There is only one place that hasn't changed in my entire life, and I am in it. I am in the country.
My grandparents own a country house about an hour outside the city, near a lake called Lake Celeste. When I was a kid, we called it, simply, "the country." It looked like the country in books. My grandmother doesn't call it "the country." She calls it, grandly, "Celeste."
It's really not the country. It's more like an outlying suburb. It's kind of country lite. It's within earshot of some major highways, and it's not high enough in the mountains or far enough from the city for the air to taste like gaseous crack. You can hear the romantic whistling of Metro-North trains on the Hudson line, along with plenty of other civilized noise. Still, there are trees, and there is a lake--Lake Celeste.
The lake is man-made and therefore an ecological nightmare. Aquatic weeds grow up from the bottom and a weird algae forms on the top. Still, the water in between the weeds and the algae is cool and clear. "Like velvet," my grandmother is fond of saying. "Like velvet."
At the edges of the lake, lily pads grow with supernatural force. It's quite possible they are not normal lily pads. The Indian Point nuclear power plant is just a few miles away, lending this place an ominous touch. If Indian Point were to blow, Celeste would be in the kill zone.
West Point is also nearby. Some days, you can hear the heavy artillery firing as the cadets prepare to depart to foreign countries as commissioned officers, where they will orchestrate the controlled chaos of state-sanctioned murder.
Lake Celeste, however, is an enclave apart from these grim realities. It's a respite, an idyll, a safe cluster. It's a former bungalow colony, a place where in the summer aging Jewish women stand in the shallows wearing bathing suits with skirts. It's a place where you drag large, rusty devices across the clay tennis court between sets. This place and this house are cluttered with forgotten objects, and they are weighty with memory.
There is a plastic salad bowl full of maracas. There are lamps that would command several hundred apiece in the used furniture stores of Williamsburg, kitsch the hipsters would lap like Pabst. There are rotary phones here. I dialed my cell on one, but they are disconnected, save for 911. All outgoing calls are emergent.
There is a framed certificate thanking my grandfather for his decades of accounting service to the Lake Celeste Community Association. There is an oversized painted spoon with a tiny mariachi band inside made of wire and cloth. There are drawers full of partly melted candles and incomplete sets of poker chips and power adapters for nations long since immolated in civil conflict. There are rusted fans and dead flashlights. There is a closet filled exclusively with raincoats, another filled exclusively with tennis attire circa 1981. There are twelve boxes of aluminum foil.
Among the thick tomes about history, Freud and the Jews (including, but not limited to, one book called The Jews), flanked by moldering second-best-selling paperbacks of decades past, there is the copy of The Joy of Sex I read wide-eyed one day I stayed in from some family activity, claiming to have a cold. Illustrated in the seventies, it put in my head a permanent association between sex and unshaven armpits, sex and brown leather boots. It may be this copy of The Joy of Sex that is responsible for the conflation of the two governing desires in my life, the basic human desire to have sex and the basic stoner desire to time-travel to the seventies.
A quick revisiting of The Joy of Sex reveals that the text was written by a complete lunatic. It is as if no one expected the text to be read at all. Indeed, it took me fifteen years to read the text, now that I have seen sex in places other than between the covers of The Joy of Sex.
There is an ancient phone list of all the houses here, updated over three decades with pencil. There is a newer yellow piece of paper with the words BRENDA CALLED in scrawled pencil, followed by the words SHIRLEY GOODMAN (I CALLED). Underneath, in pen, it says:
She has lost 6" in height Jason is at Bard Peter decided he did not want to go to school anymore--he is recovering from his lapse. Edwin + Mark are OK. She is to get back to me about situation with the burial plot Margaret Marin has Alzheimer's she is in an assisted living facility
(all names have been changed to protect the lapsed)
Are these notes on a recent phone conversation or a phone message from one grandparent to the other? Or notes to assist in the relaying of a phone message? I didn't know that they were taking notes on their phone conversations now, that they are that forgetful. Still, I am encouraged. They are thorough notes, and it is a clever solution.
I've noticed that my grandparents say that people are losing their minds the way someone my age might say someone can't hold their liquor. It's understood that it's not the person's fault, but there's an element of judgment in it. It's accepted, but it's not admired.
One of my students asked adorably the other day if I could teach her enough math to enable her to build a time machine. She is in fifth grade and still curious and cute. At my tutoring jobs I observe what the hormones that send us to The Joy of Sex do to humans. They turn us into monsters. Ten-year-olds are sweet and inquisitive. Teenagers are dark and insane. There is no math to explain it, nor to build time machines. But, I am going to tell her next week, if you want to travel through time just make sure one place, one house, stays unchanged your whole life. You don't need math to build a time machine. Only, ironically, time itself.
II
Lake Celeste briefly achieved a moment of unparalleled hipness when a celebrity bought a house here. Several years ago at Passover, my grandfather gestured at the Times magazine, which had Moby on the cover that week.
"Hey, that's Moby," said my grandfather. "I know him."
"You know Moby?" I asked incredulously. "How?"
"He had a house up at Celeste."
"Moby had a house up at Celeste? That Moby? The musician?"
"Well, he's not a musician the way I understand it," my Grandpa said. "He makes music with computers. He told me all about it."
"Moby told you all about it."
"Yeah. He's a very nice guy. Though we had a terrible time getting him and his friends to stop jumping off the dock."
Moby eventually sold his house at Lake Celeste. Perhaps he realized he had bought into a bungalow colony of aging Jews within the kill zone of nuclear power plant, and he said, "Hey! I'm a multimillionaire! I can buy any country house I want!"
