Give Me Everything You Have: On Being Stalked (10 page)

At 5:00 a.m. we pass oil refineries glittering in the dawn light, their domed tanks and flaring towers filigreed over in silver pipes, and then cross the Maumee River into Toledo, where my neighbor gets off, frowning again as he nods goodbye.

A woman takes his place. Fifties, puffy-eyed, eager to talk. She’s on her way to a blues festival in Grant Park, tremendously excited about it. She works in a Michelin factory, also a source of great excitement (she’s a type I’ve encountered before in America: the exuberant self-spokesperson who addresses you as if from an inner press conference in which you are the horde of journalists besieging her with questions). “I used to build tires,” she informs me. “Anymore I mainly just balance ’em.” She has two years to retirement, after which she plans to move somewhere with a better climate, “somewhere you don’t can get sunburnt and frostbit on the same day.” Noting her way with words, and mindful of my professional obligation to be interested in such things, I try to keep up a conversation with her, but I am still drowsy and there is something encroaching on my thoughts, some presence drawing them toward it, and I begin to feel my attention drifting.

I close my eyes. The feeling of being able to go back to sleep in the morning, after you have woken up, is one I associate with being young, when it was followed by my most memorably pleasant dreams: dreams of flying and then, later, erotic dreams. Even now it is a time of unguarded semiconsciousness, and I am only half aware that the presence drawing me pleasantly toward itself is Nasreen’s.

A sexual overture, however firmly resisted, is registered in a part of the psyche that has no interest at all in propriety or fidelity or any other such considerations. If the person making the overture is attractive and interesting, then that part of the psyche regards it as a matter of course that you will go ahead and sleep with them, and in fact regards it as a deeply unnatural act to choose not to. Monogamous relationships require such unnatural acts to be committed from time to time, and so this is nothing new to me. But they have their reverberations nevertheless, and as daybreak rouses me out of this half sleep, a thought I have been reluctant to acknowledge comes to me with sharp clarity, which is that if I had not been married, or if I had been less than happily immured in my own domestic existence, things might have developed in a very different way between me and Nasreen. It makes me wince a little to acknowledge this. But now, as I disentangle myself from her image, or the image I have created of her, I realize that the offer implicit in her suggestion that I bring her along for this journey, however jokey its intent, has had other effects besides making me feel that the time has come to be, as I had put it to myself, “more explicitly discouraging.” It has made me susceptible to her as an object of fantasy.

*   *   *

I have three hours to kill in Chicago. I’ve never been here before, but I feel a connection to the place via my father’s enthusiasm for it (the same kind of half-real, half-spurious connection I feel toward Persian culture). He came here on a honeymoon tour of America with my mother and was smitten by Louis Sullivan’s skyscrapers, so much so that by the time I was born, the phrase “Louis Sullivan’s skyscrapers in Chicago” had become a permanent part of the verbal furniture of our household, and I grew up as familiar with it as I was with our sofas and chairs. At school or other places where I might want to impress people with my worldliness and culture I would casually utter it—
Louis Sullivan’s skyscrapers in Chicago
—as if I had a natural right to speak of these buildings with my father’s warmly proprietorial affection.

