Paradime

There’s no app for this.

Though I seem to have one for nearly everything else. I can track my movements over the course of a day, every footstep, every heartbeat. I can monitor my stress levels, boost productivity, enhance cognition.

But relieve anxiety? Eliminate dread? Not a chance.

As the R train rattles towards 59th Street, I look down at my phone and swipe to the right.

Start your free seven-day trial now . . .

I’ll never use any of these. I put my phone away.

The green I-beam columns and ceramic wall tiles of the station flicker into view. I get up and wait by the car door. It’s 11:30 a.m., the platform not particularly crowded – a lull between surges, the secret hour for tourists, junkies, and unemployed people.

Up on 59th Street, it’s bright and sunny, the sky almost aggressively blue. Just ahead, vast and constipated as always, looms the Plaza Hotel. At the kerb, waiting to cross, I gaze for a moment down Fifth at the flow of traffic and buildings – parallel lines that trail towards a meeting point at the blistering horizon. I turn and look the other way, over at the huddled expanse of Central Park, and then, a little further to the right, at the deck of sidewalk awnings fanning north – the ones fronting the granite and marble mansions that line this side of Fifth, what used to be called, quaintly, Millionaire’s Row.

This morning, up here, the specific anxiety, the specific dread, is easy to identify. It’s simply that I don’t belong. I’m not a tourist
en route
to Tiffany’s, or an addled junkie wandering lost through the canyons of Midtown. I belong to that third group, the unemployed, and consequently have no real business being here. Every person I see reinforces this – every silk-suited alpha dog barking into his cellphone, every skinny society hostess dripping in jewellery and laden down with designer shopping bags, every map-consulting European family of four, immaculate in their ironed jeans and matching Oxford-blue windbreakers.

But I have to go somewhere, right? I can’t be
no
where. And that’s the problem. No matter where I end up, there’ll be a local supply of reasons to feel shitty and out of place. If I go into the park, for example, all those bright, determined people in Lycra running towards a better future . . . well, they’ll crush any semblance of hope
I
might have. If I go too far west, Tenth Avenue and beyond, the gradual disintegration I’ll see all around me there won’t do my mood any good.

If I go back to the apartment . . .

Can’t really do that though, not until late afternoon, not until Kate has put in however many hours she needs to put in. And even then . . .

If I leave New York?

If I go back to Asheville?

It doesn’t matter. When it comes to anxiety and dread, there’ll always be location-specific reasons. But it’s when
they
run out that the existential shit really hits the fan – because even if I found the perfect location, where conditions were ideal, guess what . . .
I’d
still be there.

How do you escape that?

I cross Fifth, walk past the Plaza and on towards Sixth, where I turn left.

The Avenue of the Americas.

I could walk down to Greenwich Village from here, block after block, passing through several Americas in the process and certainly ending up in one that’s different from the one I’m in right now. But what then? Another cappuccino in some dingy café? Another hour or two in the Strand? How long will it be before I start shouting at people – from a park bench, say, or in the street, or on a subway platform?

Hey, you!

Hey, buddy!

Hey, gorgeous!

The prospects aren’t good. I need something to occupy my time. I need something to occupy my
mind
. I need a job. And I need one fast.

Three weeks ago I was a civilian contractor in Afghanistan.

Working in a chow hall.

All my life, on and off, I’ve worked in kitchens. My old man had a restaurant –
restaurant
, it was a steakhouse – and I spent a lot of time there, first as a kid running around the place, then as a teenager washing pots, bringing out the garbage, even doing some basic prep, but always, as I remember – and no disrespect to the old man here – always dreaming of what it’d be like to work in a proper kitchen. By this I think I probably meant the kitchen of some place like the Four Seasons on 52nd Street, which I’d once seen an article about in a trade magazine. But with visions of pristine chef whites and brushed-steel surfaces etched in my mind, sustaining me, I never thought I’d end up working in a place that served food you’d be embarrassed to feed to a dog – food that was tasteless, highly processed and basically inedible. The stuff still had to be cooked though, and the job of doing that, it turns out, was an actual job, and a well-paying one – something that at the time I really needed.

