatovan calls me back seven minutes after I call. I ask him"what's the Russian movie you are watching about? What is the plot?"

"It's a great movie," he answers. "It's an hour and a half long, and my mom and I watched it together, but I don't understand why I can't get full reception on it. Have you heard of the director in it? He's a great poet. I'm saying why he became famous, he said this great poem."

"No, I have not heard of the director of an unknown movie where I don't know the title or the plot. Do you mean he composed a great poem?" I say, irritated by the inconsistencies in his speech.

"No, no no. He played three great roles," he says. He has a history of being impervious to questions.

"So he is an actor, not a director," I say, trying to understand what we are talking about. We're trying to have a discussion about what makes a life great, but his answers are hysterical when I look at how insular they are.

"No, he is a director, no he is an actor you should like. He very famous. He actually came to the United States. He became famous before Great Revolution. He was like famous of great royal family. " It is just like Ignatovan not to specify what Revolution he is talking about, or what royal family he is talking about, or what actor he is talking about, or how this all relates to our conversation.

"What royal family? Are you talking about Stalin or something?" I ask.
"There are two versions, he committed suicide or he married an American ballerina."
"There are two versions of what?" I ask.
"Well, in this movie the official version is that he committed suicide," he says breathlessly. "But they speculate on the idea that he was killed by the KGB. And he definitely married the ballerina. The movie is all very dramatic. It was famous even before the Revolution. But there were two of them and they both committed suicide. They are great but they really have their own style, very different from anybody else."

To ask him what "they" he is talking about would be useless. Also, how can he even claim to tell if somebody has a style that is different from somebody else or not? He is incapable of grappling with those kinds of aesthetic judgment calls.

Dr. Ignatovan giggles randomly.

"He even left a suicide note. I even remember a couple lines. The last two lines are, well, 'to die is not new in this life, but to continue to live is not newer. "

I tell him that his double negatives make no sense. He mutters in Russian, and then says that the phrase is closer to "there is nothing new about death. But to continue to live, that is not new either."

"I still don't get it," I say.

"It's not profound," Dr. Ignatovan admits. I don't know whether he means his translation abilities are not profound or the text itself is not profound because what he means when he speaks is too painful for me to derive out of our conversations. Nevertheless, I can't stop trying, for to connect with this strange creature would be rewarding, creative, and possibly meaningful. Except it would probably take more time than either of us have left on this earth.

He addresses me as if each sentence is a prophet in disguise. His excitement, paired with what he is saying, makes me sad.

"There was an answer to his suicide note. It's not new to die, but to make a life is profound. You can't just continue living, but make life," he says.

"What constitutes a great life?" I ask him. I know he can't think for himself, but I want to prove myself wrong.

"After the Russian Revolution, that is a major discussion," Dr. Ignatovan says. He does not answer the question, as usual, but makes a comment about what sort of conversation my question elicits. For Ignatovan the interesting part of a conversation is never about getting to the heart of the matter, but conducting an outside formal study of textbook cases full of facts that accidentally relate to bits and pieces of what we say.

Again he avoids my question. It's like talking to a deaf person over paper.

"What makes a life great?" I ask again, adding extra emphasis to the word great.

"I probably can't say it concisely." Still, Ignatovan's mind finds it hideous to think that he is in a classroom and does not have the correct answer, so he gives me an answer in the hopes that he will be accepted. "Make people happy, have a family," is what pops out.

He giggles like a 12 year old trying to flirt, then talks about Olympic medals.

"I think to live a great life is to have great education," he says. "I cannot permit myself to consider moral issues. I probably won't agree with moral issues because they are ambiguous."

"So by your standards are you living a great life?" I ask, tired of trying to guess what he is saying.

"Pretty good so far for yes, I was married."

"But you didn't sustain the marriage. You got divorced."

I want to be kind with Ignatovan but I doubt his rulebook covers what kindness means coming from another person with their own needs, much less artistic aspirations. Art and expression are related, and if he were to understand this he would find it emotionally and sexually threatening. The massive weight of believing that everybody in American will never discusses their feelings has him bringing exalted expectations to every new social encounter. He probably thinks compassion is also something that is an obvious trait that every American handles in the same way, and therefore, needs not be discussed or analyzed.

