We sit together on a grassy slope. Kitty has resumed talking dutifully about her new movie, the specter of her returning publicist doubtless having reminded her that the promotion of said movie is the sole reason she is in my company.
“Oh, Kitty,” I say. “Forget the movie. We’re out here in the park, it’s a gorgeous day. Let’s leave those other two people behind us. Let’s talk about…about horses.”
What a look! What a gaze! Every cheesy metaphor you can fathom comes to mind: sun breaking through clouds, flowers yawning into bloom, the sudden and mystical appearance of a rainbow. It’s done. I’ve reached behind or around or within—I’ve touched the real Kitty. And for reasons I cannot understand, reasons that surely must rank among the most mysterious of quantum mechanical mysteries, I experience this contact as revelatory, urgent, as if, in bridging the crevasse between myself and this young actress, I am being lifted above an encroaching darkness.
Kitty opens her small white purse and takes out a picture. A picture of a horse! With a white starburst on its nose. His name is Nixon. “Like the president?” I ask, but Kitty looks disturbingly blank at this reference. “I just liked the sound of that name,” she says, and describes the sensation of feeding Nixon an apple—how he takes it between his horsey jaws and smashes it all at once with a cascade of milky, steaming juice. “I hardly ever get to see him,” she says, with genuine sadness. “I have to hire someone else to ride him because I’m never home.”
“He must be lonely without you,” I say.
Kitty turns to me. I believe she’s forgotten who I am. I have an urge to push her backward onto the grass, and I do.
“Hey!” my subject cries, her voice muffled and startled but not yet frightened, exactly.
“Pretend you’re riding Nixon,” I say.
“HEY!” she yells, and I cover her mouth with my hand. Kitty is writhing beneath me, but her writhing is stymied by my height—six foot three—and my weight, two hundred sixty pounds, approximately one-third of which is concentrated in my “spare tire of a” (—Janet Green, during our last, failed sexual encounter) gut, which pinions her like a sandbag. I hold her mouth with one hand and worm the other hand between our two flailing bodies until finally—yes!—I manage to seize hold of my zipper. How is all this affecting me? Well, we’re lying on a hill in Central Park, a somewhat secluded spot that is still, technically speaking, in plain sight. So I feel anxious, dully aware that I’m placing my career and reputation at some risk with this caper. But more than that, I feel this crazy—what?—rage, it must be; what else could account for my longing to slit Kitty open like a fish and let her guts slip out, or my separate, corollary desire to break her in half and plunge my arms into whatever pure, perfumed liquid swirls within her. I want to rub it onto my raw, “scrofulous” (ibid.), parched skin in hopes that it will finally be healed. I want to fuck her (obviously) and then kill her, or possibly kill her in the act of fucking her (“fuck her to death” and “fuck her brains out” being acceptable variations on this basic goal). What I have no interest in doing is killing her and then fucking her, because it’s her life—the inner life of Kitty Jackson—that I so desperately long to reach.
As it turns out, I do neither.
Let us return to the moment: one hand covering Kitty’s mouth and doing its best to anchor her rather spirited head, the other fumbling with my zipper, which I’m having some trouble depressing, possibly because of the writhing motions of my subject beneath me. What I have no control over, unfortunately, are Kitty’s hands, one of which has found its way into her white purse, where a number of items are sequestered: a picture of a horse, a potato chip–sized cell phone, which has been ringing nonstop for the past several minutes, and a canister of something that I’d have to surmise is Mace, or perhaps some form of tear gas, judging by its impact when sprayed directly into my face: a hot, blinding sensation in my eye area accompanied by gushing tears, a strangling sensation in my throat, spastic choking and severe nausea, all of which prompt me to leap to my feet and double over in a swoon of agony (still pinning Kitty to the ground with one foot), at which point she avails herself of yet another item in said purse: a set of keys with a small Swiss Army knife attached, whose diminutive and rather dull blade she nevertheless manages to sink through my khakis and into my calf.
By now I’m bellowing and honking like a besieged buffalo, and Kitty is running away, her tawny limbs no doubt dappled with light falling through the trees, though I’m too distressed even to look.