III
We would go up there some weekends. "Kids," my parents would say, "We're going to the country." My mom would make me lists on tiny pieces of paper so I could pack my own clothes. Before I could read she'd use pictograms. She'd write, "3" and then draw a picture of underpants. Sometimes she'd cross out "3" and write "4." "It's never a bad idea to have an extra pair of underpants," she'd say.
The road was narrow. My dad would beep the horn going around blind curves. He didn't want to, but my mom would make him. "Hunk, Carl, hunk!" she'd say. For some reason her faint but discernible New York accent causes her say "hunk" instead of "honk."
"I'm hunking, Annie, I'm hunking!" my dad would say. My parents' identical accents continue to make the dying and flawed argument for marrying within your cultural group.
The final turn led onto a dirt road. I was obsessed with the line between the paved road and the dirt road. It occurred just after Ron's Kwik Stop. I would hold my breath as we approached Ron's Kwik Stop, listening for the sound of asphalt changing into dirt. I was also a big fan of the Queens-Manhattan sign in the Midtown Tunnel. I always liked crossing lines.
When we got to the country my dad would sing, "We're here, because we're here, because we're here, because we're here." He is tone deaf and so the inflection in the song was imparted by escalating volume. When we got in the car to go home on Sunday he'd sing, "We're going ho-ome, we're going ho-ome!" I'd always fall asleep and wake up as Shea Stadium came into view. Maybe it was because my dad would read that year's team motto aloud. "Catch the rising stars!" he'd shout, or "The magic is back!" Sometimes the Met game would be on the radio, other times Springsteen. Life was simple in the mid-eighties. We hated Reagan, we loved the Mets, and one of the many hit singles from Born in the USA was on the radio all the time.
When we'd get back from the country our apartment in Queens would smell weird from being closed up for a few days. Not bad, just weird. I was obsessed with smelling the smell of the apartment being closed up. When we got back I would rush inside and try to get a good smelling in before the closed-up smell disappeared out the open door. While I was inside sniffing out the smell of a place without people I'd hear my parents yelling, "Who is going to help unload the car? Who is going to schlep? I don't see anyone schlepping! Come help! Come schlep!"
IV
The country house consists of a living room, dining room, kitchen, two bedrooms and a screened-in porch on one level, and then a separate bedroom downstairs accessible by an outside stairway. That room is called, "The room downstairs." It was where my parents and I would stay when I was very little, before my brother was born. My parents were actually married in the room downstairs, because it rained on the day of their wedding, and they could not be married outside by the lake like they planned. They wanted to get a tent but my grandfather said, "Trust to luck."
My grandmother would come and get me from the room downstairs early in the morning and make me Cream of Wheat. She never stirred it so it was full of chewy, undercooked lumps. I loved it that way and would nag my mom to make it lumpy, too, but she could never get as many lumps.
My grandmother would wear an orange terrycloth bathrobe. My grandfather would sleep late. He'd come shuffling out of the bedroom in his slippers and blue terrycloth bathrobe, sans hearing aid and teeth.
"Sammy," my grandmother would snap, "Put your teeth in for God's sake." It was the first command of the day. Many others would follow.
After a while my parents would emerge from the room downstairs. They were always in a really good mood. It only recently occurred to me how they might have been using their private time in the room downstairs.
After breakfast, it would be time to "go around the lake." Though the house has lakefront property, the other side of lake has a communal sandy beach, and the weeds and muck have been cleared to make a sandy bottom. There is also the tennis court where a person can "hit a few balls." My grandparents were tennis fiends and always hoped to instill a similar love of tennis in the next generation. My mom wasn't too into it and my grandmother seemed annoyed about this. "Your mother really has a very nice forehand," my grandmother would sometimes say to me, as if this were a sad secret.
There'd be much discussion of how to dress around the lake, because around the lake the temperature would be several degrees warmer. The outdoor thermometer on the deck would be consulted, and then the discussion would ensue of how many degrees warmer it might be today around the lake. It might be as much as five to ten degrees warmer around the lake. There was also a thermometer around the lake, and my grandmother would often take readings over there and compare them.
"Yesterday, over here, seventy-eight," she'd say. "But that thermometer around the lake, do you know what it said?" She'd pause for effect.
"Eighty-five! Can you imagine? It's like a whole different climate."
Bathing suits would be put on. Tennis rackets would be liberated from their hexagonal presses, new cans of balls opened. I really liked the smell of a new can of tennis balls, but would never be allowed to open one, because the lid had a sharp edge.
Tote bags would be packed with towels and changes of clothes. My mother would remind me to bring my underwear for after I swam. Then my grandmother would remind me to bring my "panties." I tried to no avail to get her to stop using the word "panties," which I still can't hear without cringing.
What is this family obsession with having underwear? I have some insight, because one of my grandmother's charming habits is repeatedly telling traumatic stories from her childhood. During the Depression, my grandmother's family was so poor that she and each of her three sisters only had one pair of underwear, or panties, as she would say. The elastic was all worn out and the underwear had to be held up with safety pins. One day in the stairwell at school the pins came undone and the panties fell off. She tried to abandon them on the stairs but all the kids screamed and laughed, "Ruthie lost her panties!"
Many survivors of the Depression have an obsession with abundance and hoarding. In my family this expresses itself through having enough underwear.
