New Jersey Noir (27 page)
Authors: Joyce Carol Oates
That’s when Ernie sees: he didn’t try and run.
Go down Kettle Run. There’s a place used to be a Girl Scout camp.
How’d he know that yesterday? It was after they had gone to see Tull.
“Keith … I think I’ve got it, Keith.”
Driving back to Cherry Hill last night, Ernie had smelled a whiff of Carleen’s perfume on his shirt. He wouldn’t have thought shit about the scent at a store, but now that he connected it to her pink sweater and question-mark jeans he planned on sleeping with this shirt on. He planned on wrapping it around his head. Would she say hi to him in the hallway? He didn’t care. He wasn’t a sentimental little shit. He wouldn’t even brag to Pervert about it. Something as pure as this belonged in a very quiet space. The best way never to lose something is to take it out carefully on special occasions, turn it very delicately in your hand, and put it back away without wasting a second, keep it in a safe place, someplace Fuckhead would never look.
It was Tull who told Pervert about the plants, baiting Pervert to come out here because he knew he could frame him and get away with a few extra pounds for himself. Then he brought Keith out to catch Pervert and Ernie, and only Pervert had known the setup.
Now Keith comes back around the bunkhouse and Tull is almost done digging. “Took for fuckin’ ever.” Tull looks up, sees Keith holding the gun, sees Ernie watching. “What the fuck?”
Here comes your answer.
When I wake up in a strange bed
Beside a girl called Pam
I try to play the whole thing down
And give my name as Sam
It’s clear I’m way out of my depth
It’s clear that she’s dropped a dime
It’s clear that even I suspect
I’m guilty of some crime
I know those goons by the streetlamp
Are champing at the bit
I last saw them on board the train
Before we took a hit
And jumped the observation car
Only to lose our way
In a nightmarish railroad yard
Somewhere near Noir, NJ
When I squint through the slatted blinds
Pam orders juice and eggs
She’ll let a man do the legwork
While she works on her legs
It’s clear her husband was a wimp
It’s clear he had no spine
It’s clear she lit that cigarette
To give the goons a sign
I know that it’s a rule of thumb
A gumshoe’s fingered me
When ladies who’re high maintenance
Meet lighting that’s low key
They’re just so many femmes fatales
Who have been led astray
And now lure plainclothesmen et al
Back there to Noir, NJ
When a sergeant with a scattergun
Meets a shamus
Halfway up the stairs
Somewhere between Paterson
And Paramus
They redefine the parameters
And bid us welcome, hey, hey, hey,
Welcome to Noir, NJ
When I flash forward through the murk
Of who did what to whom
I’m pretty sure I don’t deserve
To die here in this room
It’s clear that I’ve been double-crossed
It’s clear that I’ve been framed
It’s clear Pam’s husband was half deaf
From how they shout his name
I know I’ll be reduced to pulp
She’ll gulp with her orange juice
If I don’t reassert myself
She’ll kick in my caboose
It’s not too late to be hard-boiled
Like the eggs on Pam’s tray
Though even her pistol would recoil
At what happened in Noir, NJ
O
n the first day of my forced sabbatical, I noticed a car driving down Nassau Street with a large spherical device extending from its top. It looked like the past’s vision of the future. I assumed it was part of some meteorology or physics or even psychology experiment—another small contribution to our charming campus atmospherics—and I didn’t give it much thought. I probably wouldn’t have even noticed it in the first place had I not been taking my first walk for walk’s sake in years. Without a place to get to, I finally was where I was.
A few weeks later—exactly a month later, I was to learn—I saw the vehicle again, this time crawling down Prospect Avenue. I was stopped at a corner, not waiting for the light to change, not waiting for anything that might actually happen.
“Any idea what that is?” I asked a student who was standing at the curb beside me. Her quick double-take suggested recognition.
“Google,” she said.
“Google what?” I asked, but wanting far more to know what she thought of me, and how other students on campus were talking about and judging me.
“Street view.”
“Which is what?”
She sighed, just in case there was any doubt about her reluctance to engage with me. “That thing above the car is a camera with nine lenses. Every second it takes a photograph in each direction, and they’re stitched together into a map.”
“What kind of map?”
“It’s 3-D and can be navigated.”
“I thought you used a map
for
navigating.”
“Yeah, well.”
She was finished with me, but I wasn’t ready to let her go. It’s not that I cared about the map—and if I had, I could have easily found better answers elsewhere. But her reluctance to speak with me—even to be seen standing beside me—compelled me to keep her there.
I asked, “No one minds having all of these pictures taken all the time?”
“A lot of people mind,” she said, rummaging through her bag for nothing.
“But no one does anything about it?”
The light changed. I didn’t move. As the student walked away, I thought I heard her say, “Fucking pig.” I’m virtually positive that’s what she said.
A few days earlier, while eating pasta out of the colander, I’d heard an NPR piece about something called “the uncanny valley.” Apparently, when we are presented with an imitation of life—a cartoon, a robot-looking robot—we are happily willing to engage with it: to hear its stories, converse with it, even empathize. (Charlie Brown’s face, characterized by only a few marks, is a good example.) We continue to be comfortable with imitations as they more and more closely resemble life. But there comes a point—say, when the imitation is 98 percent lifelike (whatever
that
means)—when we become deeply unsettled, in an interesting way. We feel some repulsion, some alienation, some caveman reflex akin to what happens when nails are run down a blackboard.
