Luminous Airplanes (25 page)
I stayed that night in a Kingston motel, where I lay awake listening to the trucks pass on the Thruway, and the next morning I drove to New York City. I stayed with a friend named David Rice who I knew from college. He worked for a company that invented financial instruments of increasing complexity, not options, not derivatives, but derivatives of derivatives, products so complex that he and his colleagues referred to them simply as colors: Rose, or Lime, or Buff. David had done well with Peach, which went to telecommunications companies in the Southwest; now he owned a brownstone in Brooklyn, which had belonged a century before to one Elijah Scruggs, the captain of a whaling ship. Although neither David nor anyone else knew anything more about Elijah Scruggs, since he moved in David had created a kind of myth of Scruggs, and decorated the house with knickknacks from the sailor’s supposed travels: coconut-husk masks from the South Pacific, whalebone toys, the shell of a Galápagos tortoise, and, above the fireplace, an oil portrait of a white-bearded man who David swore was Scruggs himself. Apart from the ghost of Scruggs, David lived alone; there was a guest room on the second floor that overlooked a weedy garden and the neighbors’ better-kept yards. David was working late, so I ate leftover samosas from the fridge, showered and fell asleep at nine o’clock.
I slept until the middle of the next afternoon, an incredible sleep, which made me feel as if the last ten years had been a dream and I was twenty again, ready to begin my life. A voicemail from David told me to meet him in an East Village bar. It was only when I came out of the subway in Manhattan and saw people on the street with little I VOTED stickers on their lapels that I realized it was Election Day. I hadn’t followed the campaign; no one in Thebes had talked about it. I had no idea whether Bush or Gore was favored to win. I was like Rip Van Winkle, coming down from the mountains after a long sleep to find his country changed; all I lacked was the long white beard.
“Are you shitting me?” David said when I told him about this. “What were you doing up there?”
“I told you, I was cleaning out my grandparents’ house.”
“Don’t they have a TV?”
“They did, but …”
“Get this man a fucking drink,” David said to the bartender. We watched the returns come in, the states turning red and blue. Each was a shock to me: an entire state full of people who had remembered to vote! It was the most ordinary thing, but it seemed incredible that all over the country people had gone to their polling places and voted for the candidate of their choice, who would in a few months’ time be president. We had a president! We were a nation! The size of it, after the smallness of Thebes, was thrilling. All those blank states waiting to be filled in! Then it became clear that this was not an ordinary election. “What the fuck?” David howled as the newscasters called it for Gore, then for Bush, then for nobody. His thumbs composed urgent messages to politically connected friends, begging them to explain. We forgot to eat dinner and by the time the bar closed we were very drunk. The East Village was full of people like us, drunk people staggering to the subway, asking each other silently, what was going on?
David took the next day off from work and we sat on his sofa, drinking coffee and shouting at his plasma-screen television. David’s appreciation of the sporting-event side of American politics was contagious, and besides, I had to affirm my citizenship, to compensate with insults and groans and hurled popcorn for my weird absence from the world. We watched television until midnight, then David went to bed and I kept watching. I watched for days, following in numbing detail the recount of the Florida ballots. I meant to call Yesim. I knew she would be wondering where I was, but it had only been a couple of days, and she had her program at the Pines to get through. Maybe it was better that I didn’t call. Anyway, I needed to think things over. Hadn’t Yesim herself told me at one point that she couldn’t see me because she needed time to think? I felt like I had the right to do the same thing, even if it wasn’t exactly the same thing. So I waited, tortured by an inarticulate feeling that I was on the wrong track. Like the rest of America, I was in the middle of making a costly mistake that I could not stop myself from making. It was as if I were watching my own life on David’s TV set: the person who shouted
No!
at the screen was hundreds of miles from the person doing the bad action, and although I could see that person, we were separated by a distance that my
No!
was powerless to cross.
No!
at the screen was hundreds of miles from the person doing the bad action, and although I could see that person, we were separated by a distance that my
No!
was powerless to cross.
