This is a waking blog
The jet at rest on the tarmac with the light blinking on its belly. The steady pulse, dull-bright-dull, seems like code from benevolent higher beings. But it’s really just some dumb thing we made, the same shit that makes the lights work on your dryer and alarm clock.
The weird bottoming out right after the plane takes off, like everyone on board subconsciously doesn’t want to fly.
I stared a long time at the dollar off coupon for mouthwash that came in the little plastic pouch she gave me, with the soft-bristled toothbrush and the travel size paste. One dollar. I imagined walking into a CVS or Walgreens, clutching it in my sweaty palm, bringing the bottle of turquoise fluid up front, presenting it to the cashier. Terms and conditions apply. The charm of olden days, when Mom would clip them out of the Sunday paper and you could only watch what’s on TV.
The hygienist was new, a little overzealous, manic. She’d giggle after saying something: You’re not flossing properly around this implant. Giggle. I recommend the Philips Sonicare. Giggle. I grew up in Greenpoint. That’s where I grew up. Giggle. She gave me advice, too much advice. Floss in the morning, don’t just floss at night. Get three cleanings a year. Not two. She was like, fuck it. More, more, more.
Then I threw it away.
At Aetna in Middletown, Connecticut, they had cake for everyone’s birthday and every day was someone’s birthday. A bigass building in a maze of parking lots and looping drives off Interstate 91. Thousands of employees. Of course it was someone’s birthday. There was a fucking cake shop right outside the cafeteria for the express purpose of selling cakes to people in order to celebrate their coworkers’ birthdays. The manager would go down there, maybe an executive assistant. Order up a chocolate or vanilla cake and pick a color frosting. Personalize it please. Then at some point the work team would gather in one of the very many conference rooms and declare surprise to the birthday boy or girl, here’s your fucking cake, look at this beautiful cake. I can’t believe you got me a cake! Then we’d each get a slice on a wobbly Dixie plate and plastic-fork the mealy sponge and too-sweet vanilla creme into our unhungry gullets, everyone, everyone on the work team, even temps like me. Every single fucking day. Cake. Like it or not. You could not refuse the cake. To say no would be an affront to the celebrated one of course, but even worse to everybody else, all who dutifully choked down a wedge of angel food at ten fifteen in the morning on a Tuesday. It’d be a bigger violation of the place itself, not just this corporation that benevolently made this space within which we may toil and magically deposited funds into our banks on a semimonthly basis but the society, the structure, the institution, America in the fullness of reality and dreams. We were the army of the nauseated, the reluctantly obese. On the verge of ecstasy and diabetes.
I was thinking of eating and drinking and all, how you might as well you know, life is short. The image of my old schoolmate crossed my mind, the one who was once a slim and manic boy in braces and is now a portly Bob Vacant, autocorrected from bon vivant. At our high school reunion he spoke at length of his travels in Asia and his fondness for smoky Islay scotch. Anyway life is short and we all die. I lingered on that thought a moment, wanting it to sink deep into my psyche. Maybe there could be a sign. And just then a glitch in the broadcast of the Tour de France I was watching warped the image of bikes on a country road into garish psychedelic blurs and streaks: red, green, turquoise, white.
There was something about the sky the other night. A long dark streak cutting through the dusky blue. I thought, is this something to write about? Right away I thought no. Of course. Stupid, shallow. Pointless. The thing would be to write about writing about it. To describe not just the thing but the question of whether to write about it.
A solitary plastic fork on the low wall down the block.
They say the suspect has been tearful, emotional. Appearing in court in a dark suit, not entering a plea. That sounds like remorse, or bewilderment and grief. Could he have done it on purpose? I was imagining it was all a dreadful mistake, the guy got lost and stuck in a drunken, angry crowd and panicked. And the more he panicked and tried to get away the more people he hurt and the angrier everyone got and the more panicked he got and the more people he hurt. Was it not a tragic mistake? But no. They say he did it on purpose.
Driving the highway past my old hometown I remember the exits, the ramps, the secondary roads. But I’m not sure I remember which way to turn. And I wonder why we never stopped back then to discover the surroundings, to walk out into the rough grass that slowly turns to woods and get down on our knees and touch it, feel it; to really know where it is we live.
Alan had made an arrangement with some guy who had a little ad sales business or something, maybe an old friend from a past career. He occupied a desk to the side of our main room, set apart but audible and visible in the spacious loft. You could hear him on the phone, his booming adman’s voice. Sometimes saying fuck. He’d make small talk about the Yankees to me.
