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.

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.

How I love to watch the Tour de France, not for the racing but the scenery, the nothing restaurants in the middle of little towns, the glorious mountains and waterfalls, people perched on steep hills, almost tumbling into the road that’s painted with riders’ names, a family of five wearing polka dot jerseys, the details.

When I saw the American cheese on the burger on TV I nodded involuntarily. I don’t know why. Not in affirmation, or agreement. Almost defensively.

 

The waiting area by the gate, one flatscreen showing a storm surge lashing Florida’s coast, another showing golf, white men hunched in a green expanse, the tedious unchanging leaderboard displayed. Plus. Minus. Even. The bar and grill across the way is closed but already at this early hour you can glimpse a server behind the screen of idle taps, getting things ready for the coming onslaught of anxious, booze-mad fliers. The agent at the gate informs us that boarding will begin at five forty-six, one minute past schedule.

Man he really is concentrating on that putt. 

Last call for San Francisco from the neighboring gate. The others in our seating area are utterly unremarkable. No defining features, mannerisms. No intriguing conversation. A terrible torpor has set in; they barely reach their hands up to their faces. They’ve been reduced to this: travelers. When they get back to where they come from they’ll reinhabit themselves. People with jobs, friends, hobbies. Secrets. Features that define a life. But for the time being they’re in a state of grace: they’re nothing.

In fact the TV screen with golf has been frozen all along.

I read the police report off my phone, glasses up on my head so I could get up close and see the print. Witness #1, Witness #2. The alleged perpetrator’s unlikely alias, Hugh. By one account he was Puerto Rican, by all the others Italian. White. Heavy-set. 5-11.

One passage described the blood as magma-like.

I peered away from time to time to watch a documentary about an extraordinarily successful singer from the nineties whose song may or may not have led to the suicide of the man who coined its title. She collapsed in tears in her interview on her rickety wooden chair.

He was described as having a widow’s peak. Upon his arrest out of state he had been using “some sort of cane.”

The perpetrator and one of the witnesses arrived at the victim’s house in the perpetrator’s thirty-year-old pickup truck. Something was broken and the victim and the perpetrator spent a few hours troubleshooting. Then they came back in the house together.

Sometimes at night after the kid goes to bed I collapse onto the couch and into the idiocy of “Below Deck Mediterranean.” There’s a comforting aspect to its wretchedness. The put-upon staff welcoming aboard a clan of holidaying ugly Americans, the men paunchy in pink shirts, white pants; the women sun-damaged and lip-augmented; everyone a little rude and impatient to get soused. The staff are hungover themselves, recovering from a shore-leave escapade when someone hit on someone, someone was offended, someone puked and someone fell into the bay. I watch this for exactly six minutes and I’ve had my fill.

It’s the sort of night when I want to fall into the imbecility of watching Worls Cup downhill skiing, a scotch in my hand, mouth a little bit agape.

I was watching a classic French movie late at night, drunk, after the fireworks and after the guests had gone home, actually the fireworks were still going on and they still go on now. I’d watch a scene and descend into a psychedelic interpretation of the events—is that what really happened? Did he think she said he said she thought? I fumbled for the slender Apple TV remote and swiped back 20 seconds, whatever the device is set to do. And 20 seconds more. Turns out nothing of the sort took place.

It took me all day to remember what I’d watched drunkenly before bed last night, a documentary about Sam Cooke. Smokey Robinson appeared to me, his fine features and processed hair, and I realized he’d been on it had to be about music, but what? R&B, Motown? Sam Cooke. 

I flipped through the channels and landed on a tennis match. Was it a replay from years back? It didn’t seem to be. Anonymous players and no crowd. Not even empty stands. No stands. A plywood barrier where they would start. Mask-clad figures hovered just off court, watching vaguely, attending to some thing or other. So it was current, I thought. But then I looked again and wondered whether it was a video game. There was a vague stiffness in the movements, of the players but especially of the others, and of the leaves on the nearby trees and everything else. There was a suspicious emptiness in the grassy area adjacent to the court. No people or cars parked or infrastructure—why bother coding it? The gleam of the sun on the players’ shirts seemed too real—so unreal, really. The match proceeded a while and a more frightening thing became clear: it was real.

I flip to the DVR and there’s a new Anthony Bourdain episode, like he’s still alive, or like he’s haunting us. It’s like there’s somewhere new to go, new experiences to be had, especially if you’re dead.

I wondered briefly tonight whether “The Americans” was an allegory for the opioid epidemic. A middle-class family on a suburban street. Everything looks OK. But the parents are absent unpredictably. Sometimes they return home bruised, maybe missing a tooth. They go to great lengths to explain it all away. And when one day their child sees a crack in reality, and confronts them, they turn it into a family secret. Us versus them. You can’t tell anyone. But the child knows: there’s something Mommy and Daddy love more than me.

How many people live in homes where the sound of jet airplanes routinely pierces the silence, interrupting conversation, requiring the brief rewinding of video programming? A lot, I bet. I really noticed them tonight. Flight paths might have been low on account of the rain. But I like it. Imagining all those people up there, on their way—somewhere, or home.

I almost had a good time today at the sad people’s store, wandering the aisles in search of spaghetti and tonic. In from the cold rain for just a minute or two.

As I did the dishes two great movies were on at the same time: “Office Space” and “School of Rock.” Each one a sparkling affirmation of humanity, a blow against the forces of evil and oppression. I’d watch one until it broke for commercials, switch to the other, switch back. Then they were both on commercials at the same time, pills, dish soap, whatever. Got to serve the man I guess.

