Through the Children's Gate

by Adam Gopnik

  Then an odd thing happened. Every day Luke would come home from school with a kind of offer sheet for his McCovey card. “Dad, what if I traded McCovey for Bob Gibson?” he would ask over dinner, his face betraying only the slightest sign of deliberate taunting, of complicity in teasing Dad. “You'd be crazy,” I would say flatly. The next night: “Dad—Daniel offered me Whitey Ford for him.” I tried to distinguish between my own knowledge of the relative value of these ballplayers and their represented value on the face of the cards. I tried to be sage. But I didn't want him to trade the McCovey card. Every morning I would drop him off at school and cry out inwardly: Don't trade the McCovey card!

  I don't know why it mattered to me. “You're going to be trading steak for hamburger!” I would warn him when he came home with a particularly lowball offer. But the truth was that, so far as I could see, some of the offers—Gibson for Willie, Ford for Willie—were pretty decent. I could sense that the card was burning a hole in his pocket—that possessing it was, perversely, urging him to surrender it, transform it, abandon it. It was, I suppose, a dream come true, and the only thing to do with a dream come true is give it up, so another dream can take its place. (Proust got a whole book out of this idea.)

  Why did it matter to me, though? After all, one card or another … it's his game, I told myself relentlessly. It was, I came at last to understand, because the serendipity of the purchase of the card at Alex's was a marker in our own relationship, our own friendship, beginning to change, properly, with the passing years. We had bought it together, and I wanted it for us. If it became currency in his game of peer-group rivals—which is what it ought to be—then it was no longer a significant object in our history of father-son pleasures. This had occurred to him, too, or at least been sensed by him, driving him in just the opposite direction.

  I came home from the office one day, and he was waiting for me by the door, a guilty smile on his face. “Dad, I traded the McCovey card today,” he said, smiling but firm.

  “What did you get for it?” I asked weakly, sadly.

  He showed me: Whitey Ford, and Yogi Berra, and a throw-in member of the 1959 White Sox, Luis Aparicio. It was a pretty good haul of old ballplayers, I had to admit. Well, each man kills the thing he loves, and each nine-year-old has to trade his McCovey card. The cards are a way out into the adult world of exchange and judgment, of deceit and enterprise; they are there, above all, to be traded. Once the card is put in circulation, it is no longer his—but it is no longer mine, either. Parenting, however hard we discipline our hearts to make our children independent, involves an assertion of ownership; baseball cards, like money and desire, are a medium of exchange.

  When we had another no-screen sleepover the other weekend, I walked into Luke's room and was annoyed to find the boys huddled over the computer. “It's okay, Dad,” Luke said with winning innocence. “We're writing a screenplay.”

  They were, too—a story called “The New Finding,” a sequel to The Lord of the Rings. They let me read a few pages. It was pretty clever, a transposition of Tolkien into Manhattan.

  And what could we say? That they alone could not enter into the great gamble, the permanent game, of screenplay writing, into which all their parents would sooner or later plunge, as Mexican peasants plunge into the lottery, knowing the odds but dreaming of the jackpot? How could we forbid them that?

  Considering the maze of screens and cards and pages, I ended up at last with a bitter, semi-Marxist conclusion: It is not that we want them free of screens, really. It is that we want them to be screen producers rather than screen consumers. We say that we don't want them enslaved to screens, but what we really want is for them to enslave other people to them. We want them to be Steve Jobs or Steven Spielberg—feudal screen lords rather than mere screen peasants, screen serfs. We do not mind if they play games, so long as they grow up to write the software. We will leave them alone for a weekend to write their screenplay, even if they have to huddle over a screen to do it.