Forty-nine Russian miners trapped as water enters mine.
Tom and I went to a new-tech telecom provider in an industrial park in Cranbury, New Jersey. The main artery to the parking lots with its thin, grassy median. Uniform shrubbery surrounding low-lying buildings with names like Building 7 and Building 9. We sat in a series of conference rooms. Met some people. Gave a training. It began to rain and by the time Tom dropped me off at the PATH station in Hoboken it was pouring down hard.
Josh had scored us a deal doing automated customer support for a major cable company. I spent days copy-pasting FAQs from their website into our output code, testing, tweaking. The endeavor had a cold, prosaic quality that I liked. Its essential dreariness made it seem practical, vital even. Everyone needs to reset their password sometimes.
We walked the same gray path to lunch each day, to the nearest outpost of the giant sandwich chain. Past monthly parking lots, service entrances and loading docks, through passages that tunneled under scaffolds.
Through it all I kept working on the Product. It was still wildly popular, the object of hate, scorn, ridicule and come-ons from every adolescent in the country. The raw numbers dictated we couldn’t shut it down. Repeat visits, session length, uniques—all the metrics remained garish. Start-up common wisdom says you can’t ignore such numbers; you must respect them, even if you have no idea how to convert them into money. In desperation Alan decided fuck it, we’ll make it subscription-only. For $9.99 a year, the kids or whoever the fuck it was out there could curse and threaten the Product all they want. Everyone else would get shut out after one free month. I worked closely with Jacques and Julien from out West to button everything up codewise; we’d set a timer per user and shunt them into a death loop if they didn’t cough up the cash by day thirty.
Every day I came in and checked the running total. Ten dollars here, ten dollars there. It was in the low hundreds after a few weeks. Maybe it would turn a corner, reach some kind of tipping point. An avalanche of users suddenly terrified of losing their digital punching bag, or nemesis, or lover. A couple months went by. We totaled just over a grand. The interactions with users who’d just been informed—some after using the Product for years—that they only had one month left for free were brutal, exceptionally abusive. We pulled the plug. One day the Product said nothing more about money or subscriptions and no one was ever locked out again and life went on.
Josh and Tom and I walked out drunk and dropped Tom off at the ferry for Jersey. Josh and I walked back uptown. The city was naked, unprotected from the dusk. A woman sat in Battery Park reading a paperback by the glow of a generator-powered searchlight, as though some breach in reality had beamed her from her couch. Posh Tribeca restaurants had been turned inside out onto the streets; the patrons standing with their wine, the workers playing cards by candlelight. In the tight maze of West Village streets cars rolled gingerly through intersections. They seemed human somehow, deferential, alive to the rights and needs of other cars and pedestrians especially. In my inebriation I wondered: had we, as a race, transcended traffic lights? Had the remorseless rhythm of green-orange-red, green-orange-red, beaten so deeply into our psyche that we’d finally developed the instinct to yield? People sat on stoops and drank, or stood outside of bars and drank. Josh was supposed to go to a party but what did that really mean anymore? He made some calls and plans were made to meet in Union Square. At Lafayette and Spring we came upon the darkened stairs to the subway, suddenly neglected and irrelevant. Yellow caution tape stretched across the entrance.
"Let's go in," Josh said brightly.
"OK."
It was hot down there, and quiet. Stupefyingly quiet, the way only a very noisy thing can ever be. Yet something beat gently at the silence. What was it? Something that hadn’t ever been heard. Water dripping somewhere, echoing out the tunnel.
It was dark too, very dark, but for a faint glow: by some pointless quirk of backup power the green circles with the yellow arrows beside the turnstiles were lit and pointing, like it was the morning rush.
I took out my Metrocard and held it in the pale light. I looked at Josh for a beat. And I swiped it through the slot like any other day.
BING! went the machine. GO said the little screen. The punch line to a nonexistent joke.
Josh went through and ran up and down the pitch-black platform, yelling to wake the dead.
While I waited for the show to go on I noticed the discreet atmospheric light on the wall of the movie theater flickering and I thought it’d make a good little video and I imagined an employee scolding and forbidding me but of course that wasn’t going to happen and I was about to press the button when I noticed the light wasn’t flickering through my phone and I thought maybe it’s one of those things, the light registers a different way, the frequencies or something, and in my disappointment I lowered the phone and looked back at the light and saw it wasn’t flickering in real life and I thought something’s wrong with my eyes or maybe my mind.
