Soon I can see the Museum of Man, its tower in the style of a Spanish Colonial church. As I get closer, I hear shouting and chanting. I see women carrying signs, a rally protesting the museum’s name. I tell myself that only in San Diego could you get away with a name like the Museum of Man, but then it occurs to me that the name would pass without comment in almost any American city, that there are only a few places where the verbal sexism would even be noticed. The museum’s current exhibit is “The History of Torture,” which reminds me of something I read in a magazine recently, the results of a national survey showing that many Americans think that nothing really happened at Abu Ghraib, that the whole thing was a hoax and the pictures were fake, that American leaders never would have sanctioned such disgusting things. I wonder how many Americans think that the prisoners got what they deserved, that a country run by Saddam Hussein deserved whatever happened.
One of the protesting women steps out of the picket line and hands me a pamphlet. I glance at it and say: I’m sure what you’re doing here is important, but I’ve been reading all morning, and I’ve reached a point where I can’t stand words anymore.
She says: You must have been reading the wrong words.
I say: I was reading words that pay my rent.
She smiles: Like I said, you must have been reading the wrong words. The right words would’ve made you want to read more.
I’m not sure if she’s trying to be funny, or trying to be serious by saying something funny, or trying to be funny by saying something serious, or just trying to be serious. I look at her carefully, hoping to see where she’s coming from. She’s fairly tall and heavyset with short black hair and a gray sweatshirt with a picture of a double-edged axe. The axe makes me think she’s being sincere, so I say: It’s not always easy to find the right words. This morning I was looking for them in the papers, but I couldn’t find anything.
She says: The papers aren’t the place to find the right words.
I get nervous when I’m talking to people I don’t know, and I often tell pointless lies, like the claim I just made that I’ve actually read the papers, when I got my news from other sources. I feel like a jerk when I twist the facts, even if it’s a harmless fabrication, and I’m always convinced that the person I’m talking to knows I’m lying. My usual approach is to try to get through the conversation as quickly as possible without being rude. But I’ve been dying to talk to someone about what happened yesterday, and this might be a good opportunity, so I nod and say: Yesterday was a good example. When the sky was filled with food, there was nothing in the papers about it, nothing at all, even though I heard reports on the radio.
She laughs: I heard those reports too, and so did some of my friends. We agreed that it had to be some kind of hoax.
I say: But it wasn’t a hoax. I saw hundreds of people vomiting yesterday afternoon on junk-food row.
She tries to smile, but it doesn’t come off at all. She says: There might have been people vomiting, but how could there be hamburgers in the sky? Or giant hot dogs? The reports had to be a joke, or maybe a short story read on the radio, like the time Orson Welles read War of the Worlds on the radio, and people thought that men from Mars were invading the earth.
I nod and return her attempted smile, but I can tell she thinks I’m stupid for believing what I heard on the news. I change the subject, a skill I’ve mastered over the years because I don’t like tense situations. I’ve gotten so good at changing the subject that people rarely notice. I ask her what the axe on her sweatshirt means.
She points to the pamphlet: Read this and find out.
She hurries back to the picket line shaking her head, where another woman wearing a gray sweatshirt with an axe is yelling into a megaphone. It distorts her words so thoroughly that the only thing I can make out is her anger. I’ve got my own anger to deal with now, my anger at myself. Why did I talk about food in the sky when I didn’t see food in the sky? Why did I let the mass media tell me what I saw?
I look at the pamphlet briefly. The thought of axes makes me think of Barack Obama, soon to become the first non-white U.S. President. I think about how unsafe he is in a racist country like ours. There has to be at least one right-wing group with plans to assassinate him. The thought of it makes me want to find out who they are and expose them, make sure that their trial and execution are televised. I’m not pleased that I’m filled with such violent thoughts, but I see nothing wrong with extreme measures when the things they confront are worse. In fact, I’ve wondered many times over the past few years why no one has had the guts to assassinate George Bush and the big shots in his rich Republican support system.
I brought this up with Craig a few years ago, soon after the 2004 presidential election, and he asked me why I wasn’t ready to do it myself. I told him I wouldn’t know the first thing about assassinating someone. If I even began to make assassination plans, I’d probably make a mistake so obvious that I’d get rounded up as a terrorist and sent to Guantanamo to be tortured. Craig told me that unless I was ready to do something myself, I had no right to say that someone else ought to do it. At the time I simply nodded in agreement. But now that I think of it, it’s funny that Craig would be concerned with the difference between doing something and discussing it.
Twenty years ago, Craig was doing anthropological fieldwork on a little-known Philippine island. He’d done fieldwork before and knew what he was doing, but the more he tried to write up and publish his findings, the more he saw that his way of describing one of the few remaining Paleolithic tribes in the world had nothing to do with the way they would have described themselves, assuming they would have described themselves at all. Craig decided that simply by approaching these people as intellectual subject matter, he was distorting what they really were. Though he went on to publish a well-received book on this tribe, he knew there was something wrong with what he was doing.
