by Ben Lerner
Then I recoiled at the thought, wanted one not at all. So this is how it works, I said to myself, as if I’d caught an ideological mechanism in flagrante delicto: you let a young man committed to anticapitalist struggle shower in the overpriced apartment that you rent and, while making a meal you prepare to eat in common, your thoughts lead you inexorably to the desire to reproduce your own genetic material within some version of a bourgeois household, that almost caricatural transvaluation of values lubricated by wine and song. Your gesture of briefly placing a tiny part of the domestic—your bathroom—into the commons leads you to redescribe the possibility of collective politics as the private drama of the family. All of this in the time it took to prepare an Andean chenopod. What you need to do is harness the self-love you are hypostasizing as offspring, as the next generation of you, and let it branch out horizontally into the possibility of a transpersonal revolutionary subject in the present and coconstruct a world in which moments can be something other than the elements of profit.
The food was okay, but the protester kept saying it was awesome. He had put his dirty clothes back on but looked and smelled refreshed. He drank only water, but the food made him voluble, and, as his clothes banged around in the dryer, he talked to me about his travels, how more than anything else—debating everybody about everything, getting kettled and beaten by police on the Brooklyn Bridge, learning to wire generators, quitting drinking—his experiences in what he called the movement had helped him chill out, as he put it, about men. I thought he was embarking on a story of sexual awakening, but he meant something more general: instead of assuming that every male stranger past puberty was a physical and psychosocial threat, he was now open to the possibility of their decency. For as long as I can remember, he said, whenever I walk past a guy on the street or see a guy in another car or the halls of a building, what I’m thinking to myself, consciously or not, is: Can I take him, who would win the fight? Almost every man thinks that way, the protester said, and I agreed, even though my awareness of that line of thinking had diminished steadily if incrementally since I was a teen, replaced now with my awareness that a blow to my aorta could kill me. When I’d opened the door for the protester, though, and sized up his height, had my chances in a fight occurred to me? Probably. But I don’t think that way anymore, the protester said, not after so many experiences like this, referring, I supposed, to my letting him shower, sharing food.
We talked about the latest NYPD brutality for a while and then he said, You know how when you’re a kid and you go to the bathroom with other boys, I mean you’re standing side by side pissing—I was a little worried where the protester was going with this—the big thing was looking at the other kid’s dick out of curiosity, and as you got older that became more and more of an offense, could get you called a faggot or whatever, and so that stops at some point, unless you’re cruising maybe, I don’t know. But then sometime in middle school or maybe for some people it’s high school there is this kind of performance that starts when you take your dick out of your pants to piss in a urinal, you start bending at the knees just a little, or otherwise making a show as if you were lifting some kind of weight.
I was laughing because I did know what the protester was talking about, knew exactly, but had somehow never noted the widespread practice consciously. Countless instances flashed before my eyes—in locker rooms in Kansas as a kid, more recently in airports all over the country and in large restaurants, two of the only institutions where I now urinated in company, because at school I always entered a stall; many men, maybe the majority, would act, as they took themselves in hand, as if they were grasping, at the minimum, a heavy pipe, and others as though they were preparing themselves for a feat of superhuman strength, often then making a show of supporting their back with the free arm if they held their penis with one hand, or grasping their member with two hands, as if either of those postures were required by the weight. I tried to recall if I’d seen this in other countries. Regardless, we were both laughing by this point, laughing as hard as I’d laughed in a long time, because now the protester stood and started miming perfectly there in my dining room the midwestern man’s premicturition ritual display.
I saw my dad do it and my coaches and my friends and I did it basically without knowing it, had done it all my life, the protester said, catching his breath, and then the other day we were in the McDonald’s bathroom by the park where the manager lets us go and my friend Chris was just like, When are you going to quit acting like it weighs so much, man? Do you need help with that or something? And that was the first time I even realized I was doing it, realized that all these men were always doing it, and I just stopped. I mean, I know it’s not the point of Occupy, but I’m telling you that now I don’t size men up in terms of fights all the time and I don’t act like my cock weighs a ton and it does make me see the world a little differently, you know?
After we cleaned up together we walked to the train; I was meeting Alex at Lincoln Center. Before he got off at Wall Street, I told him to text me if he or a friend needed to shower again and that I was sure I’d see him at the park regardless, that I was often at the People’s Library, but I never did. It felt strange and unsettling to stay on the train as the protester got off and the doors closed, to continue uptown toward a center for the performing arts, but I never considered altering my plan.
Alex and I found each other in the relatively short line on Sixty-second Street for Christian Marclay’s The Clock. The twenty-four-hour video work was running continuously for one week. Wait times were unpredictable; we’d met in and abandoned the line twice before when the estimated wait was two hours or more; now it didn’t look so bad, probably because it was a work night. Alex and I hadn’t seen each other in a few days and could catch up while we waited side by side.