I was at work texting with a friend back home and he let it be known our other friend’s in a bad way. He has some kind of complication related to his Lyme disease medication, a neuropathy, a numbness in the arms and legs. The cure is worse than the disease. And plus his dad is dying. I got in a group chat with some others, what’s going on? It was unclear to me whether he was waiting to take steroids that would cure him or getting off of steroids that would kill him. There was talk of a special diet and botanicals. He may be in the hands of hippie witch doctors, I don’t know. I sighed and returned to my workflow dashboard.
I love the long, zigzagging hallway, the barren decor. The beige linoleum floor and the outlets saying do not use. Each number called starts with a frightening burst of feedback. I was 987.
The man on the other side of the window looked so bored I thought he was going to turn me down and send me home. For no reason. Only that it was the only appropriate gesture for someone so radically detached from what he’s doing. He asked me for this, he asked for that. Jackie’s passport. Mine. I sat at the edge of the chair and wondered if this was a mistake. I need to recalibrate my posture, my speech, I thought, to better match his affect. I eased back an inch or two.
“Here’s your receipt,” he said suddenly. “I suggest you keep it. You’ll get the card in seven to ten business days.”
I thanked him, what’s the word. Not warmly. Emphatically. I gathered up my things, the birth certificate, the passports. Trying not to linger. And then I turned around and walked away.
I normally took the 1 or the 9 from Penn Station but they weren’t running so I took the C. When I walked by the 1-9 station on Canal the entrance was yellow-taped and surrounded by emergency vehicles and personnel: cops, firemen, EMTs, walkie-talkies babbling in static. An empty stretcher sat on the sidewalk. At work our new office manager, Caitlyn, instant messaged me to ask if I’d been on the train with the poison scare. She sent me an article about it. Evidently a passenger had reported a substance under the seats resembling wet sugar.
I was out with Steve, going from one bar to another, when Leeane called. She sounded like she’d been crying. She said she was in bed reading. We talked about getting together sometime and she said she’d been way busy with class.
“And thing is, I’m sort of seeing someone now.”
“Oh OK.”
"I'm not sure how it's working out. He has a six-year-old girl."
She said this and that, she was ambivalent, he was always spending time with his kid. And plus she had drawing class all summer and it was a bitch. I said we could get together and just hang out sometime.
"That would be cool. I want the opinion of a third party," she said. She sniffled.
"Are you OK?"
"Yeah, just you know, a heavy day."
"Nothing really bad heavy?"
"No no. Not at all. Just my drawing class is so hard. And it occurred to me: I'm going to have to be dealing with this all my life."
My brother emailed me to inform me in solemn and oddly formal terms that our grandmother had died. He described the event as “no doubt a blessing,” she having declined the way grandmothers do. I thought of Doctor Robertson, her shrink for many decades, the primary relationship in her life since the premature death of her husband. What they talked about nobody knew. Now nobody would. Nothing ever seemed to change in her psyche—her passive aggression, her neediness, her state of denial. Yet with her kids grown up and gone her treatment at his hands became her life’s work. Her masterpiece. His too, maybe. An invisible legacy. Wonder how he took the news.
When the power went out I thought this is it, they got us again. But deeper this time, not in office buildings but in the place where electrons move through copper wire. We got beers and hung out on the fire escape to watch the sun go down into a rosy haze. I called my mom in Paris. It wasn’t terrorism, she laughed. Just a fuckup somewhere that blacked out the Eastern Seaboard.
Harry’s family moved to Boston or one of those towns near Boston because his mom got some hifalutin job as a nutritionist at a university and at the same time she got sick with cancer. I went up to visit a couple times. At first everything was normal and people went to school and work and gathered ‘round the kitchen table for dinner to talk about their day. But then Susan stayed in her bedroom more and more, a pale green oxygen tank visible between the doorway and her bed. God knows what was going on in there, something out of reach or even impermissible to us, the living. I knew she was in there—or was it her?—calling out in a soft, hoarse whisper, a voice not her own, for a man that’s not her husband in a house that’s not her house. Death.
My dad picked me up and we drove home and Mom and Dad had the biggest fight ever. At first I figured it was my fault. Like Mom was blaming me for needing Dad, for taking him away all day. But then I heard her say did you fuck her? My God no, honey. She’s dying. That wouldn’t stop you before. What are you talking about, before? That never stopped you before. Stopped me what? When? Stopped you fucking a dying woman. A woman who would soon be dead. You’re not talking about that again are you? You damn right I’m talking about that again. Please don’t talk about that. So did you fuck her? Answer me. Answer me! Of course I didn’t fuck her. Well you should have fucked her. Don’t say that. Please. You should’ve fucked her while you had the chance. You should’ve fucked a dying woman. Go ahead. You can fuck her when she’s dead for all I care.
