by Ben Lerner
I asked him to look at me and then promised him in two languages the only thing I could: he had nothing to fear from Joseph Kony.
After I presented Roberto to his mother, Anita, in front of the school, first asking permission to buy us both churros from a silver-haired woman wrapped in a bright red blanket, one of the many vendors who appeared whenever the school day or the after-school sessions ended, selling churros in all weather and helado in warm, beautiful children swarming them, more material vibrancy and intergenerational exchange and linguistic diversity in this brief public than I had perceived during my entire childhood in Topeka, I did not, as was my habit, begin the long walk home, but instead reentered the building, drawn there by a subtle force. The school had emptied quickly; with the exception of a custodian and a superobese security guard with whom I exchanged a ritual nod, the only remaining inhabitants were a few teachers ensconced in their rooms, applying adhesive stars or planning lessons or replacing cedar shavings in wire cages, presences I could intuit as I began wandering the halls, running a hand along the construction paper autumnalia: foliage changing its Crayola, horns of plenty, turkeys whose bodies were formed by tracing multifingered extremities.
Do you know what I mean if I say that when I reached the second floor and disposed of the wax paper, I was in Randolph Elementary School and seven, the wall hangings now letters addressed to Christa McAuliffe in exaggerated cursive, wishing her luck on the Challenger mission, which was only a couple of months in the future? I pass through Mrs. Greiner’s door and find my desk, the chair no longer small for me, Pluto among the planets in the Styrofoam mobile suspended from the ceiling. My parents are at the Menninger Clinic; my older brother is in a classroom directly above mine; Joseph Kony is just coming to prominence as the leader of a premillennialist force; my aorta may or may not be proportional; the radiator sputters in the corner because November in the past is often cold. The classroom isn’t empty, but its presences are flickering: Daniel appears at the desk beside mine, Daniel whose arms are always a patchwork of Peanuts Band-Aids and minor hematomas, who will go to the emergency room this spring for inhaling a jelly bean—on my dare—dangerously deep into his nose, who in middle school will become the first of us to smoke, but at the time is known for his habit of surreptitiously ingesting Domino sugar packets. It is sad work to build a diorama of the future with a boy you know will hang himself for whatever complex of reasons in his parents’ basement at nineteen, but that work has been assigned, Mrs. Greiner standing over us to check our progress, the synthetic coconut odor of her lotion intermingling with the smell of rubber cement. I’ll make Daniel’s effigy and he’ll make mine, but we’ll coconstruct the spacecraft, letting it dangle like a modifier from a string, perpetually disintegrating.
And I want to say something to the schoolchildren of America who were watching the live coverage of the shuttle’s takeoff. I know it is hard to understand, but sometimes painful things like this happen. It’s all part of the process of exploration and discovery. It’s all part of taking a chance and expanding man’s horizons. The future doesn’t belong to the fainthearted; it belongs to the brave. The Challenger crew was pulling us into the future, and we’ll continue to follow them.
Pulling us into the future
* * *
An unusually large cyclonic system with a warm core was approaching New York. The mayor took unprecedented steps: he divided the city into zones and mandated evacuations from the lower-lying ones; he announced the subway system would shut down before the storm made landfall; parts of lower Manhattan might be preemptively taken off the grid. Some speculated that the mayor, having been criticized for his slow response to a record-setting snowstorm the previous winter, was strategically overreacting, making an exaggerated show of preparedness, but his tone at the increasingly frequent press conferences seemed to express less somber authority than genuine anxiety, as if he were among those he kept imploring to stay calm.
From a million media, most of them handheld, awareness of the storm seeped into the city, entering the architecture and the stout-bodied passerines, inflecting traffic patterns and the “improved sycamores,” so called because they’re hybridized for urban living. I mean the city was becoming one organism, constituting itself in relation to a threat viewable from space, an aerial sea monster with a single centered eye around which tentacular rain bands swirled. There were myriad apps to track it, the Doppler color-coded to indicate the intensity of precipitation, the same technology they’d utilized to measure the velocity of blood flow through my arteries.
