New Jersey Noir

by Joyce Carol Oates

  Only someone who hasn’t given himself over to the map would scoff at the deficiency of the experience. The deficiency is the fullness: removing a bit of life can make life feel so much more vivid—like closing your eyes to hear better. No, like closing your eyes to remember the value of sight.

  I went to Rio, to Kyoto, to Capetown. I searched the flea markets of Jaffa, pressed my nose to the windows of the Champs-élysées, waded with the crows through the mountains at Fresh Kills.

  I went to Eastern Europe, visiting, as I had always promised her I would, the village of my grandmother’s birth. Nothing was left, no indication of what had once been a bustling trading point. I searched the ground for any remnant, and was able to find a chunk of brick. I download images of the brick from a number of perspectives, and sent them to a friend in the engineering department. He was able to model the remnant, and fabricate it on a 3-D-rendering printer. He gave me two of them: one I kept on my desk, the other I sent to my mother to place on my grandmother’s grave.

  I went to the hospital where I was born. It has since been replaced with a new hospital.

  I went to my elementary school. The playground had been built on to accommodate more students. Where do the children play?

  I went to the neighborhood in which my father grew up. I went to his house. My father is not a known person. There will never be a plaque outside of his childhood home letting the world know that he was born there. I had a plaque made, mailed it to my younger brother, and asked him to affix it with Velcro on the sixteenth of the following month. I returned to his house that afternoon and there it was.

  Instead of dropping myself back down in Princeton, I decided to walk all the way home. It is quicker to walk in the map, as each stride can cover a full city block, but I knew it would take me most of the night. I didn’t mind. I wanted it that way. The night had to be filled. Halfway across the George Washington Bridge I looked down.

  Nothing ever happens because nothing can happen, because despite the music, movies, and novels that have inspired us to believe that the extraordinary is right around the corner, we’ve been disappointed by experience. The dissonance between what we’ve been promised and what we’ve been given would make anyone confused and lonely. I was only ever trying to inch my imitation of life closer to life.

  I can’t remember the last time I didn’t pause halfway across a bridge and look down. I wanted to call out, but to whom? Nobody would hear me because there’s no sound. I was there, but everyone around me was in the past. I watched my braveness climb onto the railing and leap: the suicide of my suicide.

  On the fourth of the next month, I walked beside the vehicle. It was easy to keep pace with it, as the clarity of the photographs depends on the car moving quite slowly. I took a right down Harrison when the car did, and another right on Patton, and a left on Broadmead. The windows were tinted—apparently the drivers have been subject to insults and arguments—so I didn’t know if I was even noticed. The driver certainly didn’t adjust his driving in any way to suggest so. I walked beside him for more than two hours, and only stopped when the blister on my right heel became unbearable. I had wanted to outlast him, catch him on his lunch break, or filling up at the gas station. That would have been a victory, or at least a kind of intimacy. What would I have said? Do you recognize me?

  I went home and turned on my computer. Everywhere you looked in Princeton, there I was. There were dozens of me.

  Hi, it’s me. I know I’m not supposed to call, but I don’t care. I’m sad. I’m in trouble. Just with myself. I’m in trouble with myself. I don’t know what to do and there’s no one to talk to. You used to talk to me, but now you won’t. I’m not going to ruin your life. I don’t know why you’re so afraid of that. I’ve never done anything to make you think I’m in any way unreliable. But I have to say, the more you act on your fear that I will ruin your life, the more compelled I feel to ruin it. I’m not a great person, but I’ve never done anything to you. I know it’s all my fault, I just don’t know how. What is it? I’m sorry.

  I was spending more time each day inside of the map, traveling the world—Sydney, Reykjavik, Lisbon—but mostly going for walks around Princeton. I would often pass people I knew, people I would have liked to say hello to or avoid. The pizza in the window was always fresh, I always wanted to eat it. I wanted to open all of the books on the stand outside the bookshop, but they were forever closed. (I made a note to myself to open them, facing out, on the fourth of the next month, so I would have something to read inside the map.) I wanted the world to be more available to me, to be touchable.