After it was confirmed that everyone had enough underwear and towels, we'd go around the lake, where when I was really little I could run around naked. Hands would periodically descend from above and slather me in sun lotion. Hunger would be staved by partially damp rice cakes. Wholesome and well-supervised outdoor aquatic fun would be had by all.
We might return to the house around lunchtime. This would invariably be a can of salmon. "Let me make you a can of salmon," my grandmother would say. "Can I make you a nice can of salmon?" She actually makes a very nice can of salmon, and tuna. So does my mother. So do I.
V
I went around the lake yesterday and attempted to take out a rowboat. The rowboat was full of rainwater and despite dragging it onto the sand and shoving with all my might, I could not overturn and empty it. It's the same rowboat that's been there all my life, the same one I was permitted to take out, while wearing a moldy lifejacket, after passing the "deep water test," which consisted of being thrown from the rowboat by Sid Friedman.
Sid was in charge of administering swimming tests to the grandchildren of all the homeowners. To be allowed to progress beyond the roped-off crib, you had to prove you could survive a disaster in the middle of the lake, like your canoe overturning or an unexpected ejection from the rowboat. My grandmother always felt that Sid's tests were incomplete because they did not include the possibility of being stung by a wasp while in the rowboat. She thought you could get stung by a wasp in the rowboat, and then panic, and then knock yourself unconscious with the oar, in which case you would fall into the lake already unconscious and drown, and was Sid Friedman preparing you for this possibility? He was not.
"Emily," my grandmother would say, even when I was still wearing an inflatable seahorse in the crib, "the water gives us life, but it can also take it away. It can take it away in an instant. In an instant. So be careful."
This was not unlike the time she told me, "The joys...of having a body...and sharing this body...with another body...the joy of two bodies...such a joy. But there are dangers that can change your life in an instant. In an instant. So be careful."
That's pretty much my grandmother in a nutshell--a hedonist with a vivid and developed sense of impending disaster. She's all sex and death, and now so, too is the country house. The Joy of Sex is still here, but so is the implication of death, in my grandparents' accumulated junk, in their likely absence from the house this coming summer, in the undecided fate of this house and all the junk inside it. Everything here is old and musty and smells of mildew, even The Joy of Sex. Only the people on its pages, frozen in eternal ecstasy, haven't aged at all.
One of my more difficult kids today, champion eye-roller, adenoidal whiner, one who feels the indignity of being sixteen more acutely than most and takes it out on me. Probably doesn't even need a tutor, seems to pick up a decent understanding of the material from class, but highly unmotivated, vulnerable to that oldest of parental ruminations, not working up to her potential. Just getting by.
Once I showed up early and a truly beautiful boy came swaggering down the stairs, sized me up, slowly said, "You the math tutor?" and I think I may have blushed. He slipped out the door and she glared at me and I didn't blame her. "Sorry," I whispered. "You don't have to work up to your potential. Working up to your potential is what people who don't have sex in high school do to distract themselves."
Today, anyway, she had some homework, difficult stuff, exponential equations. You need to use logarithms to solve them, something I never quite understood and actually learn anew every time I try to teach them. Then I get overly excited, telling the kids, "It's not the opposite of an exponential function, it's the inverse! That's it! Yes!" Telling the kids, "MIND YOUR LOG RULES," and they stare blankly, and I sigh and ask for paper, and they sigh and rip it out, and I sigh and ask them how they're going to keep it in their notebooks if it's ripped, and they sigh and open the rings on their binders, and then I write LOG RULES at the top of the paper, I write log MN = log M + log N, I write log M/N = log m - log N, I write log a^b = b log a, I point at the paper, I bang on the paper with my fist, I say, "THESE ARE THE RULES OF LOGS," and they say, "Okay, okay," and I say, "WHAT ARE THE RULES OF LOGS?" and they point at the paper and say, "These are!" I say, "Isn't that thrilling? Aren't you glad to be alive?" And they roll their eyes, and I say, "Okay, it's not thrilling, it's horrible, and the truth is you should drop out and run away from home. Take to the road! Take to the streets! Be bold! Be brave! Live freely!" And they say, "I don't want to," and I say, "Then LEARN the RULES OF LOGS like the coward you are!"
"What's this even FOR?" whined Tuesday 6:30 adenoidally.
"These are exponential equations," I said. "They're actually kind of useful. You can use them to calculate population growth, or the decay of radioactive elements or drugs. Like medications, caffeine, and, ah, illegal drugs as well, they all degrade in the body according to these equations. So if you wanted to keep a constant supply of a substance in your body you'd use these equations to figure out how much should be in the pill and how frequently you should take it."
"EW," she said.
"Also, like, animal populations. If you figure out how fast the population is growing, you can figure out when a species was introduced, in a controlled environment, like an island."
"So WHAT," she said.
"And the other ones," I continued, undeterred, "are for calculating interest. And actually, if you think about them a little you can see why rich people get so rich. Because interest increases exponentially, and what happens when big numbers get raised to higher powers?"
I like this kid because whenever she calls forth knowledge it always appears to be against her will. Her eyes rolled so far back in her head they went uniformly white.
"They increase FASTER," she sighed with great effort.
"Yes, they do. That's why they say 'it takes money to make money.' So these equations actually help us account mathematically for the gross inequities in our current society, and the increasing rate at which the gap between rich and poor is widening."
This kid is suspicious of my propaganda.
"This is my homework," she said pointedly.
"Okay--"
"But I DID that part."
"Okay, so let's--"
"THIS is the hard part."
"Okay, so--"
"But I DID it. But Monica got a different answer."
