Through the Children's Gate

by Adam Gopnik

  I got in line. The guy in front of me, a white guy in a suit with a loosened tie, was ordering one of those baroque-flavored and sweetened seasonal drinks that Starbucks sells: an eggnog latte or a gingerbread latte, that kind of thing. More incidental sweetness. There was some kind of confusion on the part of the girl behind the register—was it tall or grande or caf or decaf?—and he sighed hard and said, “What is wrong with you?” He had a nasty, bad New York tone.

  “Hey,” I said, about as sternly as I have ever said anything. “Let's keep it polite here.” He swiveled and saw me standing there, an obnoxious shrimp, and was about to start letting me have it. But I held up my walkie-talkie and hit the button, surprising him with a blast of static. Then I stood there, impassive. He took me in: my orange vest and electronic communications gear, my look of official purpose. Perhaps the fuzz—obviously the fuzz, though whether bona fide Starbucks security or sinister private contractor, he was as yet uncertain.

  He took one nano-step back, unsure. I scowled and hit him with another burst of static. Then I spoke into the radio. “It's all right,” I said to no one in particular, “this situation secure.”

  It sounded like just what Starbucks security might report to Seattle. Then I looked at him again, hard. The hiss and cough of the milk steamers continued in the background. He shrugged and stepped to the back counter where you pick up your drink. I hit the back of his jacket, hard, with one last long-distance burst of meaningless electric noise. I felt utterly vindicated, in love with the booming security professions, at home in the new epoch, a lover of my time: administering homeland safety, proud and paranoid among the paper cups.

  When I told the family about it over dinner—how I had curbed hate crime at Starbucks and brought justice to the baristas—I thought they would be pleased: their First Line of Defense, their very own First Responder, tested and ready.

  They looked at me long and pityingly. “The really sad thing, children,” said my wife, “is that he means it. If he can't be with the fountain police, your father would like to be some kind of cappuccino commando, making sure that milk steamers don't get used nefariously.”

  “But all the kids got home safe, at least,” I said.

  “They always do,” Luke pointed out.

  “See?” I said, and I thought I had a point.

  Security, security, its rites and rituals. To dramatize our insecurities, to hold Bitterosity a moment at the arm's edge, we do … well, many things. The Listening Post hears us redefining even the miraculous. A few months ago we all spent a lot of time watching a man stand on a pole in Bryant Park. Then he jumped off. It happened not far from the office, and several of us would go over during lunch or after work to watch him. David Blaine, the magician who did the standing and the jumping, is a local boy from Brooklyn, and in years past he has tried such self-improving stunts as having himself imprisoned in a block of ice in Times Square for three days and being buried alive in a closed coffin on West Sixty-eighth Street for a week. This time, in Bryant Park, he stood for almost thirty-five hours in baggy clothes on a small platform atop a ninety-foot pole.

  The strange thing is that this magician wasn't doing anything magical. He was just standing there. For P.R. purposes, I guess, Blaine invoked the tony pedigree of certain earlier columnists: the saintly stylites, out there in the Byzantine desert at the dawn of the last Dark Age. But what he was doing in fact belongs to a very different local tradition of doing nothing in midair. They called it flagpole sitting back in the twenties, when it was all the rage in this part of town, and it, too, had its heroes: Alvin “Shipwreck” Kelly, who perched at the top of a sky-high pole above the old Madison Square Garden for twenty-two days and six hours, and fifteen-year-old Avon Foreman, who, over on Broadway, reportedly established the “juvenile flagpole-sitting record”—ten days, ten hours, and ten minutes. (I went back to the office and looked it up.)

  Back then, though, flagpole sitting was never confused with magic. Magic was what Harry Houdini was doing down the street at the Hippodrome—an office building and parking garage now—struggling in and out of straitjackets, slipping in and out of handcuffs, escaping from locked safes underwater. Magic was work. Magic was activity. Flagpole sitting was simply endurance, its only prerequisite an endless capacity for standing there.