I think I’d have to call that the end of our lunch. I got twenty extra minutes, easy.
The end of lunch, yes, but the beginning of so much else: a presentation before the grand jury followed by my indictment for attempted rape, kidnapping and aggravated assault; my present incarceration (despite the heroic efforts of Atticus Levi to raise my $500,000 bail) and impending trial, which is to begin this month—on the very day, as luck would have it, that Kitty’s new movie, Whip-poor-will Falls, opens nationally.
Kitty sent me a letter in jail. “I apologize for whatever part I played in your emotional breakdown,” she wrote, “and also for stabing [sic] you.” There was a circle over each i and a smiley face at the end.
What did I tell you? Nice.
Of course, our little contretemps has been enormously helpful to Kitty. Front-page headlines, followed by a flurry of hand-wringing follow-up articles, editorials and op-ed pieces addressing an array of related topics: the “increasing vulnerability of celebrities” (The New York Times); the “violent inability of some men to cope with feelings of rejection” (USA Today); the imperative that magazine editors vet their freelance writers more thoroughly (The New Republic), and the lack of adequate daytime security in Central Park.4 Kitty, the martyrish figurehead of this juggernaut, is already being touted as the Marilyn Monroe of her generation, and she isn’t even dead.
Her new movie looks to be a hit, whatever it’s about.
1. I’ve engaged in a bit of sophistry, here, suggesting that entangled particles can explain anything when, to date, they themselves have not been satisfactorily explained. Entangled particles are subatomic “twins”: photons created by splitting a single photon in half with a crystal, which still react identically to stimuli applied to only one of them, even when separated from each other by many miles.
How, puzzled physicists ask, can one particle possibly “know” what is happening to the other? How, when the people occupying tables nearest to Kitty Jackson inevitably recognize her, do people outside the line of vision of Kitty Jackson, who could not conceivably have had the experience of seeing Kitty Jackson, recognize her simultaneously?
Theoretical explanations:
(1) The particles are communicating.
Impossible, because they would have to do so at a speed faster than the speed of light, thus violating relativity theory. In other words, in order for an awareness of Kitty’s presence to sweep the restaurant simultaneously, the diners at tables nearest to her would have to convey, through words or gestures, the fact of her presence to diners farther away who cannot see her—all at a speed faster than the speed of light. And that is impossible.
(2) The two photons are responding to “local” factors engendered by their former status as a single photon. (This was Einstein’s explanation for the phenomenon of entangled particles, which he termed “spooky action at a distance.”)
Nope. Because we’ve already established that they’re not responding to each other; they’re all responding simultaneously to Kitty Jackson, whom only a small fraction of them can actually see!
(3) It’s one of those quantum mechanical mysteries.
Apparently so. All that can be said for sure is that in the presence of Kitty Jackson, the rest of us become entangled by our sheer awareness that we ourselves are not Kitty Jackson, a fact so brusquely unifying that it temporarily wipes out all distinctions between us—our tendency to cry inexplicably during parades, or the fact that we never learned French, or have a fear of i
nsects that we do our best to conceal from women, or liked to eat construction paper as a child—in the presence of Kitty Jackson, we no longer are in possession of these traits; indeed, so indistinguishable are we from every other non–Kitty Jackson in our vicinity that when one of us sees her, the rest simultaneously react.
2. Occasionally, life affords you the time, the repose, the dolce far niente to ask the sorts of questions that go largely unexamined in the brisk course of ordinary life: How well do you recall the mechanics of photosynthesis? Have you ever managed to use the word “ontology” in a conversational sentence? At what precise moment did you tip just slightly out of alignment with the relatively normal life you had been enjoying theretofore, cant infinitesimally to the left or the right and thus embark upon the trajectory that ultimately delivered you to your present whereabouts—in my case, Rikers Island Correctional Facility?
After several months of subjecting each filament and nanosecond of my lunch with Kitty Jackson to a level of analysis that would make Talmudic scholars look hasty in their appraisal of the Sabbath, I have concluded that my own subtle yet decisive realignment occurred at precisely the moment when Kitty Jackson dipped her finger into the bowl of salad dressing “on the side” and sucked the dressing off.