"Well, is Monica good at math?"
Shrug.
"Let me see."
Monumental sigh, vicious shove of homework paper in my direction.
"Okay, this is right, good, okay, good, that's the right equation, good, you remembered that growth rate is one plus the percentage, good, oh, well, this is wrong, you forgot to multiply the power by n, in this equation the exponent is actually t times n--"
The sigh turned into a snarl. She snatched the paper back, began erasing viciously.
I thought of money. Money, money, money. Forty minutes to money. I do this for money. I am not sixteen. I am not sixteen. I am free. School is over. I put in my time. All seven hundred days of high school, adjusted for exam days, sick days, the day I totaled the car. I got my degrees, and for this I am rewarded at higher hourly rates than those who did not, I am remunerated, I am paid for my trouble.
It wasn't worth it. I'd rather have been upstairs with the beautiful boy, instead of never, ever forgetting to multiply t times n. Maybe once, but I made it up with an arcane extra credit project on credit cards, a graph in three different shades of colored pencil.
"Is THIS right?"
"Yes. Good. Good!"
Snarl, sigh, eye roll, adenoidal snuffle.
"What's the POINT?"
"There is no point. This is the eleventh grade."
"I HATE THIS."
"That's because it sucks."
It always throws them off when I agree with them.
I brightened. "These equations are used by insurance companies. Insurance people use it to figure out--uh, risk, I think." I'm cheering myself up! There are worse jobs in which equations can be used!
"That's SO DEPRESSING."
"Yes, it is."
"How can those people LIVE?"
"I ask myself that all the time."
"I mean, seriously. They couldn't pay me enough."
"Actually, I had a roommate once who was an actuary. He was weird. Calculated the likelihoods of various kinds of death all day."
"Oh my GOD."
"Yeah, he was totally weird. And it was a horrible apartment. I think there was an actual crack den on the first floor. There was a chop shop in the back. You know what a chop shop is?"
"Like with cars?"
"Yeah, when they steal cars, break them down real quick, sell the parts. Very noisy. There were feral cats in the alleyway. I never slept. My room was a closet. The whole apartment was titled. I rolled out of bed if I didn't tense one side of my body all night. Except it wasn't a bed. It was two foam-rubber mattresses from my parents' attic. But then when Rebecca moved into the windowless closet we each had only one. It sucked. AND he never cleaned the bathroom. But yeah, it was weird, how he calculated death all day."
"My friend says that when you die they empty your whole body of blood and fill it with GAS."
"Not gas. Formaldehyde, I think. Very bad for the environment."
"I want to be burned."
"That's a popular option," I say, realizing as I hear the words that this is dialogue from Six Feet Under. "I want green burial."
"What's that?"
"It's when they don't use formaldehyde and instead they wrap you in a biodegradeable sheet."
"I would give my organs. But not my eyes."
"I would, too. Even my eyes. You're not using them anymore, that's the thing. They don't see unless someone else gets them. But it's not your eyes, it's just your corneas anyway."
Shudder.
Shudder.
"Maybe I don't want green burial. I want to be shot out of a canon. But Hunter S. Thompson already did it, and Johnny Depp had to pay for it. Very expensive."
"That'd be cool."
"Or I would have a vast progeny and they could each have my ashes. And if anyone was mad at me they could flush me down the toilet."
"Once you think about it it's so scary."
"It is, you can't think about it too much. It's so scary. Unless you go somewhere else, that'd be cool."
"D'you think you do, though?"
"I want to. I don't know. Sometimes. Most of the time I can't make myself believe it but sometimes, I've had--experiences, there've been times I felt, I really felt it, that there was more, so much more that we can't see, all around us, in us, that we are only a small part, of something so vast and not empty, not only empty, but infinite, filled with other realms and times, that maybe it's beyond time, since time is what makes us die, maybe death is the passing beyond time, to a place where we move freely past all limiting forces of earthly life, and there is no pain, and no fear, and no time, and no ego. But then other times I think, this is it, this is the best place, or it's not the best, it's just the only, it's all there is, that's the secret, that's the joke, that this life is Heaven, that our suffering is in vain, and takes away from an elusive and beautiful truth we're denying to ourselves."
It is strange to speak these words, at a dining room table in Park Slope, in the early evening, sober, not, say, babbling on a mountaintop or barstool, pupils dilated with with ancient dessicated plants or technologically advanced powders or tiny bits of paper impregnated with microscopic amounts of barely pronounceable substances originally designed for the interrogation of prisoners.
"I just don't believe it."
"Well, there's no proof it's there, but there's no proof it's not."
"If it is, it will go against science."
"Science is just another religion, made up by other people."
"I don't want to fly that much."
"Maybe it's floating."
"Or float."
"Maybe it's better than that, something we can't imagine. But the worst thing is that it could be nothing."
"That's the worst thing."
"How could it be nothing?"
"How could it not?"
I tell her about this song I know, about God and time. I tell her about the end of Six Feet Under Season 4, when the dead dad tells his son, "You can do anything, you lucky bastard - you're alive! What's a little pain compared to that?" I'm not sure what I'm saying. I'm glad I'm not on drugs.
"You can't think about this too much," I warn.
"It's too crazy."
"Yes."
There is quiet. I check the time.
"Well, that's all the time we have for today. Why don't you just do one problem so we can make sure you understand."
