The Collected Stories of Deborah Eisenberg

by Deborah Eisenberg

  Oh, that day! One kept waiting—as if a morning would arrive from before that day to take them all along a different track. One kept waiting for that shattering day to unhappen, so that the real—the intended—future, the one that had been implied by the past, could unfold. Hour after hour, month after month, waiting for that day to not have happened. But it had happened. And now it was always going to have happened.

  Most likely on the very mornings that first Rose and then Isaac had disembarked at Ellis Island, each clutching some remnant of the world they were never to see again, Lucien was being wheeled in his pram through the genteel world, a few miles uptown, of brownstones.

  The city, more than his body, contained his life. His life! The schools he had gone to as a child, the market where his mother had bought the groceries, the park where he had played with his classmates, the restaurants where he had courted Charlie, the various apartments they’d lived in, the apartments of their friends, the gallery, the newsstand on the corner, the dry cleaner’s…The things he did in the course of the day, year after year, the people he encountered.

  A sticky layer of crematorium ash settled over the whole of Matsumoto’s neighborhood, even inside, behind closed windows, as thick in places as turf, and water was unavailable for a time. Nathaniel and his friends all stayed elsewhere, of course, for a few weeks. When it became possible, Lucien sent crews down to Matsumoto’s loft to scour the place and restore the art.

  Farewell

  A memorandum hangs in Mr. Matsumoto’s lobby, that appeared several months ago when freakish blackouts were rolling over the city.

  Emergency Tips from the Management urges residents to assemble a Go Bag, in the event of an evacuation, as well as an In-Home Survival Kit. Among items to include: a large amount of cash in small denominations, water and nonperishable foods such as granola bars, a wind-up radio, warm clothing and sturdy walking shoes, unscented bleach and an eyedropper for purifying water, plastic sheeting and duct tape, a whistle, a box cutter.

  Also recommended is a Household Disaster Plan and the practicing of emergency drills.

  A hand-lettered sign next to the elevator says think twice.

  Twenty-eight years old, no superhero, a job that just might lead down to a career in underground architecture, a vanishing apartment, a menacing elevator…Maybe he should view Mr. Matsumoto’s return as an opportunity, and regroup. Maybe he should do something—take matters in hand. Maybe he should go try to find Delphine, for example.

  But how? He hasn’t heard from her, and she could be anywhere now; she’d mentioned Bucharest, she’d mentioned Havana, she’d mentioned Shanghai, she’d mentioned Istanbul…

  He’d met her at one of his uncle’s parties. There was the usual huge roomful of people wearing strangely pleated black clothes, like the garments of a somber devotional sect, and there she was in electric-blue taffeta, amazingly tall and narrow, lazy and nervous, like an electric bluebell.

  She favored men nearly twice Nathaniel’s age and millions of times richer, but for a while she let Nathaniel come over to her apartment and play her his favorite CDs. They drank perfumey infusions from chipped porcelain cups, or vodka. Delphine could become thrillingly drunk, and she smoked, letting long columns of ash form on her tarry, unfiltered cigarettes. One night, when he lost his keys, she let him come over and sleep in her bed while she went out, and when the sky fell, she actually let him sleep on her floor for a week.

  Her apartment was filled with puffy, silky little sofas, and old, damaged mirrors and tarnished candlesticks, and tall vases filled with slightly wilting flowers. It smelled like powder and tea and cigarettes and her Abyssinian cats, which prowled the savannas of the white, long-haired rugs or posed on the marble mantelpiece.

  Delphine’s father was Armenian and he lived in Paris, which according to Delphine was a bore. Her mother was Chilean. Delphine’s English had been acquired at a boarding school in Kent for dull-witted rich girls and castaways, like herself, from everywhere.

  She spoke many languages, she was self-possessed and beautiful and fascinating. She could have gone to live anywhere. And she had come, like Nathaniel, to New York.

  “But look at it now,” she’d raged. Washington was dropping bombs on Afghanistan and then Iraq, and every few weeks there was a flurry of alerts in kindergarten colors indicating the likelihood of terrorist attacks: yellow, orange, red, duck!

