As a committed Bakerite I felt something of a tingle on recognizing that Checkpoint’s entire focus was an intimate, male friendship. Hadn’t Baker ruled this out for himself? When I met Baker for the first time I sent up a kind of trial balloon by sneaking in a reference to Abelardo Morell, with whom Baker did have a long-standing friendship. In addition to the author photos and the two men having produced A Book of Books together, Morell makes an appearance in The Mezzanine, first as “Abe,” “Howie” ’s boss, then as “Abelardo.” But I didn’t get much of a response from Baker. No “Oh, yes, old Abe, great chum of mine—need to give him a call!” I took this as confirmation that Baker did not have many, if any, intimate male friends. To my mind, that demands a reading of Checkpoint that stretches beyond the realism you’d expect of a writer drawing in any way on personal experience.
It’s easy enough to recognize that Ben is another Baker-figure, a stand-in for Baker himself. The details of Ben’s life read practically like Baker’s author’s notes, and when Jay asks Ben what he’s been working on lately—there is a surprising amount of small talk in Checkpoint—the answers, the Office of Censorship and “Cold War Themes,” put an attentive reader in mind of Double Fold. And once we recognize that Ben is Baker, the entire book changes, or it should change, because in a nutshell Checkpoint is the story of Ben talking Jay out of his wacky plan. The conversation is literally an argument against violence.
To be fair, though, Jay too puts an attentive reader in mind of Baker. Jay’s life trajectory, now in an emotional tailspin, seems pretty close to the troubled Emmett of A Box of Matches, published only twenty months earlier. And tellingly, when Jay finally does allude to 9/11, he directly anticipates what Baker, speaking for himself, would soon say of the attacks: “I knew, I knew when those towers came down, I knew we would be bombing somewhere very soon.”
Throughout this study I’ve been more or less operating on the assumption that Baker’s many Baker-figures are interchangeable. And that’s pretty much true, but it’s not entirely true, and Checkpoint is unique in that it’s the only time two different versions of Baker, one of them approaching fiction and a somewhat more nonfictional edition, appear on the page at the same time. Checkpoint, then, is an exercise in self-dialogue, a depiction of Baker’s chronic, duplicitous ambivalence. Or, given the absurdity of Jay’s planned assassination methods—remote-control flying saws and programmable bullets: a boy’s fantasy of drone technology—the two men represent Baker’s inner comedy team.
The early reviews of Checkpoint do not note this aspect of the book at all. From here on we’re in uncharted Checkpoint territory. So what does Baker chat with himself about? Jay has a lot to say about Ben’s work. Ostensibly, he’s called Ben in to serve as confessor, and though there’s a lame attempt to recruit him as an accomplice, Jay knows full well that there’s absolutely zero chance Ben will participate in the scheme. Curiously, then, not long into the discussion, Jay begins to press Ben on why he tends to write only about the past. History. Isn’t the present, these days, a more pressing concern?
Jay’s point is a little similar to an observation leveled by one of Baker’s hostile reviewers, writing about A Box of Matches: “It’s a particularly disposable artifact from a pre-9/11 world that willfully celebrate[s] the trivial and minute.” Hasn’t the world changed? Don’t we now need different kinds of books? Ben grows defensive on this point. Historians can’t really study the present, he claims. They don’t have access to the kinds of documents they would need. As well, Ben admits that he doesn’t really want to spend his career mulling the political scoundrels of his time. The Gulf War “really undid [him],” and if getting “interested in the Second World War” means he’s hiding in the past, then fine. Jay argues that Ben could “at least map the old onto the new,” as Human Smoke sort of does, and this activates, from Ben, a rant on how the current political climate has already mapped the old onto the new in that the political scoundrels of our time, those who fomented the Iraq War, were the same scoundrels who had mucked things up thirty or forty years before.
Eventually, and this is the crucial moment, Ben appears to recognize that all this chatting about his work has distracted him from his mission, which is to distract Jay from his mission. To get the conversation back on track, Ben initiates this exchange:
BEN: You know, this isn’t frivolity.
JAY: I’m not being frivolous. There is zero frivolity in my outlook right now.
That’s the problem. Ben uses “frivolity” here as we all might, as a synonym for “trifling,” as a way of disparaging thoughtlessness. But in the context of Baker’s career it’s a double entendre: Frivolity is what the book should be, what books should be. All of us in the post–9/11 world, even characters in post–9/11 Nicholson Baker books, have forgotten how to appreciate frivolity.
66
THERE ARE TWO WEAPONS IN THE ROOM. OR SCRATCH THAT—THERE are two tools in the room, one that can be employed as a weapon but is designed for other uses, and one that is designed for violence alone and can serve any other purpose only awkwardly. A hammer and a gun. Jay and Ben, we know, are tool-challenged men, so it should come as no surprise that the tools trigger abstract reflection along Bakerian lines. Jay notes that the value of a hammer, as opposed to a gun, is that it is a “basic tool.” He reminds Ben that a similar cudgel-style implement was employed in a famous nursery rhyme to delivery “forty whacks.”