He believes that a couple should not discuss things that are relevant to ones feelings or life. He should have lived in the 18th century, and married a wife whom he never spoke to. It was acceptable in those days. Now, we fight for the right to be personal, the right to comfortably shout what we feel. Self-reassurances aside, he finds this very discomfiting. Even though he tells himself that it is anti-American to speak honestly, he is not immune to the laws of human nature. Once, he filed a complaint because a man in a bar was taking stock of pictures featuring women in provocative outfits, photographs in a magazine carried in most grocery stores. Dr. Ignatovan found this offensive because the name of the bar was the Canterbury. He thought that the rules of hospitality demand that people sitting inside a bar such a name should only read articles which pertain to Geoffrey Chauncer's literary keepsake, "Canterbury Tales." Dr. Ignatovan must have also felt that it was a sin that nobody inside this bar knew anything about the history behind the chancellor and Archbishop working for Henry II, beheaded at Canterbury Cathedral in 1170. This was a murder that turned the Canterbury cathedral into a place of refuge for Christians throughout the world.

However, for Ignatovan, this was not a matter of paying history its due respect, but of following rules. For Dr. Ignatova had no problem ogling the naked women in the back of the Seattle Stranger. His argument had something to do with the fact that he could read the Stranger because the Canterbury circulates the Stranger.

Although for the first time Dr. Ignatovan is saying he is interested by the idea of a "great family," Dr. Ignatova'ns marriage occurred largely by accident. The women he married, a dentist, was secretly living in Dr. Ignatovan's cramped quarters. For whatever reason, she could not find it within her to tell her family or her boyfriend that she was living with Dr. Ignatovan, so they got married. Three days after the wedding, his mother moved from Russia to the states.

"It was like a fairy tale, being reunited with my mother," Ignatovan said of the time. His mother moved in with the young bride and groom. Insisting on living in the same apartment with them, the brides pleas went unheard, even though she purchased an empty apartment on the floor below them. The bottom apartment remained bare. When I heard the story, and met the mother, I was left with the feeling that a mental vacuum of debasement had taken over any attempts the bride might have made to make a place in Ignatovans' heart.

The marriage was short-lived. The first time I asked him why he got divorced, Ignatovan told me that they got along very well, and that the divorce was mutual and friendly. The second time I asked, it was six years later. He told me that his wife was probably a lesbian, and that she accused him of being gay. I could feel the contempt swelling off of him in waves. It didn't help matters that his mother had died a year ago. He also gave me a paltry excuse for why their lives went in different directions.

If I tied the man down, connected electrodes to both of our heads, and with advanced technology beyond our current reach made him speak the way I understand the truth, he might explain it this way:
"I took thirty world cruises in a row. My bride didn't understand why I didn't continue to write textbooks, create groundbreaking new theories, and teach graduate students math at MIT, as I was up for tenure after teaching there for only two years. I'd begun work there at 25. I wanted to teach high school students, but I don't have the right certificate. She moved for me once, but I didn't think she wanted to move again."

However, I could only deduce this, for I did not get to tie Ignatovan down to a table with electrodes in our heads.

"So somebody who has never married has not led a great life?" I ask, annoyed.

"You can't compare the two," he says.

"But if you want to say what is a great life you have to say what isn't a great life," I say.

"Not everybody is competitive," he answers. "For instance, I don't think there is anybody who doesn't watch the Olympic games."

"I don't watch the Olympic games."

"But you traveled to Canada this summer for two days!" Dr. Ignatovan babbles on about hammer throwing medalists. I don't have the heart to tell him that my trip to Canada was a lie to get out of hurting his feelings. In early February, I couldn't hang out with him so I told him I was on a road trip to Vancouver. It was plausible enough. Friends have offered me road trips to Canada so they can score extra bottles of codeine. The next time I saw him I gave him a birthday present, knowing how big he is on formalities. Maybe the gift would become a pivotal moment in his life, I'd thought.

"I don't understand the relevance between my going to Canada and the Olympics," I say, my jaw clenched.

"But you want to win in chess," he says.

"Not always. It's an art form to me."

"No, you want to win," he says. "You want to win. You want to win."