  “Do you know how I get the news here?” Delphine said. “From your newspapers? Please! From your newspapers I learn what restaurant has opened. News I learn in taxis, from the drivers. And how do they get it? From their friends and relatives back home, in Pakistan or Uzbekistan or Somalia. The drivers sit around at the airport, swapping information, and they can tell you anything. But do you ask? Or sometimes I talk to my friends in Europe. Do you know what they’re saying about you over there?”

  “Please don’t say ‘you,’ Delphine,” he had said faintly.

  “Oh, yes, here it’s not like stuffy old Europe, where everything is stifled by tradition and trauma. Here you’re able to speak freely, within reason, of course, and isn’t it wonderful that you all happen to want to say exactly what they want you to say? Do you know how many people you’re killing over there? No, how would you? Good, just keep your eyes closed, panic, don’t ask any questions, and you can speak freely about whatever you like. And if you have any suspicious-looking neighbors, be sure to tell the police. You had everything here, everything, and you threw it all away in one second.”

  She was so beautiful; he’d gazed at her as if he were already remembering her. “Please don’t say ‘you,’” he murmured again.

  “Poor Nathaniel,” she said. “This place is nothing now but a small-minded, mean-spirited provincial town.”

  The Age of Digital Reasoning

  One/two. On/off. The plane crashes/doesn’t crash.

  The plane he took from L.A. didn’t crash. It wasn’t used as a missile to blow anything up, and not even one passenger was shot or stabbed. Nothing happened. So, what’s the problem? What’s the difference between having been on that flight and having been on any other flight in his life?

  Oh, what’s the point of thinking about death all the time! Think about it or not, you die. Besides—and here’s something that sure hasn’t changed—you don’t have to do it more than once. And as you don’t have to do it less than once, either, you might as well do it on the plane. Maybe there’s no special problem these days. Maybe the problem is just that he’s old.

  Or maybe his nephew’s is the last generation that will remember what it had once felt like to blithely assume there would be a future—at least a future like the one that had been implied by the past they’d all been familiar with.

  But the future actually ahead of them, it’s now obvious, had itself been implied by a past; and the terrible day that pointed them toward that future had been prepared for a long, long time, though it had been prepared behind a curtain.

  It was as if there had been a curtain, a curtain painted with the map of the earth, its oceans and continents, with Lucien’s delightful city. The planes struck, tearing through the curtain of that blue September morning, exposing the dark world that lay right behind it, of populations ruthlessly exploited, inflamed with hatred, and tired of waiting for change to hap pen by.

  The stump of the ruined tower continued to smolder far into the fall, and an unseasonable heat persisted. When the smoke lifted, all kinds of other events, which had been prepared behind a curtain, too, were revealed. Flags waved in the brisk air of fear, files were demanded from libraries and hospitals, droning helicopters hung over the city, and heavily armed policemen patrolled the parks. Meanwhile, one read that executives had pocketed the savings of their investors and the pensions of their employees.

  The wars in the East were hidden behind a thicket of language: patriotism, democracy, loyalty, freedom—the words bounced around, changing purpose, as if they were made out of some funny plastic. What did they actually refer
to? It seemed that they all might refer to money.

  Were the sudden power outages and spiking level of unemployment related? And what was causing them? The newspapers seemed for the most part to agree that the cause of both was terrorism. But lots of people said they were both the consequence of corporate theft. It was certainly all beyond Lucien! Things that had formerly appeared to be distinct, or even at odds, now seemed to have been smoothly blended, to mutual advantage. Provocation and retribution, arms manufacture and statehood, oil and war, commerce and dogma, and the spinning planet seemed to be boiling them all together at the center of the earth into a poison syrup. Enemies had soared toward each other from out of the past to unite in a joyous fireball; planes had sheared through the heavy, painted curtain and from the severed towers an inexhaustible geyser had erupted.