  The New York Mafia season passed with the coming of summer, when the players scattered, and then re-formed with the autumn. The game went on, but we noticed that the circle of players had altered slightly; there were certain couples whom we decided not to ask back to play with us—they were too loud, or too dull, or too unskilled—and then we noticed that certain other people, with whom we had played in the spring, were no longer playing—at least they must have given up the game, since we were not invited to their houses to play. Funny, that they lost interest …

  And then it dawned on us: The game of Mafia we play at night is a ruse, a red herring, the game that conceals the real game. The real game of Mafia is the game of who asks whom back to play the game again. The apparent game of playacting and pretend death is just a subsystem, orbiting within the larger game not of pretend death but of brutally real social inclusion and exclusion. Over the Chinese takeout, murderous social judgments are being made: They're no fun, they're too giddy, they're too flat, they're too shrill. Silently, in the middle of the night in our Sicilian village—the real Sicilian village of New York, where the work of conspiracy is accomplished by cell-phone calls and e-mails—someone is being murdered and dropped right out of the game, the social circle, while others are being left to live. The real killers are an amorphous and self-appointed but fatal small inner circle within the larger innocent circle of players. A Mafia! One morning you wake up dead, though you don't know it until weeks go by and you realize that you have not been invited to the next game. You thought they were your friends, but they now turn out to be, well, Mafia. We are complicit in these murders, of course, as we, too, include and exclude, reinforcing our own circle. There is not one true Mafia, we realize, but several, Five Families, each whacking members of the other ones. The real “night” is the week's interval between games; the real murders the dropping off of friends; and the real God—well, there is no God, really.

  On Thanksgiving, after the meal, with many friends we played Mafia because the children wanted us to; they are envious of our game-playing evenings out, the only thing we do without them. But the game feels rote in the absence of near-strangers with whom we can bond and break. That new game had decentered us as we want the old games to decenter the children; it left us reeling, just a little, with a usefully punctured ego. To have been killed, and by those people, too—to have been judged, so unfairly, as dull as all those others who deserved it! But then we have killed, we know, and just as cruelly, those friends on whom our social disdain has somehow landed, who could not have known that we would never ask them back. We were at the center, and now we are not. We have turned on our friends, and our friends have turned on us. We are a Mafia, after all, and more murderous than we pretend.

  Death of a Fish

  When our five-year-old daughter Olivia's goldfish, Bluie, died the other week, we were confronted by a crisis larger, or at least more intricate, than is entirely usual upon the death of a pet. Bluie's life and his passing came to involve so many larger elements—including the problem of consciousness and the plotline of Hitchcock's Vertigo—that it left us all bleary-eyed and a little shaken.

  To begin with, Bluie, as his name suggests, was not actually a goldfish. He was a betta, a goldfish-size fish that the people in pet stores encourage you to buy in place of the tetchy and sickly true Asian goldfish. The betta is a handsome fish, with long, sweeping fins. It can be red or black or violet or blue, and it is, at least according to the pet-store people, the Vietcong of pet fish, evolved in rugged isolation in the rice-paddy puddles of Indochina and just about impossible to kill off. The only drawback is that male bettas fight with one another and have to be kept apart. It is not surprising these days to see a pair of them on a child's dresser in Manhattan, held in separate containers, in a kind of glass-bowl parody of the co-op apartment building that surrounds them, each fish furiously pacing its cubic foot of space and waiting for the other to turn up the stereo.

  And then, in a deeper, damper sense, Bluie was n
ot really a fish at all. He was, like so many New York fish and mice and turtles, a placeholder for other animals that the children would have preferred to have as pets, but which allergies and age and sheer self-preservation have kept their parents from buying. Olivia and her ten-year-old brother, Luke, desperately want a dog, and at Christmas Olivia brought the class hamster, Hamu, home from her preschool as an experiment in pet-keeping. Hamu stayed with us for a mostly happy, if sometimes jittery, holiday week, and we reluctantly agreed to add a hamster to the family.

  We went to the second floor of PETCO, the mallish store on East Eighty-sixth Street, where all the rodents are kept together—rats and mice and guinea pigs and hamsters and gerbils. Looking at them, Martha had a foreboding sense of what Darwin must have felt, looking at the Galápagos finches: that these things were not nearly so distinct as they had been trying to make you believe. A hamster and a guinea pig and a gerbil are all rats, and the differences, tails and no tails, cute noses and not, are really bells and whistles, niche-marketing gimmicks. Having spent twenty-five years of her New York life struggling to keep rodents out, Martha couldn't see spending time and money to bring one in.

