Men and Apparitions

by Lynne Tillman

  I’m a picture to myself, a mental image; but when I look in the mirror, I don’t know that person. Analyst says that’s dissociation. I don’t know him.

  I could love anyone, anything. I love an image, big deal. Who cares, really, who gives a fuck.

  It wasn’t just, whatever you think it is, I said to my analyst, I feel Clover, I didn’t just “project” her into being. Sure, transference, that was on the table, and the couch, and it’s what love is, anyway. I fell in love with an essentially always unavailable woman, the image of a beloved.

  analyst: Does Clover love you? Can she?

  me: It doesn’t matter.

  Silence.

  me: She makes me happy.

  analyst: It doesn’t matter that you can’t hold her in your arms.

  me: Is that a question or comment?

  analyst: A question.

  me: In my dreams.

  analyst: Those are dreams.

  me: So what. That’s what we analyze. There’s truth there. Right?

  It was a mind game, and it wasn’t.

  I had time, right, I had it, and didn’t have it. I discovered how to leave love and find it again, we find what we need. I found someone who is not actually there, I saw her right in front of me. OK, I’m in love with an image.

  Mother says, when you’re yourself again, you won’t think this way.

  I don’t buy that there’s a self waiting for me to return to or become, that is some old-timey shit. They split the atom, right?

  I don’t know. Love has an object, it is something, it has quiddity, totally, but the more I felt myself or feel myself not Maggie’s other, the less I believe in romantic love or that it is or was the only way to love, the only way of passion. I’m not talking about robots, dummie-substitutes, cybersex. It’s here, that love also, and this society is in transitions of all kinds. Everyone’s creeped out by this, but I don’t know. I don’t see obvious, conclusive harm. People can come together to have babies, shop them out, get them from donors or from machines. Life is brought into life, artificially. And, love doesn’t have to play or be gamed the way it’s been for the last 500 years. Romantic love grew into wanting to be with someone forever, all of that. That could be over. It didn’t start out “romantic.” Except, will people ever be secure enough to live without a net? Probably not. Drugs might help that along, offer a false sense of security—is there any other kind?—singing lullabies to the brain. To feel content, to have it all pleasant, in the maniacal face of loss.

  Zeke’s new MO: All love is substitution.

  In ethnography, as in life, I now believe we find what we look for, not in a good way.

  Accept all substitutions.

  i become a domestic spy

  Oh, man, even if I explained my motives for becoming an ultra-low-level domestic spy, I’d be skimming the surface. I won’t say when I did this gig, act as an agent for the U.S. Post Office, or why. It came from somewhere in me, this need, OK. I was stale, and pissed about everything—including lost mail, like Florida grapefruits sent to me for Xmas that vanished inside the post office—line-standing, the incompetence and stupidity of my post office station, I could go off at any time about anything.

  It began innocuously, but I was inoculated. Ha. I received an official letter from the USPS in D.C., asking me to cooperate in a study “about making the postal system better.” To help in their “collection efforts” (domestic spying). My duty involved telephoning a special # to record the mail I received, using their code numbers; the # of pieces in any day, and the exact date I received the test mail, as the USPS called it. If I didn’t know the date it had arrived—let’s say, I had been away for two days—there was a problem: that particular test mail wouldn’t count. I couldn’t approximate, I had to know for sure, and be honest, honesty is usually wasted effort; so I was, because I wanted to nail the USPS and I wouldn’t need to lie to do it. Mail came almost every day, all kinds of envelopes. I had to phone a telemarketing firm, with my agent number, punching it in or speaking it into the machine; I’d get a recorded message and answer the simple questions, pressing #1 or #2; but sometimes there were additional problems, like my having been away for more than two days, when I was supposed to have let them know two weeks in advance if I were going away. I didn’t live that way, I often didn’t know my comings and goings until I went and returned. Then my uncertainty about a letter’s actual delivery date forced me to speak with an actual person, because there was a problem, and it wasn’t straightforward. If I called after midnight, when I came home from a club or bar, it was more complicated. The mail had by then actually arrived the day before, so instead of pressing #1 for Today, I had to hit the keys for yesterday’s date, which meant I had to know the date. I didn’t sometimes, or it was physically hard to press the keys, it was a long night, maybe my eyes weren’t focusing right. It was easier just to press the #1 key for Today. But that meant every night I needed to get home before midnight; often I couldn’t or forgot, and then there was that annoying end-of-day duty I’d voluntarily pledged to do. It was a simple job anyone who could read, hear, and count could do, but after two years I’d had it; being civic-minded and responsible was a drag. Civil servility, for zip. The post office will never get better. It’s over. Old technology. It can’t compete, and it wasn’t built to compete. And, it’s not environmentally friendly. But the loss of post office stations can destroy neighborhoods.