The equations are incredibly complicated. The problem is tricky. But now there's no time to teach her everything, because we spent the whole session talking about death, life after death, what happens to our bodies when we die. I ask for another sheet of looseleaf. I write down all the equations. I label them, "INTEREST," and "POPULATION, RADIATION, DRUGS." I spin the paper around so it's in front of her.
In a few moments the red timer will ring. It just did. It is exactly 4:00 p.m.
The red timer marks off the ten minutes for which I boil my eggs (which leaves the yolk just the tiny bit soft, but not liquid) the three minutes for which I steep my coca tea (which imparts to me the mental focus of many other stimulants without the jitteriness of caffiene or its chemical analogues, except for that one panic attack last year but I think that was because of an unfortunate falling away in my mind of the veil that usually softens my perception of time and death), and the eight minutes for which I boil ravioli. The timer came with a little sticker that said something like, "The design of this timer is distinctive and patented and replicating it is a federal offense."
When I was a child and so allergic to the world that I was sick every week of first grade, my mother took me to an allergist in Connecticut who cured me of all my allergies. He did this by testing me for every known allergen in the world and then vaccinating me against my own body. When went there for a number of days, and each day was partitioned by the ringing of the Lux timer.
During the testing phase, I received serums under my tongue every fifteen minutes. I'd set my timer and wait a few minutes to see if I went crazy or had a sneezing fit. I would then report my symptoms on mimeographed sheets. After a week, the doctor made up a series of serums to be injected into me. When I realized that these serums would enter subcutaneously instead of sublingually, I took off running down the halls of the allergy clinic, a team of nurses in hot pursuit. I was eventually tackled, subuded and injected. My mother, desperate to cure me of my allergies, promised me innumerable Hershey bars (to which, testing had determined, I had a "moderate" allergic reaction), upon completion of the course of injections. I relented, and set my timer for the sixty-minute intervals at which the injections were administered. They would ask, at first, which hand you wrote with, so you could get the most injections in your other arm. But after a while both arms were bruised and limp from injections. I refused to let them inject me in my thighs or buttocks, but I didn't mind the ensuing dead arms. I amused myself all the way back to Queens from Connecticut by trying to pick up my bruised arms and struggling against their weakness. They felt, I kept thinking to myself, like metal. I couldn't say exactly how they felt like metal, only that the pain in them, sometimes, dull, sometimes sharp, not entirely unpleasant, felt like metal.
The allergy center was named for the head doctor's dead son. He had died of a drug overdose. His name was carved into the cement out front, and I touched it reverently with my sneaker each time we entered.
The treatments worked. My allergies went away and never came back. This past spring, I felt this strange burning sensation in my eyes and throat on the first spring afternoon I spent in the park. I called my mother. (Lately I have been amazed that I carry in my pocket at all times a device on which I can push a button that says "Mom" and be instantly connected to her voice. Isn't that the fantasy of all children? That no matter where we are or what we're doing, if we are in the least bit of distress we can push a button and call our mommies? I think the cell phones of children with living parents, particularly Jewish, formerly allergic children, should come with buttons that say, "MOMMY!" Because that's what pressing the speed-dial or scrolling down to "Mom" in the Address Book and hitting "Send" really is, isn't it?)
"Mom," I said, "I feel so strange...my eyes are burning. I'm sneezing. But I'm not sick." My mom pointed out that I was probably having an allergic reaction. It was a particularly bad season for hay fever, she said. Reassured by my mother for the millionth time since birth that I was probably not dying and whatever was going on was normal I left the park and found my allergies relieved by the mercifully inert concrete and steel of the city. It turned out I was not entirely immune to the intersection between myself and the world, only mostly so.
I consider it a psychological triumph that I'm willing and able to use this very same sort of timer that once rang hourly to summon me to be poked with needles to measure the innocuous chores of my kitchen. But why not? Time is the same whether its marching us toward stabbing pain or a cup of tea. You can pretend otherwise, but you know what the man said, the man now dead so very long--"never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee."
Just before I left on my most recent international adventure my parents came to Brooklyn for dinner. Upon entering my apartment, they thrust a Xeroxed, stapled sheaf of paper in my face.
"Just sign this," said my dad.
He had put a little "sign here," Post-It flag on the last page. My dad is an accountant, in fact my accountant, Rebecca's accountant and most of our family and friends' accountant. He has all kinds of little flags to show you where to sign on your tax returns. Every year my return arrives in the mail with a very official looking cover page full of instructions like "file" and "1040-ES" and "registered return-receipt." At the bottom of the cover page my dad signs, "Love, DAD."
My dad had brought his own pen and was offering it to me. "Go ahead, sign it."
"What is it?"
"It's travel insurance. We read about it in the Times. We figured you should have it so we got it for you."
"Because God knows what might happen to you!" added my mother. "We don't know what you do, with Holly, in Peru."
"It's just a good idea," said my dad. "It's just good to have."
I leafed through the policy and saw the phrases, "In the event of death," "repatriation of remains," and "$250,000."
"You got me life insurance?"
"It's health insurance. In the event of an emergency you can be airlifted by helicopter."
I suddenly imagined myself falling in a ditch, as I often do in South America, but this time instead of escaping with a skinned knee that I could then happily photograph for the next week for an ongoing project I like to call "Time Lapse Wound Heal," breaking some critical bone that punctured some critical organ. In my daydream, a chopper suddenly appeared from behind an Andean peak, scooped me up and deposited me in the Intensive Care unit of North Shore Hospital, where my worried parents would be waiting with an armload of homeopathic remedies. Do airlifted trauma patients go through customs, I wondered? Or do you get a pass and can therefore bring whatever goodies you can fit under that scratchy-looking blanket that gets belted onto the stretcher?
