Through the Children's Gate

by Adam Gopnik

  Late for school on a frozen day, we give up the usual bus route and grab a cab. (Hop in a taxi, as her friend Charlie Ravioli says.) The moment we get in, we're greeted by the deep thrumming sounds of chanting—not Gregorian but some other, more Asian kind. I check the driver's name: a long compound of vowels and “chg” consonants, Rumpole Chingoloalanana—something like that, though not that, obviously.

  “Excuse me,” I ask, “what is that beautiful music?”

  He explains that it is the music of his home country, Nepal, or rather of the Sherpa peoples who inhabit the lower slopes of the Himalayas. “Sherpas like Sherpas?” I ask stupidly. “You mean the kind who guide Englishmen up Mount Everest?” Not Everest, he says, but—and he pronounces the long name of the mountain in his native language.

  “What does that mean?” Olivia pipes up.

  “The top of the world,” he says proudly.

  “Have you ever been to the top of the mountain?” Olivia asks, a New York child for once impressed.

  “No,” he admits. “I have been almost halfway up, to one of the bases. My family guides men up, but I have come here to make my living in this city, make more money here, and send it home.”

  The beautiful chanting continues. An odd feeling of peace descends on us both, I can tell. “What a journey!” I say sententiously to Olivia as we exit the cab. “Imagine this man climbing down from Mount Everest and coming all the way around the world to live in New York and drive a taxi!”

  I tell Luke and Martha the story with great excitement, the chanting and the history, and turn to Olivia. “Wasn't it exciting?” I demand.

  “Actually, it was obvious,” she says calmly; extremely miscellaneous people are just part of life here.

  While the children play with screens and cards, the grown-ups have their games, too. Martha and I have begun to play Mafia, a parlor game that has become popular among our friends. A “Mafia evening” is called, and a crowd—no fewer than fifteen, no more than twenty, writers and screenwriters and actors and publishers and lawyers—gathers at night in someone's living room or around someone's dining room table (in the rarer apartment where there is a dining room). Generally, two games are possible in a single evening, interrupted by Chinese takeout and excited discussion about the game just ended.

  The rules of the game are so simple that to recite them is to make the game sound bafflingly dull. It's one of those games that plays much better than it sounds. The game begins when one player, with long experience of the game, takes on the role of God. He distributes, facedown, a playing card to each player. Three people get red cards and become, for this round, the Mafia; the rest, the ordinary black cards, become villagers; and the one who gets the joker becomes the Comandante, the policeman.

  Night has fallen, “God” announces—and a small but real part of the pleasure of the game lies in having a “God” sufficiently persuasive and authoritative to make the game come alive, to make the night falling on the town feel serious, not playful. The Sicilian village (that is, the group of New Yorkers of the professional classes) falls asleep (that is, shuts their eyes tight).

  “Mafia, make yourselves known to me,” “God” says, and the three Mafia members “make themselves known”: They open their eyes and look at one another, silently acknowledging the others in their sinister cenacle; then they look at “God” before going back to sleep. This is a thrillingly conspiratorial moment, particularly if the Mafia members are in some way ill sorted—a combo of newcomers and veterans. Then the “Comandante” makes himself known to the “God.”

  Then everyone opens his eyes, and the game begins. The villagers must try to identify the Mafia members among them, and then, at the end of each “day,” a majority vote is enough to kill someone they believe to be a Mafia member. The Mafia, of course, try to mislead the villagers into killing the wrong—that is, non-Mafia—people without so obviously collaborating among themselves that their real identity is clear. Then, after the majority votes someone dead, “night” falls again (i.e., everybody shuts his eyes), and the Mafia members silently consult among themselves, instructing the “God” by pointing who it is they want to kill—usually someone whose conversation and questions and accusations suggested that he was on the track of the Mafia, but often enough a red herring. (I won't put quotes around all this from now on—“kill,” “Mafia,” etc.—because the quotes are the game. If you need quotes, you're not getting it.)