She had been to see her mother in New Paltz and, while her mom had looked unchanged since the last visit a month before—frail, but no more frail—much of her talk now was frankly about death, indiscriminate cytotoxins circulating through her. It’s not that she thinks she’s dying tomorrow or has given up on trying to live for many years, Alex said, but she clearly thinks of her remaining time as the prolongation of the illness and not its outside. Alex’s mother, a sociologist who taught at the state university in New Paltz, had raised her largely on her own; Alex’s father, who was from Martinique, was never married to her mother, and Alex had no clear memory of him. Her stepfather, also a professor at SUNY New Paltz, had been around since she was six; he was gentle, attentive, and, Alex reported, increasingly, if quietly, desperate now.
“Meanwhile,” Alex said, clearly wanting to change the subject, “I learned today that I have to get my fucking wisdom teeth removed.”
“I thought you did that as a kid.”
“I had two out but they left two on top they thought weren’t going to cause problems and now they’re ‘impacted’ and have cavities because I can’t reach them when I brush.”
“When are you going to do it?”
“Soon, before my health insurance runs out. It will still cost me at least a thousand dollars, by the way, because of how bad my dental is.”
“Shit. I’m sorry. Let me know when you schedule it and I’ll go with you. I’ll make you soup. I’ve been working on my cooking.”
“You’ll like this: the receptionist says I can either just do local anesthetic or a heavier IV thing and I’m supposed to choose which one to do. The dentist says just to do local but almost nobody I know has just done local.”
“What did you do as a kid?”
“That’s the thing—I can’t remember. I asked my mom and she said she thought I did something heavier. Apparently if you do the IV sedation it induces amnesia. That’s why so many people have trouble remembering what they did. The difference isn’t really in how much pain you experience but in whether you remember it.”
“I wouldn’t want them working on me when they know I won’t remember what they’re doing.”
“I�
�ll probably just do local.”
I thought about offering to pay for whatever her insurance wouldn’t cover, and worried she was leaning toward local only because it was cheaper, but I wasn’t sure if she’d appreciate the gesture, so I let it go.
I told her about the protester, hoping to cheer her up with the whole pissing-contest thing, and the line moved or seemed to move quickly; we’d waited well under an hour when we were let in. The Clock is a clock: it’s a twenty-four-hour montage of thousands of scenes from movies and a few from TV edited together so as to be shown in real time; each scene indicates the time with a shot of a timepiece or its mention in dialogue; time in and outside of the film is synchronized. Marclay and a team of assistants spent several years sifting through a century of film for possible footage for their collage. When we found our seats it was 11:37; the tension of imminent midnight was palpable, the twenty-three and a half hours of film that preceded us building inexorably to that climax. (I had wanted to arrive by 10:04 to see lightning strike the courthouse clock tower in Back to the Future, allowing Marty to return to 1985, but Alex couldn’t get a train back from her mother’s in time.) Now the actors in each scene, no matter how incongruous, struck me as united in anticipation of that threshold. Even though we had arrived only twenty-three minutes before the end of the day, we were immediately riveted. Several consecutive people on the screen were on the phone begging for stays of execution.
When the hour arrived, Orson Welles fell from the clock tower in The Stranger; Big Ben, which I would come to learn appears frequently in the video, exploded, and people in the audience applauded; some kind of zombie woman emerged from a grandfather clock and everybody laughed. But then, a minute later, a young girl awakes from a nightmare and, as she’s comforted by her father (Clark Gable as Rhett Buttler), you see Big Ben ticking away again outside their window, no sign of damage. The entire preceding twenty-four hours might have been the child’s dream, a storm that never happened, just one of many ways The Clock can be integrated into an overarching narrative. Indeed, it was a greater challenge for me to resist the will to integration than to combine the various scenes into coherent and compelling fiction, in part due to Marclay’s use of repetition: at 11:57 a young woman tries to seduce a boy; at 1:19 they reappear, sleeping in separate beds; what has passed between them? It was impossible not to speculate on what had transpired in the interval, in that length of fictional time synchronized with nonfictional duration, the beating of a compound heart.
Scores of people left the theater after midnight. We remained for exactly three hours; strangely, even though you knew you’d walk out on the film eventually, it felt disrespectful to leave in the middle of an hour. I would return at different times in subsequent days and come to love how, as you spend time with the video, you develop a sense of something like the circadian clock of genre: the hour of 5:00 to 6:00 p.m.—rumored to be the first hour Marclay had completed because there are so many scenes of people “watching the clock” in that interval—was dominated by actors leaving work; around noon you could expect an uptick in westerns, in shoot-outs; etc. Marclay had formed a supragenre that made visible our collective, unconscious sense of the rhythms of the day—when we expect to kill or fall in love or clean ourselves or eat or fuck or check our watch and yawn.
At some point in the second hour of watching with Alex, I noticed she had drifted off, and I surreptitiously checked the time on my phone. Half an hour or so later, I did it again, realizing only then that the gesture was absurd: I was looking away from a clock to a clock. I was a little embarrassed to realize how ingrained this habit of distraction was for me, but decided it revealed something important about the video that I’d forgotten it was telling me the time.