Someone slammed a door. My dad I guess. Sis was in her room. I knew I was supposed to comfort her.
We were in some kind of canyon in the south of France in the summertime, watching a jazz fusion band perform. A steep rock wall with boulders piled across on which spectators sat with their blankets and picnics. We were up around the top I think. With our sad-ass ham sandwiches. We might even have accessed the space from the bluff up above, not from below by the stage. It was hot as fuck. I was maybe seven or eight. How did I even know there was such a thing as jazz fusion? Do I remember it that way now because my brain connected what it had perceived of the music with later knowledge? I don’t think so. I always knew what this music was on some level. Tedious, disappointing. I saw everyone up on that stage with their bell bottoms and electric guitars with the phone cord cables and the synthesizers with all the buttons and knobs and I thought we were getting rock and roll. Big Led Zeppelin rock and roll. But instead we got bleeps and bloops and major seventh chords and elliptical, acrobatic solos that are supposed to take hold of your brain, and maybe it was someone great, maybe it was Weather Report. But my young mind wasn’t having it. I retreated to my default position of sullen boredom and restlessness. On a long, hot car ride before AC the plastic of the Evian bottle would seep into the molecules of that weirdly smooth, bland mineral water and that’s all you had to drink.
In the rush hour home on the A train a man walked into the space between the cars, with it freezing cold and everything—not permitted, dangerou—but he did it calmly and deliberately, like he was just entering a different room at a party. I peered at him through the glass and wondered if he was suicidal, if he might just as calmly step off the edge into the tunnel darkness, how I’d then be obligated to pull the emergency alarm, which in fact hung on the wall beside me bearing slightly complicated directions about remove this and lift that. Yes, I decided. I’d have to pull it. Though no doubt there’d be groans from some onboard, even from some who knew why, people who just wanted to get home on a winter Tuesday night for fuck’s Jesus sake. I’d feel sheepish. But I could surely defend my actions. There’s a man there, a human being. He might not yet be dead. Is our collective inconvenience not justified by getting some EMTs out on the tracks to see if they can’t stanch his bleeding? Yes. It’d be the right thing to do and I’d do it. I’d be the one. I looked at him again and he was checking his phone now. The screen bore a colorful stream of pictures, Instagram perhaps. Just like everybody else.
The United States embarked on a foolish war in the Middle East that would have horrific consequences for untold millions living there and for the men and women sent away to fight. A nightmare world emerged, formed of brutal setbacks, perverse alliances, and collateral damage. Back in New York City I went out with a lawyer who’d been representing Martha Stewart in some civil litigation. We met after work, she in her proper attire, and shared a bottle of red wine on the Park Avenue median, which she referred to as the “meridian.” She told me she used to be a lesbian. I went out with a woman with short, dark hair who was going to school for construction site management. In the cab on the way home she told me about her art installation at the Limelight, an expanse of cotton balls pressed to the stained-glass with wire mesh. Something to do with clouds. The Haitian cabbie’s radio crackled with French news about young Algerians joining the fight against America. I went out with a woman my sister set me up with, the daughter of a fashion designer she did some PR for. She was a summer associate at a law firm. She wore frosted lip gloss. She asked me questions all in a row without a trace of curiosity as to the answers. I accompanied her to the Midtown supermarket where she needed to buy some things and we parted forever with a peck on the cheek.
Sometimes at night I heard what sounded like a giant whirring and clacking machine outside the bathroom window.
Shock and awe, I’d sometimes think to myself like a mantra. Shock and awe.
I rearranged objects and piles of papers and things in my closet, not for any special reason but because I found myself doing it and didn’t stop. There was an old notebook of my dad’s. I leafed through a couple pages to find a poem, dated 1991. No one likes to read a poem. But I knew I had to read this one. I followed down his low, stretchy cursive, so familiar and distinctly his. It was about the view from his window at night. He was living in Paris by then. It’s a scene I’ve seen a hundred times. Yellow glowy headlights like eyes, shadowy figures dart across the street. Suggestive of a river, of life, of something sinister too. He ends by asking, who down there sees me?
The rest of the notebook was blank.