Finally, I did call Yesim. Six days had passed since I came to New York, and the terror that had driven me out of Thebes, the need to disappear from my own life, was beginning to fade. I told myself that Yesim was a fallible, changeable person too, so there was reason to hope that she would forgive my error. Eventually we’d laugh about it: Remember that time you ran away?—Sure! I was scared shitless! But the duty nurse told me that Yesim was no longer at the Pines. She’d checked out early, was all she could, or would, say. I called the Regenzeits’ house, and Kerem answered.
“Where are you?” he asked.
“New York.”
“Have you been there all this time?” He sounded less angry than puzzled.
“Yes. Listen, is Yesim there?”
“My sister is in Turkey, with our parents.”
“Oh?” I remember thinking, that was fast. “I thought she didn’t want to go.”
“What are you doing in New York?”
“I had some things to take care of.”
Kerem was offended by the blandness of my lie. “Things?”
“Can you give me Yesim’s number? I really want to talk to her.”
“She doesn’t want to talk to you,” Kerem said. “I don’t want her to talk to you.
I
don’t want to talk to you. What the fuck is your problem, anyway?”
I
don’t want to talk to you. What the fuck is your problem, anyway?”
If I could have answered his question, maybe he would have helped me, and this story would have a different ending; but I couldn’t answer him. My problem was Richard Ente; my problem was myself. “I’m trying to figure some things out,” I said. There it was again, that terrible word
things
, which soared like an airplane over life’s specificity, lumping together fields and trees, cities, lakes, rivers, mountains, places where people lived and places where they didn’t.
Things
was what the world became when you didn’t love it enough to pay attention. “Please,” I said, “just tell me how to reach Yesim.”
things
, which soared like an airplane over life’s specificity, lumping together fields and trees, cities, lakes, rivers, mountains, places where people lived and places where they didn’t.
Things
was what the world became when you didn’t love it enough to pay attention. “Please,” I said, “just tell me how to reach Yesim.”
“Why should I?”
“Because we’re going to have a child.”
Kerem laughed unhappily. “If it were my decision, there wouldn’t
be
a child. As it is, if I ever run into you again, you’d better fucking watch out.” I could hear the bravado in his voice, the fifteen-year-old punk making a threat. It was almost as if he were giving me, as a parting gift, a memory of the friendship we’d once had.
be
a child. As it is, if I ever run into you again, you’d better fucking watch out.” I could hear the bravado in his voice, the fifteen-year-old punk making a threat. It was almost as if he were giving me, as a parting gift, a memory of the friendship we’d once had.
Gore conceded to Bush, and I felt only the mildest indignation. Really, I was beyond caring. I spent most of my time playing Final Fantasy IX on David’s PlayStation and accumulating empty beer bottles which I arranged in vaguely nautical clusters on his kitchen counters. Finally, at the end of December, David asked me to move out. He was worried about me, he said, but he couldn’t have me around anymore. I was becoming a fucking downer. I understood. With the money I’d saved working at Cetacean, I rented a room on West Fifty-fourth Street, in the apartment of a fifty-something Broadway costumer named Elena. The second millennium of the Common Era came to an anticlimactic end, and in January I looked fitfully for work as a content manager, but the slowdown that was now making my friends’ lives difficult in San Francisco had flattened the new economy in New York, and no one was hiring. I remembered my old plan to move to Europe, or to Canada, maybe I could still go, maybe if I left America things would be different; but the idea of leaving was utterly abstract. More and more, my own mistakes were the only things that seemed real. It wasn’t fair that Yesim had left America so fast, one part of me raged, but another part, the part I was, increasingly, coming to hate, even as its voice grew louder in me, asserted that what had happened was merely just. As it had been with Richard Ente, so it was with me, and so it would be, unto the end. After a few weeks I stopped going to the library. I spent a lot of time sleeping and playing with Elena’s cat. I was allergic to the cat, but it didn’t matter; my watering eyes were a small price to pay for the pleasure of being near a living creature and having it not recoil in horror. I went to bed every night with the idea that tomorrow I would get my life back on track, but I must have known the truth, that my life was
on
its track, which had been laid down for it thirty years earlier.
on
its track, which had been laid down for it thirty years earlier.