He never did field work again. From that point on, his writing focused on writing, on the ways in which narratives of all kinds make the world look more like a story than it really is. Craig’s claim in subsequent articles and books was that knowledge itself is an authoritarian system, a collection of observations, opinions, and suppositions disguised as factual pictures of the world, and the job of the anthropologist was not to keep feeding the system with new scraps of so-called information, but to challenge the system’s fundamental assumptions, its verbal methods of constructing and authenticating itself.
Of course this caused a commotion among Craig’s colleagues, but it also made his career, establishing him as an outlaw celebrity in academic circles. Suddenly all fieldwork was suspect. All First World claims about socalled Third World cultures were suspect. Craig’s picture was everywhere. Anthropology departments all over the nation wanted him. He finally took a position that required no fieldwork and almost no teaching. He’d essentially been hired to write books claiming that writing itself was a fascist project, valid only if the writer waged war on his own medium.
I remember how pleased with himself he was. After all, he was beating the system, getting praise and money from people whose values he was attacking. I was impressed with how he’d taken a risk and succeeded. But it wasn’t just his daring I admired. I liked the idea that human knowledge was nothing more than a house of cards, that if I sometimes got frustrated with the limits of what I knew, I could always feel better by reminding myself that no one else knew anything either. But I couldn’t get past a basic contradiction: if Craig could declare war on writing and thinking, how could he trust his own writing and thinking? From what enlightened point of view was he making his judgments, when the very notion of an enlightened point of view was being called into question? Wasn’t Craig’s critical perspective, his enlightened point of view, just another house of cards?
When I brought this up with Craig he laughed and changed the subject. When I tried to return to the subject he changed it again. When I told him he was changing the subject he laughed and changed it again. I w
ould have been upset if someone accused me of changing the subject, but Craig didn’t seem disturbed. He looked me in the eye and his teeth were flashing in the sunlight. Thinking back on it now, I wish I’d asked him why getting caught in evasive behavior didn’t make him feel sneaky and stupid. But I rarely have the composure to say what I wish I’d said when I think of it later.
The wind is getting more intense. Normally I love the wind, especially since anything more than a lively breeze is rare in San Diego. But right now the wind feels difficult, like it’s coming from several directions at once, making it hard to keep track of what I’m thinking. Something keeps changing the subject, words becoming other words without consulting me first. It’s like I’m part of a story someone I don’t know can’t stop telling. My hunger isn’t going away. When the woman at the museum mentioned hamburgers and hot dogs, I wanted to be on junk-food row, vomiting or not. Again I get that feeling that I might be under a spell. I’m glad that The Green World is now just a block away.
When I open the door to the restaurant, there’s a tall blond waitress laughing at something a man with an apron apparently said. She puts on a serious face as soon as she sees me, as if laughter on the job were a crime. The guy in the apron shrugs and goes into the kitchen. He looks like my former therapist, tall and lean with short white hair, but he seems to be one of the cooks.
His joke must have been good. The waitress can barely keep a straight face. She struggles to look professional by straightening out her white uniform. In the past, Green World servers didn’t have uniforms. They wore whatever they wanted to wear, part of the casual image that the owners seemed to want. Maybe new people are running the place. I’m hoping the food is still good, though I’m also hoping it’s not still good and I can get a greasy cheeseburger with French fries and a Coke.
The waitress tries to give me her best professional smile and says: “Hi, I’m Tammy and I’ll be your server today!” I return the smile but I’m annoyed by the scripted introduction. It never would have happened before. Is someone trying to turn a good health-food place into a boring family restaurant? Everything else about the place looks the same as it did before: broad oak floorboards and big wooden booths that look like they might have been taken from a nineteenth-century tavern. But maybe these things will soon be gone, replaced with linoleum floors and plastic tables. It certainly wouldn’t be the first time that new owners have ruined something good. I’m thinking that Craig and I might have to meet somewhere else in the future.
She seats me in a booth beside a window. It looks out on the Museum of Man, its tower rising above the trees in the park, piercing the sky.
I smile and say: Nice view.
She says: Sure, if you like phallic symbols.
I’m not sure how to respond. Why would a server talk like that to a customer she’s never seen before, especially if the restaurant wants to change its image, to seem cheerfully bland and conventional? It occurs to me that Tammy isn’t as dumb as I thought at first, that maybe she thinks the uniform and the server script are just as absurd as I do. She’s deeply tanned and blond like many San Diego women, so I quickly assumed that she had to be an idiot, a beach girl who would grow up to marry a suit and take her kids to family restaurants. But now I’m thinking I’ve made an unfair assumption. Even if she does like the beach, that doesn’t mean she’s stupid. Maybe she’s got a Ph.D. in psycholinguistics, and she’s only working here because she can’t find a job in her field, like so many people these days. Like me, in fact. I couldn’t find a job in my field and ended up doing something else. It’s not bad work, but it’s not the job I dreamed of. Thirty years ago, I wanted to do what Craig has ended up doing, practicing the art of interpretation. But maybe it’s just as well that I didn’t. After all, my reading of Tammy was probably wrong, and wrong or not, it was based on at least one stereotype.