  Agents had to return the test mail every few weeks, which required going through piles of mail and finding the right pieces to check off from the list, and place those pieces in the envelope. Bad mail waited to be purged, and I needed to shred irrelevant documents, or disguise them. Shredding takes too much time, so I’d spill ketchup and mustard all over the mail. I don’t think Richie or any other of the mail carriers surveilled the garbage cans (maybe suspicious supers); but if someone was checking the cans, he/she wouldn’t want to get messed up. That’s what I counted on, propriety, staying clean, but I didn’t really appreciate desperate acts then. Also I couldn’t return the test mail from my own zip code. They’d already mailed us agents self-addressed stamped manila envelopes, folded inside smaller ones, so everything was disguised, people’s names, mailing addresses from FL, MN, England, all fakes; but they were uniform, same names and addresses every time. I could tell exactly what was what, so the demented civil servants in our mail-disaster station could too.

  I’m not a suspicious-looking character, trained by my status-wary parents to blend in, and also I learned how from Mr. Petey. T-shirt or long sleeve shirt, black jeans, dark jacket, voluntary uniform. When I was required to carry mail into another zip code zone, I became aware, one, of how many mail carriers there are; and, two, that any border crossing, inner or outer, is a fragile divide, invested with power or not. And intentions are no cover story. I became sensitive to how I might appear to others; crossing over, I slowed down, like, this is hyperbolic, walking through Nothing to Declare at customs, and wondering What is Something to Declare? Then in that second, that delay, I knew I was betraying what I did feel guilty about that could get me stopped, like in a shrink’s office when you stop, hitting right zap on the nexus of the hang-up. I haven’t been stopped at customs recently, not since I was twenty and had no knowledge about the treachery of border crossings.

  Often, no agents are standing around Nothing or Something to Declare, because FBI or Interpol have done their work before: you’re on a list, and would have been stopped earlier. Supposedly. Ends up: no one’s there. Still, I’m guilty about something, and get shaken. Not stirred. Ha. Right, I’m expecting to be caught for something, whether my name registers on their screens or not. I’m expecting to be taken away for something I haven’t done, something that is not on my person, no plants, meat, drugs, nothing but my burden of guilt.

  Totally ready to confess.

  Get past customs, and all these strangers are standing, eager, anxious, waiting. Boom, fluorescent lights, expectant faces—could it be YOU after
twenty years?—you’re parading on a catwalk in a human being fashion show. I’ll take that one; no, that one’s not right. Nope, that’s more like him.

  Reporting on the USPS, its failures: I wanted this urban adventure, not about sex, drugs, rock and roll, etc. Done and done again. Overdone. Being an agent felt clean and dirty, but I was undercover. I wanted to feel worthy about something. I’d started watching spy movies incessantly, after the betrayal, so that was going on also. Media assists! I’d been set up to be crushed, because there had been such an emphasis on loyalty in my clan, but Clarissa betrayed me, and Father—he wasn’t a loyal man. He was selfish, loyal only to himself.

  In my mind, now I was acting like a “man.” I wasn’t terrified of anthrax on my mail. My post office had been shit way before I moved into the zip code, maybe before the WTC was built, that far back, and those times were better, Father said, the sixties, the parents told me stories about their time, and they told me I would have mine. Maybe their time was better, but it was also worse, four major assassinations in five years: JFK, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr., RFK. And others, right. Fred Hampton.

