Luminous Airplanes (26 page)
I think I understand now why some Millerites preferred to believe that the world did indeed end on October 22, 1844. There’s something terrible about the fact that things go on. It’s not just the embarrassment of having been wrong, of having not Gone Up in your ascension robe, like a little luminous airplane; it’s the sheer overwhelmingness of the world, where the wind keeps blowing and the sky darkens with rain, where people sell bread and sharpen scissors and pack up their wagons, their cars, and go on trips and fall in love and none of it seems likely ever to stop. Here it all is and no one will tell you what to do about it, where to go, how even to begin to understand all the things that are taking place. Compared with the world’s bigness, the apocalypse would be a relief.
After I decided not to leave the world, the world grew around me, grew immeasurably, and I blew through it like a leaf. Everywhere I looked people were doing things: ripping up the streets and paving them, waiting purposefully for subways, hailing cabs, striding in and out of buildings, their eyes turned a little upward, not to the sky, which they didn’t care about, but to the invisible goals which floated above everybody else’s heads. For lack of anything better to do, I returned to the public library on Forty-second Street, the same one I’d visited as a child, trying to prove that America was discovered by the Chinese, but even the people in the Reading Room, tourists and semi-homeless seekers of respite from the unwelcoming street, knew what they were doing more than I did. Like Mr. Casaubon in
Middlemarch
, they were looking for the key to all mythologies, or the lost continent of Atlantis, or, more mundanely, for a job, a lover, a place to spend the night. Whereas I had no goal; when I looked up, all I saw was the blank air. I envied the disappointed Millerites: at least they had one another. They could (and did!) hole up in abandoned houses, singing and praying and promiscuously washing one another’s feet. I would have welcomed the chance to wash someone’s feet, to wedge my soapy fingers between a set of warm human toes, never mind how gross, but by the winter’s end I had no friends in the city.
Middlemarch
, they were looking for the key to all mythologies, or the lost continent of Atlantis, or, more mundanely, for a job, a lover, a place to spend the night. Whereas I had no goal; when I looked up, all I saw was the blank air. I envied the disappointed Millerites: at least they had one another. They could (and did!) hole up in abandoned houses, singing and praying and promiscuously washing one another’s feet. I would have welcomed the chance to wash someone’s feet, to wedge my soapy fingers between a set of warm human toes, never mind how gross, but by the winter’s end I had no friends in the city.
The person who returned me to the world of time and purpose was, unexpectedly, my aunt Celeste. She came to see me on Fifty-fourth Street one day in March—there was some question of what to do about the things I’d left in Thebes, which had been annoying Charles for months, and which had finally reached a crisis because my grandparents’ house was going to be sold. A lawyer named Rich was buying it, a coincidence of name and occupation that we all preferred not to think about. My left-behind things made their way into the mail; for weeks they remained in the hall of my mothers’ apartment, and finally Celeste showed up in a taxi and told me to come downstairs and get my stuff already. She came upstairs with me, and when she saw the purple book on my nightstand, she flinched.
“God,” she said, “you took
that
?”
that
?”
Celeste told me that my grandfather had read
Progress in Flying Machines
to her and Marie as children, too. “You can imagine how interested I was,” she said, “in the carrying loads of pigeons.” Then to my surprise she imitated my grandfather’s baritone: “But, Celeste, you must understand that these were
important experiments
.” We both laughed. “Come on,” she said, “let’s have lunch.”
Progress in Flying Machines
to her and Marie as children, too. “You can imagine how interested I was,” she said, “in the carrying loads of pigeons.” Then to my surprise she imitated my grandfather’s baritone: “But, Celeste, you must understand that these were
important experiments
.” We both laughed. “Come on,” she said, “let’s have lunch.”
We went to a French restaurant on Ninth Avenue, one of the heralds of a new neighborhood which had not yet entirely realized itself. I asked Celeste about her work and she told me she was making stop-motion animations. “Of all the stupid things I could have done.” She looked well, though: her hair had grown long and gray, distinguished. Her face was pink. I suspected that another reversal had taken place between my mothers, and Celeste was once again ascendant. “And you?” she asked. “You know, we’ve been a little worried. Do you have a job yet?”
“Not yet.”
“You should think about teaching. Couldn’t you teach computers?”
I said I’d think about it. I still had some money from Cetacean, so it wasn’t urgent.
“But it’s your life,” Celeste said. “Isn’t there something you want to do?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “How’s Marie?”
