by Arjun Basu
She took her hand off my back. “You’ve lost something,” she said. “Spark. You’re not funny. I don’t know. You’re not you.”
She downed her drink and held it out for Alex. “My father thinks I’ve been having a midlife crisis,” I said. “For a year. He thinks I’ve been like this for a year.”
“You’re too young,” she said. She watched Alex make her drink. “We’re not midlife crisis people. That’s just what he’s calling it. That’s generational.”
And I realized I had been diagnosed with something for a year now. “I dislike the whole Boomer thing,” I said.
“Your dad’s not a Boomer.”
“No,” I agreed. “He’s not. But the Boomers, that’s all I think about. Most of the time. At work. And if there’s one thing they’ve done, they’ve allowed us to see what happens when your entire life becomes a midlife crisis.” I finished my beer and Alex gave me another one. He gave Angie her drink and she took a sip.
“You ad people,” she said.
“They’ve shown us how stupid it is to spend your life trying to be something you’re not,” I said.
“And what’s that?” she asked.
“Young,” I said.
Angie laughed then. And she touched me again. “Maybe it is a midlife crisis,” she said. She took another sip of her drink. It seemed to be too late in the evening for sipping. I took a long pull from my beer. “Or maybe you’re in-between, like you say.”
“Maybe,” I said sighing. “Maybe it’s semantics.”
The problem was I didn’t believe anything. I didn’t want to pin my melancholy on age. Because that’s what it was. Melancholy. I was listless. I lived my life without living. Without feeling alive.
And that night alone in bed, regretting what had never been with her, drunk most certainly, I started floating.
And then, more alarmingly, I started having these dreams. I don’t know what else to call them. Visions maybe. Nightmares. This thin black man in a floppy straw hat, dressed right out of the seventies, looking for all the world like a TV pimp. Like Huggy Bear from Starsky & Hutch. I never watched that show, it was before my time, but I remembered the character and now he was haunting my dreams. And this man, sometimes, later, would ride in on a white horse, a gigantic white horse with a mane that looked combed and neat and clean. A good-smelling horse. Bathed. It smelled supernaturally clean. And the Man had a smile you couldn’t outrun. It was the size of the world. I fell into it.
I had the dream every night.
In different permutations. We would talk. Sometimes he would watch me. Stare. From across the room. In one dream, he watched me as I sat in the office and listened to a colleague debate the sexiness of his new iPad. One of my colleagues kept repeating that he didn’t need human companionship anymore. His biological imperative had been fulfilled. In another dream, I walked with the Man along the banks of a foul-smelling stream and we debated something archaic, like the reasons behind the British Invasion, or McCarthyism, things I knew little about and cared for even less. Things from another era.
And then I stopped floating. And the dreams came to me at all hours, a bully astride me whenever I closed my eyes. And then, after a week of this, he spoke to me. Or, I stopped speaking to him. He became a kind of monolith. Dressed like a black pimp from the seventies. He was the speaker and I the listener. I absorbed. I saw him walking toward me, slowly, strutting more than walking. I’m sitting on my front steps talking to some neighborhood kids about the inanities of the latest Mets fiasco and I see the Man walking toward me. The kids scatter and he leans close and whispers, Wait. And his voice has reverb and echo and sounds vaguely like Isaac Hayes. With that gentle smile, he just tells me to wait. I ask why and he says, Because. I could smell the horse on him. I’m not sure I knew what a horse smelled like then, let alone a clean one.
And I kept dreaming. Longer dreams. I touched him. And when I did I felt myself falling into him, being crushed and embraced by this good-smelling man. He told me to wait on my front steps and he would come and things would get better. Things will get better. That’s what he said. Better than what? I asked. But he did not hear me. Because our relationship had changed. My role was not to speak.
