“Of course,” my mother replied briskly.
Professor Stiles acknowledged her with a nod. “And so you are likely familiar, as well, with our failures in that war, the losses our armed forces have suffered, and the despair that has spread among our soldiers there.” He did not wait for an answer, but merely went on. “It is my feeling that we have civilized our own humanness out of existence. We are too affluent, and too soft, and many of our natural instincts have atrophied. My research means to explore how the human mind reacts when its comforts have been stripped away. I intend to recover those human skills that we have lost, to create a better soldier, and perhaps more importantly, a better citizen.”
“I see,” my mother said.
The smile that Professor Stiles offered in response was a sad one. He shook his head, turned to me, and winked. Then he reached into the pocket of his sport coat, lunged to his feet, and grabbed me from behind, pinning me to my chair. His arm was crooked around my neck; the tweed was rough against my throat. I felt something being pressed to my skull, just above the right ear.
My mouth was full of food, but I was unable to swallow. I heard my mother scream.
“I’m going to murder your child, Mrs. Loesch,” Professor Stiles said, his voice loud but calm. “What are you going to do?”
She screamed again and again, her hands twisting her napkin, her body curling further and further in on itself, shrinking like a piece of paper thrown into a fire.
I had not yet had time to be frightened — I felt only shock and confusion. I looked to my father for help and was even more baffled to find him sitting back, his arms crossed over his chest, looking on with interest, even amusement. It was clear he was not comfortable with the situation — his mouth was taut, and the veins stood out above his ear — but neither was he frightened, or even angry. Meanwhile, my mother continued to scream.
“I’m going to kill Eric, Mrs. Loesch,” he said. “What will you do? How will you save your son?”
“Please!” she wailed, rocking in her chair. She turned to my father. “Please! Brian! Please!”
“Mrs. Loesch!” Professor Stiles shouted.
“Oh, please!”
“Mrs. Loesch, look at me!”
I felt the object press harder into my scalp, and I tried to lean away. But the Professor’s arm held me tight. I struggled to swallow, failed, and coughed horribly, spitting the food across the table. My father frowned.
“Look at me, Mrs. Loesch! If you want your son to live, look at me!”
I believe that lifting her head was the most difficult thing my mother had ever done. Slowly, as though she were terribly old, she turned to face the end of the table where the Professor stood over me; she gazed into my eyes and I recognized that something in her had toppled over and shattered. Her cheeks were streaked with tears, and wrinkles fanned out from the corners of her mouth. A bubble appeared at a nostril, grew, and popped.
“Look at me, please, Mrs. Loesch.”
With a final, desperate effort, her eyes rolled up to meet his.
“Do you want me to kill your son, Mrs. Loesch?”
“No,” my mother whispered.
“Mrs. Loesch, I want you to look at my hand.”
She blinked, and blankly gazed at his left hand, which rested on my shoulder, holding me to the chair with casual, implacable force. I could feel the long fingers there, pressing painfully into my flesh.
“No, Mrs. Loesch, the other hand.”
Her jaw trembling, she shifted her gaze to the Professor’s other hand, the one holding the weapon to my head.
“Mrs. Loesch, I want you to tell me what I have pressed to Eric’s head.”
Fresh tears began to run down my mother’s face. “A g—,” she stammered, “a g-g-gun.”
“Mrs. Loesch. Cybele. No. What do I have pressed to Eric’s head?”
A curious transition played itself out on my mother’s features. Though she was wracked by fear and despair, she must have found within herself some well of resolve, for she focused her glassy pink gaze and concentrated on the Professor’s weapon. After a moment, her eyes flew open, and her head jerked back an inch; the first stirrings of anger were visible at the corners of her mouth.
She looked up at the Professor, then at my father, who had slid down in his chair and was staring at his hands, folded on his belly. Some of the food I’d spat out had struck his shirtsleeve just above the elbow. He did not appear to notice it there.
Finally my mother’s eyes returned to mine. Her gaze was cold.
“Mrs. Loesch? Tell me what you see.”
She did not look at him as she spoke; her eyes remained on my face, but she appeared to be looking elsewhere, someplace far from this room. Her cheeks were still wet, but her eyes were dry now, as if the tears had been burned away. She said, “A train.”
With the pronouncement of these words, Professor Stiles released me from his grip. I slumped in my chair, coughing, and found suspended in front of my face, gently held by the Professor’s long pale fingers, a die-cast toy locomotive. After a moment, his face appeared beside it.
“For you,” he said.
This train was something I wanted very badly. I had seen it, in fact, just that week, at the toy shop in downtown Milan, displayed in the front window along with a collection of cars that linked to it. But it was the locomotive I wanted the most. Sleek, black, with windows of real glass and a precise red and white stripe running down its flank, it was a marvelous toy. It looked nothing like a gun, of course.
It is difficult to remember what, precisely, was going through my mind at that moment. I had just been through an unprecedented experience, but I cannot say that I was ever actually frightened, in spite of my mother’s apparent breakdown. This may seem like a strange thing for me to say, but it is true. My father, of course, had never moved from his chair, and had never once seemed worried as events unfolded. And there was something about Doctor Stiles’s hand, the particular way it gripped my shoulder — firm, of course, nearly to the point of injury, but also somehow reassuring. I was not often touched by my parents; ours was an undemonstrative family. Perhaps I was simply unaccustomed to this kind of contact and relished it for its novelty. At any rate, I was not afraid, merely puzzled. I had no idea what had just happened, or why, and understood only that, in the wake of an unpleasant minute, I was being offered something I wanted.
I raised my hand to take the train.
“Don’t touch that, Eric,” said my mother.
I looked at her, my hand frozen in the air, waiting for her to change her mind. Her anger was fully realized now, enveloping her face like a mask.
My father spoke now, sitting up straight with a little grunt. His voice was quiet, cowed, and strained. “Oh, now, how about—”
“Don’t touch it, Eric,” she said again, and then shifted her gaze over my shoulder, to where Professor Stiles was standing. “And you get out of my house.”
“Now, Cybele,” my father began with a sigh.
“Out!” she spat. “You’re sick. You’re a sick man.”
“Mrs. Loesch,” the Professor said quietly, taking a step away from me. The train went with him, and I watched it slip back into his jacket pocket. “I was merely illustrating that—”
“I don’t care what you were illustrating,” my mother said. “I want you to leave. You’re terrible, horrible. How could you do that to a boy?”
“Look at him, Cybele, he’s fine!” It was my father, his open hand thrust out toward me. “He knew it was a trick, you were the only one who was fooled!”