I’d heard The Clock described as the ultimate collapse of fictional time into real time, a work designed to obliterate the distance between art and life, fantasy and reality. But part of why I looked at my phone was because that distance hadn’t been collapsed for me at all; while the duration of a real minute and The Clock’s minute were mathematically indistinguishable, they were nevertheless minutes from different worlds. I watched time in The Clock, but wasn’t in it, or I was experiencing time as such, not just having experiences through it as a medium. As I made and unmade a variety of overlapping narratives out of its found footage, I felt acutely how many different days could be built out of a day, felt more possibility than determinism, the utopian glimmer of fiction. When I looked at my watch to see a unit of measure identical to the one displayed on the screen, I was indicating that a distance remained between art and the mundane. Everything will be as it is now—the room, the baby, the clothes, the minutes—just a little different.
Now I think it was while looking from The Clock to my cell phone and back again that I decided to write more fiction—something I’d promised my poet friends I wasn’t going to do—and over the next week I began to work on a story, outlining much of it in my notebook while sitting in the theater. The story would involve a series of transpositions: I would shift my medical problem to another part of the body; replace astereognosis with another disorder, displace Alex’s oral surgery. I would change names: Alex would become Liza, which she’d told me once had been her mother’s second choice; Alena would become Hannah; Sharon I’d change to Mary, Jon to Josh; Dr. Andrews to Dr. Roberts, etc. Instead of becoming a literary executor, and so confronting the tension between biological and textual mortality through that obligation, the protagonist—a version of myself; I’d call him “the author”—would be approached by a university about selling his papers. Just like the French writer in the story Bernard had recounted the night I met his daughter, “the author” would plan to fabricate his correspondence. That’s the prose I generated first, the kernel of the work, and I believed it was viable. I wrote:
The author would go back later and make sure he wasn’t overusing the signature words of the author he was imitating … He would reread the one or two matter-of-fact messages they had actually exchanged, look again at his Selected Letters.
All this was changing as the technology changed. If an author left no electronic archive, so there was no record of what e-mails you might have sent to him or her, and if you did receive some e-mails from the author in question, and so possessed the relevant address, a plausible sense of when the message might have been sent, then you could write yourself from the backdated vantage of the dead, claim to have printed it out years ago.
Here’s a message from a novelist you did in fact meet, verifiably had dinner with around some Festschrift, recounting and expanding on the talk you never had about your novel, then in an embryonic stage. Here a critic responds at length to the input on an essay you never gave. Then the debates with poets over edits you might have suggested, leading some major writers to make some major statements.
It was not only the historical moment in which the technological transition made such forgery practicable, he reasoned, but it was also the moment in which, if one got caught, the crime could largely be described as gestural, falling somewhere between performance art and political protest. Especially if one donated whatever money the library paid to, say, the People’s Library at Occupy Wall Street.
The story came quickly, almost alarmingly so—I had a draft finished within a month—and I sent it to my agent, who sent it to The New Yorker, which had expressed interest to her about my writing after the unexpected critical success of my first novel. To my surprise, they wanted it, but they also wanted a major cut: to get rid of the stuff about the fabricated correspondence, the section I considered the story’s core. The editors argued it overwhelmed what was otherwise an elegant meditation on art, time, mortality, and the strange nature of literary reception. But I wasn’t going to be one of those people, I insisted to myself, who lets The New Yorker standardize his work; I wasn’t going to make a cut whose primary motivation was, on some level, the story’s marketability. Although I’d felt a small frisson when The New Yorker had accepted it—my parents woul
d be exceedingly proud of me—and although I wanted the approximately eight thousand dollars, I also relished the opportunity to turn The New Yorker down, to be able to tell the story of my story as evidence of my vanguard credibility. I wrote a hasty and, I later realized, typo-filled message to the magazine, cc’ing my agent, explaining that I was withdrawing the piece, that the change they were demanding—I would later realize they’d never even implied it was an ultimatum—violated the integrity of my writing.
I shared the story and this backstory with Natali during one of my visits to the hospital. While Bernard slept beside us, she read it and said simply: I think they’re right about the edit. I showed it to another writer friend and he agreed. Then I showed it to my parents, who thought I was crazy; what the editors were asking for was clearly an improvement.
Finally I showed it to Alex. Her reaction to the piece in which she figured was understandably complicated—Alex wanted to be left out of my fiction—but about the fabrication question, she had no doubt: the story was better without it. Since I’d stolen the wisdom tooth trouble from her life and put it in the story, she joked, maybe I should pay what insurance wouldn’t cover with money from the magazine, assuming they’d take me back. I saw the joke as an opportunity and I begged her to let me do just that: Then I can tell myself I’m apologizing to them to help a friend, I explained, not because I’m an idiot; besides, it’s a nice crossing of reality and fiction, which is what the story is about in the first place. She was quiet for a minute and then said, “No way,” but in a manner we both knew was just a moment in the dialectic of her yes.