I look back at the cook but he’s still turned away. I look back into the space of missing pronouns. I take a deep breath, pulling something into my mouth. It tastes like me. Craig sees what I’m doing and does the same thing. Earlier I imitated him. Now he’s imitating me.
I say: That was pretty weird. I felt like my first-person singular sense of myself was floating about an inch in front of my face, like a small transparent balloon.
Craig says: That’s what I felt too. Though to me it seemed like the first-person pronoun was the dripping of a leaky faucet somewhere behind my head.
I say: Do you think those guys at the next table had something to do with it?
Craig says: They sound pretty messed up. Maybe they work for an advertising firm or a TV station, and they’re in the business of stealing people’s identities. They want us to forget who we are so they can tell us who we are.
I say: Or maybe they’re just the kind of New Age weirdos that tend to hang out in places like this.
Tammy comes from the bathroom talking on her cell phone. Again I catch myself thinking she’s an idiot. I hate cell phones. Or rather I hate the way people get excited about them, raving about all the new things you can do if you buy the latest model. Craig and I are probably the only people in San Diego without cell phones. I knew one other guy who didn’t have one, but he got so disgusted by the way people fetishize them that he disappeared into the desert with his dog.
Tammy talks into her phone: That’s always how it was with us! Always always always! Like I was part of some story you couldn’t stop telling. I—
Her body locks into place, a freeze frame in a movie. Her cell phone drops on the table with a bang. The guy on the other end keeps talking, though I can’t make out the words. The voice sounds like a mosquito trapped in a can. Craig looks disturbed, worse than disturbed. He says: I’ve really got to get out of here. Ever since I got that mosquito bite in the Philippines, I’ve been terrified of mosquitoes.
I tell him it’s not really a mosquito, but he gets up and says: It doesn’t matter. The sound itself is enough to make me sick. I’ll call you later.
When he goes outside the wind is so strong that he has to struggle to close the door. The wind slams it open again, and Craig has to work hard to close it a second time. I think back to his experience in the Philippines, the last place Craig did field work. Apparently the mosquito that bit him was dangerous. People had been known to die from its bites. Craig survived, but for more than a year he couldn’t get an erection.
I pick up Tammy’s phone and gently slip it into her hand, which is limp at first, then clamps down hard. She looks at the phone, looks at me, smiles and takes a deep breath, puts the phone in her pocket with someone still talking on the other end. She goes to the kitchen and quickly comes back with my lunch, two cheeseburgers with French fries and a Coke. My mouth starts watering, but I manage to say: This isn’t what I ordered.
She says: Of course it’s not what you ordered. It’s what you wanted.
I say: But it’s not on the menu.
She says: The cook is a burger addict. He keeps a private stash of ground beef in the freezer, and he’s also got fries and Cokes. It’s what he always has for lunch—in secret of course. This time I told him to make a few extra cheeseburgers. He’s a good guy and he always tries to give people what they want. And so do I.
I say: How did you know what I wanted?
She says: I’m good at what I do.
I nod and smile and think about asking how she learned to read minds. But she pulls out her phone and starts talking again, picking up right where she left off before, squinting like someone who can’t quite make out the words on a teleprompter. It sounds like she’s getting pulled back into a painful situation, like she’s just about to forget that she can’t get along with the guy on the phone. I want to tap her shoulder and say Don’t forget. But I’ve missed my chance. She’s rushing back into the kitchen, telling him that just the sight of his number on her phone last night got her so worked up that she ran out to the convenience store and stuffed herself with Twinkies, then spent the rest of the night vomiting, trying to talk herself out of calling him back. There’s no doubt that she’s good at what she does, and maybe she’s even got a Ph.D. in psycholinguistics, but when it comes to relationships of passion, it sounds like she’s just as confused as everyone else.
The wind is banging hard against the window. It’s so intense that it looks like it might start ripping trees out of the ground. Trash is spiraling into the sky, darkening the sun. Even the Museum of Man looks like it might be in danger. Earlier the wind felt like it was making my confusion worse. Now I want nothing more than to be outside and feel its power. I leave two twenty-dollar bills on the table, as if by paying for food I haven’t consumed I could leave my hunger behind. It hurts to leave those juicy burgers uneaten. But even if I’m under a spell, it’s good to know I can still refuse. I assume that if Craig were still here, he’d say that I’ve taken a radical action.
STOPPING
At some point in your life, you reach a stopping point. You come to a place where the only thing you can do is stop and wait. You won’t know why you’ve stopped. You won’t have an explanation later. It’s not something you can anticipate or prepare for. It just happens.
For Honey Stone, the stopping point was near the Brooklyn Bridge. She got up at half past two in the morning and went outside for a walk. The fog of lower Manhattan was thick. There might have been dangerous people walking the streets. But she knew she had to get out. Her apartment felt like the wrong place to be. It wasn’t that the two women she lived with were being difficult. In fact they were pleasant people, and the place was large and well designed, so they didn’t get in each other’s way. And it wasn’t that Honey Stone was in a tough situation. She had good friends, a steady job, and no boyfriend problems.
