GH O TI

f i sh

Issue No. 2

The Social Experiment *

Sun sleeps beyond the horizon, first stars testing night's black water.  Groups of children pass me on the sidewalk.  Disguised as devils or doctors, goblins and green berets, the kids head off in search of candy, mischief, guided by the token parent masked beneath the lie of a smile. 

I never played trick or treat as a boy.  I didn't fit in.  Mars is a real ghost, the kids would say.  Spooky.  I'm, so scared.  They called me grandpa and snowman, scorning me for being different without ever learning just how different I was.  Without friends, I had no group to join.

My father felt bad for me and volunteered to take me out alone or with my rebellious sister in tow, but I declined.  I was as content to experience isolation as anything else.  Alone in my room, I stared out my window, watching the albino moon cast off from the company of stars. 

This alienation was a hefty slap and a deep ache for Dad.  It was as if he were the outcast, the butt of cruel jokes and juvenile bigotry.  He always felt guilty about my appearance.  He never said it, but I could tell by the submissive tone of his voice, the way he looked away while talking about his son, the way he spoiled me beyond his means while sometimes overlooking the basic emotional needs of my older sister Sonja.  Some doctor told him if both parents carry the gene, one of four children's likely to be born albino.  Dad understood that he had it and, by siring two kids, he created a fifty-fifty chance of inflicting one.  "You know I love you, Mars," he said.  "If only things were different. . . ."  He loved that infinite improbability of if.  He would've given everything to the metamorphosis, hoping a colorful butterfly with stained-glass wings might emerge from this pale caterpillar's chrysalis.  But his hopes were as futile as his self-pity.  He couldn't repair the faulty wiring in his genetic machine.  Or mine.  All he could do was compensate with too much emotion, tying his joy and despair to mine.  That's why it hurt him so much to see me cast out by the others at my school.

Personally, he knew nothing about alienation.  It didn't suit him.  He learned early on how to work people and be whatever they wanted.  A linebacker on his high school football team, a lieutenant in the army, a union rep at the bottling plant--he fit in.  The one thing that made him different was his son.  He wanted me to fit in, too.  He hoped I'd lose myself in the crowd rather than shrug and stare at light from the moon.  That's why he convinced Mom to send me away. 

The Oran Institute was a boarding school for young albinos.  Parents from across the U.S. shipped their children to this perennially snowbound campus atop Stonewater Mountain in northern Appalachia.  They didn't know how to help their kids, so they paid Norman Oran and his albino staff to do the job.  Oran brought all these young albinos together and gave them a place where they weren't outcasts--or at least, where they weren't alone.  It was a cross between a support group and a leper colony.  We were considered derelict children, lost and hopeless, each of us in need of identity.  Oran thought we'd find it amidst others like ourselves.

How well this worked for the rest, I can't say.  For me, Oran's social alchemy turned lead into fool's gold.  I felt more removed than ever.  After all, an orchid in the shadows of a rosebush is unique and uniquely beautiful, but an orchid still standing apart from a field of other orchids seems all the more alone.  Giving me identity amidst others like me was doomed from the first.  There were no others like me.  I felt twice as different here for every way I was the same.

Only Doctor Haller understood me.  He had a surplus of difference, too.  An albino son from a poor black family, he knew more about troubles of self than any man I've met.  "My folks didn't know albinism," he told me in confidence.  "To them and everyone at school I was just a white boy born to a black family.  Dad hated my mother so much because of it that the anger could've killed him, and anyone else that happened to be near.  He thought she'd been fooling around with another man.  A white man.  He beat her up and down with the heel of a work boot.  I'd come home from school crying, looking for comfort, looking for someone to tell me it's all right, only to find my mom twice as bad.  She'd be hiding in the shadows where she thought I wouldn't be able to see the blood.  I ended up comforting her instead.  And it was all my fault.  I was the family freak, a mark of sin on the forehead of the Haller bloodline."

Haller carried a double burden, so he sympathized, giving me the warm smile and pat on the back.  Yet even he fell short of understanding.  "You see, Mars," he said, "whatever your situation, you're just like everyone else.  What you have to learn's that it takes time for the people around you to realize that.  For you to realize that.  That's why you're here.  It's so you can see it while you're young.  It took me a bit into my thirties before I figured out that I fit in well enough despite being the way I am, and believe me, that's thirty years of my life I wasted.  I don't want you to waste thirty years thinking you're different when really you're the same."