  That's not magic, that's just a stunt, I thought as I watched him. But each age calls magic whatever stunt it needs to marvel at, and each age gets the magic it deserves. David Blaine, standing up there, was actually as good a magical metaphor for the moment as Houdini, fighting his way out of the straitjacket of immigrant identity toward prosperity, was for his, or David Copperfield, causing whole monuments to disappear while having dubious assignations with supermodels, was for the Gilded Age, now in twilight. (He made the Statue of Liberty vanish—a stunt no one even wants to think about now.) David Blaine is the magician as stoic, the magician as the nonmagical bystander, drawing on the ancient Egyptian gods of extremely tedious normality, the magician as the guy from the outer boroughs who just stands there and puts up with it.

  A Steinbergian drawing of New York in these years would show eight million people, each person standing on a pole above an abyss of anxiety—not looking down, never looking down, looking only from side to side, warily. Yet with so many people perched together, New York life in this hair-raising time looks just like—well, just like New York life, only somehow heightened. We are scared, and we stand there. The leaders of the country seem to have abandoned the first and oldest principles of leadership—don't panic the troops and always lead from the front—which have long held good for everything from leading armies to victory to leading your kids to the Port-A-John at halftime. The new model is frighten everybody you can and dive into a secure bunker. The bad guys are out for the Statue of Liberty, they're out for the Brooklyn Bridge, they're on the number 6 train, and they're probably down the hall in 6-F—but don't ask us what you can do about it, and don't expect us to join you while you wait. You're on your own.

  On the last night of Blaine's performance, I was working late and so went back to watch the magician jump down. One felt almost grateful for his gracelessness: After a clumsy back flop onto cardboard boxes, he emerged, not pumping his fist, triumphant, but huddled in a blanket, his voice shaking. “I'm all right,” he said; but his body language seemed to say, It's scary up there, it's scary down here, and it's scary when you're in midair. It is a curious thing to be grateful for a frightened daredevil. That is the Great Blaine's queer period appeal: After each stunt he seems to say, in effect, not “I transcended!” but “Hey, fuggetaboutit—I was freezing, I almost lost my mind, I thought I was going to die, this was a lot harder than I thought it was going to be.” But he also says, “I'm still here,” and we call it magic.

  * * *

  Kirk uses his mind every day to discipline his fear, not because his fear is not real—it is, absolutely—but because to give in to it would be to die before death comes. I go with him to the chemotherapy, where he sits with two catheters in his veins, one putting in saline solution, the other the hyper-powerful chemo, which I imagine as something like Drano, which, horribly, it probably is; and he talks and talks: about the lectures he will give next year, about the Metrozoids, the flag football team he is coaching for Luke, about the state of the world. He throws the Daily News across the chemotherapy suite, infuriated by the cultivation of fear. We discuss Christmas, approaching for the children.

  Luke wants a Yu-Gi-Oh! structure deck, some kind of Japanese super-game that gives you the, I don't know what, ghosts and magicians and Egyptian pharaohs large enough to win tournaments. But it costs fifty dollars, and we agonize about whether to get him this—a deck of cards, after all. Kirk nods wearily. Normally, he is all for toughening and inspiring the children, but not now, not exactly. “Buy him the structure deck,” he says. “It's fifty dollars, not fifty thousand.”

  Fear is the great solvent, the great freezing agent, the great chill. It leads us toward super
stition and into the bus. Lately, I like to ride the buses, the ordinary city buses, those vaguely purposeless-looking, bulbous-faced, blue-and-bone M2s and 3s and 4s and 5s that chug up and down the avenues and along the cross streets, wheezing and whining, all day and night.