  So we talked the children into goldfish, and then the weary fish salesman talked us into bettas instead. (“The goldfish will die,” he said shortly. “Then what?”) We bought them bowls and gravel and decorative architecture to swim around in, and took them home. Luke named his Django—a family joke, since he has often heard the story that this is what I had wanted to call him until his mother vetoed it, firmly—and Olivia gave hers the more descriptive name of Bluie. For a while, she seemed to accept his provisional, placeholding nature with equanimity.

  For a pet condemned to live in so many brackets of meta-meaning, a fish passing as a hamster hoping to become a dog, Bluie had a pretty good life. In the constant struggle of parents of two children—one obviously large and one (especially to herself) irrefutably, infuriatingly small—to even life up, we got Bluie a castle, a bigger object for his tank than we got for Django. It sat on the gravel, and rose almost to the surface—a Disney-like princess's residence, with turrets and castellations and plastic pennants. There was even a route from the base of the castle to the top turret that Bluie could swim up. A third betta, won at a street fair, joined Bluie on Olivia's dresser, but this new guy, named Reddie, had only a bowl to swim in. Reddie, we thought, kept pressing to the edge of his bowl to stare at Bluie's real estate with a certain resentment, the way a guy who lives in a condo on Broadway and teaches at City College might regard a colleague who writes best sellers and lives in a penthouse on Central Park West.

  One Sunday night around bedtime, my wife called me into Olivia's room. Bluie was stuck in one of the windows of his castle, wriggling and huffing, with just his head out, looking ahead and trying to swim away. He wasn't supposed to be able to swim up there into the windows—he was supposed to stay within the channel in the castle. But the castle obviously had a design flaw.

  “Bluie's stuck in the window!” Olivia cried.

  “Calm down, Olivia,” Luke said. “He's just a fish.”

  “Bluie is my best friend,” Olivia said. “I could tell him things I couldn't tell anyone else!” Until that moment, Bluie had seemed to be just a finny bit of decor, but at that moment, at least, he mattered to her crucially.

  I watched Bluie wriggling in his window, staring out, stuck.

  I felt for him, another victim of grandiose Manhattan real estate, undone by his own apartment. It was one of those moments, of which parenting is full, when you scream inside, I don't know what to do about this! while the parent you are impersonating says calmly, “I'll fix it.”

  I picked up Bluie's bowl and took him into the kitchen, leaving Martha to console Olivia. I slid the kitchen door shut and then reached into the water and tried gently to draw Bluie out of the window. I tugged lightly and then realized that he was really wedged in. I tugged again, just a touch harder. Nothing. I saw that if I pulled at all firmly I was likely to rip his fins right off. I tried pushing him on the nose, urging him back out the way he came. Still nothing. He was stuck.

  I looked around the kitchen. The remains of a sea bass that we had eaten for dinner—and that had doubtless, when it was up and swimming, had a lot more personality than Bluie ever did—rested on the counter, filleted skeleton and staring, reproachful head, waiting to be tossed out.

  “Why can't Bluie think, I got into this mess by swimming forward, I'll go back the other way?” Luke said. “It's like he doesn't have a rewind function in his brain.”

  He had slipped quietly into the kitchen beside me and was watching, an intern to my baffled surgeon. Like many ten-year-olds, he is obsessed by what philosophers call the problem of consciousness but he calls the thinking-and-feeling thing. “Does Bluie know he's Bluie?” he would ask when we watched the fish swimming in his bowl in Olivia's room. “I mean, I know he doesn't think, Oh, I'm Bluie! But what does he think—does he know he's him swimming around? Or is he just like a potato or something, only with fins, who swims but doesn't think anything?” What does it feel like, he wanted to know, to be a fish, a hamster, a monkey, a chimp? What does it feel like to be someone else?