But in fact I have no idea which of these tall buildings surrounding me are Louis Sullivan’s skyscrapers, and anyway the truth is I am not at ease thinking about architecture at all. Though he was the soul of tolerance in most respects, my father was something of a tyrant when it came to the visual arts, and I am still afraid of liking things he might turn out to despise (I was under a cloud for several years as a small boy for liking the garden gnomes outside a suburban house in Surrey), so I tend to wander around towns and cities in a state of paralyzed judgment, aesthetically speaking, while other kinds of judgments and observations seethe inside me with a compensatory hyperactivity. To me, the half square mile of Chicago I explore feels much like other midwestern cities I have visited—Minneapolis, Pittsburgh—the same gleaming blocks and towers with their chain restaurants and stores and cafés, all glazed in the peculiar high polish of the contemporary American mainstream that elides the buildings with the food, the commercial music, the movies, the magazines, in a single expression of the collective human will at its most dazzlingly efficient, which also, alas, by some odd quirk in the laws of existence, appears to be its most spirit-numbing, a reflection that surprises me as it breaks to the surface inside me, though before I can pursue it any distance I find myself brought up short by the familiar downward slippage in the tenor of my thoughts, and instead begin to question why so much of what I experience these days takes on this negated aspect; why, as I had put it in the poem I was trying to write (before it too became a victim of the very tendency it was trying to articulate), there seems to me to be “so much to say no to / before you can start to say yes.” Or why, at least, this capacity for negation and rejection is not matched by an equal capacity for being gladdened and excited by things, as my father was, right to the end of his life. (The day he died, lying in hospital with pneumonia, he repeatedly asked his doctor if there was a chance, “a sporting chance,” that he might be able to take the trip he and my mother had arranged for the following week, to visit the castles of Oman.) I grew up expecting to be just like him, but I seem to be evolving in a different direction. In the past decade, especially, the spectrum of things capable of arousing a comparable enthusiasm in me seems to have narrowed steadily. Family, friends, a few books … not much else. And the things that do excite me tend to do so for reasons that seem vaguely pathological, morbid rather than uplifting; the interest itself more a state of passive enthrallment than a matching, reciprocal energy. All decompositional forms and textures fascinate me—ruins, fall foliage, corrosion patterns, freaks and excesses of collapsing societies, stories of self-destruction through alcohol, drugs, sex—and I have come to think that I belong to the category of creatures that have an innate, organic affinity with the downward stroke of nature, the implosive cycle. The Zoroastrian religion of ancient Persia divided all phenomena into those that belonged to the creator, Ormuzd, and those that belonged to the destroyer, Ahriman. Bulls and fresh water belonged to Ormuzd; vultures, crocodiles, and salt water to Ahriman. We grow up wanting to be creatures of Ormuzd, or I did: the writers I admired most at university, and still do—Tolstoy, D. H. Lawrence—were celebrators of life, growth, vitality, and my ambition was to be their heir. But what I look at so admiringly through their eyes has a way of turning to ashes when I look at it through my own. While I am reading, for instance, Lawrence’s story “Sun,” in which a woman is liberated from the grayness of her domestic life in New York by a trip to Sicily, where she spends day after day lying naked in the sun, I am caught up unresistingly in the woman’s ecstatic inner awakening. But after I have finished, a weariness comes over me and all I can think of is UV rays and ozone depletion and skin cancer. Even without such obvious grounds for skepticism, I find, when it comes to it, a layer of indifference between myself and the things I too would like to celebrate; a barrier that requires more and more effort to surmount. In this respect I tell myself I am, if nothing else, authentically of my time. Because if we are entering an age of losses, extinctions, elemental poisonings, gigantic simplifications and erasures—an entire age of Ahriman, in fact—then indifference would seem to be a necessary adaptive trait.

(I record these meanderings purely for the sake of the self-portrait that I am trying to paint here. They were the things that preoccupied me at that particular time.)

*   *   *

My Superliner, the Southwest Chief, is ready to board when I get back to the station. The chain of double-decker carriages lies along the platform like a glittering, recumbent blue-and-silver dragon, snoring in its berth. Childishly, I hope I am on the upper floor, and I am. My roomette is about seven feet long and three feet deep, with two seats facing each other beside a large window. The ends of the seats slide together to form a bed, and there is another bunk that folds down from the ceiling. It is functional but snug, something between a ship’s cabin and a space capsule, with built-in drink holders and coat hangers and spotlights and a curtaining door that folds away into itself. I settle in with a feeling of pleasant loneliness and apprehension, as if I am embarking on something more unpredictable than a voyage along fixed steel rails.

We depart in the mid-afternoon, a slow grind through Chicago’s suburbs and exurbs: Naperville, Mendota—places with names but no gaps between them, only denser entanglements of highways curling like gigantic spilt film reels. Miles and miles of new housing flow by in different stages of development: skeletons of golden lumber, entire half-finished towns wrapped in Tyvek, spanking new McMansions with their turrets and buttresses freshly painted mint and strawberry. These in particular, these kingly existences-in-waiting, acquire in recollection a look of melancholy eagerness as they stand in readiness to be owned and entered (melancholy because they may still be waiting: four years later, as I write, the economy is in ruins and everywhere you see unbought constructions from that time fading together in disappointed groups, dust in their virginal windows, the old meadows, of which they were, as the phrase goes, the “last harvest,” springing back up as crabgrass and goldenrod through cracks in their unused driveways).