  For twenty-odd years in New York, I never took the bus at all. Even if I had been on a bus, I don't think I would recall it. Bus blindness is a standard New York illness; of all the regularities of life here, the bus is the least celebrated, the least inclined to tug at the heart or be made into a symbol of our condition. The taxi has its checkered lore, the subway its legend, and the Town Car a certain Michael Douglas in Wall Street icon quality; but if there is a memorable bus scene in literature, or an unforgettable moment in a movie that takes place on a New York City bus, I have not found it. It isn't that buses are intrinsically inimical to symbolism: The London bus has a poetry as rich as the Tube's—there is Mary Poppins, there is Mrs. Dalloway. In Paris, Pascal rides the bus, Zazie dreams of riding the Métro, and that is, evenly, that. In L.A., Keanu Reeves rides the bus, round and round in desperate Dennis Hopper–driven circles. But as a symbolic repository, the New York City bus does not exist. The only significant symbolic figure that the New York bus has had is Ralph Kramden, and what he symbolizes about the bus is that being stuck in one is one more form of comic frustration and disappointment; the bus is exactly the kind of institution that would have Ralph Kramden as its significant symbolic figure.

  If you had asked me why I avoided the bus, I suppose I would have said that the bus was for old people, or that taking the bus was one step short of not living in New York at all, and that if you stayed on the bus long enough, it would take you right out of town. Riding the bus, I thought, was one of those activities, like going to Radio City, that was in New York but not really of it. My mother-in-law rode the bus when she came to New York to visit, and that, to me, said whom the bus was made for: elegant older women who didn't mind traveling forty-five minutes every morning to visit their grandchildren.

  And then I didn't ride the bus because when we first arrived here I loved the subway so. The subway was anxiety-filled. Compared with the vivid, evil, lurid subway, the bus seemed a drab bourgeois necessity—Shirley Booth to the subway's Tallulah Bankhead. In the late seventies and early eighties, the subway was both grander and stranger than a newcomer can imagine now. The graffiti, for one thing, was both more sordid inside—all those “tags”—and more beautiful outside. When the wild-style cars came roaring into a station, they were as exciting and shimmering as Frank Stella birds. The air-conditioning was a lot spottier, too, and sometimes the windows were open, driving the stale and fetid air around in an illusion of cooling. When the air-conditioning worked, it was worse. You walked from steambath to refrigerator, as if changing continents, and your perspiration seemed to freeze within your shirt, a phenomenon previously known only to Antarctic explorers.

  Feral thugs and killer nerds rode the subway together, looking warily at one another. And yet there was something sublime about it.

  Although it was incidentally frightening, it was also systematically reassuring: It shouldn't have worked; it had stopped working; and yet it worked—vandalized, brutalized, a canvas and a pissoir, it reliably took you wherever you wanted to go. It was a rumbling, sleepless, snorting animal presence underfoot, more a god to be appeased and admired than a thing that had been mastered by its owners. If the stations seemed, as people said, Dantesque, that was not simply because the subway was belowground, and a punishment, but also because it offered an architectural order that seemed free from any interfering human hand, running by itself in its own grim circles. It was religious in the narrow sense as well: Terror and transportation were joined together, and fear propelled you to a higher plane. (The taxis, an alternative if you had the money, were also alarming then—a silent or determined driver in a T-shirt, resting on a mat of beads and demanding, fifty blocks before your destination, which side of the street you wanted, without being at all sublime.)

  The bus also has its order, old-fashioned and patriarchal, maintained by an irritable chief. The driver has control over his world and delights in the exercise of arbitrary authority, like a French bureaucrat. On the bus, if your MetroCard turns out to be short fifty cents, the driver will look at you with distaste, tell you to find change from fellow passengers (surprisingly, to a subway rider, people dig into their purses cheerfully), and if this doesn't work, he will wearily wave you on back. You are included, fool though you are, and this grace is often bestowed even as the driver ignores the pounded fists and half-audible pleas for admission of the last few people who, running for the bus, arrived a second too late. The driver's control of the back door is just as imperious. A zone of acceptable access, a five- or six-foot expanse exists around the bus stop, known only to the driver, who opens and closes the door as he senses the zone appearing and receding.