We are happy with the fake, and happy with the real, but the near real—the too near real—unnerves us. (This has been demonstrated in monkeys as well. When presented with near-lifelike monkey heads, they will go to the corners of their cages and cover their faces.) Once the imitation is fully believable—100 percent believable—we are again comfortable, even though we know it is an imitation of life. That distance between the 98 percent and 100 percent is the uncanny valley. It was only in the last five years that our imitations of life got good enough—movies with digitally rendered humans, robots with highly articulated musculature—to generate this new human feeling.
The experience of navigating the map fell, for me, into the uncanny valley. Perhaps this is because at forty-six I was already too old to move comfortably within it. Even in those moments when I forgot that I was looking at a screen, I was aware of the finger movements necessary to guide my journey. To my students—my former students—I imagine it would be second nature. Or first nature.
I could advance down streets, almost as if walking, but not at all like walking. It wasn’t gliding, or rolling or skating. It was something more like being stationary, with the world gliding or rolling or skating toward me. I could turn my “head,” look up and down—the world pivoting around my fixed perspective. It was
too much
like the world.
Google is forthright about how the map is made—why shouldn’t they be?—and I learned that the photos are regularly updated. (Users couldn’t tolerate the dissonance of looking at snow in the summer, or the math building that was torn down three months ago. While such errors would put the map safely on the far side of the uncanny valley, it would also render it entirely uninteresting—if every bit as useful.) Princeton, I learned, is reshot on the fourth of every month.
I wanted to walk to the living room, find my wife reading in her chair, and tell her about it.
The investigation never went anywhere because there was nowhere for it to go. (It was never even clear just
what
they were investigating.) I’d had two previous relationships with graduate students—explicitly permitted by the university—and they were held up as evidence. Evidence of
what
? Evidence that past the appropriate age I had sexual hunger. Why couldn’t I simply repress it? Why did I have to have it at all? My persistent character was my character flaw.
The whole thing was a farce, and as always it boiled down to contradictory memories. No one on a college campus wants to stand up to defend the right of an accused harasser to remain innocent until proven guilty. The university privately settled with the girl’s family, and I was left with severely diminished stature in the department, and alienated from almost all of my colleagues and friends. I believed they believed me, and didn’t blame them for distancing themselves.
I found myself sitting in coffee shops for hours, reading sections of the newspaper I never used to touch, eating fewer meals on plates, and for the first time in my adult life, going for long, directionless walks.
The first night of my forced freedom, I walked for hours. I left the disciplinary committee meeting, took rights and lefts without any thought to where they might lead me, and didn’t get back to my house until early the next morning. My earphones protected me from one kind of loneliness, and I walked beyond the reach of the local NPR affiliate—like a letter so long it switches from black pen to blue, the station became country music.
At some point, I found myself in the middle of a field. Apparently I was the kind of person who left the road, the kind of person who walked on grass. The stars were as clear as I’d ever seen them.
How old are you?
I wondered.
How many of you are dead?
I thought, for the first time in a long while, about my parents: my father asleep on the sofa, his chest blanketed with news that was already ancient by the time it was delivered that morning. The thought entered my mind that he had probably bought his last shirt. Where did that thought come from? Why did it come? I thought about the map: like the stars, its images are sent to us from the past. And it’s also confusing.
I thought that maybe if I took a picture of the constellations, I could e-mail them to my wife with some pithy thumb-typed sentiment—
Wish you were here
—and maybe, despite knowing the ease and cheapness of such words, she would be moved. Maybe two smart people who knew better could retract into the shell of an empty gesture and hide out there for at least a while.
I aimed the phone up and took a picture, but the flash washed out all of the stars. I turned off the flash, but the “shutter” stayed open for so long, trying to sip up any of the little light it could, that my infinitesimally small movements made everything blurry. I took another picture, holding my hand as still as I could, but it was still a blur. I braced my arm with my other hand, but it was still a blur.
On the fourth of the next month, I waited on the corner of Nassau and Olden. When the vehicle came, I didn’t wave or even smile, but stood there like an animal in a diorama. I went home, opened my laptop, and dropped myself down at the corner of Nassau and Olden. I spun the world, so that I faced northwest. There I was.
There was something exhilarating about it. I was in the map, there for anyone searching Princeton to see. (Until, of course, the vehicle came through again in four weeks, replacing the world like the Flood.) Sitting at my kitchen counter, leaning into the screen of a laptop I bought because, like everybody else, I liked the way it looked, I felt part of the physical world. The feeling was complicated: simultaneously empowering and emasculating. It was an approximate feeling had by someone unable to locate his actual feelings.
I asked myself: Should I go on a trip?
I asked: Should I try to write a book?
Should I apologize? To
whom
should I apologize? I’d already apologized to my wife in every way possible. To the girl’s parents? What was there to apologize
for
? Would an apology retroactively create a crime?
There were the problems of shame and anger, of wanting to avoid and manufacture encounters like the one with the student at the streetlight. I needed to be away from judgment, and I needed to be understood. There was nothing keeping me. I’d never been enthusiastic about teaching, but I’d lost my enthusiasm for
everything
. I felt, in the deepest sense, uninspired, deflated. I’d lost my ability to experience urgency, as if I thought I was never going to die.