I lived close enough to the World Trade Center to think he was talking about life in the most general way possible. I didn’t think he was speaking about me. I could see him imparting in me the wisdom for some major civic improvement project. I saw his instruction through the lens of my workspace. Because I never considered my own life. I figured I was living. Even though I knew I wasn’t. But that WTC thing, with all the fighting and the politics. I mean, the site was still a tourist attraction. My neighborhood had been through a lot. I breathed in that dust. Somewhere inside of me, I could still taste the burning embers of those buildings and everyone and everything inside of them. That dust lives on in all of us. And through the crazy times on Wall Street right to the crash, that dust lingered, never changing, resilient in its own sad way. I didn’t think I needed anything better. I hated my job but everyone hated their job. No. In the dream’s promise, I saw something larger than myself.
The next night I had another dream. And then the night after that I had it again. And for another week I had this strange dream of the Man walking up to me and telling me to wait for him. Promising a better world. And one night I was working late, alone in the office, trying to finesse the overall theme for a series of ads for a car company out of China launching an ambitious but poorly planned invasion of America, and I heard the Man’s voice. Over the office intercom. I walked around the empty space. Past the light boxes with the black and white photos of the staff. The whiteness of the space. The glassed-in conference room. The rows of blank, humming computers. It was after midnight. And then I heard it again, as clear as if he was sitting across the desk from me. And again, it told me to wait by the steps. It commanded me. Over the office intercom the gentleness of the dream had been usurped by a tone of authority. And the next day, as I lay in bed wondering if I should hit the snooze button for the seventh time, he came again, not in a dream but as a voice that seemed to come in through my window, carried by the wind.
And at that point I became obsessed. I pondered therapy. I started to lose the desire for sleep. Sometimes I’d stay at the bar drinking by myself so I wouldn’t have to go home. I became superficial. Even with Angie. How could I explain this? One of my neighbors gave me pills to help keep me awake. Because sleep meant the dream and the dream was a road paved with the outrageous. I couldn’t share it with anyone. I didn’t dare. Who wants to share their most intimate forms of lunacy? And I heard the Man’s voice everywhere around me. Every creak in my apartment building, every kid yelling on the street, every time the wind blew in off the river, everything, every noise I heard was the sound of the Man saying Wait. His voice had become the soundtrack to my life.
And then one night, overtired, stressed about selling Chinese cars in America, about making Americans feel the need to own a Chinese car, I realized the Man was talking about me. Because I was alone in my office and I was lobbing crumpled pieces of paper at a wastebasket and pretending I was LeBron, and I was stupid. And instead of seeing these dreams as something deep inside telling me to confront my unhappiness, my little crisis, I took the Man at his word. And being a man of words, I cringed. I saw the Man as someone who was going to help me. I saw the Man and his horse and his mission. He was promising something. Courage maybe. He was asking of me the kind of action that my inactivity had been demanding. He came to me again. I was in mid-jump, sinking the paper ball into the wastebasket, and he said, The floating stops. Now.
And that night, I woke from a fitful sleep. And I was crying. I hadn’t cried in years, since I had been a boy, and tears were streaming down my face. I was blubbering like a soap opera diva. I went to the kitchen and drank a glass of water. I put my head under the tap. The Man was sitting at my kitchen table. What ar
e you waiting for? he asked.
You told me wait, I said. But wait for what?
And the Man stood up then and hugged me. He squeezed me until I had trouble breathing. I struggled under the power of his embrace. You’re waiting for me, he said. And then he was gone.
And I felt beaten. It was something I just felt. In the shoulders.
I gave up. Maybe it was more like giving in. I think there’s a difference. I gave in to the voice, the message of this Man, the constant voice I was hearing, the word that drowned out everything else. I decided I was going to wait. For him. For word. Not because it suddenly made sense, or because the world was both confusing and maddeningly predictable at the same time, or the Mets had opened spring training or my parents were not speaking to each other once again. No. I was tired. I ate breakfast and I took a long, hot shower and I sat down on the steps to my building and that was that. I started to wait.
So here I am, I said. I’m waiting for you.
