I Wrote This Book Because I Love You

by Tim Kreider

  In 2006, Lauren and Lars had a child (she’d revisited her “Fuck motherhood” policy) and moved back to the West Coast. Once in a while, on a visit, she and I would have a summit meeting to check in and see how we were each doing with “our whole, y’know, Thing.” For a long time our friendship felt more intense and volatile than most, requiring active maintenance and tending, with little rifts and reconciliations. But over the years it slowly toughened, became less like some precious heirloom than a piece of luggage you’ve had since college—familiar and durable, unobtrusively beloved. I took it as a sign of recovery, a healthy overcorrection, when familiar foibles of Lauren’s no longer seemed endearing and instead just got on my nerves. Eventually a day came when I got horribly heartbroken over someone else, and then Lauren got to hold me while I sobbed in public and everyone around us assumed she was breaking up with me. It was the first time since our big talk that I was grateful again to have this woman as a friend.

  The fall of the Bush administration came in a way that, per history’s usual MO, satisfied the demands of neither justice nor dramaturgy. Just a year after his reelection, George finally lost any credibility among all but that die-hard 35 percent of Americans who also believed in guardian angels, not because of the ongoing disaster abroad but because of a hurricane that gutted an American city. Katrina was an Iraq that happened at home, where reporters couldn’t be embedded or the footage censored. Seeing their fellow countrymen’s corpses floating in the streets, abandoned by a government that seemed to regard the Hobbesian social contract as some liberal boondoggle, Americans belatedly realized that the people running the country were a bunch of blustering fuckups who couldn’t be trusted to cat-sit. On the day George had to announce that the economy had accidentally collapsed, I sketched his face from the TV screen, and I could see that he looked old and scared, and relieved to be on his way out.

  The atmosphere on election night 2008 was ecstatic, aphrodisiac. I watched the returns in an apartment full of friends in New York, but when the networks called the night for Obama, I rushed to call Lauren. I got the “circuits busy” signal for the first time since 9/11; everyone was calling everyone else, all across the country, a happy echo of that awful day at the other end of the decade. When I finally got through to her, Lauren said that the Bush years had gone on so long that we’d assumed this was just what the world was like: the shitheads would always win. We’d forgotten that it was only a phase, a passing spasm. We tried to imagine how people who’d lived their whole lives in the Soviet bloc, for whom that Potemkin empire had been the whole world, must’ve felt when the edifice of lies finally collapsed like a flimsy stage set and they found themselves, unimaginably, free.

  Having spent years in love with a woman I knew I was never going to be with, protesting a war we knew we weren’t going to stop, I do have to ask myself whether any of it was worth it. I know I should probably mourn the years I squandered loving someone else’s wife, years I should’ve invested in building a history with someone that could endure. But I’m more often seized by regret that feels like panic when I realize that I wasted the prime of my creative life on political cartoons, an art form less enduring than bathroom graffiti and as critically esteemed as balloon animals. I sometimes used to hope the country would descend into fascism just so my cartoons would acquire some retroactive historical importance, like Grosz’s art from the Weimar years. The last time I recalled aloud how frivolous and irresponsible it would’ve felt to draw cartoons about anything else in that time, Lauren commanded me: “Write that down! Write it down, with the date and time! I’m tired of reminding you.” Maybe my relationship with Lauren—and it was a relationship, however lopsided and sexless—was, like my years as a political artist, unavoidable, something that had to be undergone. And I have to believe that that love, like that work, was not wasted. If I do ever end up in a lasting relationship with someone smart and sane and kind, it’ll be because I first loved Lauren.

  Or maybe that’s just the sort of horseshit you have to tell yourself to get through the nights. Maybe love and patriotism are both adolescent illusions, scams to get us to have babies and kill strangers, and those irreplaceable years were simply lost to folly. We all idealize our lovers, but I was able to keep Lauren more pristine than most, since we never even kissed. That imaginary relationship also kept me conveniently unavailable for real ones. And all nations are imaginary—only the guns are real—but America is even more fictitious than most, held together less by any common ethnicity, history, or even ideology than by a myth. The “real” America, the one soldiers and protesters alike were fighting for, is always on the horizon, over the rainbow, the country seen from the mountaintop. Between conservatives’ Rockwell nostalgia for an imaginary past and our own Star Trek vision of a dubious future, practically no one could even see the actual United States—just another dumb blundering empire, like Athens or Assyria or Austria-Hungary, that overextended itself and learned its limits too late.

  I recently looked up that funeral director who’d left all those bodies out to rot in the woods. He served time in prison and had to write a letter of apology to the families of the dead, but he never gave any explanation for what he’d done—not to the families, the court, or reporters. “He probably doesn’t have one that’s very satisfying,” Lauren wrote me. “Things just kind of got away from him.” And after all, what conceivable explanation could make sense of such a thing? The bodies are still piling up, and we’re all still declining to talk about it. The only honest reckoning of the war I ever heard was on a New York City sidewalk: one guy was grumbling about what a clusterfuck Iraq had become, and his friend said, “Yeah, but you were probably all for it at the time, just like I was.” By the time the war formally ended, it was like hearing about the death of a celebrity I hadn’t known was still alive.