But she knew she was in the wrong place. She knew she had to be somewhere else. She walked down Broadway watching herself appear and disappear and reappear in the darkened shop fronts. The streetlights floated in the mist. Her footsteps told her where she was going. She walked into City Hall Park and saw the lights of the Brooklyn Bridge. She told herself to stop. She took a step, took another step, and stopped.
Silence moved in every direction at once. She had no words to give the moment shape. If a gust of wind suddenly ripped through the fog, blowing discarded pages of a New York Times across the pavement, it made no impression. She had no words to tell herself what she was looking at, no words to tell herself that she had no words to tell herself what she looking at, no words to explain why time was no longer trapped in the sound of her footsteps, no words for the lights of the Brooklyn Bridge, while more than fifty blocks uptown, thirty floors above the street, Harry Knight was looking out a window toward the Brooklyn Bridge, relaxing into the jazz and dim blue light of a late-night party, ignoring all the talk that filled the room. He wasn’t there to socialize. He was there to please the host, a man who owned the music store where Harry Knight had a part-time job. Now that Harry Knight had made himself look happy and social, talking and laughing his way around the room, nodding at all the appropriate times, telling his boss what a great time he was having, he felt free to sit back and lose himself in the jazz and the Brooklyn Bridge. But a white-haired man in a black shirt pulled up a chair, meeting Harry Knight’s eyes, putting a deck of cards on the table between them.
Harry Knight was annoyed. He didn’t want to be bothered keeping up a conversation, especially not with someone he’d never seen before. But Harry Knight was polite. His mother had taught him not to hurt people’s feelings, even if it meant that he had to set aside his own feelings. So he smiled at the white-haired man and the white-haired man smiled back. Then the white-haired man shuffled the deck and placed five cards face-down on the table.
He said: Choose a card and place it face-up on the table.
The card that Harry Knight picked was unfamiliar. Instead of an ace of spades or two
of clubs, or one of the emblems in a tarot pack, the face of the card was an eye that opened and closed four times, then disappeared. Harry Knight briefly felt like four different people, each of whom briefly felt like four different people, each of whom briefly felt like four different people, each of whom briefly felt like four different people.
He lifted his eyes from the card and smiled at the man and the man smiled back and said: Care to pick another card?
The next card was a green ear nesting in blood-red notes of music. It made him think that music was in his blood, that his ear was always green, always new, when he heard great music. But the music on the card made him feel like dancing, and dancing made him feel self-conscious and awkward, while the music in the room was calm and expansive, like an easy chair with a view of an urban skyline. The ear on the card heard nothing, and the blood-red music made no sound, which made him feel that he must have lost his hearing, that the jazz and the talk of the party was all in his head.
The next card was a pile of teeth beside a glass of water. Harry Knight suddenly felt like eating and drinking. He was just about to get up and find food and beer, but the white-haired man smiled and asked him to pick another card. There were two cards left on the table. Harry Knight wondered if the choice made any difference, if the stakes of the game were higher than he thought. Perhaps he was choosing between right and wrong or life and death. But the white-haired man seemed harmless, so Harry Knight picked up another card, which showed a king-size bed with a nose instead of a pillow. Harry Knight put his hand on his nose, stroked it with his thumb, making sure it still felt like his own nose and not someone else’s. Then he licked his teeth and put his hand on his mouth, as if to prevent words from getting out. But the gesture was unsuccessful, and Harry Knight heard himself telling the white-haired man to pick the last card himself. The man was blunt in his refusal, suddenly more serious than he seemed before. Harry Knight felt anxious, thought of changing the subject, then realized that he wasn’t sure what the subject was, unless it was change itself, in which case changing the subject would be an example of the subject, and would only make his anxiety worse. He thought of getting up and leaving, but he knew it would be impolite not to take the last card.
He picked it up, expecting to find another facial feature. But the card was blank. Looking into its white rectangular space made Harry Knight dizzy. He closed his eyes. His mind was spinning in two directions at different speeds slowly becoming one speed. He opened his eyes. The table was empty. He looked around the room. It seemed to be looking back, then closing its eyes. The talk and the jazz were the same but the white-haired man with the black shirt wasn’t there. Harry Knight looked again. He assumed that the man had gone to the bathroom. But when the bathroom door opened a few minutes later, a woman came out, bobbing her head to the music. Harry Knight scanned the room again. The white-haired man wasn’t there, but this time his absence felt absolute, and a minute later even his absence wasn’t there anymore, and the absence of the absence felt absolute. Harry Knight got up and left.