But I wasn't.  True, now as then I'm as normal as an amputee, a person with a birthmark, a hair lip, a stooped shoulder.  I look a bit out of the ordinary, but rational adults ignore that.  Or pretend to.  What makes me different's the static hum of white noise ringing in my ears. It's the symphony of awareness, my way of listening to that maddening clatter without really listening, making sense of it with every sly smile and casual sigh of acceptance.  Society's abuzz, and nature sings loudly in the background.  I ignore them, focusing on the monotone voice inside me.  Perhaps that's my beautiful ambivalence: letting society happen, letting nature happen, letting my history happen.  If I were to fall from a ladder or bump my head on the branch of a tree, it would be my life continuing.  And if Death had a hand on my sleeve?  I'd laugh and accept her tenderness.  Death would be happening, my history complete.

Doctor Oran saw that in me.  He despised it.  A radical activist hoping to create a better world for his oppressed people, he was like an old-style fundamentalist preacher.  To him, you either took a role in your salvation or you might as well go straight to Hell, drowned like a witch in a test of unprovable faith.  Hell to Oran wasn't the burning lake, however.  It was the status quo.  "There's no as we are," he often said at lectures and during seminars.  "If we're not moving forward, then we're moving back."  In private, his smug, translucent eyes gathered me in like meat for a beast.  "Mars Nébuleux," he said, as always looking at my file as if he didn't have my name and face etched into his thoughts.  "You don't seem to fit in well with the others."

I shrugged, studying his smooth skin from the bald head down to square jaw and tight, muscular neck.  I was eight or nine, and not skilled in dealing with people who didn't like me. 

"You don't join any of the groups or play games at recess.  You eat by yourself and spend too many hours alone in your room  Don't you have any friends?"

"No," I said meekly.

"Doesn't that bother you, Mars?"

"No."

"It doesn't?  Don't you want any friends?"

I shrugged and flinched but said nothing.

"That's not an answer."

I hesitated, uncertain what to say.  But as always, I saw it didn't really matter what words I chose and said what came to mind: "They don't want me."

"What?" he said, his voice raised with righteous animosity.  I swear I almost saw a hint of color break like a frail sunset along the barren horizon of his cheeks.  "Has someone been picking on you?  Harassing you?  Tell me their names and I'll take care of it.  I won't stand for that.  We're a community, and we have to work together to make things better for the whole.  If someone's out of line, you come to me and I'll set that person straight."

"No, Sir," I said when his tirade dimmed.  "That's not it.  I just don't fit in."

"Don't be absurd, Mars," he said with a slow spray of saliva, his voice calmer and more soothing.  "Of course you fit in.  We're all the same here.  It's not like out in the world where everybody wants to be cruel to a young boy who just happens to be a little different.  Here you're like everyone else.  You don't stand out any more than I do.  We're part of the same family.  We share the same blood.  There are no individuals here."

Again I shrugged.

"Don't you want to be part of the group?"

"If I can," I tried to explain.  "If not. . . ."  Once more my shoulders hunched up in the universal salute to indifference.  "Either way, it's fine with me."

That made the director twice as angry and more intense.  I could feel his pulse breaking in violent ripples across the air between us.  After a lengthy hesitation, he spoke in short, strained sentences as if a child himself.  "You've got a lot to learn.  No room for that attitude.  Play by the rules, Mars.  Play by the rules.  You're with us or against us."  And on and on.  He ranted and raved for ten minutes or so as the cords bulged from his neck. 

I could tell he hated me, and I didn't care.  I took his sermon in as best I could, but I didn't cherish Oran's grand experiment expressed in terms of thou shalt and thou shalt not, his ideology of glorification for his kind.  And yes, it was his kind.  I was no more like him than a white Persian kitten's like a Siberian tiger.  They share a colorless coat and similar evolution, but one's aloof to the world, while the other prefers to hunt and dominate all it sees. 

Oran and I never came to an agreement.  He used and reused the same disjointed monologues, trying to convince me his way was best, or at least hoping to enforce his will.  No matter what he said, I still felt most alone surrounded by hundreds who supposedly were like me.  So, just before my junior high years, the director and I were linked by a realization: the time had come for me to rejoin society.  At thirteen, I went back to public school.  I found it easier this time.  I put my differences aside and walked through the crowd as if nothing troubled me, as if no mean word could singe my pale ears or disturb this newfound sense of balance.

----

*This is an excerpt from Beautiful Ambivalence, 30,000 word novel covering both the life and a night in the life of albino poet Mars Nebuleux,  Most if not all of the stories are already available on the web. "The Social Experiment" is story 2 in the novel.  To read the entire novel, or what's currently up, visit (http://www.circlemagazine.com/beautifulgirl/beautifulambivalence.html) and follow the links

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