  The Comandante then opens his eyes and silently points to any one of the sleeping players. God either nods, meaning that player is in the Mafia, or else shakes his head, meaning not. The Comandante must use this knowledge during the day without giving away the fact that he is the Comandante, which would result in his instant assassination that night, or “night.” (I had to use quotes, just that once.) The game ends when the villagers have killed off all the Mafia, or the Mafia outnumber the surviving villagers. (Mafia wins are not unknown, but the village usually has the edge.)

  Catching the Mafia begins with circumstantial evidence and pure guesswork—a rustle overhead in the night, a guilty smile on a naked face. For a villager, the best starting strategy seems to be a kind of “Blink” scan, simply and quickly to survey every face in the circle as soon as eyes are open, hoping to deduce from a thousand subtle, nonverbal clues just who looks guilty. This works better than you might think. As the game goes on, deductive reasoning comes, slightly, to the aid of intuitive guesswork. The wise villager tries to track the circles of accusation and assassination and figure out whose accuser is getting killed. It is perfectly possible—in fact, completely strategic—for the Mafia to accuse one another, so long as the accusation is deflected sufficiently never to result in a vote on the accused; and it is also possible for the Mafia to kill a perfectly innocent, nonaccusing villager one night, just to throw the others off the scent.

  The game, which is said to have been invented by a sociologist in Russia, is meant to be a kind of devilish variation of Prisoner's Dilemma and other games in which cooperation and competition sit in uneasy equilibrium. The game demonstrates the many and pressing kinds of double-bind logic that fill a social group if its members suspect there are enemies within it. If you are in the Mafia, you have to kill all the people who correctly suspect that you are, but you can't be too obvious that the people being killed are the ones who suspect you, since that would confirm the truth of their suspicions. If you are a villager, you have to share information with the others in order to persuade them to vote the right way, but you can't share too much information, since some of the villagers with whom you're cooperating are certainly Mafia.

  The ostensible pleasure of the game lies in testing your own skills as a dissembler and as a spotter of dissemblers—in lying and spotting liars. Both eager cooperation and absolute paranoia are essential to the strategic game. Yet the really fascinating thing about Mafia is seeing how much pure irrationality lingers in its play, how little real deduction and how much sheer panic govern its conduct. The game quickly breaks down, as social groups will, into small circles of belief, which become lynch mobs of mistrust on the next turn. As these small circles within the group form and break, the emotional authenticity of the alliances, the felt pleasure of trusting another, is startlingly, frighteningly real. “I think it's Larry—it must be Larry,” George says to you, filling his eyes with sincere persuasiveness, leaning forward, confiding, conspiring. And you nod with conspiratorial glee: Yes, it must be Larry, look at him—and for that moment the bond between you and George is so intense as to overshadow your general and complete lack of interest in George as a person. You and George against the Mafia—but then the quick nightly shadow intrudes: What if George is the Mafia? Yet the proper suspicions, though they rise, rarely override these instant bonds. The impulse to trust and go on trusting a confidant is so strong that it often survives even overwhelming evidence that the confidant is a rat—just as, in the real Mafia, Big John Gotti went on trusting Sammy the Bull long after it should have been plai
n to him that Sammy the Bull was singing; the loss of Sammy—the loss of the idea of Big John and Sammy as a single mutually reinforcing unit—was so terrible to contemplate that Big John was prepared to put aside his own doubts rather than lose his friend, with, as we know, fatal results.

  Trust, which we offer the children as a panacea, is dramatized in the game of Mafia, as it is in adult life, merely as a precondition to blindness. “Just trust me” in the grown-up game means “I'm probably lying,” and the more trust you demand, the more likely it is to be a lie. “Just trust me” in the game means merely, “See me past the lie. Support me in the lie.” “Just trust me” is the prelude to betrayal.