Because every conversation you overheard in line or on the street or train began to share a theme, it was soon one common conversation you could join, removing the conventional partitions from social space; riding the N train to Whole Foods in Union Square, I found myself swapping surge level predictions with a Hasidic Jew and a West Indian nurse in purple scrubs. At Canal Street the three of us were joined by a teenager whose body seemed smaller than the cello case strapped to her back. She explained that the doomsday hype was designed to evacuate lower Manhattan so police could install bugs and other listening devices in every apartment. We stopped talking when a mariachi band composed of three men in their twenties, one of whom wore embroidered straight-cut muslin pants, struck up “Toda Una Vida.” It was hard to tell if they played particularly well or if we passengers were, in the glow of our increasing sociability, particularly disposed to appreciate them, or music generally. Regardless, there was an unusual quantity of pathos in the song, applause, then an unusual quantity of currency in the hat.
Emerging from the train, I found it was fully night, the air excited by foreboding and something else, something like the feel of a childhood snow day when time was emancipated from institutions, when the snow seemed like a technology for defeating time, or like defeated time itself falling from the sky, each glittering ice particle an instant gifted back from your routine. Except now the material form of excitation wasn’t ice: the air around Union Square was heavy with water in its gas phase, a tropical humidity that wasn’t native to New York, an ominous medium. In front of the Whole Foods where Alex told me to meet her—it was a preposterous idea to shop at Whole Foods, given that it was always already mobbed, but they were the sole carrier of a tea on which Alex claimed to be dependent, one of her few indulgences—a reporter bathed in tungsten light was talking to a camera about a run on flashlights, canned food, bottled water. Children were darting back and forth behind her, stopping now and then to wave.
Alex greeted me and I noted to myself a difference in her appearance, an unspecifiable radiance, but, as we began to push our way as gently as possible through the crowds, I realized the alteration was most likely in my vision, because everything remaining on the shelves also struck me as a little changed, a little charged. The relative scarcity was strange to behold: in what were typically bright aisles of superabundance, there were now large empty spaces, especially among prepackaged staples, although plenty of outrageously priced organic produce still glistened in the artificial mist. Alex had some kind of list—storm radio, hand-crank flashlight, candles, various foodstuffs; they were out of almost everything on it at this point. We didn’t care, and circulated through the vast store on the current of other shoppers, shoppers who seemed unusually polite and buoyant, despite the presence of police near the registers.
I want to say I felt stoned, did say so to Alex, who laughed and said, “Me too,” but what I meant was that the approaching storm was estranging the routine of shopping just enough to make me viscerally aware of both the miracle and insanity of the mundane economy. Finally I found something on the list, something vital: instant coffee. I held the red plastic container, one of the last three on the shelf, held it like the marvel that it was: the seeds inside the purple fruits of coffee plants had been harvested on Andean slopes and roasted and ground and soaked and then dehydrated at a factory in Medellín and vacuum-sealed and flown to JFK and then driven upstate in bulk to Pearl River for repa
ckaging and then transported back by truck to the store where I now stood reading the label. It was as if the social relations that produced the object in my hand began to glow within it as they were threatened, stirred inside their packaging, lending it a certain aura—the majesty and murderous stupidity of that organization of time and space and fuel and labor becoming visible in the commodity itself now that planes were grounded and the highways were starting to close.
Everything will be as it is now, just a little different—nothing in me or the store had changed, except maybe my aorta, but, as the eye drew near, what normally felt like the only possible world became one among many, its meaning everywhere up for grabs, however briefly—in the passing commons of a train, in a container of tasteless coffee.