"I might pick a chess line that is ambiguous over one that is forced and wins because I want to see where it goes," I say. I know people that lose on purpose." It's true. I know a hustler who does this for extra money, to boost peoples egos so they will underestimate him. Then he crush es them for money. I also know of an intellectual who occasionally plays the losing line to see how well his opponent knows the winning line.

"Yes, I do this sometimes too," he says, always the smug know-it-all child, eager to please. He is the biggest kiss ass, except he can no longer make a living being a teacher's pet. Just as I cannot make money by my defiant attitude.

"What does competition have to do with living a great life?" I ask him. This conversation is going much better than most of our conversations, for I am getting a word edgewise in. Normally I have to shout over him or hang up to get his attention. I must be coping with his vicissitudes in a manner incongruous to the way we normally talk. There is usually conflict when we speak. My guess would be that today I am not trying to ignore or pacify the conflicts. I am not trying to help him, or try and treat him like he is normal when he is not. And. I am not talking to him as if he were my good friend. Perhaps I have a talent for acting like a different person on every new encounter I have, conversational or physical, partially do to my extraordinarily selective memory that tries to create new uncovered topics every time I talk to somebody I have spoken to before. However, I normally don't change my attitude. With Ignatovan, changing my attitude has established a new conversation pattern.

"If you want to compare great lives you have to have something more uniform, like having a great family," he says. Back to the great family theme. He is obsessed with the idea of a great family.

"In America competitiveness is more unified by the idea of success. In Europe, I think, actually maybe in Russia, everybody believes it is outside of the U.S. that it is important to have a great family."

What he means is that Europeans place more value on family, while Americans don't.

"Great family?" I ask, sick of the phrase.
"Good family," he answers happily.
"Good family? Why not just family," I say.
"Make a family," he says. This is how you have a good life, he believes. This is too pathetic. Has he ever read a philosopher? Would he understand philosophy if he read it? Probably not unless his mommy breastfed it to him.

"What if somebody wants a family but can't find the right person?" I suggest.

"People who want success get married. It's almost universal for people to have pals," he says, sounding like the communist he is.

"Does it make them less great to live alone?" I ask. "After all, somebody might dedicate their life to science, or to medicine, and not be able to marry because they couldn't find anybody who accepted that their priorities were with their job first."

"And in a lot of these cases, if the person had married, they might not have pushed forward in the field they were in and contributed so much research and knowledge," I say.

"Freud was saying all persons actions are either to be successful or to be popular among the opposite sex. And Yung proved that no, it's only in order to attract more potential mates, success is only to attract mates, " Dr. Ignatovan says.

"But maybe Freud or Yung had problems in their marriage. What about people who end up murdering their family? Am I supposed to think they had a successful life just because they had a family once? You say your morals are ambiguous but what else do we have to judge people by besides morals and actions?"

"But Freud grew up constantly with girls," he says. It takes me a second because at first I don't know what this has to do with anything, but this is how Dr. Ignatovan talks, and he means that Freud's childhood gives him a free pass when it comes to living a great life.

"But anybody can say it's because of their childhood that they don't live a great life," I say. "Your definitions are fragile." And so are you.

"Why, I am just making a point that I think everybody needs to have a family, and I'm trying to support my argument," he says stiffly.

"I think there's a lot more to life than that," I answer. I refrain from sighing. "If you had to write a biography of your life where would you want to start?" I ask him.

"Ostroesky was blind and he wrote a book on special paper. His mom helped him and then sent it to the editor," Ignatovan says. He is obsessed with mothers who help their sons. I don't think we have ever had a conversation where he didn't mention somebody who's mother saved their sons life in some major way.

"I don't like writing at all especially about myself. I like yes or no," he says.

"You don't know yourself because you haven't given yourself the chance to explore who you are,"I say.

"I have painful memories. They would give us topics and we'd have to write about them." Again, he refers to his ubiquitous they. He's spent so much time in America, and he speaks like the opposite of a poet. And to think that the mathematician in my graduate program I befriended before Ignatovan spoke like a poet. I thought there was a connection between poets and mathematicians.

"My mom would do it for me," he shares. What a shock.

"I remember when I wrote what I thought, but I wasn't supposed to write what I thought, but what they want you to write."

This is how he lives, I think.

This is how he thinks.

This is how he talks.

This is how he lives, thinks, and talks.

"You are still operating on Russian principles. saying you say what you want to because in America you are supposed to," I tell him, knowing that he will not understand.

