Thy Neighbor by Norah Vincent

the voice of an overheated droid should warn you about.
    Danger, Mrs. Robinson.
    They met through me, of course. At the Swan. And the D-man, being the turkey vulture he is, took up the roadkill I declined.
    I can’t even talk about what they’ve done together or how bad she’s felt about it afterward, or the fact that she’s repeated the encounter anyway. It’s enough to give you posttraumatic stress disorder. It has me. Thinking about it is like an abuse flashback. Makes me go clammy all over and want to shower.
    I know, I know. You’re saying: He’s
your
friend, bro. Your best friend if, and I quote, “time wasted together is any indication.”

7
    Yeah, motherhood.
    There’s something for you.
    It’s something for me for sure.
    Big.
    That’s why watching Dorris exercise her sensibilities in front of the mirror made me weep until the front of my shirt looked like a bib, and why watching Dave tup Dorris as if her boudoir were a barn was just too much for me.
    Here’s one for the books out loud. Take it down.
    My mother was murdered.
    Full stop.
    That in itself is quite enough for anyone, without the coda of Dad as murderer tacked on.
    All in the same crime.
    All in the family.
    I just cannot understand.
    And my ignorance is killing me.
    I have no information but my own past—the one I had with them, which was so partial anyway. After the age of fourteen I was away at school so much of the time.
    I have summers and holidays to go by. And before that, I have the warped view of a child looking up at his progenitors in awe and wonder and, sometimes, impotent rage, as if at the colossi of Easter Island.
    Maybe that’s right. Maybe our relationships were always mediated by distance and therefore mystery, and that made them both easier and harder, but artificial all the same. And maybe that’s why I have so much trouble remembering, because so much of it happened in small bursts, punctuated by long separations.
    How much easier it was in this context to build up a theology around my parents. To love them so much and so falsely.
    This I know is true, and I know it now for certain in a way that I never did then: it is impossible for me to love a person, or even know a person in any meaningful sense, because I do not believe that there is any such thing as a person.
    To me, people have no substance but flesh. Bodies. The rest is purely ideas, a performance on one side, met by projection, and inference on the other. Minds meeting other minds, where minds themselves are just ideas, and the conference between them, illusory. Not a meeting at all. Just a ricochet of mistakes.
    I have only an idea of a person, even the person that I call myself. That’s all. And when I love another person, or think I do, it is only the idea of that person that I love, and it is only the idea of me that is doing the loving.
    And why not love ideas when ideas are so easy to love? So perfect, and ordered, and beautiful, and narcotic. Even chaos has become a theory.
    That is the whole history of man, to me. Human events boiling down to this: living, breeding, killing, and dying for ideas, and loving them unrequitedly.
    We are no more capable of loving people than we are of loving dirt. We love the ideas that we attach to carcasses, the meanings we ascribe to them, and the image we form of them in our minds, minds that are no more substantial than anyone else’s.
    Show me where love is, where it exists, and I will show you a cerebral circuit board of signals and crossed wires. Saying you are in love with a person is like saying you are in love with a radio, or a TV, the box itself, not the broadcast coming from it, which is always hopelessly muddled anyway with the broadcast that is coming from yourself.
    We are talking past and over each other all the while, and we take the resulting cacophony for music.
----
    So, I suppose, my memories, patchy though they may be, are as legitimate, or as