"Just sign it, so we can go eat," encouraged my father.
I signed here, initialed there, and dated it.
"And Emily, please, listen to me," said my mother. I could tell she was about to begin her usual pre-travel admonition. Every year, as she grows more resigned to my advancing age and autonomy, the admonition grows more specific. It used to be, "Don't take drugs or walk around strange places at night." Then it became, "Don't take drugs AND walk around strange places at night." This being my fourth trip to South America in as many years, her plea for my safety was a chain of prepositions. "I know you and Holly are very adventurous together. But please, don't take strange drugs with strange people in the middle of the night in the middle of the street."
"Don't worry, Mom," I said. "I'll be fine. I'll be back in a few weeks."
That's what I always say to my mom when she accurately worries in that psychic maternal way about all the things she knows I'm doing the minute I get out of her sight.
Several weeks later at two in the morning when the acid was really beginning to kick in I thought about motherhood and the cycle of life, and the universe and birth and death and love and theft. I thought about how much my mom would probably like to see the moon on acid from high up in the Andes, but probably never would, so it was a good thing that I was.
We had timed the acid perfectly so that it would really get going just as the lunar eclipse was beginning. I'd never done acid before but I figured a full lunar eclipse of a full moon in the Andes might be an auspicious time to try new things. My friend the expatriate subsistence farmer had kindly tested the acid on two previous occasions, in two different denominations, and I was thus presented with a psychedelic experience usually available only in Amsterdam, one in which the effects of various quantities of the drug you are considering taking are laid out for you with clinical precision.
We ate the tabs and made a fire. As the acid came on, we shivered, but not in a cold way, more in a feverish way. You could really tell it was kicking in when you looked at the flames of the candles or the fire, and you went, "Ooooooooooh."
It had been a while since I looked at the flame of a candle and went, "Ooooooooooh." I don't think it's any accident that the drugs known for encouraging deep insights sometimes followed by psychotic episodes make their presence in our brains known by heightening our appreciation of the one thing that's always separated us from animals, our ability to make and maintain fires. Well, that and the opposable thumb. As hallucinogens are kicking in, the next thing I look at with wonder after a fire is usually my opposable thumb.
The acid made us quiet, and then it made us chatty. It made us cold and then it made us wiggly. It also gave us the ability to stop time and therefore the path of the moon across the sky with our minds and re-start it at will, but sadly there is no documentation of this phenomenon. After the show was over and we had gently dropped the moon behind the trees with our minds and were watching the clouds and saying, "Oooooooooh," I started telling the story of how I had been robbed, and it was there, still peaking on acid at 10,000 feet of elevation that I hatched the greatest criminal plot of my short criminal history.
"Maybe it never would have happened if I hadn't taken the diazepam," I began.
"What's diazepam?" asked the expatriate subsistence farmer.
"Well you see," I said, "It's for the bus."
"But what is it?"
"You take it on the bus, when you want to erase time. So it's like the bus never happened."
"But what is it?"
"I told you," I said. "It's for the bus."
Earlier in the trip, Holly and I had decided to check out Ecuador for a change. This entailed an overnight bus across the border. An overnight bus across a border is a fine and terrible thing, much like life. Sometimes on an overnight bus, just as in life, you can live better through chemistry, and so we never get on a bus without a little blister-pack of diazepam, which I now know to be the generic form of Valium but until recently only knew as the thing Holly gives me on the bus.
On the way up to Ecuador, I took one diazepam, queued up the ol' iPod, and lay back in my broken, filthy seat. An indiscernible amount of time later I noticed that I was still having thoughts in my brain and hearing music in my ears, but I could no longer move. I tried to move my limbs but I was paralyzed. It was as if my limbs weighed 10,000 pounds. I tried to fall more deeply asleep, or wake up, but I couldn't. By some stroke of luck, the song on my iPod ended and was replaced with my soothing nature track, Relaxing Ocean Surf, so I remained calm. After a while Holly poked me and said, "Border." With this I returned from the place of paralysis, which after some pondering I realized was a state of physical--but not mental--sleep. A later Google search of "sleep paralysis" led me to a troubling but informative Wikipedia article, which revealed that while sleep paralysis is a serious medical condition if it occurs recurrently,
"[V]arious studies suggest that many or most people will experience sleep paralysis at least once or twice in their lives.
Some reports read that various factors increase the likelihood of both paralysis and hallucinations. These include:
Sleeping in an upwards supine position
Irregular sleeping schedules; naps, sleeping in, sleep deprivation
Other risk factors were mentioned but I've chosen just to list the ones I had.
The episode of sleep paralysis, while intriguing, was not one I particularly wanted to repeat, and so after we spent a few days in the mountains riding horses and hiking to waterfalls and relaxing on the deck of our $9 a night cabin and generally deciding that Ecuador was all right with us but it was time to make like mad for our favorite depraved beach town, there was something we knew not what calling to us from there, when it was time to get back on the overnight bus I took two diazepam instead of one, and I did not have another episode of sleep paralysis. Instead, I slept so soundly that I was a perfect mark for a two-bit thief who robs the backpacks of unsuspecting tourists when they're benignly trying to avoid a second terrifying episode of sleep paralysis.