When he argues with me, going on about how there are never any conflicts between family and career, or cultural divides, I go for the jugular.

"You are one of the least personal people I know," I blurt out with more than a hint of lost allegiance in my voice.

Anytime you meet somebody, there are a few moments where one permits oneself to imagine an incredible integration taking place. A remarkable meeting of the minds. In Ignatovan's case, we spoke for weeks on the telephone, and my fantasy was fed on two levels, for Ignatovan's intellect and kindness was of use to me. This was enough to keep me considering whether his ideas were enough for me romantically. However, we all are capable of imagining the most gruesome of people being capable of meeting our needs.

When I knew him six years ago, he appeared to me to be a more desirable person. I had seen much less of the world, and did not understand how maladjusted he was, and how disgusting I would eventually find his particular disease. It is possible we are all sick, but to fall in love, we must be able to tolerate our loved ones condition.

Back then, his mother was still around to hold his hand.

He knew how to cover his chillingly choreographed hugs so that I mistook him for somebody who did not know how to contain his feelings, instead of what he was- a man protecting a sexual love that most people try to purge from society. Having no polite term for the relationship of this man and his mother, I tried to think of it as another cultural difference. Sadly, his cultural background is simply a brilliant diversion to what prevented anybody from seeing or stopping what continued until the woman's death. Her eyesight became stricken. She could only see what was straight in front of her. She could not move her eyeballs. It is a strange way to die, and to this day Ignatovan is slightly obsessed with rare forms of eye disease. The last girl I think he had a crush on could only see out of one of her eyes, and her eyes were each different colors. So, Dr. Ignatovan why the search for all that is proper and right?

"I usually separate if it involves somebody else and me," he says. "I would say, I like a book. But I would never say to somebody else that I liked a girl. This is normal," he says arrogantly.

"No. It's neurotic," I conclude.

"It's not okay to say anything personal. It is sexual harassment to look at a girl. It is not okay to have a conversation with a doctor if it is about anything but medicine," he tells me.

"Then you are not very American," I insist. "Americans often go up to each other and tell each other who they like."

He claims he likes questions. In particular, he likes tests that offer him either a yes or no. Tests with multiple questions. He doesn't like essay questions that ask him personal questions. The word "personal" to him is as violent as the word "murder" is to somebody else.

So I look up sexual harassment online, and explain how it has to involve physical touch, stalking, requests for sexual favors, verbal threats, or intimidation- like if the girl is afraid she will lose her job if she does not sleep with the boss. Ignatovan disagrees with the legal definition of sexual harassment.

"If somebody is murdered, you have a case. If you look at a girl wrong, you have a case," he says. But this is not the most important thing on his mind. The most important thing on his mind is that everybody considers him to be American.

"What I said about not being personal and not telling people that you like a girl is actually totally American," he declares.

"No it's the opposite of American," I say, sounding bored. "The fact that you think you have to do what is supposed to be American is very communistic of you as well, except you completely misunderstand what is and what is not American. It's not very simple in the first place, and I don't like how simple you like to make your separations." I try not to sound like a total bitch when I say this.

"I'm just saying I don't say who I like and don't like," he says, sounding very frustrated. I don't take much notice.

"That is such an over-simplification. It's insulting."

Then, I call him repressed.

"I wouldn't want some boy to tell my father or some other person that they like me. That would anger me," he says.

Would the feelings anger him, or the expression of feelings anger him?

"Really? I would be more upset if somebody withheld that sort of stuff from me. I would want to know. " I go on some more about how Americans like to be candid and open.

"Don't talk about me behind my back. That sort of thing," he says. "What is private? If it involves feelings, I wouldn't share it with somebody else." He also explains that somebody either has a girlfriend or boyfriend, or they are not together. I try to get him to understand that in my culture, people "hook up" and are not together, and that there are all these new in betweens, and that people love to gossip with one another and tell people in explicit detail acts that do not have the sort of labels he is thinking of.

As I talk, I heavily tone down how I say what I say because otherwise, he would not believe it.

"Here is a metaphor, Ignatovan. You are a bottle with a cork in you about to explode while others are fountains spouting freely. You go out of your way to eject and edit personal material," I say, giving him my own label.

