Through the Children's Gate Page 21

  Third Thanksgiving: Bitterosities

  Olivia tells us that Kweeda has died, and we mourn her as we might mourn ourselves. Everyone has sobered up now—or our circle has, anyway; the intoxicated are downtown, making love and taking coke, not up here in the parent belt, where grown-ups make dates for sex as their children make dates to play.

  Only Charlie Ravioli, prince of the city, seemed immune from the sobriety as he raced around town, bumping into Olivia. But now even he has begun to learn through suffering, as epic characters must, I suppose, even epic characters that begin as imaginary friends.

  He had been married, and then … well, it happened this way. A few days before Thanksgiving, Olivia mentioned that Ravioli had gotten married. Gotten married! we said. Who to? Or to whom? To a girl named Kweeda, Olivia announced. (I am guessing at the spelling, obviously, thinking it likelier that a guy like Ravioli would marry an African princess, Kweeda, than Queeda, mere Balkan nobility.) They went to a place called Cornfields on their honeymoon, which Martha and I imagined as one of those golf-and-baked-ham Wasp resorts in Virginia or Tennessee that you used to see advertised in Gourmet(“Come to Cornfields for the Finest in Traditional Dining …”).

  But then something happened. Olivia was at her usual speaking station, the little café table where she has lunch with Martha while I work, hidden behind a screen. She forgets that I am there and then launches into dreamy flights of invention; she informs Martha that she was with Luke when he told jokes before the Purim crowd. “My brother had a microphone, and I had a microphone.”

  But today there is a new seriousness. “Mommy,” she says as she eats her tuna sandwich, “I'm sorry to tell you that Kweeda has died.”

  “She's died!” Martha says, genuinely shocked. “What did she die of?”

  “She died of a disease called Bitterosity.”

  “Bitterosity!” Martha exclaims.

  Olivia nods grimly. Bitterosity had taken down Kweeda; it could happen to anyone. She had moved to New York, I guessed, and gotten it there, as we all do, or will, if we're not careful. What might Bitterosity be? Bitterness born of betrayal and disappointment, jealousy and resentment—half of life here involves safeguarding yourself from the plague of Bitterosity. It is a plague: You see the buboes of Bitterosity swelling on your body, the flush of Bitterosity rising on your face, and soon the cheerful young woman who arrived with a black leotard and desire to dance, or the young man with a manuscript in his suitcase and an ache in his heart, becomes another grumbling embittered crank, a querulous angry radio-talk-show caller, an anonymous poster, a failed writer complaining about his publisher and the stupidity of the critics and the public, or just another person contributing bad reviews of inoffensive restaurants to Zagat. Bitterosity has you in its grip, and, like poor Kweeda, you die from it. (Actually, I can count at least four people I know who have already died of Bitterosity, though not all of them quite know it. They are vampires of Bitterosity, living on in the strange Manhattan gloaming of its afterlife.)

  One cure for incipient Bitterosity is company. People write as if anxiety and fear are the same thing, or interchangeable things. Every day in the city we are learning that they're not. Anxiety is provocative, a stimulant that makes you act out; fear is silencing, a paralytic, and it makes you burrow in. Movement and activity can eliminate or reduce anxiety, but fear can be cured only by retreat, or alleviated by sudden bursts of hope, or comforted by the company of friends.

  The most magical company-creating thing I've seen in the past year is a machine—a machine that listens to the world, reads its mind, and tells you exactly what's up in there. The machine, a Jimmy Neutron assemblage of display monitors and loudspeakers and copper wire, is the brainchild of a Bell Labs statistician named Mark Hansen and a sound designer and artist named Ben Rubin. Mark is a scientist and engineer who looks like one, and Ben is one of those downtown people who are somehow half Laurie Anderson and half Mr. Wizard. For most of the past year, you could find their machine in a loft on the Bowery; you could just drop in, if you knew it was there. It was made partly as a work of conceptual-computer art, partly as a real attempt to take the world's temperature at any given moment, actually to hear the unconscious of the übersoul.

