by Pico Iyer
The last taxis slipping back towards the suburbs. The girls finally leaving the discos and clubs and heading back to the shacks where they sleep across the river. The city caught by surprise, going about its private rites while the bulldozers, churning, in the little lanes, all the neon now turned off, grind back and forth, back and forth, removing the evidence of night.
Because jet lag is so much a part of my life now, I tell myself I will make the most of it—attend to it, enjoy its disruptions, as I would those of a geographically foreign place. When I return to my mother’s home, therefore, I go out at first light for lunch, and enjoy seeing my hometown as I have never seen it before: the smell of kelp above the fast-food stand, the pungent tang of the sea that will disappear once the day is under way. People returning from parties, or the graveyard shift, others going out into the day while it is still virgin: all the people I never see in my ordinary life.
And when I return from California to Japan, I return by way of some strange Asian city—Kuala Lumpur, Shanghai, Hanoi— and, for my first few nights of discombobulation, prowl the dark. Were I to go to anywhere that resembled home, I’d be keeping everyone up by going out for lunch at 3:00 a.m.—and would, in turn, be thrown out by them as I turned in for a good night’s sleep at eleven in the morning. So, embracing the traveler’s first rule—everything is interesting if you look at it with the right eyes—I use the sleeplessness to try to see a world, a self I would never see otherwise.
I step out of the airport in Singapore, though in Singapore it’s easy to feel as if you’ve never stepped out of the airport: everything is so spotless, so streamlined, that the entire city feels as if it’s a line of duty-free stores, and man-made rain forests, set along landscaped streets. A visitor always feels he’s on a tour bus in Singapore, even if he’s alone—being guided around the sights of the “Singapore Story” film that is screened for tourists at the airport round the clock.
Under jet lag, though, another city comes forward, as if the twenty-first-century construct were peeled away to reveal something more odorous and ancient, less domesticated. The last few tubes of pink fluorescent lighting are still on in Little India, where the women sit on rattan chairs in evil-smelling doorways and look out into the dark. The temple pythons who guard the unmarked alleyway, and offer good luck, are gone now for the night, but the joss sticks still burn beside the candles in the Chinese shrine. The vendors sell potency pills and dildoes from their wheelbarrows. Groups of men circle around, muttering, pushing one another about, and now and then, in a bout of intoxicated courage, one of them steps forward, into the room, and states a price.
Along the shiny malls of Orchard Road—the new, official Singapore, where Barnes & Noble and Marks & Spencer and Nokia and Nike all share a single entrance (there’s a Starbucks on this intersection, a Starbucks on that one)—tall girls who weren’t girls when the day or the decade began flounce outside the Royal Thai Embassy, walking up the sidewalk, walking down it. The only other figure in sight is Ronald McDonald, seated on a bench, one arm extended, surveying the outlines of what seems a burger paradise. Farther down, along the water, the faces of Manchester United and Chelsea follow me as I walk along a strip of bars, their neon lights reflected in the canal. African men are disappearing down a street of bobbing red lanterns, where the international phone-call centers have the overbright clarity of provincial police stations.
I see a woman, standing at a window, arms folded, in a long black backless dress, staring out into the night, and then, coming round, I see that it’s a mannequin. A White House official is reading from a text about the war on an oversized screen above the steps that lead down to the disco called Underground. Outside the clamorous bars of Orchard Towers—Crazy Girls, Sex, the Ipanema World Music bar—the taxis are lined up, forty strong, and the waitresses smiling at you as the doors of Country Jamboree swing open are all wearing ten-gallon hats. It could be Singapore, of course, but it very likely isn’t.
The lure of modern travel, for many of us, is that we don’t go from A to B so much as from A to Z, or from A to alpha; most often, we end up somewhere between the two, not quite one, not quite the other—in an airport, perhaps, that is and isn’t the place we left and the place we think we’re coming to. Jet lag, in some ways, is the perfect metaphor for this, the neurological equivalent, I often feel, of some long grey airport passageway that leads from one nowhere space to another. It speaks, you could say, for much in the accelerated world where we speed between continents and think we have conquered both space and time.
