Indecision (3 page)

But Jerry
had
died. And soon our lease would be up! And so would I end and die too! I tried not to be reminded of the eternal endingness of everything by Ground Zero down the street. I really preferred for the reminder to come, more gently, from philosopher Otto Knittel. In the months before Ecuador I was all about
The Uses of Freedom
—or
Der Gebrauch der Freiheit
if you’re German. Late at night I would look at the words of this very deathocentric book, and on that Saturday night with Vaneetha (which had so far failed to distinguish itself from many of the Saturday nights preceding it) I was looking again at the words, with one eye open and the other shut since I’d taken out my contacts and otherwise couldn’t focus on the lines. “Procrastination is our substitute for immortality,” went the first half of the sentence I was rereading; “we behave as if we have no shortage of time.” I read the book at maybe two pages an hour.

Yet I felt more slow than stupid, and suspected it had always been thus with me. Maybe my slow temporal metabolism wasn’t equipped for the efficient digestion of modern—or postmodern life, as it had apparently already been for some time. Sometimes I felt like I’d never catch up with even the little that had happened to me. There had already been too many people and places, and the creaking stagecoach journey or straggling canoe ride by which one location might observe, in olden times, how it became the next (and one Dwight, the next, uncannily similar Dwight) had been supplanted by the sleight of hand of subways and airplanes, always popping you out in unexpected places.

At least at night the phone didn’t ring. My feeling was, the soul is startled by the telephone and never at ease in its presence. Often on a midtown street someone’s cell would ring and half a dozen people would check their pockets to see if it was them being called, and I’d glimpse a flash of panic in one or another guy’s eyes. Myself, I kind of felt like I needed my news delivered by hand—to look out the window as some
courier
appeared in the field, coming from a distance so my feelings had time to discover themselves. But instead people were always calling and asking me to do things, and since only pretty rarely was I really sure I wanted to, my system was to flip a coin. “Hold on let me check my . . . yeah sounds cool but hold on . . .” I would say in the Chambers St. kitchen or if someone called at work. But I didn’t have a date book and was actually consulting one of the special coins. Heads, I’d accept—whereas tails, I’d claim to have other plans. I was proud of this system. Statistically fair, it also kept my whole easy nature from forcing me to do everyone’s bidding; it ensured a certain scarcity of Dwightness on the market; it contributed the prestige of the inscrutable to my otherwise transparent persona; and above all it allowed me to find out in my own good time whether I would actually have liked to do the thing in question. By then it was invariably too late—but everyone agrees that knowledge is its own reward, and so do I.

A night alone meant I could get a jump on
The Uses of Freedom.
At this rate there was every possibility of my finishing inside of the year. “Why don’t you just
write
the thing,” Dan said. “It would probably be faster.”

“But how would I ever come up with Der Unternehmungsgrund der Individuums on my own?”

When I first read about this
ground for the individual’s action,
I could at last put an unwieldy and foreign name to what I had felt had been missing from my life ever since puberty struck and my prep-school days commenced, more or less at once, and I’d begun to proceed unsteadily from day to day as if I were on a bridge swaying in the wind while both sides of the canyon—I mean past and future—disappeared in foggy weather. Suddenly I’d lost the sensation of there being either a source or an end to my life, an original birth or ultimate death, and was therefore amazed at how everyone seemed to consider me a solid reliable young man. Otto Knittel, I was learning as a much older young man, was
way
into forests, so while reading him I would imagine decamping from the city and going to live in the woods in Vermont. With a dog. Or several dogs. The idea was to inhabit a cabin, baking bread and hardly even watching TV, petting and talking to the dog, or dogs, and drinking tea instead of so much coffee. Sunlight, wide floorboards, caller ID for the phone . . . And old friends from the city could drive up to admire my aura of wisdom and calm benevolence that I would be too egoless even to notice. I felt that in these circumstances the
ground for my actions
might sort of percolate up through me in this slow molten way, and a prayerful clarity of consciousness would finally pop into my brain. Then I would know what to do. Then I could return to New York, and do it.