  I went to see the machine during a jittery moment. I found its block of Chinese restaurants and restaurant supply houses and walked up a flight of steep wooden stairs. The machine, or “Listening Post,” as it is called, works in a way that would be hard for an anxiety-ridden computer-illiterate type to understand, but the basic idea, as I understand it, is this: Hansen and Rubin have written a program that allows them to probe into all the unrestricted Internet chat rooms in the English-speaking world and dredge up thousands upon thousands of random sentences even as they are being typed. The program is an “octopus.” The casual remarks, desperate pleas, and lecherous queries that are sucked out of the stream of world chatter are then relayed in various ways on the two hundred or so small screens and ten loudspeakers that make up the machine's public face. The found words and sentence fragments can be strung out at random on the display monitors or made to race across the screens in constant streams, like a Times Square zipper, giving the thing a Jenny Holzer–like gnomic and oracular quality. Better yet, a speech synthesizer can read aloud from the found chatter—either intoning words and sentences one by one in a sepulchral BBC announcer's voice or chanting and singing them in fugue-like overlay. The craziness and weirdness that are harder to find now on New York streets are still there sunk down deep. Joe Gould is the patron saint of the Listening Post; his oral history of our time is in there.

  Quite often the sequences of words and sentences are meaningless, but sometimes they take on striking shapes. Today, for instance, the machine produced a kind of found poem on the theme of “orange” and duct tape: “WARNING: CODE ORANGE where'd my ORANGE go? And plastic sheeting! duct tape and plastic people tape ducks now President Plastic Wrap Who's got DUCK TAPE!? buy stock in duct tape duct tape and lingerie.”

  From fear to affirmation, or at least to sex, in nine lines. I walked back to the subway feeling comforted. I half expected one of the screens to announce the death of Kweeda, one of the voices murmuring to mourn her passing, until I recalled that only Olivia knows of it, and she is still too young for a computer.

  Martha's antidote for the strange disease called Bitterosity is movement. She wants us to do things: for me to learn to drive at last, and to sail, as I've long wanted to, for us to move to Connecticut or New Jersey, where there are houses with gardens and you know one season from the next when you wake up and look outside, not when you check the front page of the paper to see what the weather is.

  She has a need to believe in freedom and mobility. Not that, if the shoe drops, we will somehow escape Manhattan, fleeing the fire like the last Trojans, in a sailboat, gliding out past the Statue of Liberty, or, for that matter, in a station wagon. One only has to try to get across the George Washington Bridge to realize how ridiculously cut off all of Manhattan would be in any real kind of crisis. (In Manhattan, we used to think, we are ruined, and now we think we are doomed, when we are probably neither.)

  But the emotional symbolism of potential escape is worth something, and so she is urging me to learn to do things, rather than to watch things. She has enrolled Luke and me in a sailing course all the way down in Annapolis, while she and Olivia go away to her mother's for the holidays. I am aware, have been made aware, as I have crisscrossed the country on planes for the past two years—becoming that bizarre early-millennium figure, the author on a book tour, who will be as incredible a figure to our children as the author on a Chautauqua lecture tour, like Howells and Twain and all the lesser figures, is to us—just how weird a place New York is, how unlike the country it claims to superintend. In some ways, the manners and habits of New York are as remote from the rest of the country as Venice is from Italy. Not just remote geographically, or because the city's head still turns toward Europe tropically. Remote in the basic
patterns of the basic activities of civilization, movement and eating and laundry. New York is a walkers’ city in a country of cars; New York is a compressed city in a country of malls; New York is a city where you take your dirty clothes to the local dry cleaner and walk three blocks to do it. We rely on foot and train, and an occasional recreational bike ride, while America is, first and last and above all, a country of cars and washing machines.

  I do not discount the love of cars just because I can't drive one. When we are on holiday by the ocean, the appeal of the car to America becomes apparent. It is not only speed; it is a vehicle of intimacy. Conversation takes on a different hue. People need to share secrets in boxes, and cars are confessional-shaped. Lacking that, New Yorkers have the sauna in the health club, where grown men groan, wordlessly but meaningfully, sweating the Bitterosity out of their bodies. Perhaps if I could learn to sail, I would have the thrill of expertise without the necessity of driving, be able to move a vehicle from place to place without having to park.

