Manhood for Amateurs

by Michael Chabon

  Then my daughter entered the scene, passing from one doorway to another across and down the hall. She was twelve then, going on thirteen, tall, leggy, not exactly graceful—no dancer—but with a distinct air of confidence in her gait, of knowing where she was going and how to get there. I’m not sure she even noticed the boys and their chair, perhaps because the instant she entered the hallway, they all fell completely silent and stood there gaping at her, motionless, sagging like the fingers of an empty glove. They weren’t having fun anymore. She had kicked their power cord right out of the wall just by walking past.

  Nobody ogled or leered at her. There was no Tex Avery business with extruded eyeballs or the unspooled flapping window shades of their tongues. Nothing unseemly or overtly sexual at all, just a bunch of boys standing around blinking as this girl sauntered by. And yet the moment, which I happened to catch sight of through a doorway, made me really uncomfortable. For a while everything about my daughter’s entrance into puberty, her emerging new self and the concomitant interest of boys in her, discomfited me. And the part of it that made me squirm the most was how depressingly trite my discomfort was.

  I am not a prude. I like sex; I respect sex; I have enjoyed sex, not without interruptions, losing streaks, and dry spells, for almost thirty years. I don’t care to give sex any more credit than it deserves, nor do I necessarily prefer it at any given moment of the day to drugs, rock and roll, watching The Wire, or the sight of a paper packet filled with well-salted pommes frites still hissing with oil from the fryer. I like the dirtiness of sex, the smell of it, the measured violence and tenderness. I like thinking about sex. I don’t begrudge sex or its indisputable pleasures to anyone in any variation that consenting partners can safely attempt or devise—not even to my children, when the time comes and they are of age, well informed, and emotionally ready. My wife and I vaccinated our daughter early against the human papilloma virus, a gesture that encompassed or presaged or at least sought to face up to the nature and the dangers of her eventual life as a sexual being. I believe that sexual freedom is good for all women, including my daughters, and good therefore also for the men who may one day be their partners; that sexual hypocrisy and repression are inherently evil; and that the protective ministrations and censoriousness of fathers are at best harmful to daughters and at worst the mark of the same kind of deep human ickiness that brought us the story of Lot and his daughters. And yet there I was, scowling at those boys in the hallway, feeling an obscure and altogether clichéd urge to go after them with a large mallet, because I didn’t like them looking at my daughter that way—or any way at all.

  Was that the kind of father I had turned out to be? Standing on the front porch with my shotgun under one arm, cartoonishly interrogating my daughters’ cartoonish dates as they sat with a boxed cartoon corsage covering their cartoon boners? Fumbling with a show of jocular pedantry or saggy would-be hipness through every “little chat” with her about menarche or masturbation?

  How embarrassing! and above all, in my lamentable sense of embarrassment over the whole business! when the first box of junior-size tampons made its appearance in the house—a bit prematurely, as it turned out—and in spite of my having been raised by a frank 1970s-style mother who saw to it that I understood clearly the laws and equipment of menstruation, and my having lived intimately with women and their periods since I was not quite eighteen years old, I suffered the tritest fatherly panic imaginable.

  “Do these fucking things come with instruction books?” I cried to my wife. “Oh my God, what if you die the day before she gets her period?”

  “Relax,” my wife said, putting her arm around my shoulder and adopting a textbook condescending-yet-patient wife cartoon tone. “It’s very simple.”

  I have no idea what she said after that, because I was too busy pretending to pretend that I understood. I am sure it is very simple indeed, though there is still and I suppose there will always be a fundamental mystery inherent in the word applicator that I will never fully grasp. But brassieres—I’m sorry. Cup size, wires, padding, straps, clasps, the little flowers between the cups: You need a degree, a spec sheet. You need breasts. I don’t know what you need to truly understand brassieres, and what’s more, I don’t want to know. I’m sorry. Go ask your mother.