But in the smaller of the hours I could get to feeling bad that I hadn’t even looked into doing “it” yet. And the feeling was worse if the night ended with the warm smooth length of Vaneetha at my side, as she slept and breathed beneath my not-so-clean cotton sheets. There were starting to be signs that a serious attachment to me had been formed, by her, so that not only would I need to slip out of the city to go let my truer understandings avail themselves of me—I’d also have to extricate myself from someone else’s life.

One good thing was that at least I didn’t have a lot of furniture to take. However first I would need to find a town in Vermont, and a job there. Yet I was full of hope that the new information-based economy might really spell the end of geography and I could do tech support from the woods. Then again this hopefulness was
so
1999, and now it was May 2002—late May already. In any case I had a to-do list (more a list of good intentions) and before finally going to sleep I would get up to write down—after GROCERIES! or MOM RE: CHURCH!! or VANEETHA? or PAPER TOWELS or COST OF SHRINKS?—LOOK INTO VT. OPTIONS.

So it would be late at night before I fell asleep. But don’t worry: I got plenty of sleep. Not only was I an excellent sleeper, but I had no functioning alarm clock to disrupt my Cimmerian rhythms. Of course when the relevant button broke off, I’d put it on my list to get another clock. But then at work they—or Rick, the manager—made an announcement, which was that although we who worked at Pfizer in the Problem Resolution Center were already only subcontracted, we were still considered
in house
for the fairly inarguable reason that our office was housed in Pfizer headquarters. Soon some guys in Mumbai, India, were going to be doing our work for less of our pay. “You sayin we getting outsourced here?” my colleague Wanda asked. Rick was saying that, and adding this sick little smile all his own.

The effect on morale was not good. In my case I saw that globalization was for real and declined to replace my alarm clock. What did I have to get up for if my days at Pfizer were numbered anyway? Now I usually just woke around ten, yawning and stretching, replenished with ignorance. Work was officially beginning but I would go out and get an everything bagel—impossible, otherwise, to choose—and come back and toast the halves and slather one with pesto and the other with Nutella. Yum.

So far my main accommodation to Vaneetha-Dwight domesticity was to keep little jars of both condiments at her place in Carroll Gardens. “I still
can’t
believe what you’ll put in your mouth.” Her dad’s various ambassadorial postings had caused her to be educated in British-run schools, and she pronounced
can’t
like as in philosopher Immanuel Kant. “But I’m touched you’re moving in, after your fashion.” Morningtime fun could be had if she was game and would feed me a mystery bagel half while my eyes were closed. “To have no idea,” I would say, “when both options are so equally good!”

Then I rode the F train, if from Vaneetha’s place, or took the 2/3 to Forty-second, and on the way would look at
The Uses of Freedom
—such a different book in the daylight, and so much less credible.

A philosopher of Knittel’s caliber or even your average educated human being such as Vaneetha might consider it stultifying to sit in a cube farm all day saying “Hello, and thank you for calling the Problem Resolution Center. This is Dwight speaking,” then patiently listening to the user’s complaint, then suggesting the obvious solution, then waiting for the next user’s call. But often when I was at work, feeling relaxed and unfree, overqualified and airconditioned, it seemed to me that the plight of the low-level corporate drone was unfairly maligned by believers in social justice and human potential. It was true that the pay was low, the benefits nonexistent, the question of upward mobility moot, and the institutional neglect of our hidden talents virtually complete. But what a tremendous, almost vegetal peacefulness there was in working for das Man! (As Knittel would say.) At night I might feel bad about colluding in my mediocrity—but somehow while seated before my terminal as I swiveled slightly back and forth in my standard-issue office chair, I felt that if I just kept working, with due diligence, at this time-serving American job that after all
someone
had to do, then whatever happened to me or my country wouldn’t be my fault.

And I did work hard, or hardish, since Rick kept competitive stats of our individual call times and personal pride insisted that I keep my average low. It was something I liked bragging about to mom or dad whenever I saw one of them. Plus the sooner I told somebody how to translate a file into a new format, the sooner I could resume downloading for personal use free audio software from the web, or Google myself and discover again that Dwight Wilmerding was also a high-school basketball star, his team’s top rebounder, in Ashland, North Carolina. Or I could ask Wanda to school me even deeper in the lyrics of Mary J. Blige. “Aw, that’s some awesome shit she sings!” I’d say.