This links nicely with Vox’s allusion to children’s literature, and in general Baker’s sex trilogy is close at hand throughout Checkpoint. For example, shit intimacy reappears as Jay and Ben try to get their heads around the motivations of war-mongering scoundrels:
JAY: . . . The thing I can’t figure is, military men seem to want to spend their lives living with other men. Can you make any sense of it? They’re out there on some desolate airbase in the middle of nowhere, protecting some future pipeline—eating with other men, shaving with other men. And then actually defecating with other men.
BEN: It’s a puzzler.
JAY: Shitting with them, day after day after day! How can they endure it?
BEN: I guess it’s like professional football.
JAY: Excuse me for a second, I’ve got to take a dump.
BEN: Sure.
JAY: No, I’m just kidding.
That’s more than coincidence. Baker can’t have produced this exchange without hoping that some reader somewhere would reflect back on Sylvie and Marian and conclude that Marian’s claims about shit intimacy—“You can do anything now”—has a dark equivalent when applied to heterosexual men who prefer shit intimacy with other heterosexual men.
More notably, near the end of the book, when Jay’s madness begins to spiral out of control, it’s hard not to hear Jim of Vox climbing to his feet and roaring out his orgasms:
JAY: . . . So then the desire for justice starts moving through me. It’s like a huge paddlewheel, it just churns up all of this foam and fury. VENGEANCE.
BEN: Please don’t stand up! I mean it, this will invalidate any point you will ever want to make.
JAY: This is the point I want to make. You’re blocking me.
It’s worth tracing this scene through to its conclusion. Ben manages to keep Jay in his seat, but he realizes that Jay is experiencing an uncomfortable buildup of churned foam. Ben tries a concession. He allows that murderous emotions can’t be suppressed: “Feel murderous, by all means. Rage inwardly. Just don’t actually attempt the murder.” But it doesn’t work. Nor does Ben’s claim that assassinating the president could have wide-ranging implications that
Jay can’t anticipate: “You don’t have any idea what you might set in motion, what kind of uproar, what kind of clamping down would follow.” I didn’t fully understand what Ben meant by this until I read Human Smoke, which tells the story of Herschel Grynszpan, the Jewish assassin who murdered Ernst vom Rath just three days before Kristallnacht. Vom Rath’s death was immediately employed by Goebbels to crystallize Germany’s already hardening anti-Semitic spirit.
But Jay is unimpressed with the argument. He offers a counterexample: Dietrich Bonhoeffer. I knew this was coming! Bonhoeffer’s appearance, however, makes exactly the opposite point I’d thought it would make: Even a good man can get sucked into a bad plan. Regardless, it’s a surprisingly lucid argument for Jay to make, as his diction (“penisfucker,” “peckerfuck,” the angry correlate of dildo talk) has begun to suggest that he is beyond the reach of reason.
At the brink of disaster Ben strikes on an idea. He asks to see Jay’s hammer, which has been hidden under the bed covers, and on taking it up he claims to recognize it as a tool of voodoo-style magical potential: “Whatever harm you inflict on an evildoer’s image with this hammer will also be visited upon the evildoer himself.” Jay agrees to play along with this immature fantasy. A printed headshot of the president happens to be near at hand, and they position it on the bed. Jay proceeds with a bludgeoning. The scene echoes the corresponding climax of Vox:
BEN: Just lift the hammer. Good. Now when you bring it down, put your whole strength into it. Really kill him. Ready? Now, GO!
“Oh, I’m starting to come for you, my cock is pumping inside you.”
“Oh! Nnnnnnnn! Nnn! Nnn! Nnn! Nnn! Nnn! Nnn!”
JAY: HHHHHHHRRRRRRA-AAAAGH! [Flump!]
“It’s spurting out! I can’t help it! Ah! Ah! Oooooo.”
BEN: And again?
JAY: DAMMIT! [Flump!] BASTARD! [Flump!] RRRRRRAAAAGH! [Flump!]
There was a pause.
“Oh man,” she said. “Wow. You there?”
“I think so.” He swallowed. “Let me catch my breath.”
BEN: Okay, okay. Wow. So how do you feel now? Any better?
That’s pretty much the end of Checkpoint. Ben now has the gun and the hammer, and they’re leaving the hotel, and, apprehended or no, the solution to Jay’s assassination fantasy has been another fantasy, a story, a Shakespearean king-slaughter that enacts Susan Sontag’s paraphrase of Aristotle: “Art is useful . . . in that it arouses and purges dangerous emotions.”
Not only is Checkpoint about the role and purpose of literature, it’s a fervent defense of art for a post–9/11 world. And for my money it is not only a book that ought to have been published and celebrated, it’s perhaps the only book of that time that needs to have been published at all.