And the voice came to me and it was pleased. And by the time night rolled around, my course of action seemed to be the most rational, the most logical action I had ever taken. I wasn’t going to work for a while, I knew that. I was thirty-six. I was in advertising. I was successful. My parents were proud of me. I had disposable income. The economy sucked. My stocks had been hammered. That loss made me feel adult. I had savings. And I felt an unease about what I did to make all of this possible. I felt dirty doing what I did. Perhaps it was a lack of maturity. Or perhaps I was hindered by excessive amounts of shame. Or at least a certain amount of self-consciousness.
There were practical matters to sort out. How long would I wait? What would I do if it rained? What would I do for food? And this: was I quitting my job? Or was I going to use up my bank of vacation days? What was the plan? Asking these questions, and considering their implications, I understood this: I had given in to the voice. I surrendered. It had me. The grip of its logic, or the message at least, finally overcame me. In a place where stunned ex-bankers and stock guys still wearing their suspenders walked the streets eating slices of pizza, vacant-eyed, alone; in a world where the bow tie made a comeback; where skanks from the Jersey Shore could become TV stars; and where I wrote ads for a dying media, assailed by technology and the power of a people both numb to their anger and buoyed by it; in this kind of place, giving in seemed logical.
The voice didn’t vanish but it wasn’t a constant. It wasn’t something I could feel all around me. And though I could still feel the Man, I was plagued by an uncertainty that never left my side. And I also realized this: he was waiting, too.
I was stuck someplace, the kind of place that takes the meaning out of things. Wherever I was, joy was being sucked out of me, leeched out. I had to acknowledge that. If everyone around me could feel it, I should, too.
My job was to make people feel unique enough to purchase products everyone else was buying. To create desire where once there was none. Is that even fair?
A day later, I was noticed. A neighborhood kid, a boy who lived across the street, noticed. He asked. Within a few hours, the neighborhood caught on. And I told them, “I’m waiting for the Man.” This is New York. This kind of statement just caused a shrug. Angie gave me blankets for the night when I convinced her I wasn’t going inside. It was spring and the nights were still cold. She was the only one who tried to talk some sense into me, but I wouldn’t listen. She was adorably Italian this way, sexy and motherly and crass and smiling through the rainiest of days. She worried for me. She said so. She said, “You worry me.” She was beautiful in that way that all the women in Italian films are beautiful and her worry made her all the more so.
By the next day, I was a fixture. People started to hang out around me. Kids would sit on the steps after school to keep me company. Some would look out for the Man with me, but mostly I just became a place to hang out. I was geography. The old men got their coffees and hung out. Unemployed hipsters came by and texted their friends, who came by, too. And I was the subject of conversation, of debate, the crux of a battery of meaning. Symbolism. The source of something no one understood, but you never knew. Something might happen. I was the subject of impressive conjecture. And the Man zoomed in and out of my consciousness. Keep at it, he’d say. And then he’d leave. Sometimes I would smell the horse and know he was around. Watching me. Evaluating.
By the third night, women were handing me leftovers from last night’s dinner. They’d say, “Just hang on to the Tupperware, Joe,” and they’d leave me alone. Angie would bring me food from the trattoria. Nights I would see her walking toward me, doggie bag in hand. She’d bring me cakes, pasta, paninis, whatever didn’t sell. Her chef always seemed overly optimistic about the fish. People were caring for me and not really questioning what I was doing. The world believes, or needs to believe, that New Yorkers are rude and brusque. They need to believe this because they have seen this version on TV and in the movies. But they’ve never lived here. Not after a snowstorm or during a fierce rain shower or when you show signs of distress. They did not see our strength when the crazies from the other side of the world flew our planes into our buildings. We are a tribe, us New Yorkers, and we can be as civil as anybody. Sometimes more so.