Here, carefully teased apart and restored to chronological order, is a reconstruction of the brew of thoughts and impulses that I now believe coursed through my mind at that time:
Thought 1 (at the sight of Kitty dipping her finger and sucking it): Can it possibly be that this ravishing young girl is coming on to me?
Thought 2: No, that’s out of the question.
Thought 3: But why is it out of the question?
Thought 4: Because she’s a famous nineteen-year-old movie star and you’re “heavier all of a sudden—or am I just noticing it more?” (—Janet Green, during our last, failed sexual encounter) and have a skin problem and no worldly clout.
Thought 5: But she just dipped her finger into a bowl of salad dressing and sucked it off in my presence! What else can that possibly mean?
Thought 6: It means you’re so far outside the field of Kitty’s sexual consideration that her internal sensors, which normally stifle behavior that might be construed as overly encouraging, or possibly incendiary, such as dipping a finger into salad dressing and sucking it off in the company of a man who might interpret it as a sign of sexual interest, are not operative.
Thought 7: Why not?
Thought 8: Because you do not register as a “man” to Kitty Jackson, and so being around you makes her no more self-conscious than would the presence of a dachshund.
3. For those who will inevitably interpret this caprice as further evidence that I am, indeed, a “numb nuts,” a “creepazoid,” or a “sick puppy” (—excerpts from correspondence received from strangers while in jail), I can offer only the following: On a spring day almost four years ago, I noticed a girl with short thick legs and a long narrow torso, wearing a pink tie-dyed T-shirt, picking up dog poop with a Duane Reade bag. She was one of those muscley girls who turn out to have been a swimmer or a diver in high school (though I later learned she’d been neither), and her dog was a mangy, wet-looking little terrier of the sort that would seem, even by the most neutral and objective standards, unlovable. But she loved it. “Here, Whiskers,” she cooed. “Come on, girl.” Watching her, I saw it all: the small, overheated apartment strewn with running shoes and leotards, the biweekly dinners at her parents’, the soft dark fuzz on her upper lip that she bleached each week with a tart-smelling white cream. And the feeling I had was not of wanting her so much as being surrounded by her, blundering inside her life without having moved.
“May I help you with that?” I asked, stepping into the sunlight where she and Whiskers stood and slipping the Duane Reade bag full of poop from her hand.
Janet grinned. It was like someone waving a flag. “Are you insane?” she said.
4. To the Editor:
In the earnest spirit of your recent editorial (“Vulnerability in Our Public Spaces,” Aug. 9), and as the embodiment, if you will, of the “mentally unstable or otherwise threatening people” you so yearn to eradicate from the public domain in the wake of my “brutal attack” on that “too trusting young star,” allow me to make a suggestion that is sure to appeal to Mayor Giuliani, at the very least: why not simply erect checkpoints at the entrances to Central Park and demand identification from those who wish to enter?
Then you will be able to call up their records and evaluate the relative success or failure of their lives—marriage or lack thereof, children or lack thereof, professional success or lack thereof, healthy bank account or lack thereof, contact with childhood friends or lack thereof, ability to sleep peacefully at night or lack thereof, fulfillment of sprawling, loopy youthful ambitions or lack thereof, ability to fight off bouts of terror and despair or lack thereof—and using these facts, you can assign each person a ranking based on the likelihood that their “personal failures will occasion jealous explosions directed at those more accomplished.”
The rest is easy: simply encode each person’s ranking into an electronic bracelet and affix it to their wrist as they enter the park, and then monitor those encoded points of light on a radar screen, with personnel at the ready to intervene, should the perambulations of low-ranking nonfamous people begin to encroach upon the “safety and peace of mind that celebrities deserve, as much as anyone else.”
I ask only this: that in keeping with our hallowed cultural tradition, you rank infamy equally with fame, so that when my public excoriation is complete—when the Vanity Fair reporter I entertained in prison two days ago (following her interviews with my chiropractor and building superintendent) has done her worst, along with the TV “news” magazines; when my trial and sentence are concluded and I’m allowed at last to return to the world, to stand beneath a public tree and touch its scraggly bark—then I, like Kitty, will be afforded some protection.
