The Enterprise - 64

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.

The Autobiography of Someone Else - 20

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 Enterprise - 63

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.

Today in light of the fires we discussed digitizing everything, birth certificates and social security cards and deeds and whatever, against some abstract calamity ahead because no one ever knows. The TV playing college basketball on mute. I coughed spasmodically whenever I laughed or sometimes even talked, the tail end of this virus.

Sometimes outside our window at night someone shouts out something strange and alarming. Like now: “Excuse me! Can I borrow your phone to call my dad?” With the strain of urgency in the voice, maybe fear. But when I get up to look out the window all I see is a solitary figure across the street, a young woman. She stands at the crosswalk for a moment and then turns to walk along the park. Like nothing.

Facebook has become—or is more than ever—a morass of bullshit posts promoting or representing this or that, the Baltimore Orioles or the ASPCA. Blocking them becomes a game, an obsession even, and then of course there’s the dreadful realization you’re doing what they really wanted all along, instructing the machine who you are and how you behave by being you and doing what you do. There’s nothing you can do but flee, but you’re not going to do that, are you?

With every tap you feel more and more, I’m working for these motherfuckers now. I’m a data-providing machine. Telling the algorithm what you hate is just as valuable as telling it what you like. Maybe more.

Then you notice all the other posts, by your friends. They’re sharing the shit they’ve been told to follow. All we can do in the end is one of two things: block or follow. block or follow. The terms of the AI era have already been inverted: we humans are propagating content by machines.