I lost track of time. It got to the point that when someone would ask me how long I’d been sitting on the steps, I’d just have to shrug. The difference between night and day was a question of light and perception. When I slept, the Man would talk to me in my dreams about things like destiny and loyalty. He told me my loyalty would be rewarded. He told me I was doing the right thing and because of this he would do right by me. During the day I would sometimes see him in the small crowd, watching. He drank coffee out of a Styrofoam cup. He would not sit by me. Not while I was awake.
One night Angie sat down next to me and we talked. She said she was getting worried about me. “This was cute and now I’m not so sure.”
“Me neither,” I said. “But this is something to do.” She touched my forehead. “I’m not sick,” I told her, backing away.
“You’re not crazy, right?” she asked.
She was persistent. She was being a mother without being my mother. She was relentless with concern. And she asked me more and more questions and finally I wanted them to end. I could only handle one type of oppression at a time. “I haven’t thought this through,” I said. I may have yelled. “I admit it. And admittedly, this is strange and stupid and completely fucked. It’s not normal. Yes. I’m conversing with someone in my head. I don’t know why I’m sitting here.” And then I was yelling for sure. “I’m waiting for a figment of my imagination to come whisk me away. I don’t fucking know anything. Isn’t that obvious?”
The stupidity of my situation, the trap I had constructed for myself had become obvious to me. And it did feel oddly like a trap. The Man’s gaze was like a cage. Forget the logic argument. I had already changed my mind. The confusion, and anger, that would reign over me for so long had set in like a bad storm. Angie cared. She had always cared about me. Angie was a road not taken. That’s what laziness does to you. It obliterates possibilities.
Angie left me alone and I thought, Great, I was getting real used to her doggie bags, and I realized that I couldn’t alienate people by jumping all over them for asking simple questions. I apologized to her the next day and she kept bringing me food, but there was no real conversation after that. She wouldn’t soon forgive me. She was the first person I hurt in all of this. This whole mess. This thing that brought me here.
IN A BIG COUNTRY
I walked here.
And here is nowhere even by Montana standards. That’s not to be insulting. It’s just true. It’s not New York. And that’s a part of this place’s charm. It’s a selling point. If the concepts of “somewhere” and “nowhere” are human constructs, or at least must be considered in relation to human activity, then this is, indeed, nowhere. Or irrelevant. We’d be considered off the grid
if we didn’t have electricity. But the power lines come here. They reach this place, webs to a civilization far beyond. In the literal sense, we are very much on the grid. In many other senses, too.
Here is a luxury guest ranch. A five-star spa. In the midst of sky and mountains playing host to wealthy people with a nostalgia for the Old West that only goes as deep as their rooftop plunge pools. Where just running out to go to the store means hopping in a car, or a pickup truck more like it, and hoping your tank has enough fuel to drive a little while. The idea of walking to anything isn’t stupid, it’s impractical. There’s nowhere to walk to.
I didn’t walk all the way here from New York. Let’s get real.
But I walked here.
I spent three days walking here and despite my Grizzly Adams appearance, or maybe because of it, I don’t know, and my smell and the dirt on my clothes and my shit-covered hair and even though I admitted to walking here, which should have made someone nervous, I managed to talk myself into a job in the kitchen. I found myself a simple job. Peeling. Apples, potatoes, onions, carrots. Edible flora that need peeling. That was my job.
And they gave me a room, next to the bathroom, in a long stainless steel tube full of identical rooms. A trailer of sorts, standing on concrete pillars. And here, the kitchen and waitstaff sleep and fuck and drink and write bad poems and play music and fight and huddle to stay warm during summer nights that always seem to threaten winter. I’m told I’ll be receiving new accommodations soon. We’ve all been told that. We’re overcrowded. The difference in the amount of space between the outside and the inside is a kind of cruel irony. Though no one seems to mind. Because there is, here, a general kind of happiness, an odd feeling of being separate from the world’s troubles. Of simplicity. Listening to the sounds emanating from the three staff trailers at night is to acknowledge an odd kind of joy. Of freedom.