67
U AND I IS PRETTY SPECIFIC ON ONE POINT: UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES does Baker want “to see the techniques of ‘closed book examination’ applied to any other novelist.” So no following in his footsteps. I thought about this as I was driving to meet Baker for the second time. En route to the diner where we would have lunch, I noticed that Baker was driving the beater car ahead of me. He was swerving a bit. That’s why I noticed him. Until now, I’d followed his biographical footsteps, but now I was literally following him—warily, and with an extra car length between us for safety’s sake.
At that point it had been a little more than two years since I’d first read U and I. Since then my paperback copy of the book had sat smooshed between other books in what I now thought of as my Baker library, which filled a shelf near at hand as I sat and wrote. The book’s having been smooshed meant that when I plucked it out again in late fall 2012 to reread it once more—abomination or no, I intended to teach it—its cheap-stock cover had lost all its sexy, questioning curvature. It was once again a flat book. I snapped the spine when I read it this time—I find that to be a weirdly satisfying sensation—and about a third of the way through I discovered what I now recognized to be a description of “the restaurant thing”:
Indeed, all male friendships outside of work sometimes seem to be impossible: you look at each other at the restaurant at some point in the conversation and you know that each of you is thinking, man, this is futile, why are we here, we’re wasting our time, we having nothing to say, we’re not involved in some project together that we can bitch about, we can’t flirt, we aren’t in some moral bind with a woman that we need to confess, we’ve each said the other is a genius several times already, and the whole thing is depressing and the tone is false and we might as well go home . . .
He goes on for a while longer, but he doesn’t need to—because this is exactly what having a public lunch with Nicholson Baker is like. Or not quite, because Baker couldn’t tell me that I was a genius because he hadn’t read anything I’d written. He did, however, not long after we sat down, ask which book of mine he should begin with to get a sense of my work. My heart soared at this! Baker would read something I’d written. But then I realized he was just being polite. I hedged for a while over an answer, and I thought over the connections between his career and my life that might occur to him if he were to read my work, even the connections that I haven’t shoehorned into this study because there were finally so many it became embarrassing. But I didn’t mention any of that. Nor did I say what I was thinking, which was this: Nicholson Baker, you have no idea. Scratch me anywhere, and I’ll bleed your blood, man! Instead I got a little shy, or I faked shyness, and I asked him how he would answer the same question. Baker saw right through this ploy. I had inverted the polarity of our discussion, and in so doing emphasized once again what we were both trying to forget: This was an interview. He must have wondered if I’d been lying or at least wrong when I’d said that I didn’t plan on writing about meeting him.
The real truth was that I had a pang of concern. What if Baker wrote about meeting me? What if that was the only reason he had agreed to meet with me in the first place? It was just the sort of metatwist that was always popping up in his work, and he could totally get away with it because I’d written far fewer books than he had, and even though I had a big head start on him, he could probably skim through everything I’d written in a few afternoons and then write some pithy thing for The New Yorker and beat me to the punch. Nothing doing! Answer your own question, Nicholson Baker! “I have no idea how to answer that question,” Baker said, and that slammed the door on that particular line of mutual interviewing, and we were left for a time in the droll, stagnant stasis of “the restaurant thing.”
It might have stayed like that, tense and uncomfortable, had Baker not begun to be made even more uncomfortable by something he noticed over my shoulder. His eyes darted past mine several times, as though he couldn’t stop himself from visually confirming some private dread, and soon he recognized that his distraction was itself a distraction, and he explained that he knew a woman sitting a few tables away from us. He couldn’t recall her name. This made him anxious because he was anticipating that the woman would spot him and stop by our table, and there would be the awkwardness of his not being able to properly greet her or introduce her to me. If you plan ahead, moments like this are easy enough to navigate. You can prepare something warm but inconclusive: “Hello! Good to see you! How are you?” Or, because people are generally pretty forgiving, you can acknowledge the slip: “I’m sorry, you’ve caught me off guard. I’m Nic
k—what’s your name again?” I might have earned Baker’s goodwill had I offered, as newish romantic couples sometimes do when one partner meets the poorly recalled acquaintance of the other, to aggressively introduce myself if the woman did approach. But that didn’t occur to me because now I was distracted. The Fermata, I was in the process of recalling, describes at some length the “name problem,” moments when Arno fails to recall people’s names. “I will so much want to remember his or her name!” he says. “They usually remember my name, and in some cases I can detect a faint hurt look in their eyes when they perceive, through my joshing and bluster, that I don’t remember theirs.” Of course Arno has a solution. He stops time to dig through people’s purses and wallets for identification. But Nicholson Baker could not stop time, and it was absolutely killing him. He practically writhed in his chair, like a piece of popcorn shriveling under hot butter or an ant fried by a ray of sunlight focused through a magnifying glass. I didn’t have to wait long for the coup de grâce, as the woman had caught Baker’s eye as she had begun to stir. She did not approach our table. Rather, on her way out the door she called out to Baker from across the room, in a friendly voice loud enough to turn the heads of several people between us: “Hey, Nick! How are you?”
B & Me Page 27