One morning in February I got up early and walked along the Hudson, past the great gray bulk of the
Intrepid
bristling with defunct warplanes, past weedy lots of suspicious parked trucks. The river was deep blue and calm, still benighted at six-thirty a.m. I picked up the path that rounds the tip of the island, past the World Trade Center and the Battery, park, cannons, plaques commemorating the days when lower Manhattan was the frontier between one world and another: the British and the rebels, the Indians and the Dutch. The sun rose and the Staten Island Ferry pulled into its terminal, huge and orange, honking. Soon people were coming out of the terminal, their faces sad, as if something terrible awaited them, and perhaps it did, perhaps it did, there in the Financial District, what did I know about the days that were waiting for all those people? They walked north, their heads tucked down against the cold wind. I slipped through them, blown along by my personal weather. Past South Street Seaport with its lovely reproductions of human transport from a century and a half ago. The wind slacked off. A few tourists in brightly colored anoraks gathered on the wooden planking of the pier, as though they were about to leave for an expedition to the North Pole. When I was in high school I used to cadge drinks from a Mexican restaurant in the seaport mall: I had no taste. And look what I became, a content manager, a pioneer of the new commerce, brighter and cleaner even than the mall. I walked north, past Fulton Fish Market, already closed for the day. I’d never seen it open. Everything is like that, I thought, everything keeps its own hours. The only traces of the fish trade were some puddles of slick fishy water, three pallets stacked by the shuttered front of a market stall. A coil of green hose. What does a world leave behind when it goes? A question for archaeologists, historians. Of the three of us, Victor and Alex and me, it was Victor who believed most in the evidence of the past. Then he gave history up and founded MySky: maybe the evidence of the past wasn’t so appealing. Maybe it was better to leave nothing behind, or as little as possible. I kept to what became a path beside parks. A track, a ball field. The middle-aged businessman’s basketball league at morning practice, brokers in sweatsuits and headbands trying to grab hold of the sky’s rim. A parkaed kid riding in circles on a trick bicycle. Nothing to stare at. What would any of us leave behind? E-mails, files on our laptops. As long as we didn’t print out we’d disappear, or maybe even if we printed. A professor at Stanford once told me that toner isn’t archival; the day will come when the letters literally fall from the pages and turn into a layer of black dust at the bottom of countless filing cabinets. Our legacy, our gift to the next civilization, will be blank pages and black dust. Scuff marks from our exercise shoes. Fouled weather. The Brooklyn Bridge soared over the waterside path; I turned inland. The old heart of the city in systole, workers gathered into the buildings, the streets nearly empty. Breakfast carts packing up, lunch trucks not yet arrived. I found the path onto the bridge, joined the crossers. There’s an old joke: a man walks up to a bridge, gives the toll collector fifty cents. The toll collector says, hey, buddy, toll on this bridge is a dollar. That’s OK, the man says, I’m only going halfway across. I went halfway across and stood at the bridge’s highest point, looking out at the water. A friend of mine in high school knew someone who jumped from the Brooklyn Bridge and lived. A classmate’s father: apparently he swam to Chinatown and got lunch there. Ginsberg wrote about him in
Howl.
How he jumped is a mystery to me; you’d have to climb over the traffic lanes; more likely you’d fall and get run over. But how had I, who grew up in New York, not known the layout of the Brooklyn Bridge? Embarrassed, I turned back, and walked up Centre Street to Canal, the Manhattan Bridge. The pedestrian walkway was closed for construction but it looked solid enough. I was just swinging my leg over the CLOSED sign when a red-cheeked Chinese woman looked at me, alarmed. I nodded to her. Yes, I’m going. Everyone makes their own accommodations to the city, the crowding, the noise. She passed me and didn’t look back. I climbed over the sign and walked halfway across the bridge. I put my hands on the railing and looked south at the Brooklyn Bridge, and, past it, the widening of the river. Governors Island. The invisible place where the ocean begins. It wouldn’t take much: one foot on the low bar, other leg over the fence. Leap or just let go. Then do what I’d always wanted to do: disappear. I thought about the so-called pioneers of flight. How many of them wanted to fly, really? And how many knew what they were doing. All those hours in the workshop, building their complicated machines, trying out steam engines, pulleys, gearing schemes, nights and weekends, while their wives complained, all that time they knew what the end would be. Not up, down. The guy who invented the ornithopter was surely a suicide at heart. A water taxi crossed from Manhattan to Queens, and I thought of my old neighbor Robert, waiting in an apartment in San Francisco. Waiting for what? The inspiration that would allow him to fix his life, to fix the world? Let someone else get it right, I thought. Someone always does. Someone will get it right and we’ll go on. I put my foot on the rail. There wasn’t anything more to think about. I grabbed the top of the fence and pulled myself up, a monkey hanging now from the monkey bars. Curious George. The shirt Yesim had liked so much. The air smelled of ice and ocean.