  I quit cartooning a few months after the inauguration in 2009, burned out on politics. George, in his retirement, took up painting. Recently he’s been painting portraits of veterans wounded in his wars, like an act of penance. It’s hard to remember now the passionate loathing I felt for this sweet, dithering doofus. Lauren thinks I was instinctively onto something in my characterization of him. I almost feel as if we might yet sit down together in some bar outside of time, where the casualties don’t count, and say: It was a crazy time, everybody got a little carried away, we were all just trying to do what we thought was right.IV There wasn’t a lot of winning for anyone that decade. All those base and vainglorious agendas collided to yield a vast disastrous trajectory no one had intended or desired—history as clusterfuck.

  People started using the phrase the new normal whenever they saw soldiers loitering with submachine guns in subway stations, a sight formerly associated with military juntas, or had to remove their shoes and belts at the airport like prisoners on suicide watch—a nervous verbal shrug at the dystopian future we all now inhabited. We got used to ceding freedoms as matter-of-factly as we give out our credit card numbers online. Everyone assumed the government was monitoring our phone calls and emails, the same way we figure cell phones are giving us cancer. The police seemed less like public servants than a hostile army of occupation suppressing an insurgent population. School shootings went from freakish atrocities to something more like a teen fad. Torture became a common device in horror movies, spy thrillers, and police procedurals; rape and abuse were increasingly popular genres of porn. Even superheroes started killing the villains in their films. Young people don’t say the new normal anymore; to them it’s just normal. But I guess no one finds themselves in the same country they were born in at the ends of their lives. We all die in exile.

  Recently, during one of our long phone conversations, Lauren said she could now understand those aging boomers who still wax apoplectic about Nixon and Liddy. “They didn’t know how good they had it with Nixon,” she groused. She confessed she didn’t know whether she’d ever be able to forgive the people of this country for how they’d acted after 9/11. I was talking to he
r from Bryant Park, behind the New York Public Library, where we’d once faced off against the NYPD. Like her, I’m still a largely unreconstructed American. Looking at the New Yorkers and tourists all around me—eating their lunches, consulting guidebooks, listening to headphones—I found it hard to unsee my compatriots as I’d seen them revealed in that crisis: as dumb, herdlike creatures driven by fear, clinging to the pant leg of Authority, happy to forfeit their birthright as citizens, willing to condemn thousands of strangers to death.

  In retrospect, I don’t believe anyone was really “misled” about Iraq; they were given acceptable excuses, like the consensual lies agreed upon by seducer and seduced. To me there’s something almost optimistic about even the most cynical realpolitik explanations of the war, in that they all assume there’s something rational and calculated behind these paroxysms of insane race hatred that periodically seize all tribes and nations. The phrase War on Terror seems nakedly telling now; the U.S. expended four trillion dollars, thousands of our countrymen’s lives, and untold numbers of others’ in a mass national effort to defeat a feeling. It was a mass human sacrifice to appease the god of death.

  Lauren and I both worry that neither romantic nor political passion are renewable resources, and that with age we can deplete them. The news is starting to feel stale and predictable to me, like previews for remakes of movies that came out when I was in high school. At some point I realized that I hadn’t told anyone I loved her since Lauren and I had our late-night talk over a decade before. A decade is not a recuperative period; it’s what my life is like now, the new normal. When I didn’t even vote in 2012, Lauren was too disappointed to lecture me. The morning after the election I contrived to go for several hours without finding out who’d won. This was, pretty obviously, not true indifference but the kind of studied inattention you cultivate toward something you can’t bear to care about anymore, like contriving to be busy on your ex’s wedding day.

  “Not everybody loses that fire as they get older,” said Lauren, “but I think most people do. It’s the extraordinary ones who remain fighters for what they believe in till the end.” So if we don’t want to end up as ’00s burnouts in 2047, boring the young with spittle-flecked rants about Donald Rumsfeld,V the question becomes: how to get past that godawful decade and its disillusionments? Lauren, ever the old-lady-in-training, said that the old people she admires, the ones we hope to be like ourselves one day, haven’t lost their outrage but refined it into something finer, lighter, a precision instrument instead of a bludgeon. She pointed out that all our demonstrations against the Bush administration accomplished exactly nothing; her new slogan is: “No more grand gestures.” It would mean finding a new kind of passion, one less idealistic and futile—messier, more real, arms deep in the shitwork of living instead of holding out for the impossible.

  I hung up, as always, feeling saner. Lauren and I came through our own bout of irrational passion to a kind of love that’s truer and more enduring. Over a decade later, Lucy’s incantation has come true: Lauren is like a sister to me. Somehow we successfully navigated the transition from being friends to what you might call Platonic lovers to something we don’t have a name for: exes who never dated, friends without benefits. We have fewer words in our language to distinguish kinds of love than we do for distant cousins. I think now that what I mistook for romantic love was something rarer and more valuable, something I couldn’t recognize for what it was. It was like thinking you’ve figured out a quick route to riches or lucked into another exotic backwater to conquer, never realizing that you’ve accidentally found America.