And yet, of course—this is its power—it isn’t just a metaphor. It’s painfully real, as real as those words that are coming out slurred, or that piece of paper on which we’ve methodically added 2 + 2 and come up with 3. We’ve been placed at a tilt, and the person that comes out from us is someone suffering from something much deeper than the high-frequency hearing loss or the super-dry sinuses that flying six hundred miles an hour above the weather in a pressurized cabin mean.
Being human, we try to counteract the spell in the usual human ways, by exchanging secrets and telling stories. Take leopard’s bane, or melatonin; walk barefoot across fresh grass for ten minutes after you arrive. Carry a fluorescent light box with you to reproduce the patterns of the place you’ve left; turn your watch forward as soon as you board, to the time of the place you’re going to.
But none of it, I think, really speaks to the person we’re becoming. I feel, when lagged, as if I’m seeing the whole world through tears, or squinting; everything gets through to me, but with the wrong weight or meaning. I can’t see the signs, only their reflections in the puddles. I can’t follow directions; only savor the fact of being lost. It’s like watching a foreign movie without subtitles, perhaps; I can’t follow the story, the arc of character, but something else—that inflection of a hand, this unregarded silence—comes through to me intensely.
Things carry a different value, a different heft, when you’re jet-lagged, but there’s no counter on which the exchange rates are posted. People will tell you it’s like being under a foreign influence, but it’s not; for one thing, unlike with drink or drugs, its effects don’t diminish with the years, but grow and grow. You can make rules for yourself for what you should do in this parallel world, but they are rules, by definition, you can’t remember when you need them (the imagination is a drunk who’s lost his watch, as Guy Davenport says, and has to get drunk again to find it). Once, under jet lag, I threw away all the notes I’d taken on a magical, and unrepeatable, foreign trip. Another time I decided to do my taxes just off the plane and, happily ignoring a $40,000 credit, faced month after month of I.R.S. letters and threats.
I try to make the most of it, as ever, and say that jet lag can release me from the illusion of the self. Getting off the plane, I go through three months’ worth of correspondence, and hardly notice that this letter is praising me to the skies while that one is condemning me to perdition. They all belong to someone else, I tell myself, and I’m very happy not to be a part of his drama.
The next day, trying to pick up the pieces of my life, I go out to the post office, the bank, and all I can see is a desperate loneliness in the faces in the street; they seem plaintive, unclaimed somehow, as if they were issuing a cry for help. For someone who’s just stepped off the plane from Japan, where everyone wears a mask of cheerfulness as she goes from one place to the next, it’s all unnaturally unnerving.
The next day, though, I’ve begun to settle into the world around me; I hardly notice the lonely faces. Four, five days later, if you were to remind me of what I’d said before, I’d say, “What are you talking about? Everything’s normal. These people are just the way they’re supposed to be.”
One day in 1970, a woman called Sarah Krasnoff made off with her fourteen-year-old grandson, who was caught up in an unseemly custody dispute, and took him into the sky. In a plane, she knew, they were subject to no laws; and if they never stopped moving, the law could never catch up with them. T
hey flew from New York to Amsterdam. When they arrived, they turned around and flew from Amsterdam to New York. Then they flew from New York to Amsterdam again, and from Amsterdam to New York, again and again and again, for the better part of six months.
They took 167 flights in all, one after the other. They saw twenty-two different movies, an average of seven times each. They ate lunch again and again, and turned their watches six hours forwards, then six hours back. The whole fugitive enterprise ended when Mrs. Krasnoff, aged seventy-four, collapsed, the victim, doctors could only suppose, of terminal jet lag.
I wake up one day in my mother’s house, on one of my periodic trips “home,” and we have breakfast together. She walks more slowly than she used, and has lost, she tells me, two inches in height; now, as I prepare to fly back across the Pacific, she shows me the articles and clippings she’s saved up for me. A cartoon from The New Yorker, an article about the virtue of drinking water eight times a day.
She drives me to the airport, bravely, hardly letting on that she might be sad that her only living relative is flying to the far side of the world, only putting out a protective hand as I disappear through the security machine. I get on a small propellor plane for Los Angeles and see her standing at the gate, waving. At seventy, there are certain things you must let go of.