  I was puzzled by my use of the map, my desire to explore places that I could easily explore in the world itself. The more time I spent in the map, the smaller the radius of my travels. Had I stayed inside long enough, I imagine I would have spent my time gazing through my window, looking at myself looking at the map. The thrill or relief came through continual reencounters with the familiar—like a blind person’s hands exploring a sculpture of his face.

  Unable to sleep one night—it was daytime in the map, as always—I thought I’d check out the progress on the new dorms down by the water. Nothing could possibly be more soul-crushing than campus construction: slow and pointless, a way to cast off money that had to either be spent or lost. But the crushing of the soul was the point. It was part of my exile inside of the map inside of my house.

  As I rotated the world to see the length of the scaffolding, something caught my attention: a man looking directly into the camera. He was approximately my age—perhaps a few years older—wearing a plaid jacket and Boston Red Sox hat. There was nothing at all unusual about someone looking back at the camera: most people who notice the vehicle are unable to resist staring. But I had the uncanny sense that I’d seen this person before. Where? Nowhere, I was sure, and yet I was also sure somewhere. It didn’t matter, which is why it did.

  I dropped myself back down on Nassau Street, drifted its length a few times, and finally found him, standing outside the bank, again looking directly into the camera. There was nothing odd about that, either—he could have simply walked from one location to the other, and by chance crossed paths with the vehicle. I rotated the world around him, examined him from all sides, pulled him close to me and pushed him away, tilted the world to better see him. Was he a professor? A townie? I was most curious about my curiosity about him. Why did his face draw me in?

  I walked home. It had become a ritual: before closing the map, I would walk back to my front door. There was something too dissonant about leaving it otherwise, like debarking a plane before it lands. I crossed Hamilton Avenue, wafted down Snowden, and, one giant stride at a time, went home. But when I was still several hundred feet away, I saw him again. He was standing in front of my house. I approached, shortening my strides so that the world only tiptoed toward me. He was holding something, which I couldn’t make out for another few feet; it was a large piece of cardboard, across which was written: YOU WON’T GET AWAY WITH IT.

  I ran to the actual door and opened it. He wasn’t there. Of course he wasn’t.

  As computing moves off of devices and into our bodies, the living map will as well. That’s what they’re saying. In the clumsiest version we will wear goggles onto which the map is projected. In all likelihood, the map will be on contact lenses, or will forgo our eyes altogether. We will literally live in the map. It will be as visually rich as the world itself: the trees will not merely look like trees, they will feel like trees. They will, as far as our minds are concerned, be trees. Actual trees will be the imitations.

  We will continuously upload our experiences, contributing to the perpetual creation of the map. No more vehicles: we will be the vehicles.

  Information will be layered onto the map as is desired. We could, when looking at a building, call up historical images of it; we could watch the bricks being laid. If we crave spring, the flowers will bloom in time lapse. When other people approach, we will see their names and vital info. Perh
aps we will see short films of our most important interactions with them. Perhaps we will see their photo albums, hear short clips of their voices at different ages, smell their shampoo. Perhaps we will have access to their thoughts. Perhaps we will have access to our own.

  On the fourth of the next month, I stood at my door, waiting for the vehicle, and waiting for him. I was holding a sign of my own: YOU DON’T KNOW ME. The vehicle passed and I looked into the lens with the confidence of innocence. He never came. What would I have done if he had? I wasn’t afraid of him. Why not? I was afraid of my lack of fear, which suggested a lack of care. Or I was afraid that I did care, that I wanted something bad to happen.

  I missed my wife. I missed myself.

  I did an image search for the girl. There she was, posing on one knee with her high school lacrosse team. There she was, at a bar in Prague, blowing a kiss to the camera—to me, three years and half a globe away. There she was, holding onto a buoy. Almost all of the photos were the same photo, the one the newspapers had used. I pulled up her obituary, which I hadn’t brought myself to read until then. It said nothing I didn’t know. It said nothing at all. The penultimate paragraph mentioned her surviving family. I did an image search for her father. There he was.