It takes two hours before intervals of undeveloped land begin to appear, odd-looking at first, like oversights on the part of local planners, until, slowly, it’s the factories and suburban houses that begin to look out of place, and then, as the evening comes in yellow and warm through the window, we curve out into the flat immensity of the prairie.

My phone rings: my son calling to say goodnight. Augustus (I’ll call him that) is six. Our relationship is largely physical: mainly he likes to hurl himself at me with flailing fists and then be turned upside down and swung around in circles. But he also likes to be read to, and for the past year I have been reading Tintin to him. I was a devoted reader of these books throughout my childhood and well into my adolescence, and even now my enjoyment of them is of a primary, rather than a nostalgic, nature. The line drawings seem richer every time I look at them, especially the night scenes with ocean liners or cars defined as solid blocks of black on midnight blue, backlit or shot through with yellow electric light, and the stories—comic, adventure-filled, but anchored in lovingly observed human behavior—still move me.

But what has made the books so enduringly appealing to me is, I think, a purely accidental quality: the way their apparent Englishness is overlaid on an ineradicable foreignness. I had no idea the books were translations when I first started reading them, and by the time I discovered they were, it was too late for me to stop thinking of Tintin and his companions as English: English in a way that was at once deeply strange and soothingly familiar. They spoke English; their streets and signposts had English names; the countryside around Captain Haddock’s home, Marlinspike Hall, looked just like the countryside around my parents’ cottage in Sussex with its spinneys and dovetailing fields. But of course they were all merely “passing” as English. Marlinspike Hall made a highly dubious English stately home, being, of course, a French château. The cars were on the wrong side of the road and as foreign-looking as the Citroën Safari my father drove through the lanes of Sussex, all curving proboscis. The policemen, when they arrived on the scene, wore odd, diminutive képis on their heads instead of proper bobbies’ helmets, and there were stripes down the sides of their trousers.

As the son of Jews who had joined the Church of England and then lapsed from that and now saw themselves as not quite English without being unimpeachably Jewish either, I was highly susceptible to these images of cheerfully imperfect assimilation. I felt at home in the not-quite-England they depicted, in a way that I never quite did in the real England, where, at the schools I attended, being of Jewish descent was more like a mild disability than something to be proud of or even indifferent toward.

None of which is of any consequence to Augustus, thank God, who likes the books for straightforward reasons, above all Captain Haddock’s torrents of invective, which he reproduces faithfully at the top of his voice all day as he runs around the house:
Pockmark! Jellyfish! Bashi-bazouk!
(Now, older, he does the same, only with rap lyrics, inserting a silent beat for the “fucker” part of “motherfucker” if he thinks an adult may be listening, so that the songs sound like strange, hiccuping incantations to his mother.)

Since I can’t read to him this evening, we talk about the books instead. I tell him I’ve just been in Chicago, the main setting for
Tintin in America
. It occurs to me that the developments I passed through earlier, with their look of having sprung up overnight, are just like the town Tintin passes through in that book, the one that springs up instantaneously around an oil prospector’s freshly discovered gusher: banks and hotels fully built by noon, traffic lights, cops, and zoning ordinances in place by mid-afternoon. But he is less interested in my analogy than I am and soon interrupts me, speaking in a Chinese accent, or at least his version of my version of a Chinese accent:

“I am going to cut off your head.”

The phrase startles me, though I recognize it at once. It comes from our favorite Tintin book,
The Blue Lotus
, or, as I have somehow permitted myself to call it,
The Brue Rotus
; regressing, in my son’s company, to the soft racism that pervaded the world of my own childhood, where nobody thought twice about mimicking foreign accents for a cheap laugh. The Tintin books, being all about encounters with foreigners, encourage this kind of low humor when it comes to reading them aloud. They contain a great deal of the comic racial stereotyping characteristic of their time. Being of my own time, I have felt obliged to talk about this with my son, explaining to him that the comedy is okay only because it is directed equally at all cultures, including Tintin’s own, and because it is also largely without malice.