I watch her standing there, waving and waving as the plane starts up, begins to taxi, then takes off into the heavens, and I know that this is an image I must keep close to me. A person for whom I am responsible in some respects, too kind to burden me with her own concerns.
Fourteen hours later, I’m on a different continent, and hardly able to imagine the life, the home I left this morning. It’s as if I’ve switched into another language—a parallel plane—and none of the feelings that were so real to me this morning can carry through to it. It’s not that I don’t want to hear them; it’s that they seem to belong now to a person I no longer am.
Was it always like this, I wonder, when people were just boarding carriages for London? Or, even today, when a nephew of a friend of mine makes the two-week-long walk to school across the fields in Kenya? Isn’t infidelity part of the sales tax, part of the lure, of travel? It is, of course, and it’s nothing but the nighttime side of the dissolution of self, the release from normal boundaries that flight induces. Indeed, it’s part of what moves us to take flights in the first place: to walk through that archway of lights and become a different person. A girl in a long dress is serving up an elixir of forgetfulness. The music numbs us into a kind of trance state. Lethe—the Sirens—is available on every corner in the global order.
And yet the man who disappears into the dark arcade knows at some level what he’s doing, and chooses the amnesia that’s waiting for him. He drinks to forget, he goes home with a stranger explicitly because he longs to escape the life that doesn’t satisfy. In the realm of jet lag, though, the double life feels accidental: you’re watching TV and someone comes up and changes the channel on you and you can’t summon the energy to get up and change it back. I don’t want to betray the life I left behind six hours ago, but I’ve changed my money on arrival, changed the voltage on my shaver, and I’m working in a different currency now. I could take a drug of sorts to reverse the effects of the drug of displacement, but I’m not sure if it could return me to the person I was when I got on the plane. All it could do, perhaps, is induce me to forget that he is someone different.
“You’ll call me when you get there?” a sweetheart asks.
“Of course I will,” I say, and do. But whoever is calling isn’t the person who made the promise, and the sentences, the sentiments, so achingly alive last night, sound as if they’re coming from someone else.
Not long ago, in Damascus, I lived for a few days on muezzin time: long silent mornings in the Old City before dawn, walking through labyrinths of dead-end alleyways, in and out around the great mosque, and then long hot days in my room sleeping as if I were in my bed in California. Then up again in the dark, the only decoration in my room a little red arrow on the wall to show which direction Mecca was.
I went on like this for a while—watching the light come up in the mosque, seeing the city resolve itself into its shapes in the first hours of light, and then disappearing myself, down into a well—and then, after a few days, something snapped: at night, by day, I could not sleep. I stayed up all the way through a night, and the next day couldn’t sleep. I drew the curtains, got into pyjamas, buried myself inside the sheets. But my mind was alive now, or at least moving as with a phantom limb. Soon it was dark again, my time to wake up, and at last, at 2:00 a.m. or so, reconciled to my sleeplessness, I picked up an old copy of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and began to read.
From outside, in the fourth-floor corridor, the sound of a door being opened, then closing. Furtive rustles, a circle of whispers. The thump of a party, forbidden booze, female laughter. The ping of the elevator as it came and opened its doors; the sound of the doors closing again, the machine going up again and down. Sometimes I went to the window and, drawing the curtains, saw minarets, lit in green, the only tall monuments visible across the sleeping city. Once, putting away the story of Dr. Thompson and his Samoan, I opened the door to check the corridor, but there was no one there. No footsteps, no figures, no anything.
Hours later, I was in an Internet café in Covent Garden, not sure of who or where I was, having not slept for what seemed like weeks, and hours after that, in Manhattan, where I’d lived in a former life. My bags had not arrived, and so I was wearing clothes not my own, bought with an airline voucher. Outside, a drill screamed in the harsh summer light—“reconstruction,” the Front Desk said—and I tried to push myself down into sleep, somewhere else.
A little after midnight—I was just coming to life and light now—I went out and walked to Times Square, where there was still excitement. A man was cradling his girl’s head in his arm, and kissing her, kissing her softly. She stooped down to get into a cab, and he leaned in after her, kissing her again, as if to pull her back.