  Luke's solution to the problem of Bitterosity is intense engagement in the game of Yu-Gi-Oh! This is a bizarre Japanese card game that has swept through the third grade of Artists & Anglers like a brushfire through a dry forest in August. The parts I see are decks and decks, hundreds of cards to collect, each of which bears the (surprisingly well-drawn) picture of a figure from a Sword & Sorcery fantasy, a wizard or ghost or monster or elf or hero or ghoul. They have elaborate names, all translated from the Japanese into just slightly unidiomatic English, like images printed out of register in old comic books: Manga Ryu-Ran and Blue-Eyes White Dragon (rather than the Blue-Eyed Dragon); Maneater Bug and Relinquished; Black Illusion Ritual and Dark (rather than Black) Magician; Graceful Dice and Launcher Spider. There is an elaborate backstory as well, about a small Japanese boy called Yugi, who somehow reawakened Egyptian deities, apparently long resident in Japan, who, in a neat bit of Escher-like self-reference, taught him the card game that represents their cosmic struggles.

  The game, when you play it, has mind-numbingly elaborate rules, but you never seem to play it. The goal is to collect the cards and plan to play it someday. Weeks go by when all the boys talk about is what's in their decks—not who's won and lost, but what they have collected in their steady trips to the grungy little newsstands where the cards are sold (their money for new cards earned through bed making or begged through homework doing).

  When they do at last play, it is like watching very small boys do their taxes: Two decks of cards confront each other, as in our old games of War, and each player slaps down a card. Then the small boys, with set frowns and knitted brows, read the front of the cards, trying to deduce what the result should be: “I think it's like the Blue-Eyed Dragon presented with, like, no hex, present on the board, is worth eight thousand points … no, it should be six thousand points, because I haven't presented my Dragon Enhancer yet” On and on, a purely literary, or at least literate, tedium that one would have thought doomed by video games, and yet the children seem drawn back into the cards by their very boringness. Happiness is absorption, and though by screens they are merely excited, by the cards they are absorbed.

  I was reminded of this myself this year, when I found my own version of bliss while absorbed in the role of school safety patrol, wandering the neighborhood as a local pro tempore sentinel, a happy member of the new homeland-security culture. Sudden Flatfoot, I would have been called, had I been turned into a Yu-Gi-Oh! card. At Artists & Anglers, there is a long-standing requirement that every parent go out on safety patrol at least once a year. The obligation, like the patrol, dates from the seventies, when muggers hid in the subway station and thieves around the corner, when the park was dangerous, nightfall brought its risks, and kids really did get mugged occasionally on their way home.

  These days the likeliest crime, I suppose, is some overstoked stockbroker stopping a seventh-grader to try to steal his attention-deficit medication. But the tradition persists, partly because it always has, partly because we are superstitious that if we stop it, the muggings will come back. (That's what a cultural tradition is, a pointless habit everyone is too scared to stop, like venerating Johnny Hallyday in France.)

  I went to the school at three-thirty on the assigned day and was given my regalia: an eye-shatteringly orange safety vest and a walkie-talkie that made reassuring static noises when you pressed the talk button, and with which I was to stay in touch with home base at Artists & Anglers in case of an emergency, the shape, structure, and possible location of which were all left comfortably undefined. Then I was given my security perimeter: a three-block beat up and down Eighty-eighth Street (where Martha and I first lived in our nine-by-eleven basement room for three years), down to Eighty-seventh Street, and back. I was supposed to have a partner, one of the more determinedly artistic mothers, but she somehow hadn't shown. I had to go solo. I didn't mind. It made me more of the real Lethal Weapon thing—a cop with a beat, a grievance, and a lost partner.

  It was the first purely happy time I'd know in years. Round and round the blocks, seeing the kids going home, saying with truly obnoxious officiousness (and to Luke's extreme embarrassment, when he saw me), “Okay, kids—let's move on! Okay, kids—let's get home. Everybody home now.” I had become the voice of the Listening Post, calm and Olympian. Shooing them toward their homes, clad in the brief authority of an orange vest and a walkie-talkie.