  Long live rock and roll, rock on.

  I’m living in my time with their time’s traumas. Those murders are all mixed up in American minds, mushy minds contracted into dumb knots, numb nuts from Hell. Oh, snap, the feminists caused it! Black power! The pill! You don’t feel the trauma, it hits again with new terrible events, the shock returns, but it’s wearing a mask, and you don’t know what has hit you.

  Oh, man, the contradictions, the paralysis.

  I was bothered, worried, that Richie, my sharp mail carrier, might find out. Richie: a put-upon black guy whose wife left him with their baby boy. Richie could find out what’s up, because he cared about delivering the mail, not dropping it on the street, then trashing it. He might scope out the situation, figure I wanted to nail him: my intention was never to rat Richie out, whatever he may think now. It was and is the system. OK, this volunteer spy job, ridiculous. My buddies dismiss volunteer work. They didn’t know about this project. And other stuff I was doing. Am doing. I bet their secrets would repulse me.

  I am frolicking in failures other than my own. I’m no visionary. I like ruins. I am a ruin. I’m experimenting with unreality, and I like it.

  No matter what, I performed my agent tasks: report the number of pieces of mail received and the dates they appeared in my mailbox. Phone a number and answer an automated voice’s queries. Walk outside, wearing what I wear, to return the appropriate test mail in an alien zip code.

  On a particular day, though nothing weird about it, late fall, sunny with a chill, I came home from teaching, and opened one of the coded USPS envelopes, with a familiar address, a small city of Massachusetts I knew well. As I said, nothing was supposed to be in it except the codes I needed to report, how many pieces, and the date. Occasionally a postcard arrived. This day, about a year after doing undercover work, I opened a square, greeting card–like envelope, and there were words inside and not a code and numbers. In plain handwriting: “The way to heaven.”

  I was expecting something like this, this kind of message, and naturally, or natural to me, I wondered what was the way to heaven. I mean, not exactly a celestial wherever, but could it be that I was closer to heaven, or happiness. Or that it was coming toward me. I’m not ashamed of my interpretations. Was I knock knock knocking on heaven’s door, was my luck about to change, big time.

  Nothing happened in my mailbox for a while, but I gave hard looks, hopefully inscrutable, to the mail carriers. Seriously, they know where I live. Except our street doesn’t have a regular carrier anymore, since Richie retired, and now the carriers and their routes vary, constantly. The post office doesn’t want us to get close to our civil servants; it objects to our having a relationship with them. But UPS, that’s different. That company, staffed by people in brown who often are, chooses friendly characters, who know our names, and they’re a private company. OK, they want to make a profit. Right. But I think this is weird—we citizens aren’t encouraged to feel close to a government worker. I mean, if the government wants its people to “trust it,” wouldn’t it make sure that we knew our mail carriers’ names and we had a friendly vibe, a relationship? This won’t ever happen. In the meantime, capitalists understand the uses of trust better. In God we trust not. Really.

  Sometimes I needed to go to the post office, which I don’t like to do anymore, I used to like it, because of the crazy convos happening on line, but now—who knows what might break out. The civil servants don’t serve. Mostly there’s no one at the windows. Institutional sloth, and madness.

  One time the line was moving, oh, man, it was moving, whoosh, and I spotted the manager on the floor, a fake-friendly type, and said to her, “Wow, the line’s really moving today.” She looked toward the cage where a guy was working, then at me, and said, purposefully, “Oh, him, yeah, he likes to work fast.”

  He LIKES to work fast.

  She said it as a challenge, to me. A jaw-dropping interaction right there.

  I never saw that dude again, never, not even once behind the cage. They got rid of him, because he made them all look bad. That’s not civil service. That’s uncivil service.

  anaylst: You once told me about a frightening experience in a post office.

  me: Yeah. I was a kid, I freaked out about a poster of teenage robbers.

  anaylst: Yes.

  me: That’s ridiculous.

  Identity theft and hoaxes, that wasn’t happening in Mother’s day. If Father was alive, he’d probably say, It’s your time now, Zeke. Oh, man, say it ain’t so.