  When my sister, the developmental psychologist at Berkeley, came to visit, she sat Luke down and said, smoothly, that scientists once thought that life was a problem, but then they had not so much solved the problem as dissolved it, by understanding ever simpler forms of life. Luke's problem, why we know what it feels like to be alive, would probably dissolve into its parts, too. Luke had nodded politely, but I could see he still held that the problem of thinking and feeling certainly felt like a problem when you thought about it.

  “Swim backward, Bluie,” I implored. “Get out of there.”

  Bluie, of course, did nothing but wiggle some more, wedged in his window.

  “Is he thinking, I'm dying?” Luke asked at last.

  Finally, I settled on a cowardly postponement of what even then I knew to be inevitable. I walked back to Olivia's room. “Let's take Bluie to PETCO in the morning and see if the experts there can help him,” I said to Olivia as we tucked her in. “They've probably got a whole team of guys who are specialists in castle extraction.”

  At five in the morning, I woke up to look in on Bluie. He was dead. I tried to think about what to do. I decided to take him out, still stuck in his castle window, and put him and the castle into a white plastic bag. Then I sat down to read at the kitchen table, in the gray light of the June Manhattan dawn, spring in Manhattan feeling so much more accelerated, so much quicker and time-lapsed and vivid than it does in any other city, a wave of pollen and warmth and renewal blowing in the window.

  My sister had given me a kind of reading list to help me answer Luke's questions at a deeper level than I could on my own, and I had read many of the philosophers who have something to say about his problem. I read David Chalmers, who thinks that consciousness is the ghost in the machine, the secret irreducible presence in the mind that distinguishes us from computers and goldfish and other creatures who provide only a zombie-like imitation of our self-knowledge. I read those philosophers who think that what we call consciousness is just an illusion, and bears the same relation to the workings of our real minds that the White House press spokesman bears to the workings of the White House: It is there to find rationalizations and systematic reasons for feelings and decisions made by dim, hidden powers of whose pettish and irrational purposes it is aware only long after the fact.

  Of all the theories that I came across, the most impressive was Daniel Dennett's. He argues that consciousness is a by-product, not a point—that it is just the sound that all those parallel processors inside our heads make as they run alongside one another, each doing its small robotic task. There is no “consciousness” apart from the working of all our mental states. Consciousness is not the ghost in the machine; it is the hum of the machinery. The louder the hum, the more conscious you feel. If Bluie had had a more interesting life,
he would have known that he was having it. Bluie did not know that he was Bluie because there was not enough Bluie going on in his head to make being Bluie interesting even to Bluie.

  Luke woke up and padded into the kitchen. He asked what had happened to Bluie, and I told him. We decided that we would bury Bluie before Olivia woke up, and then tell her that we had taken him to PETCO. That would buy some time, anyway. I emptied Bluie's bowl, hid it in the closet of my office, and Luke and I got dressed. We carried Bluie, in his castle, in his white bag, down the hall to the trash room. We held our caps over our hearts as he went down the chute. Then I took Luke to school. He was silent on the way, but at the school door, he turned to me.

  “Dad, whatever you tell her, don't do a big Bluie's-in-the-fish-hospital thing,” he counseled me. “That she'll never buy.”

  When I got home, I woke up Martha. “Bluie didn't make it,” I whispered. “What are we going to do?”

  “We're doing the full Vertigo,” she announced, almost before her eyes were open. She had obviously been thinking about it since last night. “You're going to PETCO and buying a fish that looks just like Bluie, and then we 're going to put him in the fishbowl and tell her that it's Bluie. If it worked with Kim Novak, it can work with a betta.”

  She was referring, of course, to the plot of the fifties Hitchcock classic, which we had seen as part of an impromptu Hitchcock festival about a week before. In Vertigo, James Stewart falls in love with a mysterious, cool blond beauty, played by Kim Novak, who he comes to believe is a mystical reincarnation of her long-dead great-grandmother, compelled to imitate her actions. When, like her great-grandmother, she launches herself to her death from a bell tower in a restored Mission town, Stewart is devastated. Haunted and desperate, he stumbles on a brunette shopgirl who looks eerily like Kim Novak, and forces her to dye her hair blond and dresses her in tailored gray suits, turning her into a precise replica of the Kim Novak character.