“Language, Dwight.” That would be Rick.

Or else between calls I’d just go blank and white noise would brim in my head. Up on the fifth floor in a huge padlocked cage was the server farm, filled with all these refrigerated Liebert cabinets—hundreds, we’re talking—and also containing a superpowerful AS400 IBM mainframe, and at times I almost seemed to be
inside
these monster processors with their chilly emanation of a loud blank seething sound. I’d feel myself swoon and slip away into the world of information like a snowflake signing up for a blizzard. And if no user (Wanda called them
losers
) needed me, it would take the promptings of my stomach for me to recognize it was lunchtime.

Usually I ate lunch by myself so I could concentrate on the food. But then one semifateful day I went to meet this old Formmate of mine named Alexandra in the postmodern-seeming cafeteria attached to her place of work. Curvy walls of blue glass, opaque like they were pleated, surrounded kidney-shaped tables of brushed steel. And half-encircling the tables were these deep leather banquettes, and seated on this material was the ass of possibly one straight guy for every four women.

This was the headquarters of an enormous multinational media empire. Yet it more closely resembled some ideal and futuristic all-girls high-school cafeteria. I was wearing my trademark cords and frayed Brooks Bros. shirt as I sauntered out of the food course with my loaded tray, and already sensing that to dress not so well might seem in these environs like the trait of an authentic-ish heterosexual man. I’d heard this situation—where, as among water buffalo at the pool, the male of the species is seriously outnumbered, and in a pretty good position to choose among mates—was known by animal behaviorists as a
lek.
Not that I did choose, or mate, or was offered a choice. But I felt pleasantly like the object of some romantico-sexual attention as I sat down and Alex introduced me to someone and somebody, and somebody else, and then Vaneetha.

(Now in bed on that Saturday night a week before Ecuador, Vaneetha turned to one side, nestling against my thigh, and grunted softly in the inquisitive way of a sleeper.)

Some fairly technical trendspotting talk appeared to be in progress, over lunch, so mostly I just nodded my head and listened, occasionally weighing in with layman’s observations on matters of style. At one point I caught somebody who wasn’t the one called Vaneetha looking at the one who was, then indicating me with her eyes. As always I pretended not to notice what I’d noticed. Then the non-Vaneetha looked at me. “Nice shirt. The tarnished prepster look? It’s totally coming back.”

“A stopped clock is right at least twice a day,” I reminded everybody—and wondered if these women, now laughing, would have been so friendly in a situation of more sexual parity. Not so friendly but friendly still, was my tentative conclusion. But to deduct the supplemental friendliness from the rest was not a doable operation, so I became uncertain as to their true feelings for me and was reduced for the rest of the conversation to having made this last remark.

I’d already set my tray on the conveyor and said goodbye to Alexandra when Vaneetha reappeared. “Good meeting you,” she said.

“Likewise.” I had already pressed the down button on the elevator. “Completely.” Thankfully I speak slowly, with a marijuana drawl left over from St. Jerome’s—otherwise I might at times sound nervous.

“Will we be seeing you again?”

“I really couldn’t judge the likelihood.”

“Well we could arrange something.”

I was either titillated or afraid. “All of you?”

“All of . . .
me
?”

“You—I meant plural, all you girls.”

“It might be easier if it were just you and I.”

She was right there in front of me; I had no recourse to the coin. Yet her invitation suggested she thought I could say more than one laughable thing—and that the horrible indiscriminateness of my interest in all the women hadn’t been apparent. So that was good. And letting the venerable philosophical category of the Good easily expand to include this tall, dark, and handsome woman, with a narrow nose flaring at its base, a diamond stud in one nostril, and serious-seeming plum-colored lips presently unveiling a smile, I said, “How about Monday? Didn’t one of those girls back there say Monday was the new Thursday anyway?”