He walked out into the late-March fog with an unfamiliar feeling, as if he’d been stripped of his face, as if it hadn’t been his to begin with. To someone else this might have been unpleasant. But Harry Knight accepted the feeling quickly, partly because he felt that his party face belonged at the party, that it had no business being anywhere else, and partly because the absence of his face was reassuring, briefly releasing him from a lifelong source of pain, the struggle to look at himself in the mirror, or to look at people looking at him passing on the street. It didn’t occur to him that they might be more disturbed by the absence of his face than by its presence. But it did occur to him that in the dense fog no one was likely to get a good look at him. And it also occurred to him that most New Yorkers were so caught up in themselves that they rarely saw anyone else with clarity or interest.
Few things pleased Harry Knight more than foggy New York streets at three in the morning. He loved the silhouettes of pointed housetops, the dim reflections in dirty warehouse windows, the blurred imprint of streetlights on wet sidewalks, the sudden distorted shadows of people approaching or moving away. There were hundreds of ways of getting home, sequences of streets he could choose to follow, depending on what he wanted to see through the fog. He knew the streets by heart, by the sound of his footsteps on the pavement. He walked and came to corners under streetlights, turned and walked and came to other corners under streetlights, turned and walked and watched the streetlights floating in the mist, until he came to City Hall Park and the lights of the Brooklyn Bridge. He told himself to stop. He took a step, took another step, and stopped.
Silence filled his body like someone turning off a TV set. He had no words to give the moment shape, no words to make the next moment replace the moment he’d left behind, as if he could only be where he was by cooling down or heating up, slowing down or speeding up, as if the words down and up had created each other, negated each other, leaving him with no words to explain that he had no words to explain where he was, no words to explain why time was no longer trapped in the sound of his footsteps, no words for the lights of the Brooklyn Bridge, no words for the woman standing beside him, except that he knew she too had stopped.
Earlier that day, at precisely the same time, Honey Stone and Harry Knight had decided for the millionth time that President Bush was a pig. He was worse than a pig; he was a menace. He was worse than a menace; he was a mass murderer. He was worse than a mass murderer; he was a mass murderer disguised as a Christian hero. For nearly seven years he’d been a major disgrace to the nation, supported by and supporting a vast network of rich and dangerous people. Honey Stone and Harry Knight had decided that George Bush had to get what he deserved. He had to be arrested and tried as a war criminal and sent to the electric chair, a televised execution. And since they knew that this would never happen, they decided that someone had to assassinate him, and they hated themselves for lacking the guts to do it, which reminded them of all the other things they’d never had the guts to do, all the possibilities they’d missed out on because they’d been afraid.
The fact that they were the only people in the world who’d had exactly the same thought at exactly the same time and had later come to exactly the same place at exactly the same time broke the spell. They started again, in the midst of what sounded like an extended conversation.
He said: You’re absolutely right. All jobs are stupid. I refuse to work full-time. I’d rather live on almost nothing than waste my time doing stupid things just because someone tells me to.
She said: It’s not that I hate my job. As jobs go, it’s not bad, and I like some of the people I work with. But it’s like you said: I don’t want to waste time doing what someone tells me to do—
He said: Especially when the things they tell you to do are things you wouldn’t choose to do on your own.
She said: Or if I did choose to do them on my own, I’d do them the way I wanted to do them, at my own pace, in my own way, without having to deal with someone telling me when and how—
He said: For example, if you got up to sharpen a pencil, you’d look out the window and watch pigeons eating breadcrumbs on the sidewalk. And on your way back to your desk you’d play with yourself in the company bathroom. Before you started writing again, you’d—
She said: Or if I was typing an important memo, I’d make every other sentence openly or secretly ridiculous, and the person reading it would consciously or unconsciously know that nothing can be serious unless it’s also funny. If I was—
He said: It’s getting late.
She said: I think you’re right.
They turned and started walking across the Brooklyn Bridge. The lights of lower Manhattan towered in fog behind them. A dark network of old industrial buildings waited in fog in front of them. They didn’t say anything. Silence was better. Words would only have blocked out what they already knew, kept them from arriving at Harry Knight’s tiny apartment, one room with a kitchene
tte and bathroom in Vinegar Hill, a neighborhood most New Yorkers had never been to, or even heard of, until the more popular neighborhoods became unaffordable.
She sat on his bed. He sat on the chair he pulled out from his desk.
She said: Nice little place you’ve got here. I wouldn’t mind living here myself. The view of the harbor is great. And I love the hardwood floors. In my apartment everything is carpeted. It’s really stupid.
He looked outside and saw lights moving in the harbor fog. He suddenly realized that the fog wasn’t masking his face any longer. For a second he felt exposed. But when he studied Honey Stone’s face he saw no alarm, and he assumed that either his eyes and nose and mouth were back in place, or that Honey Stone didn’t think she knew him well enough to tell him to his face that he had no face.
He said: There’s nothing better than a window filled with lights in harbor fog.
She said: How long have you had this place?
He looked at the old portrait framed above his desk, a man with white hair and a black shirt. It occurred to him for the first time in his life that he didn’t know who the man was. He heard a car approaching three floors down. He heard it stop, doors opening and slamming shut, indistinct voices, footsteps on pavement, then silence, then a foghorn in the distance.
Changing the Subject Page 12