“Fine,” Celeste said, and she went back to talking about her animations. I wondered if she was avoiding the subject of Marie, whose letter I still hadn’t answered. I wondered what part tact played in Celeste’s life: for someone who was, often, unusually blunt in her speech, she seemed also to have a strange ability to know when
not
to speak, so that I couldn’t tell, in the end, if her bluntness was really thoughtlessness or if it was the product of an incredibly delicate calculation, the navigation of an inner landscape mined with subjects which might cause her or her listener pain. What made Celeste Celeste? What made anyone anyone? My thoughts drifted into generality. In half an hour we’d finished lunch and headed in our separate directions, Celeste downtown and me up, well-meaning but still mysterious to each other.
not
to speak, so that I couldn’t tell, in the end, if her bluntness was really thoughtlessness or if it was the product of an incredibly delicate calculation, the navigation of an inner landscape mined with subjects which might cause her or her listener pain. What made Celeste Celeste? What made anyone anyone? My thoughts drifted into generality. In half an hour we’d finished lunch and headed in our separate directions, Celeste downtown and me up, well-meaning but still mysterious to each other.
The box Charles had sent from Thebes contained a coat I’d left in the downstairs closet, my copy of
Norwegian Wood,
and, wrapped in a towel, two of my grandmother’s watercolors. One showed the woods and mountains that rolled westward from the peak of Mount Espy, and the other, snow falling in the Kaaterskill Clove. So this was what I was left with, I thought, barely enough stuff to fill a medium-sized box. After all the work I did! Suddenly I found myself laughing: at the box, the monstrous disproportion of effort to result, above all else at myself. I imagine that some of the Millerites must have felt the same way when they returned, finally, to their shuttered shops, and surveyed the bare shelves, from which they’d given everything away in anticipation of the end. What had they been thinking? What had
I
been thinking? The next morning I went back to the library and began to write about what had happened in Thebes.
Norwegian Wood,
and, wrapped in a towel, two of my grandmother’s watercolors. One showed the woods and mountains that rolled westward from the peak of Mount Espy, and the other, snow falling in the Kaaterskill Clove. So this was what I was left with, I thought, barely enough stuff to fill a medium-sized box. After all the work I did! Suddenly I found myself laughing: at the box, the monstrous disproportion of effort to result, above all else at myself. I imagine that some of the Millerites must have felt the same way when they returned, finally, to their shuttered shops, and surveyed the bare shelves, from which they’d given everything away in anticipation of the end. What had they been thinking? What had
I
been thinking? The next morning I went back to the library and began to write about what had happened in Thebes.
This account has gone faster than
The Great Disappointment
ever did. In three months I wrote almost two hundred pages, rarely stopping to think, carried along by the momentum of the story I was telling. As spring gave way to summer, though, I found myself thinking more and more about Yesim. I tried to imagine what her life has become: Yesim in a room with white walls and an ocher tile floor, watching television while Mrs. Regenzeit cooked her something bland. Yesim dozing in a beach chair in a courtyard among fluttering lines of laundry. Yesim swimming in a lake—apparently Anatolia is full of saline lakes, it’s one of the things I’ve learned from the
Britannica
in the reading room—her pregnant belly poking out of the water like the Loch Ness monster’s head. Yesim rising out of the water, shaking out her hair, arguing with her father. Yesim about to call me, then deciding not to call. I began a letter to her, asking if she could forgive me, but stopped when I realized that I didn’t know where to send it. I had no way of reaching Yesim: no phone number, no address, no e-mail, if they even had e-mail in Akbez. Kerem didn’t return my calls. The only other person who might have known how to find Yesim was her ex-boyfriend, Mark, and I didn’t know his last name. Not that he would have talked to me anyway.
The Great Disappointment
ever did. In three months I wrote almost two hundred pages, rarely stopping to think, carried along by the momentum of the story I was telling. As spring gave way to summer, though, I found myself thinking more and more about Yesim. I tried to imagine what her life has become: Yesim in a room with white walls and an ocher tile floor, watching television while Mrs. Regenzeit cooked her something bland. Yesim dozing in a beach chair in a courtyard among fluttering lines of laundry. Yesim swimming in a lake—apparently Anatolia is full of saline lakes, it’s one of the things I’ve learned from the
Britannica
in the reading room—her pregnant belly poking out of the water like the Loch Ness monster’s head. Yesim rising out of the water, shaking out her hair, arguing with her father. Yesim about to call me, then deciding not to call. I began a letter to her, asking if she could forgive me, but stopped when I realized that I didn’t know where to send it. I had no way of reaching Yesim: no phone number, no address, no e-mail, if they even had e-mail in Akbez. Kerem didn’t return my calls. The only other person who might have known how to find Yesim was her ex-boyfriend, Mark, and I didn’t know his last name. Not that he would have talked to me anyway.