Tammy hands me a menu, puts a glass of water on the table, and says that she’ll be back in a few minutes. I notice a copy of yesterday’s New York Times Book Review on a nearby table, and I decide to page through it while waiting for Craig. Normally I wouldn’t bother. I hate the stuffy style of New York Times reviews. But this time the lead article gets my attention. It’s a bitter attack on a work of fiction set in Abu Ghraib. I was thinking that someone should write a book or make a movie about what happened there, especially since so many people don’t remember. But this new book, by someone named Solomon Stein, has apparently taken significant liberties in reconstructing the situation.
Most outrageous, the reviewer claims, is the author’s use of President Bush, who near the end gets kidnapped, facially altered, and thrown into the prison with his tongue cut out. For several weeks the President, along with many peaceful but imprisoned Iraqi citizens, is treated abusively by American soldiers. Someone even takes a shit on his face. The President has no way of telling them who he is. He tries repeatedly to communicate by writing with his fingers in the dirt of his prison cell floor, but the soldiers just laugh, since they can see that he doesn’t look like George Bush. When the President finally dies, his mangled face and body are photographed by the people who abducted him. The pictures circulate widely through the media, a warning to future Presidents to think twice before waging war. No one is really sure it’s Bush, since his face has been altered and sliced up, but the President has been missing for more than a month and no one else can explain what happened to him. The authorities finally accept the outrageous truth.
The crowning touch—the ultimate outrage according to Times reviewer David Stone—is that the people responsible aren’t Islamic terrorists. They’re U.S. anti-war activists who make no attempt to escape the authorities, announcing that they’re eager to appear before the nation and explain their actions. In a series of TV appearances that get higher ratings than the Beatles’ three appearances on the Ed Sullivan Show, they claim that what they’ve done should be aesthetically classified as conceptual art and legally classified as justifiable homicide. The book ends before we find out what happens to them. Stone concludes his review by urging everyone not to read the book, claiming that it serves roughly the same function as the fictional picture of Bush’s mangled, shit-stained face.
It seems obvious to me that by trashing the book so ferociously, Stone is working against his own purposes. In effect, he’s publicizing the book’s anti-war message by denouncing it in such a visible place. I’d be surprised if the book didn’t become a New York Times best seller. This leads me to suspect a hoax. Are Solomon Stein and David Stone the same person? Are both just fake names used by someone clever enough to know that raging reviews often work in the author’s favor? The names are connected in devious ways: Solomon was David’s son in the Bible, while Stein and Stone are only one letter apart, and Stein is German for stone. I’m eager to read the book and see if Stein and Stone have more or less the same style. But I’m guessing it’s already sold out. I’ll have to ask Craig if he’s heard of it or knows who really wrote it.
Just as I mention him in my head, Craig enters The Green World, short and stocky with short black hair and a long white beard, a slightly bemused expression on his face, as if he’s telling you that the world is so messed up that you can’t quite laugh and you can’t quite cry, but a blank expression won’t work either, since it would suggest that you don’t really care, and Craig would never want anyone to think that he doesn’t care. He nods and slightly smiles and shakes my hand, sits and sighs and looks at me with weary eyes. I sigh and look at him with weary eyes.
He says: You know that conference I said I was going to avoid? They called me at the last minute and offered me five thousand dollars to give the keynote address and serve as a moderator on two panel discussions. I need extra money this summer for a trip I’m planning, so I said okay. But I feel like a zombie now. You know I hate being around the kind of people that go to conferences.
I’m suspicious. It would have taken more than five thousand dollars to get me to go to a professional conference. I say: The
only time I ever went to a conference—it must have been ten years ago—it took me weeks to recover. So I—
He says: Why did you go?
I don’t remember why I went, so I say: I thought I could make new connections and expand my freelance business. At the time I didn’t think I had enough clients and—
He says: I told myself I’d never do it again. But there I was, wearing a name tag, eating little cubes of cheese off toothpicks, drinking wine from clear plastic cups.
I say: The time I went, everyone was using the word interrogate. Instead of saying that they were questioning, examining, or challenging something, they all kept saying that they were interrogating it. If I hear that word again I think I’ll throw up.
He says: Then it’s a good thing you didn’t come with me. I heard that word at least a hundred times last week.
I say: I guess that’s the last time you’ll ever go to a conference.
He shrugs and looks at the menu.
I shrug and look at the menu, thinking about what I’ve ordered before that I liked. The design of the menu is new. The food is mostly what they had here before, but each dish is described in such a lavish way that it sounds like a joke. I want to laugh but I’m distracted. I’m trying to decide if Craig’s display of aversion to the conference is a cover-up. It’s the kind of thing I can see myself doing, trashing something I like because I can’t admit that I like it. I glance at Craig as he studies the menu. Was it really such a nightmare for him to be in the spotlight around people in his field? Here in San Diego, recreation capital of the world, no one knows who Craig is. He’s not a celebrity. But at the conference, Craig was no doubt viewed as a major player. People recognized his name when they saw it on the program, and people he’d never met knew him by sight from photographs they’d seen in professional journals. I’m sure he felt flattered that they wanted him for the keynote address, even as a last-minute substitute.
Changing the Subject Page 10