The chow hall was at Forward Operating Base Sharista in Nangarhar Province and was one of countless food-service facilities privately operated by Gideon Logistics. That meant production-line industrial food shipped in frozen, then cooked (for lack of a better word) and served up to exhausted, bored, jangly-nerved, hot, and above all hungry servicemen. Described as a ‘global provider of integrated supply-chain solutions’, Gideon was in Afghanistan as part of the LOGCAP IV programme and had a hand in pretty much everything over there. Security, transportation, freight management, food and laundry services, sanitation – you name it, they were doing it, squeezing every last dollar out of the war before the fucking thing ground to a halt.

I’d only been there for four months, shipped over myself like a box of frozen burger patties after I answered an ad and signed up for what promised to be a lucrative two-year contract with above-average benefits and good rotation cycles. They were looking for food-service managers, chefs, line cooks, whatever, to help run their various overseas facilities, most of which were located in environments ranging, the ad said, from ‘potentially hostile’ to ‘extremely dangerous’. In short, the work would be ‘demanding, but rewarding’. Kate was dead set against it, of course, why would you put yourself in that position when you didn’t have to, but all I could see were the numbers. I’d already been in Iraq – done two tours there – so I wasn’t intimidated by the war-zone thing, and I had sufficient food-industry experience to qualify for the job. The math was simple. Two short years over there and I could earn what it would take me five or six to earn here. Which, given our financial circumstances at the time, made it a no-brainer.

It’s just that, I suppose, go figure, things didn’t exactly work out as planned.

Every few blocks or so, stopped at the lights, I almost resolve to quit this charade and head back to the apartment. It’s Kate’s, a one-bedroom sublet in a rent-stabilised walk-up on 10th Street, so it’s small and cramped – but still, I could lie quietly on the bed, laid out like a corpse waiting to be embalmed, and she wouldn’t even have to know I was there. How different would that be from what I’m doing now, which is, supposedly – and at Kate’s gentle insistence – out looking for a job?

Or meeting people, at the very least.

Networking.

Her word.

Sometimes I wonder if Kate has met
me
.

To be fair, though, she’s doing her best. Equipped with a BA in political science from Atherton College, Kate moved to Manhattan five years ago with high hopes of . . . I don’t know, going to law school, eventually getting into public service, something, whatever, but after only a few months it became obvious that her chief asset, the one thing she had going for her, was this rent-stabilised sublet, because without it, bottom line, she wouldn’t be living in Manhattan, probably not even in Brooklyn. More than likely, in fact, with today’s rents, she’d be back living with her parents in Baltimore. She got the sublet through a connection of her old man’s, an ex-colleague who’d also promised to show her the ropes, even pave the way to a possible job, something decent, but unfortunately this same guy got sick, lost
his
job, and had to skip town, leaving Kate with the just about affordable apartment and the dawning realisation that she had little or no prospect of getting into law school, little or no prospect of getting anything like a ‘decent’ job, and little or no prospect of paying back her student-loan debts, which amounted to more than thirty-three thousand dollars and were probably now set to become the defining fact of her life.

And then – let there be no doubt – she met me.

I resolve once more to quit this charade and head back to the apartment, but again don’t quite manage it.

It’s like each day now is its own little tour of duty, and in that context there’s no scenario where you can just say
Fuck it
, let’s return to base. Think I’ll de-enlist. Don’t want to do this any more.

I come to the lights at 42nd, stop, and look around. The big difference here is that I’m on my own. There’s no command structure, no one barking orders, no exit strategy either, or even talk of one. My four months in Afghanistan might be only just behind me, but I find that my memory, if left on auto-pilot, drifts more readily to Iraq. Those impressions are bigger, louder, stickier. But that’s just what they are, impressions, because I can’t pinpoint specific incidents, I don’t have recurring nightmares, there are no indelible images in my head. Other guys have stories to tell, this happened, that happened, shit they’ll never forget as long as they live, but
some
guys (like me, I suppose), while never really able to stop thinking about it, can’t actually fucking remember the experience in any relatable detail at all.

My days at Sharista, on the other hand, they’re in high def. It’s just that I really,
really
don’t want to remember them – wholesale, retail, it doesn’t matter.

On the far side of 42nd, past Bryant Park, I have what amounts to a mild panic attack, a sudden, razor-blade swipe to the gut . . . a constriction in the chest, then difficulty breathing. It threatens to become overwhelming, but I know from experience that it won’t. I keep walking, wrestling the sensations down, folding them into my stride.