  Styles of pets revolved rapidly, as if the city’s residents were searching for a type of animal that would express a stance appropriate to the horrifying assault, which for all anyone knew was only the first of many.

  For a couple of months everyone was walking cute, perky things. Then Lucien saw snarling hounds everywhere and the occasional boa constrictor draped around its owner’s shoulders. After that, it was tiny, trembling dogs that traveled in purses and pockets.

  New York had once been the threshold of an impregnable haven, then the city had become in an instant the country’s open wound, and now it was the occasion—the pretext!—for killing and theft and legislative horrors all over the world. The air stank from particulate matter—chemicals and asbestos and blood and scorched bone. People developed coughs and strange rashes.

  What should be done, and to whom? Almost any word, even between friends, could ignite a sheet of flame. What were the bombings for? First one imperative was cited and then another; the rationales shifted hastily to cover successive gaps in credibility. Bills were passed containing buried provisions, and loopholes were triumphantly discovered—alarming elasticities or rigidities in this law or that. One was sick of trying to get a solid handle on the stream of pronouncements—it was like endlessly trying to sort little bits of paper into stacks when a powerful fan was on.

  Friends in Europe and Asia sent him clippings about his own country. What’s all this, they asked—secret arrests and detentions, his president capering about in military uniform, crazy talk of preemptive nuclear strikes? Why were they releasing a big science fiction horror movie over there, about the emperor of everything everywhere, for which the whole world was required to buy tickets? What on earth was going on with them all, why were they all so silent? Why did they all seem so confused?

  How was he to know, Lucien thought. If his foreign friends had such great newspapers, why didn’t they tell him!

  No more smiles from strangers on the street! Well, it was reasonable to be frightened; everyone had seen what those few men were able do with the odds and ends in their pockets. The heat lifted, and then there was unremitting cold. No one lingered to joke and converse in the course of their errands, but instead hurried irritably along, like people with bad consciences.

  And always in front of you now was the sight that had been hidden by the curtain, of all those irrepressibly, murderously angry people.

  Private life shrank to nothing. All one’s feelings had been absorbed by an arid wasteland—policy, strategy, goals. One’s past, one’s future, one’s ordinary daily pleasures were like dusty little curios on a shelf.

  Lucien continued defiantly throwing his parties, but as the murky wars dragged on, he stopped. It was impossible to have fun or to want to have fun. It was one thing to have fun if the sun was shining generally, quite another thing to have fun if it was raining blood everywhere but on your party. What did he and his friends really have in common, anyway? Maybe nothing more than their level of privilege.

  In restaurants and cafes all over the city, people seemed to have changed. The good-hearted, casually wasteful festival was over. In some places the diners were sullen and dogged, as if they felt accused of getting away with something.

  In other places, the gaiety was cranked up to the level of completely unconvincing hysteria. For a long miserable while, in fact, the city looked like a school play about war profiteering. The bars were overflowing with very young people from heaven only knew where, in hideous, ludicrously showy clothing, spending massive amounts of money on green, pink, and orange cocktails, and laughing at the top of their lungs, as if at filthy jokes.

  No, not like a school play—like a movie, though the performances and the direction were crude. The loud, ostensibly carefree young people appeared to be extras recruited from the suburbs, and yet sometime in the distant future, people seeing such a movie might think oh, yes, that was a New York that existed once, say, at the end of the millennium.

  It was Lucien’s city, Lucien’s times, and yet what he appeared to be living in wasn’t the actual present—it was an inaccurate representation of the past. True, it looked something like the New York that existed before all this began, but Lucien remembered, and he could see: the costumes were not quite right, the hairstyles were not quite right, the gestures and the dialogue were not quite right.

  Oh. Yes. Of course none of it was quite right—the movie was a propaganda movie. And now it seems that the propaganda movie has done its job; things, in a grotesque sense, are back to normal.

  Money is flowing a bit again, most of the flags have folded up, those nerve-wracking terror alerts have all but stopped, the kids in the restaurants have calmed down, no more rolling blackouts, and the dogs on the street encode no particular messages. Once again, people are concerned with getting on with their lives. Once again, the curtain has dropped.