There are, to be fair, there certain other measures I could have taken to prevent my backpack from being robbed, besides not taking two tablets of what I now know to be $0.40 generic Valium and falling into a deep sleep. I could have put my backpack under my legs where I would have felt someone tampering with it. I could have not allowed myself to become pinned under the bulk of the fat lady who was sitting and eventually sleeping in the aisle after all the lights on the bus had been turned off in the middle of the trip. I can see now how drugging myself into unconsciousness on a pitch-black bus under the weight of a fat lady might have made me vulnerable to the kind of theft all tourists fear.
Luckily, I didn't notice I'd been robbed until we arrived at our destination and I dumped the contents of my backpack onto the bed at our favorite hotel in our favorite depraved beach town. More luckily, I never put my most important stuff (passport, camera, notebook, iPod, phone, money) in my backpack, and consequently the bus thieves only got my glasses and a little bag full of chargers for all the stuff travelers never had before this sad media-saturated millennium.
"Holly!" I cried. "I've been ROBBED! They took my GLASSES!"
"It's funny," she said, "how incredibly nerdy and Jewish you sound when you say that."
A friend of mine had his glasses stolen once.
"How did they get them from you?" I asked him.
"They said, 'give me your fucking glasses,'" he said.
"Give me your fucking glasses," is not a nerdy, Jewish thing to say. However, "I've been ROBBED! They took my GLASSES!" somehow is. Funny how that works.
After the beach, up in the mountains, during the acid, after the eclipse, I suddenly remembered something, something nerdy and Jewish.
"I have travel insurance!" I shouted.
"So diazepam is Valium!" shouted the expatriate subsistence farmer. "Why didn't you just say so in the first place?"
"What difference does it make, it's for the bus! Now listen, travel insurance! My parents got it for me! I can claim the loss of my stolen glasses!"
"We'll go to the police and make a report!" assured the expatriate subsistence farmer.
"I'll get new chargers!" I said. "And new glasses! I'll replace my stolen property! My parents will be thrilled!"
A moment passed. We contemplated the clouds. They seemed to be breathing. The whole universe seemed to breathing in unison. Dogs barked around the valley. Years ago, when I came to this valley for the first time, I had taken different drugs and heard different dogs bark. I had been waiting all this time to hear them bark again, calling and answering, howling at the moon and passing cars. Water ran in the ancient canals and wind whistled through the ancient Incan temple. The expatriate subsistence farmer had once shown me how his property was bordered with little cement cones that said, "Zona Intangible"--The Intangible Zone. I had made it back here, to the intangible zone. It would be a great place to disappear forever.
"It's not just travel insurance," I said quietly. "It's life insurance. $250,000."
"I could fake my own death and live off the dough," I went on. "Take to the road forever. I just gotta get my parents in on the scam and I'm golden. Their worry and prudence will become my freedom and debauchery. It's perfect. It's poetic! It's what they intended, in some strange way. It's as if their worrying about me keeps me safe, and yet in this other way it's only through the act of defying their worry, disproving their worry--and therefore my own--that I become free. It is only in our triumph over the fear of death that we are truly alive."
For the next several hours this plot seemed like the culmination of all of my life so far, but in the end the farm was too isolated and the moon too beautiful to bring it to fruition. We did eventually go to the tourist police. By indulging the young cop in flirtation while exuding a patience helped along by liberal applications of dope and sambuca I extracted a police report detailing all the stolen stuff, if not the death certificate no doubt required to reap the $250,000 reward for expiring in a foreign country. I sorely regret this now, as if I were at least officially dead I would probably not owe the remaining estimated taxes kindly calculated for me by one "Love, DAD," but he told me later he doesn't think he sprang for the life insurance, just the emergency helicopter, and so my criminal plot was never based in reality. Stopping the moon in its tracks and holding it there for hours, however, I'm quite certain really happened.
Reading Hemingway on BART on the way to jetBlue Flight 644
I had skipped ahead to the end of the Hemingway novel and knew it was sad. The soldier's lover hemorrhaged after their baby was born dead. I read slowly from the middle after that, dreading the ending.
But now on the train to the airport I was close to the end. The soldier and his pregnant girlfriend were together one last time in a fancy hotel. He had deserted the Italian army while they were in retreat and come to find her on the lake in Stresa.
I hadn't realized that they could have more time together before the end came. Before the certainty of death there remained the possibility of sex. It was like the fine white wine on your tongue before the heavy red that tasted of metal and acid. In the wine country they poured the sauvignon blancs first and you sipped them while you made up your mind about the other things, and often they were the best and you loved them because they were light, and first.
As the train came to the airport you felt light, weightless, even. You existed only in the in-between places, in the airport, in the sky. You knew you might die and you made peace with it. Whether this was true all the time or perhaps even more likely on the highway or the street late at night did not matter. In the airport, on the plane you knew it might happen.
The day before a man had driven a flaming car through the gate of the airport in Glasgow. Noah told me about it while we drank vodka made from sweet potatoes.
"The car was on fire and he was on fire."
"Were many people killed or only some?"
"I don't know." He shrugged. "Maybe some. Maybe none."
I poured more vodka into the small glasses. It was cold on your tongue and burned as you swallowed.
Getting to the airport this time you felt a stillness and were not on fire. You loved no one and no one loved you. Or if you loved anyone, it was only in vestiges, like antibodies after a vaccine or virus. If someone tested your blood they would find evidence that you had had a fever once, but only from the microscopic cells you always carried that would try to fight it off if it came again. Some of the viruses you could get again, full-blown, and others you had fought off once and for all. You remembered what it was like to be sick, but only in those old soldier cells. By now it had been long enough that it could have happened to someone else. It could have happened to someone in Glasgow.