  The kids gave me steady, opaque, disbelieving looks. My achievement was the opposite of Holden Caulfield's ambition. Not to be the catcher, keeping the kids from the edge of the field, but rather the pusher on the pavement, urging them on back home.

  I loved walking my beat, with the cocky, flat-footed insouciance of Charlie Chaplin in Easy Street, swirling my (mental) billy club while adjusting my (imaginary) Mack Sennett–style bobbie hat. Last summer we visited Rome and stood outside the Trevi Fountain, and we watched in awe as a specially designated group of cheery but forceful Italian policemen appeared every half hour or so to clear all the American college kids out of the fountain, where they were bathing their sore feet and splashing their overheated foreheads. The cops were nice about it, but they were cops: Their job was to protect the integrity of the fountain from American feet, and no kidding. “Dad,” Luke said, “that's the job for you. You'd be a perfect fountain policeman.” It was true: He'd spotted my love of pointless officiousness, of being right and well armed and indignant with absolutely nothing at stake. Being a fountain policeman is, I suppose, a “thankless” Sisyphean job—you clear out the kids from Dartmouth only to be overrun an hour later by Buckeyes. (But then what job is not Sisyphean, pushing the same stone up the same hill over and over again? The policeman walks the same street beat; the essayist, finishing one humane-liberal essay, watches it disappear and begins another. All of us spend all day pushing our stone to the top of the hill and find it back at the bottom when we show up the next morning. Sisyphus's real punishment was that he still had to hold down a normal job even after he was dead.)

  I learned a lot on my beat, about why cops are the way they are, whether fountain police or homicide detectives or security patrolmen. The closer you looked at the blocks you were walking, over and over and over again, the more each block revealed itself—and the more suspicious, even paranoid, you became about what the signs of the block really meant, what was really going on there. You become conscious of the intricate variety of stores and storefronts. Density reveals itself as a particular pattern of parts: this odd little auction house, and this garage entrance beside it, and the two rival rental-car offices anchored by the garage, and the tailors down the stairs into this basement, and the Chinese restaurant that no one ever seems to enter or order from two doors away. On one street, a thousand small efforts at making a living, none seeming obviously to thrive; all, in fact, to a single policeman's passing eye, as empty and soulful as a Hopper afternoon interior, and yet it works. Somehow it thrives. (What Hopper was showing, it occurred to me, was not the desolation but the energ
y of American life: This is what a capitalist city looks like most of the time, half asleep and waiting.)

  And then you became conscious of the play of people on the street. Why are these same people hanging out here, minute after minute and hour after hour … Why is this young messenger still standing in front of the auction house? Could be nothing … but go around the block once more. Hmmn, he's still there. Why? Waiting for a friend or a fix or a … That tone cops have—that steady wariness, even if you ask them for something simple and innocent, directions or advice—is the product of their experience. There really are sinister jigsaw-puzzle patterns out there, and you may be one of the pieces. That is why cops, so to speak, examine your edges even as they answer your entreaties.

  I also understand now the other great policeman trait: why cops are both mildly paranoid and desperate for donuts. Craving carbohydrates is a natural consequence of police work: It 's cold, you're paying attention to six things at once, and there's nothing that sounds so comforting as a shot of caffeine and a bit of pastry. The need for donuts is a product of the physical work of being outside in the cold coupled with the mental work of trying to find a pattern where there may be none, but where, if there is one, it could be sinister enough to cause a crime, get somebody hurt.

  So as I made my rounds, I began to eye, wistfully, a busy Starbucks on the corner of Eighty-seventh Street, full of laughing people knocking back hot drinks. The craving began to work on me so strongly that, after a solid, virtuous hour of safety patrol, I decided to stop for a quick, excusable, union-sanctioned break. (The union would have blessed it had they known about it, and had I belonged to one.) I ducked into the Starbucks—leaving my poor private school charges, I suppose, for a moment completely naked to the Hobbesian elements—and got in line. Just a quick triple-grande cappuccino and a biscotti, I swore, and I would be back outside keeping the peace.