Who knows? I might even glimpse her one day as we both promenade in Central Park. I doubt we would actually speak. I’d prefer to stand at a distance next time, and wave.
Respectfully,
Jules Jones
Out of Body
Your friends are pretending to be all kinds of stuff, and your special job is to call them on it. Drew says he’s going straight to law school. After practicing awhile, he’ll run for state senator. Then U.S. senator. Eventually, president. He lays all this out the way you’d say, After Modern Chinese Painting I’ll go the gym, then work in Bobst until dinner, if you even made plans anymore, which you don’t—if you were even in school anymore, which you aren’t, although that’s supposedly temporary.
You look at Drew through layers of hash smoke floating in the sun. He’s leaning back on the futon couch, his arm around Sasha. He’s got a big, hey-come-on-in face and a head of dark hair, and he’s built—not with weight-room muscle like yours, but in a basic animal way that must come from all that swimming he does.
“Just don’t try and say you didn’t inhale,” you tell him.
Everyone laughs except Bix, who’s at his computer, and you feel like a funny guy for maybe half a second, until it occurs to you that they probably only laughed because they could see you were trying to be funny, and they’re afraid you’ll jump out the window onto East Seventh Street if you fail, even at something so small.
Drew takes a long hit. You hear the smoke creak in his chest. He hands the pipe to Sasha, who passes it to Lizzie without smoking any.
“I promise, Rob,” Drew croaks at you, holding in smoke, “if anyone asks, I’ll tell them the hash I smoked with Robert Freeman Jr. was excellent.”
Was that “Jr.” mocking? The hash is not working out as planned: you’re just as paranoid as with pot. You decide, no, Drew doesn’t mock. Drew is a believer—last fall, he was one of the diehards passing out leaflets in Washington Square and registering students to vote. After he and Sasha got together, you started helping him—mostly with the jocks
because you know how to talk to them. Coach Freeman, aka your pop, calls Drew’s type “woodsy.” They’re loners, Pop says—skiers, wood-choppers—not team players. But you know all about teams; you can talk to people on teams (only Sasha knows you picked NYU because it hasn’t had a football team in thirty years). On your best day you registered twelve team-playing Democrats, prompting Drew to exclaim, when you gave him the paperwork, “You’ve got the touch, Rob.” But you never registered yourself, that was the thing, and the longer you waited, the more ashamed of this you got. Then it was too late. Even Sasha, who knows all your secrets, has no idea that you never cast a vote for Bill Clinton.
Drew leans over and gives Sasha a wet kiss, and you can tell the hash is getting him horny because you feel it too—it makes your teeth ache in a way that will only let up if you hit someone or get hit. In high school you’d get in fights when you felt like this, but no one will fight with you now—the fact that you hacked open your wrists with a box cutter three months ago and nearly bled to death seems to be a deterrent. It functions like a force field, paralyzing everyone in range with an encouraging smile on their lips. You want to hold up a mirror and ask: How exactly are those smiles supposed to help me?
“No one smokes hash and becomes president, Drew,” you say. “It’ll never happen.”
“This is my period of youthful experimentation,” he says, with an earnestness that would be laughable in a person who wasn’t from Wisconsin. “Besides,” he says, “who’s going to tell them?”
“I am,” you say.
“I love you too, Rob,” Drew says, laughing.
Who said I loved you? you almost ask.
Drew lifts Sasha’s hair and twists it into a rope. He kisses the skin under her jaw. You stand up, seething. Bix and Lizzie’s apartment is tiny, like a dollhouse, full of plants and the smell of plants (wet and planty), because Lizzie loves plants. The walls are covered with Bix’s collection of Last Judgment posters—naked babyish humans getting separated into good and bad, the good ones rising into green fields and golden light, the bad ones vanishing into mouths of monsters. The window is wide open, and you climb out onto the fire escape. The March cold crackles your sinuses.
A Visit From the Goon Squad Page 17