To look at me you wouldn’t think anything was wrong. To look at me you’d think I was normal. Which I am. But isn’t that the point? People have interior lives, I do, you do, everyone walking around me here on the street does, but the sad truth is we’re all riddled with fear and insecurity. And me acting like a crazy person on the sidewalk, clutching my chest and hyperventilating – that’s not going to help anyone, it’s not going to move the situation along. Besides, I’m used to stress and I take a certain amount of pride in being able to handle it. Not only have I spent time working in high-pressure kitchens, I’ve done basic military training, I’ve served in a war zone.

This, on the other hand . . . this is Midtown on a quiet, sunny morning in early spring. I have to believe I’m capable of holding it together here. Because what’s the alternative? I go apeshit? Pull a gun out? Discharge it randomly? Then what, a cop or a security guard shoots
me
? And that’s
it
? Game over for Danny Lynch – thirty-three-year-old Iraq War veteran, unemployed, disaffected, and with a history of mental-health problems?
That’s
my fifteen minutes? ‘He frequently skipped his meds,’ a psychiatrist I hadn’t seen in five years would be quoted as saying on Fox News. ‘He pretty much kept to himself,’ someone else would tell Gawker. And then it would come out, the big reveal, that just three weeks earlier I had been fired by Gideon Logistics in Afghanistan after an ‘altercation’ at the base involving some TCNs – third country nationals – and that two people had died as a result.

It’d be the perfect narrative – rounded, cautionary, easy to digest.

Just not entirely true.

Confirmation bias would take a serious hit when it emerged that I wasn’t some lone-wolf type acting out a paranoid fantasy, that I had merely witnessed the incident at Sharista, and that furthermore, several hundred other employees had been let go at the same time not due to the altercation but to the fact that Gideon was embroiled in a multi-billion-dollar billing dispute with the Department of Defense and needed to implement drastic cuts.

But who would care? Who would even listen? The only thing anyone would
hear
is the reference to mental-health problems – which is a fairly broad stroke of the brush . . . but let’s face it, a little ADD as a kid and some standard-issue PTSD after Iraqi Freedom, and they’ve got you on their books, marked and labelled forever.

To them, that’s who you are.

And how do you escape that? I’m not sure you can, but the thing is, when Kate and I are together . . . I don’t feel like I
am
that person. I’m more grounded. I’m less likely to spiral out of control. I have space to breathe. And that’s one of the reasons I clear out of the apartment every day. To give her some space. In fact, she’s back there right now sitting at the kitchen table with her laptop open in front of her, learning how to code, doing an intensive online course in it. I’m not even sure I know what coding is exactly, but Kate has read that it’s the absolute must-have skillset of the future, that knowledge of HTML and CSS is the new literacy. It may not get her into law school, but she thinks it’ll be a passport to a job market one or two notches above the one she’s been in for the past few years – service positions that are themselves becoming harder to get, and if you have one, harder to hold on to, not to mention less well paid and with practically no benefits. It used to be that you could fake the necessary enthusiasm to secure one of these jobs and use it as a stepping stone to your preferred career path. But not any more.

Over the past few years, Kate has been a waitress (at Mouzon, where we met), a legal proofreader, a temp, she’s worked at a call centre, in retail, she’s babysat, walked dogs, done all sorts of stuff, and never once (in my hearing) complained about it. She hasn’t relinquished her dreams, either, and that’s saying something. For my part, I don’t have dreams. You might think I’d aspire to be a chef, or to have my own restaurant, or to be out pushing the boundaries of molecular gastronomy, but it’s just work to me, a pay cheque, and I guess I’ve got the old man to thank for that. If I’m a kitchen lifer it’s because of him, but at the same time he ruined it for me by the way he let it grind him down, so whatever ambition I have now is vicarious, it’s for Kate – it’s so
she
doesn’t end up getting ground down. Which is what the Gideon contract was about. I’d go over to Afghanistan, do the work, put in the time, stockpile the cash, and get out. Then I’d head back to my job at Mouzon and Kate would clear her student-loan debts. We’d get some breathing space out of it – a chance to slow down, to look around, to look forward.