  * * *

  I. Interestingly, all of my favorite sf authors were on the con side. Maybe, as with Lauren and the War on Terror, what we believe is inextricable from what we love.

  II. A preacher/media personality who inserted himself into a number of high-profile events and causes.

  III. Host of a popular satirical news show.

  IV. Though let’s not descend to some false equivalency: our side was right and theirs was wrong. And we didn’t get anyone killed.

  V. If you don’t know who this was, I have no wish to keep his name alive.

  The Feast of Pain

  Last week my friend Mishka and I, out of idle curiosity and a wistful nostalgia for a popular sedative of the 1970s that neither of us ever even got the opportunity to resist the temptation to take, conducted an Internet search for “do they still make ’ludes.” Before we could finish typing the words do they the search engine autofilled: still make quaaludes. I felt a fond affinity for all depraved humanity.

  This incident inspired me to enter various other open-ended interrogative phrases into the search engine to see what else it might autofill, as a sort of unscientific cross-sectional sampling of my fellow human beings’ furtive curiosities and desires. Type in why am I and suggestions include: so tired

  always cold

  so ugly?

  Why does produces: salt melt ice

  my vagina itch

  it snow?

  Where is: my refund

  Sochi

  Chuck Norris?

  Why can’t: we be friends

  I own a Canadian

  I cry?

  By the calendar, this long, dark, frigid winter—throughout which temperatures in the Northeast have ranged from cold to butt-cold, occasionally dipping down into what some climatologists classify as “butt-ass cold”—is over. Based on my conversations with everyone from close friends to Santo at the copy shop to total strangers on the subway, it seems as if these five months without light or exercise, all of us scrunching up our shoulders in pain whenever we step outside, holing up in bed and bingeing on Netflix, Jiffy Pop and booze, has left us all at the ends of our respective ropes. Why does it snow? Until by now, at the end of it, I find myself inappropriately cheered by glimpses of my fellow human beings’ despair. My friend Kevin recently sent me an urgent text from a stall of the men’s room at work:

  I am pooping at work and there is some guy in here making loud grunting and loud pooping noises AND I THINK HE IS CRYING!

  I was filled with a soaring joy.

  This isn’t exactly schadenfreude; it’s something more complicated for which, as far as I know, there isn’t a German compound, but if there were it’d be something like Mitleidfreude, compassion-joy—compassion in the literal sense of suffering with. It’s the happiness, or at least the consolation, of knowing that things are tough all over. The other morning I heard the guy in the apartment next to mine utterly lose his shit: screaming obscenities, venting insane rage in the way that people only do when they’re yelling at inanimate objects, a tone I know well. Shortly afterward he and I both left the building at the same time, and I saw him standing on the subway platform, to all appearances just another bored commuter waiting for the L train. I alone knew that five minutes earlier he had been out of his mind with psychotic rage. Then I realized that this might well be true of everyone else on the platform. It’s heartening to know that everyone else is doing as badly as I am—all of us secretly screaming, pooping and weeping, googling ’ludes.

  I’m not just ghoulishly thriving off of others’ pain; I’m happy to offer up my own, if it’s any help. A friend of mine who lost her father a few weeks ago still lies awake at night sick with guilt, torturing herself by wondering what she should have done differently in his last hours. I ventured to confess, incommensurate though it was to her own grief, that I still wake up in the night panicking that I might’ve accidentally killed my cat with a flea fogger, even though the cat was nineteen years old and obviously moribund. To my relief, this delighted her. She still uses flea fogger as mental shorthand to keep from second-guessing herself into insanity.

  Some people—quite a lot of them, evidently—are sustained by the Chicken Soup for the Soul book franchise, heartwarming anecdotes about acts of kindness and decency, forgiveness and redemption. (I am guessing; I’ve never opened one.) De gustibus non est disputandum and all, but, with resp
ect to those who seek wisdom in the book bins of grocery stores, I require something more pungent than schmaltz in my own emotional diet. I never go to see any movie I suspect is a Triumph of the Human Spirit, either. Self-affirmation isn’t nearly as validating for me as the frank acknowledgment that sometimes things just suck.

  Not long ago I went to the East Village’s Russian & Turkish Baths with my friend Jenny. People do not look their best coming out of the baths: their faces flushed and puffy, their hair damp and frazzled, any makeup they were wearing freshly boiled off, oils and toxins squozen out of their pores. Jenny looked at herself in the mirror in the women’s changing room, made some half-assed effort at fixing herself up, then sighed resignedly. The girl next to her—who, it’s worth mentioning, was much younger—reproached her in sororal solidarity: “No, you should never do that!” she told her. “We’re all beautiful! You should say to yourself, ‘I am beautiful!’ ” At the very moment my friend was telling me this story out in the foyer to the baths, a woman in her forties or fifties, passing by us, glanced at herself in the mirror and muttered: “Someone should just kill me.” We were speechless with glee.