  There you have it: the most flagrant cliché imaginable. As I utter it, I might as well reach for a trout lure, a socket wrench, the switch on my model train transformer. This may be the fundamental truth of parenthood: No matter how enlightened or well prepared you are by theory, principle, and the imperative not to repeat the mistakes of your own parents, you are no better a father or mother than the set of your own limitations permits you to be. And that set is your heritage, the pinched and helpless legacy of all the limited mothers and fathers whose fumblings, evasions, and shortcomings led, by some dubious accidental magic, to the production of you. It turns out there are only nine different ways of being a father, and eight of them are distinguishable from one another only by trained experts from Switzerland, and the ninth is exactly like the others, only more so. Sooner or later, you will discover which kind of father you are, and at that moment you will, with perfect horror, recognize the type. You are the kind of father who fakes it, who yells, who measures his children with greatest accuracy only against one another, who evades the uncomfortable and glosses over the painful and pads the historic records of his sorrows and accomplishments alike. You are the kind who teases and deceives and toys with his children and subjects them to displays of rich and manifold sarcasm when—as is always the case—sarcasm is the last thing they need. You are the kind of father who pretends knowledge he doesn’t possess, and imposes information with implacable gratuitousness, and teaches lessons at the moment when none can be absorbed, and is right, and has always been right, and always will be right until the end of time, and never more than immediately after he has been wrong. And when your daughter’s body begins to betray her, and her sky flickers in the distance with the heat lightning of sex, you clear your throat and stroke your chin whiskers and tell her to go ask her mother. You can’t help it—you’re a walking cliché.

  [ IX ]

  I was reading, in an issue of Discover, about the Clock of the Long Now. Have you heard of this thing? It is going to be a system of gigantic mechanical computers, slow, simple, and ingenious, marking the hour, the day, the year, the century, the millennium, and the precession of the equinoxes with a huge orrery to keep track of the immense ticking of the six inner planets on their great orbital mainspring. The Clock of the Long Now will stand at least sixty feet tall and cost tens of millions of dollars, and when it’s completed, its designers and supporters—among them visionary engineer Danny Hillis, a pioneer in the concept of massively parallel processing, Whole Earth mahatma Stewart Brand, and British composer Brian Eno (one of my household gods)—plan to hide it in a cave in Great Basin National Park in Nevada, a day’s hard walking from anywhere. Oh, and it’s going to run for ten thousand years. That is about as long a span as separates us from the first makers of pottery, among the oldest technologies we have. Ten thousand years is twice as old as the pyramid of Cheops, nearly twice as old as that mummified body found preserved in the Tyrolean Alps, one of the oldest mummies ever uncovered. The Clock of the Long Now is being designed to thrive under regular human maintenance during the whole of that span, though during periods when no one is around to tune it, the giant clock will contrive to adjust itself. But even if the Clock of the Long Now fails to last that long, even if it breaks down after half or a quarter or a tenth of that span, this mad contraption will already have long since fulfilled its purpose. Indeed, the Clock may accomplish its greatest task before it is ever finished, perhaps without ever being built at all. The point of the Clock of the Long Now is not to measure out the passage into their unknown future of the race of creatures that built it. The point of the Clock is to revive and restore the whole idea of the Future, to get us thinking about the Future again, to the same degree w
e used to, if not in quite the same way, and to reintroduce the idea that we don’t just bequeath the future—though we do, whether we think about it or not. We also, in the very broadest sense of the first-person-plural pronoun, inherit it.

  Strictly speaking, the Sex Pistols were right: There is no future, for you or for me. By definition, the future does not exist. “The Future,” whether you capitalize it or not, is always only an idea, a proposal, a scenario, a sketch for a mad contraption that may or may not work. The Future is a story we tell, a narrative of hope, dread, or wonder. And it’s a story that we’ve been pretty much living without for a while now.

  Ten thousand years from today: Can you imagine that day? Okay, but do you? Do you believe the Future is going to happen? If the Clock works the way it’s supposed to—if it lasts—do you believe there will be a human being around to witness, let alone mourn, its passing; to appreciate its accomplishment, its faithfulness, its immense antiquity? What about five thousand years from now or even five hundred? Can you extend the horizon of your expectations for our world, for our complex of civilizations and cultures, beyond the lifetime of your own children, of the next two or three generations?