  Except that people seem a little bit nervous, a little uncomfortable, a little wary. Because you can’t help sort of knowing that what you’re seeing is only the curtain. And you can’t help guessing what might be going on behind it.

  The Further in the Past Things are, the Bigger They Become

  Nathaniel remembers more and more rather than less and less vividly the visit of his uncle and aunt to the Midwest during his childhood.

  He’d thought his aunt Charlie was the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen. And for all he knows, she really was. He never saw her after that one visit; by the time he came to New York and reconnected with Uncle Lucien she had been dead for a long time. She would still have been under fifty when she died—crushed, his mother had once, in a mood, implied, by the weight of her own pretensions.

  His poor mother! She had cooked, cleaned, and fretted for…months, it had seemed, in preparation for that visit of Uncle Lucien and Aunt Charlie. And observing in his memory the four grown-ups, Nathaniel can see an awful lot of white knuckles.

  He remembers his mother picking up a book Aunt Charlie had left lying on the kitchen table, glancing at it and putting it back down with a tiny shrug and a lifted eyebrow. “You don’t approve?” Aunt Charlie said, and Nathaniel is shocked to see, in his memory, that she is tense.

  His mother, having gained the advantage, makes another bitter little shrug. “I’m sure it’s over my head,” she says.

  When the term of the visit came to an end, they dropped Uncle Lucien and Aunt Charlie at the airport. His brother was driving, too fast. Nathaniel can hear himself announcing in his child’s piercing voice, “I want to live in New York like Uncle Lucien and Aunt Charlie!” His exile’s heart was brimming, but it was clear from his mother’s profile that she was braced for an execution.

  “Slow down, Bernie!” his mother said, but Bernie hadn’t. “Big shot,” she muttered, though it was unclear at whom this was directed—whether at his brother or himself or his father, or his Uncle Lucien, or at Aunt Charlie herself.

  Back to Normal

  Do dogs have to fight sadness as tirelessly as humans do? They seem less involved with retrospect, less involved in dread and anticipation. Animals other than humans appear to be having a more profound experience of the present. But who’s to say? Clearly their feeli
ngs are intense, and maybe grief and anxiety darken all their days. Maybe that’s why they’ve acquired their stripes and polka dots and fluffiness—to cheer themselves up.

  Poor old Earth, an old sponge, a honeycomb of empty mine shafts and dried wells. While he and his friends were wittering on, the planet underfoot had been looted. The waterways glint with weapons-grade plutonium, sneaked on barges between one wrathful nation and another, the polar ice caps melt, Venice sinks.

  In the horrible old days in Europe when Rose and Isaac were hunted children, it must have been pretty clear to them how to behave, minute by minute. Men in jackboots? Up to the attic!

  But even during that time when it was so dangerous to speak out, to act courageously, heroes emerged. Most of them died fruitlessly, of course, and unheralded. But now there are even monuments to some of them, and information about such people is always coming to light.

  Maybe there really is no problem, maybe everything really is back to normal and maybe the whole period will sink peacefully away, to be remembered only by scholars. But if it should end, instead, in dire catastrophe, whom will the monuments of the future commemorate?

  Today, all day long, Lucien has seen the president’s vacant, stricken expression staring from the ubiquitous television screens. He seemed to be talking about positioning weapons in space, colonizing the moon.

  Open your books to page 167, class, Miss Mueller shrieks. What do you see?

  Lucien sighs.

  The pages are thin and sort of shiny. The illustrations are mostly black and white.

  This one’s a photograph of a statue, an emperor, apparently, wearing his stone toga and his stone wreath. The real people, the living people, mill about just beyond the picture’s confines, but Lucien knows more or less what they look like—he’s seen illustrations of them, too. He knows what a viaduct is and that the ancient Romans went to plays and banquets and that they had a code of law from which his country’s own is derived. Are the people hidden by the picture frightened? Do they hear the stones working themselves loose, the temples and houses and courts beginning to crumble?