Alex found her tea. We got one of the last cases of bottled water—Alex wanted to carry it because I’m not supposed to lift anything heavy enough to increase intrathoracic pressure, but I wouldn’t let her—and then, since we were hungry, we went to the steaming buffets of prepared foods, on this night the least crowded part of the store, and piled high our plates with an incoherent mix of overpriced perishables: samosas, vegetarian chicken, chicken, various dishes involving quinoa, Caprese salad. We paid for these and our tea and coffee, exchanging jokes about our ill-preparedness with the teenager who checked us out, pink highlights in her black hair, then took the train back to our neighborhood, deciding by the time we got to our stop to head for Alex’s apartment.
We turned onto her street and it started to rain, but it felt as if it had already been raining on her street and we’d walked into it, parting it like a beaded curtain. I might have mistaken my intensified attention to the wind for intensifying wind. We passed the community garden and saw two girls huddled together in some furtive effort. I thought they were trying to light a cigarette, but they separated and we could see the sparklers they held, brilliant white magnesium slowly phasing into orange. A small dog yapped at the leaping sparks as they moved around the garden describing circles, laughing, maybe writing their names. I felt acutely aware that nothing slowly flashed across the sky, that no one looked down on the city from above, banking hard on the approach.
In Alex’s apartment we reheated the prepared foods on the stove while listening to the latest radio reports of the storm’s progress—it was gaining strength—and we did most of the things we were told: filled every suitable container we could find with water, unplugged various appliances, located some batteries for the radio and flashlights. I was pleased to see Alex had a substantial cache of wine, most of it probably left behind by the lawyer, and I opened the bottle of red with the label displaying the most distant year, taking pleasure in the knowledge that its value would be lost on me. I poured myself a glass in a clean jam jar and, while Alex showered one last time before we had to fill the tub, I looked at the now no longer entirely familiar photographs on her fridge: here was Alex as a child—gingham and braids—with her mom and stepdad; here I was with Alex’s little second cousin, whom she called her niece, at a party thrown last summer: I was placing a construction-paper crown on her head with mock solemnity, trick candles sparking in the cake beside her. Everything in the photograph was as it had been, only different, as if the image were newly indeterminate, flickering between temporalities. Then it wasn’t. A schedule of unemployment benefits was affixed to the fridge with an NYU School of Public Service magnet.
It was only when we sat down to eat by the light—even though we still had power—of some votive candles Alex had discovered that the danger and magnitude of the storm felt real to us, maybe because our meal had the feel of a last supper, maybe because eating together produced a sufficient sense of a household against which we could measure the threat. The radio said the storm would make landfall around 4:00 a.m.; it was about ten now and the surges were already alarmingly high. How prepared are you, the radio asked, for days without running water? The food tasted better than it was, since it might be the best we’d have for a while, and Alex finished hers, whereas we almost always switched plates late in a meal so I could eat what she’d left over. She asked me not to get drunk as I finished the bottle, at least not until we knew how bad it was going to be. You don’t want to be hung over without water, she said, gathering her brown hair into a high ponytail, and I’m not letting you drink up our supply.
Was I drinking quickly in part because I felt a little awkward about staying the night at Alex’s, something I’d done countless times before? I was just uneasy about the storm, I said to myself, as I cleared the table and did the few dishes. As was our habit, we decided to project a movie on the bedroom wall; a former employer had given her an LCD projector into which she plugged her computer. Because the Internet could go out at any minute, we selected from the few disks she owned. The Third Man looked best to me, maybe because it’s set in a ruined city, and I put it on while Alex changed into pajamas, then we got into bed together, although I remained in street clothes, storm radio and flashlight near me on the bedside table for whenever the power failed.