  Some of the game's pleasure lies simply in its not being conversation: It is a relief not to have to make small talk with your neighbors at a dinner party. Instead of telling them elaborate social lies in an unformed context, you get to tell them elaborate social lies in a formal one. After all, the game offers a stylized version of the same game most of the players have been engaged in at offices and in meetings all day long, and would normally be playing that night, too, only less openly. Paranoid suspicion that your friends and fellow villagers are secretly trying to kill you is, after all, not very far from the beating heart of New York professional life. Beneath the surface of cooperation and villageness, of evening games and shared Chinese ribs and noodles, there lie murderous impulses; absolute paranoia about the motives of your friends—this is a game we know already. There is a smile of happy betrayal at the end of a successful Mafia game that is a smile of real triumph, uncomfortably intense, off-puttingly familiar. “We got you,” the Mafia people cry, and they excitedly rehearse all the near-misses and shrewd killings. “I knew that Sally was about to suss us out, but we deflected it to Eileen, and then we got Sally that night.” It comes to them a bit too easily.

  Not that the evenings are not jolly, bright, and glowing, with the Chinese food and the absorbed, retrospective conversation (“I knew you were Mafia at the moment when …”). The game creates a kind of excited, genial ecstasy, an excessive feeling of happiness and release, not unlike that which we used to get from the more purple and hazy of drugs, come to think of it. The sense of happiness the game provides I take to be partly a token of its capacity to offer in symbolic form a chunk of real experience—to turn ordinary social betrayal into recreation—but I also take to be something more than merely social, something sexual and even erotic in its way.

  For the truly exceptional thing about a Mafia evening is this: The game quickly degenerates, or advances, into a series of parallel duels between husband and wife (or lover and lover). The game is really played between couples as each one spots the other lying and tries to convince the rest of the room that he or she, uniquely, knows when this is so. A wife looks at her husband, a husband at his wife, a lover at a lover, squares eyes up, and says, “That's the way she always looks when she's lying.”

  And people are bursting to offer up to the group their familiarity with betrayal! As though the truth about our lovers that we cannot wait to tell the world, the thing we've been dying to say for years, is that they—our partners—are chronic but totally unskilled dissemblers. We can't wait to produce evidence about what a liar our loved one really is, and such a steady and poor liar that we can see right through him or her. We know each other perfectly, but it is only within the ritualized confines of a game, over sticky ribs on paper plates in someone's living room, that we can declare to the world: “She's a liar! Just look at that ‘innocent’ face.” But she's my liar, and she can't fool me.

  Yet here is the really odd thing: No one credits the husband or the wife in suspicions about the spouse—at least not any more than they credit all other suspicions and accusations in the game, including those that total strangers have or make about total strangers. Everyone believes himself to be especially good at spotting the prevarications of his sexual partner, but no one else believes this—because, I realize, they have decided that if we were really good at spotting what fakes our partners are, we never would have married them in the first place. The default assumption is that nothing one person in a relationship says about the other can have any probative value at all. “I know that smile. She had that smile on her face when she told me that she hadn't slept with her creative writing teacher,” someone says, and everyone else thinks, You needed the smile to tell you that?

  There is, after all, an irreducible element of impossibility about all other people's relationships, about everyone else's marriages. To each of us, in our hearts, the attraction of another person's mate must be a little unfathomable or self-deluding, illusory. We have no choice but to believe this; otherwise, they have made a better choice than we have. We have to convince ourselves over and over that our own choice was uniquely wise, and therefore that the spell everyone else casts on their mates is essentially spurious, phony, a threadbare thing of patches and obvious bits of makeup and neediness and self-delusion. He didn't see right through this person when he was deciding to buy a co-op and make love and have children with her, so why should we think that he is sharp enough to see through her now, in the middle of this game in someone else's living room on Lexington Avenue? Now she sees through him, suddenly, here? Why didn't she see through him the first time she heard that machine-gun laugh? He thinks she's lying now? But he still nods seriously when she makes the same fatuous remark about Bush being “you know, such a simple man,” over and over again? Obviously, she doesn't know when he's faking, because he does it all the time, and she doesn't notice then. Everyone sees through her except him—so how can he claim to be seeing through her now?