Even the ones who fail get us somewhere
, my grandfather had said. Maybe some future person would learn from my mistakes, invent a better version of me, a non-fucking-up human being, but I didn’t want to know about it. The failures were the ones I had always loved. Let the explorers find their new world, let the believers go to Heaven, let the entrepreneurs get rich and take to the air in their private jets. I wanted to remain here, on the ground. Huh, I thought, then I let go of the fence. And landed on my feet, I mean, on the walkway. How would I be writing this, otherwise? A miraculous survival? Flight unassisted by any sort of machine? No. All I did was get down and walk away, back toward the Manhattan side of the bridge. I wasn’t ready to die, and I had nothing to do in Brooklyn.
Intrepid
bristling with defunct warplanes, past weedy lots of suspicious parked trucks. The river was deep blue and calm, still benighted at six-thirty a.m. I picked up the path that rounds the tip of the island, past the World Trade Center and the Battery, park, cannons, plaques commemorating the days when lower Manhattan was the frontier between one world and another: the British and the rebels, the Indians and the Dutch. The sun rose and the Staten Island Ferry pulled into its terminal, huge and orange, honking. Soon people were coming out of the terminal, their faces sad, as if something terrible awaited them, and perhaps it did, perhaps it did, there in the Financial District, what did I know about the days that were waiting for all those people? They walked north, their heads tucked down against the cold wind. I slipped through them, blown along by my personal weather. Past South Street Seaport with its lovely reproductions of human transport from a century and a half ago. The wind slacked off. A few tourists in brightly colored anoraks gathered on the wooden planking of the pier, as though they were about to leave for an expedition to the North Pole. When I was in high school I used to cadge drinks from a Mexican restaurant in the seaport mall: I had no taste. And look what I became, a content manager, a pioneer of the new commerce, brighter and cleaner even than the mall. I walked north, past Fulton Fish Market, already closed for the day. I’d never seen it open. Everything is like that, I thought, everything keeps its own hours. The only traces of the fish trade were some puddles of slick fishy water, three pallets stacked by the shuttered front of a market stall. A coil of green hose. What does a world leave behind when it goes? A question for archaeologists, historians. Of the three of us, Victor and Alex and me, it was Victor who believed most in the evidence of the past. Then he gave history up and founded MySky: maybe the evidence of the past wasn’t so appealing. Maybe it was better to leave nothing behind, or as little as possible. I kept to what became a path beside parks. A track, a ball field. The middle-aged businessman’s basketball league at morning practice, brokers in sweatsuits and headbands trying to grab hold of the sky’s rim. A parkaed kid riding in circles on a trick bicycle. Nothing to stare at. What would any of us leave behind? E-mails, files on our laptops. As long as we didn’t print out we’d disappear, or maybe even if we printed. A professor at Stanford once told me that toner isn’t archival; the day will come when the letters literally fall from the pages and turn into a layer of black dust at the bottom of countless filing cabinets. Our legacy, our gift to the next civilization, will be blank pages and black dust. Scuff marks from our exercise shoes. Fouled weather. The Brooklyn Bridge soared over the waterside path; I turned inland. The old heart of the city in systole, workers gathered into the buildings, the streets nearly empty. Breakfast carts packing up, lunch trucks not yet arrived. I found the path onto the bridge, joined the crossers. There’s an old joke: a man walks up to a bridge, gives the toll collector fifty cents. The toll collector says, hey, buddy, toll on this bridge is a dollar. That’s OK, the man says, I’m only going halfway across. I went halfway across and stood at the bridge’s highest point, looking out at the water. A friend of mine in high school knew someone who jumped from the Brooklyn Bridge and lived. A classmate’s father: apparently he swam to Chinatown and got lunch there. Ginsberg wrote about him in
Howl.