The shadows of the trees bending in the increasing wind outside her window moved over the projected image on the white wall, became part of the movie, as if keeping time to the zither music; how easily worlds are crossed, I said to myself, and then to Alex, who hushed me—I had a bad habit of talking over what we watched. We watched until Alex was asleep and Orson Welles was dead by a friend’s hand in Vienna and I could hear rain intensifying on the little skylight I was worried might soon be shattered by flying debris. When the movie was finished I looked through the other discs and put on Back to the Future, which I’d found at some point on Fourth Avenue in a box of discarded DVDs, but I played it without sound, so as not to wake her. I plugged earbuds into the storm radio and put one in my left ear and listened to the weather reports while Marty traveled back to 1955—the year, incidentally, nuclear power first lit up a town: Arco, Idaho, also home to the first meltdown in 1961—and then worked his way back to 1985, when I was six and the Kansas City Royals won the series, in part because a ridiculous call forced game seven, Orta clearly out at first in replays. In the movie they lack plutonium to power the time-traveling car, whereas in real life it’s seeped into the Fukushima soil; Back to the Future was ahead of its time. As I watched the silent film I began to worry about the Indian Point reactors just upriver.
Suddenly I became aware of a strange sensation: a faint echo of the radio in the unplugged ear. It took me a while to realize the downstairs neighbors were tuned to the same station. I turned to Alex and watched the colors from the movie flicker on her sleeping body, noted the gold necklace she always wore against her collarbone. I tucked a stray strand of hair behind her ear and then let my hand trail down her face and neck and brush across her breast and stomach in one slow motion I halfheartedly attempted to convince myself was incidental. I was returning my hand to her hair when I saw her eyes were open. It took all my will to hold her gaze as opposed to looking away and thereby conceding a transgression; there was only, it seemed, curiosity in her look, no alarm. After a few moments I reached for my jar of wine as if to suggest that, if anything unusual had happened, it was the result of intoxication; by the time I looked back at her face her eyes were closed. I put the jar back without drinking and lay beside her and stared at her for a long while and then smoothed her hair back with my palm. She reached up and took my hand, maybe in her sleep, and pressed it to her chest and held it there, whether to stop or encourage me or neither, I couldn’t tell. In that position we lay and waited for the hurricane.
At some point I drifted off into strange dreams the radio penetrated and I woke with a start, convinced I’d heard shattering glass. It was 4:43 a.m. according to my phone, the menu screen of the DVD still on the wall, so we hadn’t lost power. I focused on what the voice in my ear was saying: Irene had been downgraded before it reached landfall, moderate flooding in the Rockaways and Red Hook, the phrase “dodged a bullet” was repeated, as was “better safe than sorry.” I got up and
walked to the window; it wasn’t even raining hard. The yellow of the streetlamps revealed a familiar scene; a few branches had fallen, but no trees. I went into the kitchen and drank a glass of water and glanced at the instant coffee on the counter and it was no longer a little different from itself, no longer an emissary from a world to come; there was disappointment in my relief at the failure of the storm.
I turned off the projector and Alex mumbled something in her sleep and turned over. I said, “Everything is fine, I’m going home now,” said it just so I could say I’d said it in case she was upset later that I’d left without telling her. I thought about kissing her on the forehead but rejected the idea immediately; whatever physical intimacy had opened up between us had dissolved with the storm; even that relatively avuncular gesture would be strange for both of us now. More than that: it was as though the physical intimacy with Alex, just like the sociability with strangers or the aura around objects, wasn’t just over, but retrospectively erased. Because those moments had been enabled by a future that had never arrived, they could not be remembered from this future that, at and as the present, had obtained; they’d faded from the photograph.
* * *
When we uncoupled I thought I saw Alena’s condensed breath slowing in the air, but the apartment was too warm for that; regardless, her body returned to homeostasis, it seemed, much more rapidly than mine. She rose from the mattress and smoothed the dress she’d never taken off and I gathered myself and followed her onto the fire escape and took in the lights of the taller buildings that loomed around us, all of which were haloed now. She removed a cigarette from a pack that must have already been atop a sand-filled paint can and lit it by drawing a strike-anywhere match—whose provenance was obscure to me—across the building’s brick exterior. “Oh come on,” I said, referring to her cumulative, impossible cool, and she snorted a little when she laughed, then coughed smoke, becoming real.