The cabdriver, with a conspicuous slam, put on his meter, and the car pulled away. A woman nearby was shaking her breasts at a male companion, who looked as if he belonged to another world from hers. He watched her in delight, the screens and lights all around exploding.
The man who had been kissing, kissing his girl, eyes closed, straightened himself up as the car disappeared around a corner, looked around—taxis, crowds, from every direction—and then walked across to a telephone as if to start the night anew. Crowds streamed out of theaters so one could imagine for a moment this was New Year’s Eve, the center of the world. The hushed, deserted mosque of the Old City of Damascus—I’d been there yesterday morning—was a universe away.
I walked and walked through the city in the dark, seeing a place I could easily imagine I’d never seen before, let alone lived in for four years. At Sixty-second and Broadway, a man, tall and dark, suddenly raced out into the street, and I stiffened, my New York instinct telling me this was an “incident.” But it was just a group of cheerful men from the islands, playing cricket under the scaffolding of a prospective skyscraper at 2:00 a.m.; the man fielded the ball in the middle of the empty road and threw it back as if from a boundary in Port of Spain. Around the all-night grocery stores, the newsstands, people were speaking Hindi, Urdu, who knows what language, and epicene boys were wiggling their hips to catch the attention of taxis.
Elsewhere—last night in Damascus again—people were huddled on stoops, against buildings, bodies laid out as if no longer living, scattered across the steps of shuttered churches. A woman crouched on the steps of an all-night market, three suitcases in front of her. A man reciting to himself, outside a darkened theater. Another wheeling a suitcase across a deserted intersection—2:57, says the digital clock outside the bank.
I’d never seen these signs of poverty, this dispossession, in all the years I’d lived here, but in the dead of night a kind of democracy comes forth. The doorman says hello
to me as I pass, and the night manager of a McDonald’s laughs at a drunken joke as if he’s never heard it before at 3:15 a.m. On the floor of the same McDonald’s, a group of kids sits in a tribal circle.
On Sixth Avenue, as I walk, a clutch of Japanese tourists, twenty or thirty of them, following a woman under a flag, stand silently, waiting for the light to change. As soon as it does, they walk across, en masse, as unfathomable as everything else here, off on some kind of night tour.
An all-night guard is saying something about a colleague who got lost. A tall, tall girl with a model’s ponytail is hailing a cab on Eighth Avenue. A woman with a shock of blond hair, a leopardskin coat, is traipsing after a man in a suit, while another woman sits up and goes through her worldly possessions: a bundle of blankets beside her on the street.
I could be in Manila again, I suppose, on the night side of the world. Certainly I feel as if I’ve never seen this place around me, even when I lived here and worked many a night till 4:00 a.m., taking a car back through the deserted streets before awakening and coming back to the office after dawn. When the light comes finally up, and I go to breakfast at a fashionable hotel across from where I’m staying, the friend who greets me tells me that there was an incident last night, a mass murder in an all-night fast-food store. Five bodies discovered in a pool of blood; it was on all the morning news shows.
“That’s strange,” I say (in Damascus now, Covent Garden?), “I never would have guessed it. I was out in the street last night, walking and walking; the city never looked to me so benign.”
2002
A HAUNTED HOUSE OF TREASURES
Eyes followed me everywhere I walked around the half-lit monuments of Angkor—out of darkened doorways, out of openings in the carvings of devils and gods, out of little Buddhist shrines illuminated by the flicker of a guttering candle. An old crone waved an incense stick at me as if it were a curse, and another, her lips stained red with betel nut, spat out what looked like blood. Everywhere, soldiers were standing in the shadows of the temple, scarcely discernible by candlelight, and a white-robed soothsayer, in a sudden patch of sunlight, was dealing out futures to villagers. The Buddhas I saw in corners were not serene or reassuring presences, as they might be in other parts of Asia; they were skeletal, often, or pinch-faced, like wraiths in some complex pagan pageant (as befits, perhaps, an area that went from Hindu to Buddhist to Hindu to animist monuments during the six centuries of its creation). All around the scores of temples scattered across seventy-seven square miles of jungle in northwestern Cambodia, there were images of snakes, of leper kings, temples to Yama, God of the Dead.