The mechanized voice in the terminal announced that the threat level was orange. Orange came before red, and maybe even amber. Amber was what dinosaur DNA could be preserved in, for millions of years, in a droplet of blood inside an ancient mosquito. Amber was worse than orange, but better than red. The voice did not say what the threat might be, only that today the color of waiting for it was orange.
Yesterday, I spent the afternoon writing in the New York Public Library. I thought it might be different to write in an enormous room full of marble and hardwood. It wasn't. I was still there and so was the blank page. It was just like writing at home, except that when I leaned back in my chair and stretched after finishing a sentence, I looked up and saw pink puffy clouds painted on panels in a carved wooden ceiling as high as my four-story apartment building. Those clouds must have been painted by a sentimental person, or someone on drugs. They are too pink and fluffy to have been painted by a realist.
The New York Public Library was so beautiful that I had to check on the progress of Moynihan Station, which is supposedly going to restore to New York the glory of the old Penn Station, which they tore down in 1963 to build the then-new Madison Square Garden. I am considering becoming a Friend of Moynihan Station, so badly do I want it to be built and restore to New York the glory of the old Penn Station.
I am preoccupied with these matters because Rebecca and I recently finished watching New York: A Documentary Film (not to be confused with New York: The Place Where We Live). In it, we learned about how when the city went into fiscal free-fall in the 1960s they knocked down Penn Station, which was only 56 years old at the time. It was based on the Carcalla baths and built to last for millenia, to stand as a glorious monument to the striving of all New Yorkers as they bustled to and fro, or so the narration said, or so I imagined the narration said, as there really isn't any point to watching PBS not stoned.
When they showed us pictures of the station when it was first built, we cried. When they showed it being torn down, which took three whole years, pictures of its beautiful stone angels being hacked off and lowered to the ground and eventually, we later read, pulverized into dust in a New Jersey landfill, we also cried. When they showed the picture of what is now Madison Square Garden in architect's renderings before it was built, we cradled our heads in our hands, and made a soft, keening sound, and then we smacked our foreheads with our open palms, and this made a sharp, fleshy sound.
The new Madison Square Garden is almost as ugly as the new Penn Station, but it is not all bad. In Madison Square Garden, in 1998, I saw Michael Jordan play against the Knicks for the second-to-last time in his career, because Rebecca's dad was being solicited by a pharmaceuticals rep who gave him four tickets to the game. Rebecca's sister Rachel couldn't go so I went instead.
We went up an escalator to a room where we saw a brief presentation on a particular brand of penicillin. Then the woman gave us four tickets to see the Knicks vs. the Bulls at Madison Square Garden. These were hot tickets, even in the nosebleeds, as they were. Somehow right before tipoff Rebecca and I picked our way down to the very front seats, right behind Celebrity Row. People rich and powerful enough to have these seats don't waste their time watching the first quarter of a basketball game. We saw Woody Allen. We saw the artist then-known as Puff Daddy. We saw Spike Lee. Later on, I saw Ethan Hawke in the corridor, wearing a very nice suit. And best of all, for about fifteen beautiful minutes, until partway into the second quarter when two burly businessmen arrived at their rightful seats, we saw Michael Jordan play basketball from twenty feet away on the floor of Madison Square Garden.
The game was decided at the buzzer, when the Knicks missed a field goal and the Bulls won. By this time we were back in the nosebleeds with Rebecca's parents and all the other doctors who had been solicited by the pharmaceuticals rep. The man next to me was a middle-aged doctor from Jamaica and as the Knicks made an improbable run in the final minutes to catch and tie the Bulls, he and I were jumping up and down and high-fiving one another in the fast friendship of shared fandom. When the final shot went up we grabbed one another's arms and craned our necks and held our breath with the rest of of the crowd in the architectural nightmare that stands where a beautiful building once stood. When the shot bounced off the rim we dropped our arms to our sides and did not look one another in the eye the whole way down all the escalators. I didn't care that the Knicks had lost. I was used to them losing. I had seen something I knew I would tell my grandchildren about one day, and the moment might not have existed without pharmaceuticals salespeople and the destruction of the original Penn Station, terrible as these two things are.
Michael Jordan no longer plays. Rebecca's dad no longer lives. I hear that pharmaceuticals reps are no longer allowed to solicit doctors with free tickets to important basketball games.
I have been reading a lot of Kurt Vonnegut lately and about the death thing, he would say So it goes, and about the time thing would say that all time is simultaneous and so really Michael Jordan is still playing and Rebecca's dad is still alive and we are all still in Madison Square Garden, with Rebecca's mom and the Jamaican doctor, and Phil Jackson is there, too, it is all still happening and will always be happening, and Puff Daddy is still Puff Daddy, not P. Diddy or Diddy, and Woody Allen's most recent movie is the brilliant Deconstructing Harry, and Spike Lee has no ideas about making a documentary about any broken levees because they are at this very moment just concerns on a list of engineering problems to be dealt with at a later date, and Ethan Hawke has not yet written a book containing a chapter about John Starks' unraveling in Game 7 of the 1994 NBA finals, a chapter I will hear him read in Central Park one summer evening, and not two miles to the south the two towers still stand and the world still trades there, and I am still thinking that the Knicks could win a championship when Jordan's still in the league and prove that they could beat even Jordan, and we are all there together watching the arc of this latest Knick misfire as it hangs in the air that is really just the space inside this building or that one.
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