  I entered the map. I looked for him along Nassau Street, and at the construction site where I’d first seen him. I checked the English department, and the coffee shop where I so often did my reading. What would I have said to him? I had nothing to apologize for. And yet I was sorry.

  It was getting late. It was always the middle of the day. I approached my house, but instead of seeing myself holding the sign, as I should have, I saw my crumpled body on the ground in front of the door.

  I went up to myself. It was me, but wasn’t me. It was my body, but not me. I tilted the world. There were no signs of any kind of struggle: no blood, no bruises. (Perhaps the photo had been taken in between the beating and the appearance of bruises?) There was no way to check for a pulse in the map, but I felt sure that I was dead. But I couldn’t have been dead, because I was looking at myself. There is no way to be alive and dead.

  I lifted myself up and put myself back down. I was still there. I pulled all the way back to space, to the Earth as a marble filling my screen in my empty house. I dove in, it all rushed to me: North America, America, the East Coast, New Jersey, Princeton Borough, Princeton Township, my address, my body.

  I went to Firestone Library to use one of the public computers. I hadn’t been to the library since the investigation, and hadn’t even thought to wonder if my identity card was still activated. I tried to open the door, but I couldn’t extend my arm. I realized I was still in the map.

  I got up from my computer and went outside. Of course my body wasn’t there. Of course it wasn’t. When I got to Firestone, I extended my arm—I needed to see my hand reaching in front of me—and opened the door. Once inside, I swiped my ID, but a red light and beep emitted from the turnstile.

  “Can I help you?” the security guard asked.

  “I’m a professor,” I said, showing him my ID.

  “Lemme try that,” he said, taking my card from me and swiping it again. Again the beep and red light.

  He began to type my campus ID into his computer, but I said, “Don’t worry about it. It’s fine. Thanks anyway.” I took the ID from him and left the building.

  I ran home. Everyone around me was moving. The leaves flickered as they should have. It was all almost perfect, and yet none of it was right. Everything was fractionally off. It was an insult, or a blessing, or maybe it was precisely right and I was fractionally off?

  I went back into the map and examined my body. What had happened to me? I felt many things, and didn’t know what I felt. I felt personally sad for a stranger, and sad for myself in a distanced way, as if through the eyes of a stranger. My brain would not allow me to be both the person looking and being looked at. I wanted to reach out.

  I thought: I should take the pills in the medicine cabinet. I should drink a bottle of vodka, and go outside, just as I had in the map. I should lay myself down in the grass, face to the side, and wait. Let them find me. It will make everyone happy.

  I thought: I should fake my suicide, just as I had in the map. I should leave open a bottle of pills in the house, beside my laptop opened to the image of myself dead in the yard. I should pour a bottle of vodka down the drain, and leave my wife a voicemail. And then I should go out into the world—to Venice, to Eastern Europe, to my father’s childhood home. And when the vehicle approaches, I should run for my life.

  I thought: I should fall asleep, as I had in the map. I should think about my life later. When I was a boy, my father used to say the only way to get rid of a pestering fly is to close your eyes and count to ten. But when you close your eyes, you also disappear.

  EXCAVATION

  BY EDMUND WHITE & MICHAEL CARROLL

  Asbury Park

  It was a gray, windy Hallowe’en afternoon in Asbury Park. I was walking along the boardwalk. The beach was completely empty although the boardwalk was crowded with hundreds of people dressed as zombies. As Dita explained to me then in her heavy Slavic accent, the town was competing with Seattle to see which community could produce the greater number of zombies. She told me these facts with her rounded, startled eyes and zincwhite complexion and in spite of her deep, impeded speech, since Dita stammered. She laughed her contralto laugh, a throttled abrasion of a laugh—as if her throat were one of those giant pepper grinders restaurants used to be so proud of in the ’60s when I’d first come east after college. After at last she’d finish a sentence she would hold herself aloft over me (I was a half-foot shorter than Dita), then twist out a short rasp of a laugh, spice for her bland, matter-of-fact words. I’d always found being alone with Dita unsettling. Originally from Poland, she somehow reminded me of the Midwest, its willed warmth, its quietly self-conscious rectitude—and why I’d left it.