  You might expect an Updikean theater of adultery, of flirtation and seduction and sexual conquest and betrayal, to be going on at the same time within that same living room. The small subcircles of trust ought to become sexualized. But—and, twenty-five years married, I may well be missing something here, but I don't think I am—this doesn't seem to be going on. I am stirred by some of the women players—that excitement with which women play all games, once their tentativeness passes, without the tedious knowingness that men insist on introducing—and, who knows, there may be hidden threads, a pattern in the tablecloth visible only when you hold it to the light, that I am too dull to spot. But it seems to me that the eroticism of Mafia, like the apparent eroticism of the actual Mafia as we see it in the movies and read about it in the tabloids, lies in the renewal of sex among the already connected. The hit man's interest in his own wife is, they say, reawakened by the hit. You're a liar, and I know it, but I'll sleep with you anyway is, after all, the most intimate thing we can say to each other. It keeps the game—many games—going.

  The screens have a hold on the children, but the cards hold them even closer. We live in New York, we tell other people timidly, for the cultural advantages, and for Luke, the major cultural advantage is Alex's MVP, a grungy sports memorabilia and card store on Eighty-ninth Street and Second Avenue. It sits in a basement crowded with old cards and comic books, and Luke's chief desire is to go there and buy more cards.

  We found it first when we were bumming around one day. I was showing him the old neighborhood where Martha and I first lived, for three years, in our basement room on Eighty-seventh Street. It really was a neighborhood once, with a bad bakery, and German restaurants lining Eighty-sixth Street. On a memorable snowy night in the early eighties, I got my first job and we went out to celebrate at Kleine Konditorei, goose and duck with German sauces. All of that is gone now, wiped right off the map, not a sign anywhere of the kind of neighborhood it was just a quarter century ago.

  Luke is indifferent to this, for obvious reasons—no child wants to hear his parents’ mythology; his parents are already sufficiently mythological, evil emperor and good captive princess—and, trying to find something that he would like, I vaguely recalled a vintage comicbook store in the neighborhood. I said, “I think there's a cool card store around here somewhere.”

  “On Second Avenue and Eighty-ninth S
treet,” a man going by announced helpfully. I stared at him in gratitude.

  It was there, and Luke loved it. Small and grungy, with spiritualized sawdust on the floor. The smeared glass cases were crowded with dusty memorabilia at New York prices: a bat signed by Derek Jeter, a World Series program from 1932, a whole world of memories, some of them, a few of them, mine.

  Luke wanted baseball cards. It is only a year now since I broke the news to him, finally and definitively, that the Rookie, the three-year-old fast balling pitcher of the bedtime story of his Paris years, was a fiction. He nodded cheerfully—a Santa moment—and then Martha made me abandon another fiction we had launched before, about the king of Central Park. At Alex's, he began instead to collect Major League Baseball Showdown packs, the new craze in the civilization of nine-year-olds. You collect baseball cards, new ones, showing players from across the decades, and then play a complicated dice-throwing game. (We actually had to send to Washington State for a peculiar twenty-sided die.) Each player pits his lineup against the others, and they follow the rules marked on the back of the cards, which span the decades: Whitey Ford can get out Johnny Damon; Barry Bonds can slug some off Walter Johnson. I love this game because it is, though part of their life now, still historical—it centers and decenters all at once, and for the price of a pack of baseball cards.

  The other day we wandered over to Alex's—Olivia on her scooter; Luke has now “outgrown” his—and Luke bought a pack. He asked Olivia to kiss the pack for luck, and then he opened it.

  He paused. “Dad, this is the kind of thing that only happens to me in my dreams,” he said seriously, and he showed me what, or rather whom, he had in the pack: Willie McCovey, the great San Francisco Giants first baseman of the sixties. Apparently, McCovey, more than even better-known players, is hugely valuable within the game.

  Luke had a good sense of McCovey's “icons,” his particular status within the game, but only the most shadowy idea of who McCovey actually was, obviously, and I took delight in telling him the little I could remember, pretending that that little was more than it was. He listened seriously, with a real edge of respect for a past that reaches into the present: Who Willie McCovey was matters for who Willie McCovey is, for what he is worth in the game.