Factoring Humanity

Heather had fallen head over heels in love with the teaching assistant, Josh Huneker. Josh was six years older, a grad student, thin, with delicate, surgeon-like hands, soulful pale-blue eyes, and the gentlest, kindest demeanor of anyone she’d ever met.

Of course, it hadn’t been love — not really. But it felt something like it at the time. She’d so wanted to be loved, to be with a man, to experiment, to experience.

Josh had seemed… not indifferent, but ambivalent perhaps, to Heather’s obvious attention. They’d met at the beginning of the academic year in September; by Canadian Thanksgiving, five weeks later, they were lovers.

And it was everything she could have hoped for. Josh was sensitive and gentle and caring, and afterward, he would talk with her for hours — about humanity, about ecology, about whales, about rain forests, and about the future.

They’d dated off and on for much of that academic year. No commitment, though — Josh didn’t seem to want one, and, truth be told, Heather didn’t either. She’d been looking to broaden her experience, not to settle down.

In February Josh had had to go away. The National Research Council of Canada operated a forty-six-meter radio telescope at Lake Traverse in Algonquin Park, a huge area of untamed forest and Precambrian shield in northern Ontario. Josh was slated to spend a week there, helping monitor the equipment.

And he’d gone. But the other astronomer who was there with him had gotten sick: appendicitis. An air ambulance had taken him from the telescope building to a hospital in Huntsville.

Josh had stayed on, but then snowstorms had prevented anyone from coming up to join him. He’d been alone with the giant telescope for a week, snowed in.

It shouldn’t have been any problem; there’d been food and water enough for two for the entire duration of the planned stay. But when the roads finally were cleared and someone could get up to the observatory from Toronto, they found Josh dead.

He had killed himself.

Heather had had no special status; the police never notified her directly. She’d first learned about it from an article in The Toronto Star.

They said he’d killed himself over quarrels with his lover.

Heather had known that Josh had a roommate. She’d met Barry — a philosophy student with a closely cropped beard — several times.

But she hadn’t realized just how close Josh and Barry had been, or how much of a — well, if not a pawn, certainly a complicating factor in their troubled relationship she’d been.

No, she didn’t often think of that.

But no doubt it had had an impact. Perhaps she was less surprised than most mothers would be when her own daughter had turned out to have hidden demons and undisclosed issues — when her own daughter had taken her life.

And if it hadn’t been a great, unthinkable shock, then she couldn’t have repressed the memories of Mary’s death… regardless of how much she wanted to.

Kilometers away Kyle lay in bed in his one-bedroom apartment, also trying to get to sleep.

False memories.

Or repressed memories.

Was there anything in his life that had been so traumatic, so painful, that if he could, he would have shut out its memory?

Of course there was.

Becky’s accusation.

Mary’s suicide.

The two worst things that had ever happened to him.

Yes, if repression were possible, surely he’d repress those.

Unless — unless, as Heather said, even they weren’t sufficiently unthinkable to trigger the suppression mechanism.

He racked his brain, trying to recall other examples of things he might have suppressed. He was conscious of what an impossible task that was: trying to remember things that he wouldn’t allow himself to remember.

But then it hit him — something from his childhood. Something he’d never conceived of. Something that had cost him his faith in God.

Kyle had been brought up in Canada’s United Church, an easygoing Protestant denomination. But he’d drifted away from it over the years and today was seen in a hall of worship only when weddings or funerals required it. Oh, in moments of quiet reflection, he thought there might be some sort of Creator, but ever since that day when he was fifteen, he had been unable to believe in the benevolent God his church had preached.

Kyle’s parents were out for the evening, and he had decided to stay up as long as he could. He didn’t get to play with the remote when his father was home, but now he was flipping channels madly, hoping for something titillating on late-night TV. Still, when he came across a nature documentary, he paused. You never knew when some topless African woman was going to wander into the scene.