There was nothing I could do but work, so I kept working, but by the hot gray middle of July my hope had given way to frustration and disgust. Was I accomplishing anything by revisiting the past? Wasn’t my problem that I lived too much in the past already? As I got closer to the end of my story, my anxiety increased. What would I do when it was over? Was I ready to go back to San Francisco and pick up where I’d left off? I was thinking uneasily about this prospect in the first days of September, when someone whispered my name. An unfamiliar man in glasses, a V-neck sweater, a rumpled dress shirt, he could have been my double if he’d been thirty pounds lighter. “Matt Bark.” He looked at me eagerly, as though he’d presented a winning lottery ticket for payment.
“From Nederland?”
“That’s right. Man, it’s been a while.”
“Years,” I said.
We sat on a stone bench in the rotunda of the library, and Matt told me in brief the story of the last seventeen years of his life, how he’d gone to Princeton, married a woman named Dana, gone back to school after a disillusioning year at Merrill Lynch, received a Ph.D. in history from Columbia, and how he was teaching at William and Mary and had two lovely, lovely children. “What about you?”
“I was in American history at Stanford.”
“You, too? That’s great! You teach?”
“I dropped out. Now I’m a content-management specialist.” Matt looked at me blankly. “A kind of programmer.”
“Interesting. No question, academia’s a tough proposition with the job market like this.” He brightened as he told me about his dissertation, a history of corporations in early New England, which was going to come out as a book next year. Harvard was doing it, Harvard University Press. “It’s a new field. There aren’t a lot of us in corporate history. But I’ll tell you, it’s the next big thing.” He was planning a book on Silicon Valley. “The first start-ups, you know?”
“I know. I lived in San Francisco for most of the nineties.”
“Oh, hey, that’s amazing. You were in the middle of history being made, right there.” Matt bobbed his head. “What are you doing on Friday? I’m having a beer with Andy Ames. We reconnected at the reunion, I guess it was a few years ago, wow. You should come out with us.”
“I’ll try to,” I lied.
“You have to, dude,” Matt Bark said. He was about to go, but turned back. “You were in Mr. Savage’s class, right?”
“That’s right.”
“It figures you’re in history, then. Or that you
were
in history, sorry. It’s too bad, what happened to him, don’t you think?”
were
in history, sorry. It’s too bad, what happened to him, don’t you think?”
“What happened?”
“You don’t remember?”
“I don’t know. I left Nederland in the middle of the year.”
“Right, that’s right. Savage was fired. He got into an argument with David Metzger’s dad. Poor guy. He knew about history, but he didn’t understand the first thing about money.”
“That’s too bad.”
“Dude, that’s an understatement!”
Matt left, and I went back to my seat in the reading room. Across the table from me, a man with a thick, undivided eyebrow was reading a book called
What Remains to Be Discovered?
I tried to turn my mind back to the question of what I was going to do, but Matt Bark had stirred something else up, not plans but memories. There was David Metzger, and there was Mr. Savage, and Robert Kaplan and Gideon Peel shouting Flip him! Flip him! And there, slipping in among the people I’d already written about, was my friend Luis, moon-faced, smiling metallically: Luis who had taught me the little programming I learned at Nederland. How had I left him out of my story? But here he was, and he wasn’t the only one, I had left out all sorts of people, Momus, for example, my friend at Bleak College who came very close to killing me because of something I told his girlfriend; and Deirdre, my girlfriend at Saint Hubert’s Prep, sorry, Dee! I haven’t said a word about you or the night we set the Dumpster on fire. And they were only two of the people who had mattered to me, and to whom I’d mattered, the lovers and not-quite lovers, the enemies and friends, the people I’d worked alongside, taken classes with, argued with about historiography and the precedence of object classes, the many people who’d been kind to me and asked for nothing in return and the few who’d been mean or mad, all of them were waiting for me in my memory, as though they had gathered to give me a surprise party, as though they had been waiting in a dark living room for years, and now I had finally opened the door they were all able at last to shout, Surprise! I closed my eyes and let them come. My god, I thought, I could be writing about these people for the rest of my life. In a strange way the thought was comforting.
What Remains to Be Discovered?