  Hoaxers now devise sophisticated traps to dupe old, fragile, lonely, needy people, or people who lack thrill and want to feel special. A celebrity writes you an email, and says you are known to her or him, Wow, a star knows you! They know you will understand that they require secrecy and privacy, and then this mega-star reveals her-him-self, and the bait is dropped, the hook sinks into a vulnerable psyche. Oh, I want to be noticed by a star, because that means I’m a star too. Oh, we the people are fucked. Thousands of suckers are baited every second. And those robo calls, no end to deception, no end to deceivers.

  Remember that saying, It takes all types. Does it?

  Another kind of viral hoax is benign, jokes or urban tales. The first I remember landing in my inbox was about a man who went to a hotel and was staying for a while:

  Dear Maid,

  Please do not leave any more of those little bars of soap in my bathroom since I have brought my own bath-sized Dial. Please remove the six unopened little bars from the shelf under the medicine chest and another three in the shower soap dish. They are in my way.

  Thank you,

  S. Berman

  Dear Room 635,

  I am not your regular maid. She will be back tomorrow, Thursday, from her day off. I took the 3 hotel soaps out of the shower soap dish as you requested. The 6 bars on your shelf I took out of your way and put on top of your Kleenex dispenser in case you should change your mind. This leaves only the 3 bars I left today which my instructions from the management is to leave 3 soaps daily.

  I hope this is satisfactory.

  Kathy, Relief Maid

  Dear Maid—I hope you are my regular maid.

  Apparently Kathy did not tell you about my note to her concerning the little bars of soap. When I got back to my room this evening I found you had added 3 little Camays to the shelf under my medicine cabinet. I am going to be here in the hotel for two weeks and have brought my own bath-size Dial so I won’t need those 6 little Camays which are on the shelf. They are in my way when shaving, brushing teeth, etc.

  Please remove them.

  S. Berman

  Dear Mr. Berman,

  My day off was last Wed. so the relief maid left 3 hotel soaps which we are instructed by the management. I took the 6 soaps which were in your way on the shelf and put them in the soap dish where your Dial was. I put the Dial in the medicine cabi
net for your convenience. I didn’t remove the 3 complimentary soaps which are always placed inside the medicine cabinet for all new checkins and which you did not object to when you checked in last Monday. Please let me know if I can be of further assistance.

  Your regular maid,

  Dotty

  Dear Mr. Berman,

  The assistant manager, Mr. Kensedder, informed me this a.m. that you called him last evening and said you were unhappy with your maid service. I have assigned a new girl to your room. I hope you will accept my apologies for any past inconvenience. If you have any future complaints please contact me so I can give it my personal attention. Call extension 1108 between 8 a.m. and 5 p.m. Thank you.

  Elaine Carmen

  Housekeeper

  Dear Miss Carmen,

  It is impossible to contact you by phone since I leave the hotel for business at 745 a.m. and don’t get back before 530 or 6 p.m. That’s the reason I called Mr. Kensedder last night. You were already off duty. I only asked Mr. Kensedder if he could do anything about those little bars of soap. The new maid you assigned me must have thought I was a new checkin today, since she left another 3 bars of hotel soap in my medicine cabinet along with her regular delivery of 3 bars on the bathroom shelf. In just 5 days here I have accumulated 24 little bars of soap. Why are you doing this to me?

  S. Berman

  That’s cool, right, no one hurt, but the one about Richard Gere and the gerbil up his ass, pre-Internet, persisted, an ugly urban legend. Even one of my friends called and said, “My friend’s mother works at Cedars-Sinai in LA, she’s in admin, and it’s true, because Gere came in for …” Overnight, the joke disappeared. Maybe that’s when Gere became a Buddhist. But you can’t say “gerbil” to a certain population without Gere being remembered.

  You don’t know wassup. You can’t be sure. Symbiosis awry, human parasitism, unembarrassed narcissism, this is an arena ripe for ethnographers: study the hoax, hoaxers, hoaxees, understand the reasons societies develop them. Their purposes, how they serve, for example, is it anything like the purposes jokes serve?