  When I first started riding the bus, I mentioned it to people sheepishly, almost apologetically, as one might mention having had a new dental plate put in, or the advantages of low-fat yogurt—not downright shameful, perhaps, but still mildly embarrassing. But to my surprise, almost everyone I talked to (women, I think, in particular) turned out to feel the same way I do about the bus. “The bus lets you feel that you're in control, or that someone's in control,” one woman said to me, and another friend said flatly, “You can see what's coming.” The bus feels safe. Of course, there is no reason for the bus to feel safe. (A friend from Jerusalem got on the bus with understandable watchfulness.) Yet we have decided to create in the city a kind of imaginary geography of fear and safety that will somehow make us safer from It—the next attack, the Other Shoe, the Dreadful Thing that we all await.

  I have thought about it a lot (there's time to think on the bus) and have come to the conclusion that while anxiety seeks the company of excitement, fear seeks the illusion of certainty. Anxiety is the ordinary New York emotion. It is a form of energy, and it clings, like ivy to a garden wall, to whatever is around to cling to, whether nationalism or the Knicks or Lizzie Grubman, as readers of the New York Post recognize. At the height of the bubble, anxiety was all around us: the anxiety of keeping up, of not falling behind, of holding one's place.

  Fear, well earned or not, is a different thing. People who live with the higher kinds of fear—the sick, the soldier—go on living mostly by making structures of delusional domesticity. They try to create an illusion of safety, and of home. At Waterloo, soldiers welcomed the little signs of farm-keeping evident around them; in the dugouts of the Somme, every rat-ridden alley had a designation and every rat itself a pet name. The last time New Yorkers were genuinely afraid, as opposed to merely anxious, was during the great crime wave of the sixties and mid-seventies, and they responded in the same way: by constructing an elaborate, learn-it-by-heart geography of safe and unsafe enclaves, a map of safe rooms. The knowledge that your map of safe rooms could not truly protect you from what you feared then, any more than riding the bus can save you from it now, did not alter the need to have a map. People say that twenty somethings have sex out of fear—that terror sex—but twenty somethings have sex out of sex, and the adjective of the decade is always attached to it. In the eighties, they had safe sex, and in the nineties boom sex, and they will have sex among the ruins, if it comes to that.

  What we have out of fear is not sex, or any other anxiety-energized activity, but stillness. It's said that people in the city are nicer now, or more cooperative, and I suppose this is true. But it is true for reasons that are not themselves entirely nice. The motivation of this niceness is less rectitude and reform than just plain old-fashioned fright. There are no atheists in foxholes, but there are no religious arguments in foxholes, either. The fear we feel isn't as immediate or as real as the fear soldiers feel. But our response is the same. These structures of delusional domesticity are the mainstay of many lives in New York now. The bus, a permanently running dinner party among friends, a fiction of family for a d
ollar fifty, a Starbucks on wheels, is the rolling image of the thing we dream of now as much as we wanted the broadband pipe to wash away our sins three years ago, and that is the safe room. For the first time, the bus has something strange enough to symbolize.

  But then fear and the delusions that go with it are everywhere. After Thanksgiving, my friend the great property developer invited me to dinner, and there I met men who were planning a war. In his huge apartment on Fifth Avenue he had them all, the wise men and gurus of the neo-con initiative. The guru spoke on the Arabs: “They either want to be at the table or on the menu,” he said dismissively. Seeing the worry on my face, F.A., who a year ago had been wise about the concentric circles of culture, reassured me. “This is no big deal,” he said. “It's two weeks, three weeks, at most.”

  It occurs to me, walking home, that they are seeking their own delusional domesticity; a familiar place, and a very weird safe room. Invasion, occupation, radical reform—all of this belongs not to a new agenda but to an old and, in its way, comforting one, where states hit other states over the head with billy clubs and drag them to the slammer. To think of terrorism as a police problem, rather than a military one, is not to minimize it in a comforting way; it is to confront the real fear in its true, even more terrible dimensions. Since terrorism starts off as the weapon of war's losers, another victory in war will not make terrorists disappear. It will only make them multiply. The true thing we have to fear—the “non-state actor,” the atomic bomb smuggled into Times Square—is more real as a problem for the overmatched police right here than one that can be solved by the overweening military somewhere over there.