I tried to turn my mind back to the question of what I was going to do, but Matt Bark had stirred something else up, not plans but memories. There was David Metzger, and there was Mr. Savage, and Robert Kaplan and Gideon Peel shouting Flip him! Flip him! And there, slipping in among the people I’d already written about, was my friend Luis, moon-faced, smiling metallically: Luis who had taught me the little programming I learned at Nederland. How had I left him out of my story? But here he was, and he wasn’t the only one, I had left out all sorts of people, Momus, for example, my friend at Bleak College who came very close to killing me because of something I told his girlfriend; and Deirdre, my girlfriend at Saint Hubert’s Prep, sorry, Dee! I haven’t said a word about you or the night we set the Dumpster on fire. And they were only two of the people who had mattered to me, and to whom I’d mattered, the lovers and not-quite lovers, the enemies and friends, the people I’d worked alongside, taken classes with, argued with about historiography and the precedence of object classes, the many people who’d been kind to me and asked for nothing in return and the few who’d been mean or mad, all of them were waiting for me in my memory, as though they had gathered to give me a surprise party, as though they had been waiting in a dark living room for years, and now I had finally opened the door they were all able at last to shout, Surprise! I closed my eyes and let them come. My god, I thought, I could be writing about these people for the rest of my life. In a strange way the thought was comforting.
I opened a blank document on my computer and began to type notes for what I was already beginning to think of as
the second part of my project
, but then, with the total inconsistency of which I have always been capable, the flight from one thing to another which has often been my downfall, but which was, in this case, my salvation, I got on the Web and, with the last of my Cetacean money, I bought a plane ticket to Ankara, which is the city closest to Akbez. As soon as I had paid for the ticket it was clear that this was the solution I had been looking for all along. This story is done. It may not be done well but it is done
enough
, which is the point of writing history: not to exhaust the past, but to know it well enough that you can move on. Don’t tell anyone at Stanford I said so! Now I am leaving. I don’t know if Yesim will see me; maybe her parents will chase me off. But as long as I am alive I want at least to try to meet my child.
the second part of my project
, but then, with the total inconsistency of which I have always been capable, the flight from one thing to another which has often been my downfall, but which was, in this case, my salvation, I got on the Web and, with the last of my Cetacean money, I bought a plane ticket to Ankara, which is the city closest to Akbez. As soon as I had paid for the ticket it was clear that this was the solution I had been looking for all along. This story is done. It may not be done well but it is done
enough
, which is the point of writing history: not to exhaust the past, but to know it well enough that you can move on. Don’t tell anyone at Stanford I said so! Now I am leaving. I don’t know if Yesim will see me; maybe her parents will chase me off. But as long as I am alive I want at least to try to meet my child.
Nothing is simple, though. If you learn only one thing from history, learn that nothing is simple. On Monday I worked in the library, writing about Matt Bark. I finished my story just as the library was closing, and went down to Bryant Park. The summer heat had finally broken; there was a marine smell in the air, like a new season coming on. The leaves of some oak trees were already trimmed with rust. Everything goes on, I thought, it goes on and on … Overwhelmed by the thought of seasons succeeding one another endlessly, summer then fall, winter then spring, again and again, without ever improving on the seasons that had come before, I sat on a bench. Pigeons gathered at my feet, but I had nothing to feed them. They pecked at white pebbles on the path, as if to save me from embarrassment. A lot of people were lingering in the park, released from work but not ready to go home. They sat at the metal tables and talked on their phones, or stood on the lawn in little groups, like guests at a party. They shifted their leather bags peacefully from shoulder to shoulder. The light was beautiful; even the shadows were good. Before long the people on the lawn would disperse: some would go home to their families and others would go home alone; some would take taxis and others would decide it was a fine evening for a walk. In an hour or two they would be working out, walking their dogs, cooking dinner, listening to music, shifting their bodies tactically on the banquette of a bar and wondering how to keep talking so the person sitting opposite would go on listening, and not just listening, but listening with precisely the look they had now, as if the past existed only in words and the future would never come. For the first time in a long time, I felt like one of them. I was no longer a ghost; I was just an ordinary person who was going somewhere. It was an extraordinary accomplishment, much harder than discovering a new continent or flying off into the sky. I’d found the place where people live.
The next morning I switched on the television and saw that planes had flown into the twin towers of the World Trade Center. This isn’t happening, I thought. Then I thought, this is the end of the world. Ironically, the one thing I didn’t think about was the Millerites: their apocalypse clearly had nothing to do with the pillar of black smoke I could see from my living-room window. But later that day, when I’d stopped weeping, it occurred to me, as it must have to many other people, that the planes hadn’t come out of the blue, empty sky. All the time I had been working in the library, all the time I’d been in Thebes, and probably long before that, something had been going on. People had been preparing this event, and they had themselves been prepared by other events that I didn’t know anything about. I realized then that my ignorance was vastly greater than I had supposed. Even if I had somehow managed to tell the story of every person I’d ever known, what I would have written would be, like Thebes, only a little world, which seemed complete while you were in it, but in fact was not complete. There was always another world waiting to make contact. There was always a wave waiting to break. Now it had broken. And I sat there, staring at the screen, trying to figure out what was going on.
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