"No it's all labeled, they never say they don't like Tom Cruise." He thinks celebrities fall into a separate category from normal people when it comes to expressing feelings. As an example, he uses my friend Jason, who once kissed Jenny McCarthy. He says it is okay that Jason told us this because Jenny McCarthy is famous. I explain to him that Jason often tells me about other girls he kisses that aren't famous.

"Your ignorance is shocking!" I say, stunned. "People are often more willing to say they are hooking up, but not that they are in a relationship. A relationship is a heavy word, and some people don't like all the ramifications it has. They may feel that if they say they have a boyfriend, the boy they are interested in might think the girl is commitment obsessed, clingy, or worse. And vice versa. It is generally something that both people decide," I say.
"There are a lot of things that can't be labeled," I persist.

"You are talking about a generation gap," he says. "If you look inappropriately it is sexual harassment and what I say is completely ordinary. Saying I don't like to talk about liking a girl is in the spirit of American laws."

"It shows a complete misunderstanding of what it is to be American," I say.

"Anything emotional or sexual is not American," he says.

"Unwelcome in who's mind, yours? Maybe yours. But everybody? No. No way!"

This conversation is really beginning to irritate me. Forget my love of brilliant mathematicians in general. This is one fucked up boy who needs to admit his mommy molested him. He needs to go around telling every stranger he meets on the highway. But he thinks that if he even says that he likes a girl, he will be sued for sexual harassment. And furthermore, he believes that this is proof of the beauty of American Patriotism.

"Sexual harassment laws, terrible history, fragility, not even emotionally, but saying I am careful about expressing my feelings is not anything anybody would think is anything strange," he says.

I long ago noticed that the beginnings of a lot of his sentences make no sense.

"Most people do think it's strange," I say. This is, after all, a fact. Everybody I know think that Ignatovan is strange. And if they were hard-pressed to make a list of the details of what is most strange, they would mention how fake-polite he acts at all times, and how he never lets loose, and how he preaches incessantly about topics that do not tie together, and how most people cannot relate to him, and that they find him to look and act like a freaky Martian.

Ignatovan honestly thinks he can live in a world without comparisons. He thinks comparisons are sinful. In desperation for some humanity, even if bleak, I scold him. I tell him that what he thinks of as separations are rules. He believes that he categorizes ideas. Blueprints graphing which idea belongs to which area. His rules are arbitrary, I tell him. Finally, the truth. He makes up new rules as fast as he can come up with them in response to random stimuli around him.

Most dangerously, his are the rules of his existence alone, for they pertain to nobody but himself.

"Your head is a very interesting place to visit but you should get out of it more," I finish, and put the phone back in its receiver. I like the physicality of this gesture, and I can't help but appreciate old fashioned phones and old-fashioned answering machines that you can listen in on and interrupt. It's a much more preferable way of screening calls than caller ID.

I'm not angry at Ignatovan for who he is. I'm angry at him for thinking that he is a "normal" example of what all Americans are like. How can he miss so much? Right now, I finally get why he talks on and on to the irritation of the person on the receiving end. Since he can't empathize or relate, he has to make up experimental theories about the smallest minutia so he can explain away why people respond to him the way they do. Or why they don't respond to him the way his sets of rules insist that they should. He must constantly make up new shoulds and ifs to compensate for his tilted world view. If I believed that my genes came from a rabbit, and that my life was based on Alice and Wonderland, I would spend most of my time generating thoughts to explain why people did not see the similarities to Alice, or why people did not recognize my rabbit genes. I could create any theory at all. Perhaps this is why he is forced to be so creative with something as rigorous as math. With people, he must bend rules all the time to make room for his noncomplying nature. He is so uninsightful, he has to over-compensate, as most geniuses do. Most people who are extremely talented in one field are not balanced, but disproportionate.



NOTES:


"You can take the man out of Russia but you can't take the Russia out of man.

cultural divide.

america is a much more open society and have a high iq and not relate to other people socially
total different concept of private and public in Russia and America
the fact that it is so important for him to fit in and be american and fit in is not american.
personal problem- can't say he likes Maria.

hates feelings- the fact that somebody would like him and tell somebody about it or the communication itself?

cultural divide, growing up in Russia and being educated there.

moraldivide- how can he be friends with some of the wierd OPEN people he is friends with>?