  She lived with my favorite former student, Scott, seventeen years her junior and twenty years mine. Dita and I were age-mates, we both loved Scott, and we were both teachers and should have had lots in common except that she resented me for teaching a subject, creative writing, she didn’t believe in—as well as, I suspected, for being able to do it at Columbia. “Such a course does not exist in Europe,” she’d told Scott. Scott had never been shy about reporting her harshest judgments of me. Since he’d graduated and finally left New York, quite awhile ago, most of my conversations with Scott had taken place over the phone—wide-ranging, cheerfully anguished chats continuing at times into the early-morning hours. (I think we were both usually drinking while we talked.) Ours wasn’t the kind of relationship you could easily explain to a rational, self-possessed woman like Dita, head of computer sciences at William Paterson University. Scott could do a raucous impersonation of Dita and I only wondered if she’d ever been privileged to hear it herself. “I think your friend is declining, he’s a drawnk!” she’d supposedly told him, before going into a complaining Carpathian whine: “Oh, Scawt, you need new friends.”

  And now that I was alone with her and the two of us were walking along avoiding the growls and silly sinister menaces of oncoming zombies, I realized that Scott had been exaggerating, and that her pronunciation of his name and the diphthongs she’d had plenty of time as an immigrant to get used to weren’t as Dracula as we’d imagined. “She thinks you’re in love with me,” he’d once said, and knowing that he was in all likelihood (like a lot of insecure straight boys who consider themselves failures) fishing for my affection, I had acted the neutral part: “Come on!” And yet now as Dita and I hugged our jackets to our bodies while the cold wind whipped off the Atlantic, I realized too that I’d subscribed to those exaggerations of Scott’s to add drama to my staid life—and as a bulwark against my disappointments for not having him. And that Dita understood this. Her clear amber eyes had been seeing everything all along, registering every nuance and contradiction in her lover’s character, perceiving me
and my motives—but it was all right. She wanted us to be friends, and she needed my help. She’d called me in Manhattan the day before with the news that Scott was missing and begged me to take a train down to the Jersey Shore.

  “Scott’s been acting strange f-f-for a while,” she’d said, meeting me at the station, and I’d thought, When has he not? I was thinking insensitively—anyone weird enough to say that I’d written some of his favorite novels had to have a screw loose—but I provided the necessary, soothing coos and ahs of amelioration as she went over the details of what she knew and stopped herself from crying out—a grind in her throat of sudden emotion, a twist of bitterly recovered stoicism. “Americans are absurd,” she’d told him, “believing as they do in eternal happiness. What other country would put the word happiness in its constitution?” (How quick he’d been to call me up with that observation.) Yet if anyone ever seemed determined to be unhappy, it was cynical, mocking Scott, barely masking his contempt, I thought, for everyone including himself.

  For the first ten years of our friendship his admiration of my first two “difficult” avant-garde novels had been a love-offering. In the last ten it had been a bludgeon he used to hit me with over my already bloodied head. He had almost memorized my first novel in all its queer and complicated syntax, its gaudy pessimism—for bits of gorgeous accent shot through the gray fog banks of prose here and there. It was like De Kooning’s 1950 painting in Chicago, Excavation, which had reintroduced little pits of color into his huge, asbestos-hued abstractions … Now Scott told me that my brain was so soaked in gin that he doubted if I could remember anything instructive about the original process that had helped me produce my one masterpiece, Antic Twists. He saw me as a burnt-out hive, the swarm long since flown. A bibulous impostor who shared only a name with the gifted (and, that word, promising) author of the past. Scott’s contempt for me in recent years only echoed my own for myself. They say that alcoholics become hermits because they don’t want to expose their weakness to other eyes—no witnesses, please. That must be why I’d been avoiding Scott more and more. We’d been in touch so little lately that I wondered if he’d kept his promise to Dita to get off the bottle. This wasn’t a subject I felt naturally disposed to bring up with the woman who no doubt saw me as one of the worst influences on Scott’s life—neck and neck with the parents who he’d claimed in a memoir (his one published book) had abused and neglected him as a kid back in St. Louis.