How he jumped is a mystery to me; you’d have to climb over the traffic lanes; more likely you’d fall and get run over. But how had I, who grew up in New York, not known the layout of the Brooklyn Bridge? Embarrassed, I turned back, and walked up Centre Street to Canal, the Manhattan Bridge. The pedestrian walkway was closed for construction but it looked solid enough. I was just swinging my leg over the CLOSED sign when a red-cheeked Chinese woman looked at me, alarmed. I nodded to her. Yes, I’m going. Everyone makes their own accommodations to the city, the crowding, the noise. She passed me and didn’t look back. I climbed over the sign and walked halfway across the bridge. I put my hands on the railing and looked south at the Brooklyn Bridge, and, past it, the widening of the river. Governors Island. The invisible place where the ocean begins. It wouldn’t take much: one foot on the low bar, other leg over the fence. Leap or just let go. Then do what I’d always wanted to do: disappear. I thought about the so-called pioneers of flight. How many of them wanted to fly, really? And how many knew what they were doing. All those hours in the workshop, building their complicated machines, trying out steam engines, pulleys, gearing schemes, nights and weekends, while their wives complained, all that time they knew what the end would be. Not up, down. The guy who invented the ornithopter was surely a suicide at heart. A water taxi crossed from Manhattan to Queens, and I thought of my old neighbor Robert, waiting in an apartment in San Francisco. Waiting for what? The inspiration that would allow him to fix his life, to fix the world? Let someone else get it right, I thought. Someone always does. Someone will get it right and we’ll go on. I put my foot on the rail. There wasn’t anything more to think about. I grabbed the top of the fence and pulled myself up, a monkey hanging now from the monkey bars. Curious George. The shirt Yesim had liked so much. The air smelled of ice and ocean.
Even the ones who fail get us somewhere
, my grandfather had said. Maybe some future person would learn from my mistakes, invent a better version of me, a non-fucking-up human being, but I didn’t want to know about it. The failures were the ones I had always loved. Let the explorers find their new world, let the believers go to Heaven, let the entrepreneurs get rich and take to the air in their private jets. I wanted to remain here, on the ground. Huh, I thought, then I let go of the fence. And landed on my feet, I mean, on the walkway. How would I be writing this, otherwise? A miraculous survival? Flight unassisted by any sort of machine? No. All I did was get down and walk away, back toward the Manhattan side of the bridge. I wasn’t ready to die, and I had nothing to do in Brooklyn.
I walked into Chinatown and ate lunch, such an enormous lunch as I’ve never eaten before, dim sum from every cart. Beef noodles, taro cakes, spare ribs. As I ate, I felt a strange thing happening: Richard Ente was relaxing his grip on me, and almost physically leaving my body, as if he had been the ghost all along, not me. Not me. I ate until my stomach hurt and I kept eating, filling the void that Richard Ente had been. Shrimp in translucent shells, pork buns, rice in lotus leaves. Phoenix feet. After a while, even the cart ladies looked at me with wonder. What would happen? Would I burst? How much longer could I go on? Then I was full. I paid the check and headed north, back to Elena’s apartment.
Other books
Three Classic Thrillers by John Grisham
The One Safe Place by Kathleen O'Brien
With Spring Comes the Fall by Joshua Guess
Broken Glass by Tabitha Freeman
Someone Always Knows by Marcia Muller
The Devil Rogue by Lori Villarreal
Hillside Stranglers by Darcy O'Brien
Demonica by Preston Norton
Affair with the Rebel Heiress (2010) by Mckay, Emily
GRIT: A Spartan Riders Novel by J.C. Valentine