  I was surprised when I read about the Clock of the Long Now at how long it had been since I had given any thought to the state of the world ten thousand years hence. At one time I was a frequent visitor to that imaginary mental locale. And I don’t mean merely that I regularly encountered the Future in the pages of science-fiction novels or comic books, or when watching a TV show like The Jetsons (1962) or a movie like Beneath the Planet of the Apes (1970). The story of the Future was told to me when I was growing up, not only by popular art and media but by public and domestic architecture, industrial design, school textbooks, theme parks, and public institutions from museums to government agencies. I heard the story of the Future when I looked at the space-ranger profile of the Studebaker Avanti, at the burnerless range top of a Jenn-Air stove, at Tomorrowland through the portholes of the Disneyland monorail, at the tumbling plastic counters of my father’s Seth Thomas Speed Read clock. I can remember writing a report in sixth grade on hydroponics; if you had tried to tell me then that by 2005 we would still be growing our vegetables in dirt, you would have broken my heart.

  Even thirty years after its purest expression on the covers of pulp magazines like Amazing Stories and, supremely, at the New York World’s Fair of 1939, the collective cultural narrative of the Future remained largely an optimistic one of the impending blessings of technology and the benevolent computer-assisted meritocracy of Donald Fagen’s “fellows with compassion and vision.” But by the early seventies, it was not all farms under the sea and family vacations on Titan. Sometimes the Future could be a total downer. If nuclear holocaust didn’t wipe everything out, then humanity would be enslaved to computers, by the ineluctable syllogisms of “the Machine.” My childhood dished up a series of grim cinematic prognostications best exemplified by the Hestonian trilogy that began with the first Planet of the Apes (1968) and continued through The Omega Man (1971) and Soylent Green (1973). Images of future dystopia were rife in rock albums of the day, as on David Bowie’s Diamond Dogs (1974) and Rush’s 2112 (1976), and the futures presented by seventies writers of science fiction such as John Brunner tended to be unremittingly or wryly bleak.

  In the aggregate, stories of the Future presented an enchanting ambiguity. The other side of the marvelous Jetsons future might be a story of worldwide corporate-authoritarian techno-tyranny, but the other side of a postapocalyptic mutational nightmare landscape like that depicted in The Omega Man was a landscape of semi-barbaric splendor and unfettered (if dangerous) freedom to roam, such as I found in the pages of Jack Kirby’s classic adventure comic book Kamandi: The Last Boy on Earth! (1972–76). That ambiguity and its enchantment, the shifting tension between the bright promise and the menace of the Future, was in itself a kind of story about the ways, however freakish or tragic, in which humanity (and, by implication, American culture and its values, however freakish and tragic) would continue in spite of it all. Ee’d plebnista, intoned the devolved Yankees in the Star Trek episode “The Omega Glory” (1968); they had somehow managed to hold on to and venerate as sacred gobbledygook the preamble to the Constitution, norkohn forkohn perfectunun. All they needed was a Captain Kirk to come and add a little interpretive water to the freeze-dried document, and the American way of life would flourish again.

  I don’t know what happened to the Future. It’s as if we have lost our ability or our will to envision anything beyond the next hundred years or so, as if we lack the fundamental faith that there will be any future at all beyond that not too distant date. Or maybe we stopped talking about the Future around the time that, with its microchips and its twenty-four-hour news cycles, it arrived. Some days when you pick up the newspaper, it seems to have been co-written by J. G. Ballard, Isaac Asimov, and Philip K. Dick. Human sexual reproduction without male genetic material, digital viruses, identity theft, robot firefighters and minesweepers, weather control, pharmaceutical mood engineering, rapid species extinction, U.S. presidents controlled by boxes mounted between their shoulder blades, air-conditioned empires in the Arabian desert, transnational corporatocracy, reality television: Some days it feels as if the imagined future of the mid-twentieth century were a kind of checklist, one from which we have been too busy ticking off items to bother extending it. Meanwhile, the dwindling number of items remaining on that list—interplanetary colonization, sentient computers, quasi-immortality of consciousness through brain download or transplant, a global government (fascist or enlightened)—have been represented and re-represented so many hundreds of times in films, in novels, and on television that they have come to seem, paradoxically, already attained, already known, lived with, and left behind. Past, in other words.

  This is the paradox that lies at the heart of our loss of belief or interest in the Future, which has in turn produced a collective cultural failure to imagine that Future, any future, beyond the rim of a couple of centuries or the void of planetary catastrophe. The Future was represented so often and for so long in the terms and characteristic styles of so many historical periods from, say, Jules Verne forward that at some point the idea of the Future—along with the cultural appetite for it—came itself to feel like something historical, outmoded, no longer viable or attainable. One possible turning point here was Star Wars (1977), with its setting in the remote past, its western gunfights and World War I dogfights, its deliberate evocation of the styles and conventions of Metropolis (1927) and old Flash Gordon serials. After Star Wars, every cinematic Future has drawn heavily on the Futures imagined by previous historical eras. Even what is perhaps our era’s most heavily subscribed, culturally predominant narrative of the Future—the crypto-Christian vision of the End presented in the “Left Behind” series—is derived from imagery and narrative, some of which is by now almost two thousand years old.

  If you ask my older son about the Future, he essentially thinks the world is going to end, and that’s it. Most likely global warming, he says—floods, storms, desertification—but the possibility of viral pandemic, meteor impact, or some kind of nuclear exchange is not alien to his view of the days to come. Maybe not tomorrow or a year from now. The kid is more than capable of generating a full head of optimistic steam about next week, next vacation, his next birthday. It’s only the world a hundred years on that leaves his hopes a blank. My son seems to take the end of everything, of all human endeavor and creation, for granted. He sees himself as living on the last page, if not in the last paragraph, of a long, strange, and bewildering book. If you had told me when I was his age that a kid of the future would feel that way—and what’s more, that he would see a certain justice in our eventual extinction, would think the world was better off without human beings—it would have been even worse than hearing that his world would offer no hydroponic megafarms, no human colonies on Mars, no personal jet packs for everyone. That truly would have broken my heart.
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  When I told my son about the Clock of the Long Now he listened very carefully, and we looked at the pictures on the Long Now Foundation’s Web site. “Will there really be people then, Dad?” he said. “Yes,” I told him without hesitation, “there will.” I don’t know if that’s true, any more than do Danny Hillis and his colleagues, with the beating clocks of their hopefulness and the orreries of their imaginations. But in having children—in engendering them, in loving them, in teaching them to love and care about the world—parents are betting, whether they know it or not, on the Clock of the Long Now. They are betting on their children, and their children after them, and theirs beyond them, all the way down the line from now to the 130th century. If you don’t believe in the Future, unreservedly and dreamingly, if you aren’t willing to bet that somebody will be there to cry when the Clock finally, ten thousand years from now, runs down, then I don’t see how you can have children. If you have children, I don’t see how you can fail to do everything in your power to ensure that you win your bet and that they and their grandchildren and their grandchildren’s grandchildren will inherit a world whose perfection can never be accomplished by creatures whose imagination for perfecting it is limitless and free. And I don’t see how anybody can force me to pay up on my bet if, in the end, I turn out to be wrong.

  I met David Foster Wallace only once, at UCLA in October 2004, when we appeared together with a number of other writers at a fund-raiser for the Kerry campaign. I doubt we exchanged more than twenty-nine words, none of them memorable, at least by me. He struck me as shy and uncomfortable in the setting: in the big backstage area at Royce Hall, a whole bunch of people milling around, Cheney debating Edwards on a television in a corner and Wallace left to himself, getting ready to go out and, at least by virtue of his presence in front of a largish audience, endorse the doomed ticket. In my memory, he is wearing the trademark always unlikely bandanna, but this image may be the influence of too many author photos. The political nature of the event and Wallace’s participation in it seemed to trouble him, I thought. Not that he wanted anything other than to see Bush defeated. He just seemed suspicious of the whole enterprise—a twenty-first century presidential election—and of his own role as a putative agent therein. The kindness and politeness he showed to me and my wife was exemplary, but I admit I was intimidated by him. If you had read his formidable work, especially Infinite Jest (which I had failed twice to finish), then it was hard, at least for me, not to feel that Wallace easily could have made more out of you, found more to say on your behalf and by way of explanation of you, than you had so far managed to do for yourself. I felt that he was disappointed in me, or maybe in the fact that I evidently cared so much what he thought about me. I felt in the two minutes that fate allotted me to pass in the company of David Foster Wallace, I had somehow let him down. Indeed, when he followed me on that evening’s program, coming onstage to read to us (a story, as I recall, or anyway, a piece of a story, about a weird boy’s awful birthday party), the first thing he said into the microphone was something like “Oh, great, another white man with glasses.” Maybe he was disappointed in us both.