As I walked home from the train I looked up to a top-floor apartment on 8th Ave. A large TV hung on the wall and played, shapes and lights flashing across the screen. It played to a lit-up Christmas tree visible through the window to the left. These were the only two things I could see.

What happened today?

Felt out of sorts and alienated at work. Sara said she had a bad day too.

Someone got pushed out on the tracks apparently, and died. Survivors were treated for trauma. It was on the Q line. I don't think I've ever taken it.

In many ways it was a nothing day, a treading water day. A day for killing time before you die. A-Rod wil get hip surgery (like an old woman), miss the start of the season. The princess is pregnant.

Jackie fussed and cried, "No, no, no, no, no, no!"

I made a stupendously bland meal and we watched football, Sara drifting off to sleep as her team lost by a point.

The Enterprise - 43 - The B-Thing

I arrived at Melissa’s to find my sister, red-eyed, sitting on the crimson Persian rug, gazing at the TV. A vodka martini sat before her in its iconic glass.

“What’s yer poison?” asked Melissa.

These were her first words to me after I crossed the threshold. There were funny things about that question. Among them was this: there was only one poison on offer.

“I’ll have a martini,” I replied. She popped the cork of her beloved Belvedere to pour me the first of many.

With each iteration the narrative onscreen further coalesced around a set of themes: Al Qaeda, the Taliban, Osama bin Laden. The planes, one, two, three, four; the Pentagon, the Pennsylvania field. If the whole story could be told at the top of the hour, just once, perfectly—with all the names right, and the times—maybe everything would be OK.

I remembered a night I’d been here, two weeks before, maybe three, and spotted a story in the Times on the kitchen counter. It was about four members of a Viennese art collective who had stayed up all night in their studio on the 91st floor of the World Trade Center. At dawn, they put on climbers’ harnesses, affixed suction cups to the inside of a window, unscrewed it from its mounting, and pulled it into the room. They installed a cantilevered balcony and each, in turn, stepped outside. Accomplices circled in a helicopter taking pictures; a grainy enlargement appeared in the paper. It depicted a human form, sheathed from the waist down by the makeshift structure and framed by one of the tower’s unmistakable columnar striations.

One of the artists was quoted as follows: The amazing thing that happens when you take out a window is that the whole city comes into the building.

No one could confirm that it had happened. No verifiable evidence was found. The Austrians turned mum and the event quickly lapsed into myth. Only its name remained: The B-Thing.

The Autobiography of Someone Else - 7

Mom would always barge in during the last or second-to-last show of the morning, "Fat Albert," "Space Academy," always at the most frustrating moment, after we were full but before we were sated. We dreaded her intrusions so much that we were unable to enjoy the last hour or so of television, instead pretending to pay attention as we seesawed from guilt to fear.

"C'mon kids. Out of the house."

"Mom!"

"But Mom!"

"Up, up, up, up, up! Get some fresh air."

No one cared where their kids went or where they were back then. Everybody's door was always open, mothers high on coffee buzzing through the neighborhood like bees, children tromping through kitchens with their muddy feet, mothers stronger than dirt, filling up another bucket. Is it wet, Mr. Clean? You're soaking in it.

I rode my banana-seat bicycle down Harvard to Dartmouth and up to Harry's house. He was out front on his bike, jumping a little bump in the packed dirt where the yard met the street. He caught a little air and landed wobblingly, pedaling up to me and stopping with a squeal and a skid.

"Wanna play Atari?" I asked.

"Yup," he said.

We dumped our bikes in the driveway and went inside. Harry was my best friend. I hated him.

The Autobiography of Someone Else - 6

For the next four hours we inhabited an amplified and manic world, full of rocket ships and cannonballs, chases and escapes; the personification of things and creatures into caricatures of longing and of fear. A ceaseless refrain of noise and pain sung by nemeses trapped in hopeless, eternal conflict. Cartoons taught us to identify with protagonists, sure, but they indoctrinated us into tragedy and futility too. Who among us has not rooted for the Coyote?

The Autobiography of Someone Else - 5

The remote control was in my sister's hands. She held it to her chest, preciously, and without hesitation I grabbed for it, trying to gain purchase on a corner of the black rectangle edged in chromed plastic, prying at her damp and dirty fingers, surprisingly tenacious, the golden retriever Alex peering at us, tongue extended; I was about to give up when it broke free and fell softly in the burgundy shag. We scrambled for it, exclaiming angry nonsense, cries of ill will and dismay: Give it! Give it! Give it! No! No! No!

It was never over until someone got hurt. Pain was the solemn and incontestable signal to progress to the next step in a program of events, the chime in the filmstrip of our lives. If no one got hurt, nothing new would ever happen. Often there were tears. Sometimes there was blood. So it was that my sister konked me on the side of the skull with the flat of the remote. It was OK. It was over now. It was time to watch TV.

She pointed the remote with an overhand dipping motion, like a magic wand. A tiny dot appeared in the middle of the emptiness, a singularity. In an instant, light and color and form and motion expanded to the edges of the screen, and words and music burst forth, too. It was 7:59 am, the penultimate. The last commercial before the show.

A boy and a girl riding skateboards; the girl complains she's "getting hot and thirsty."

They cry out into the void: "Hey Kool-Aid!"

Their savior appears at once, bursting through a wooden fence and past astonished workmen, lumbering down a hill, an enormous jug with legs and cartoony feet. He bears a real jug of purple drink in his rubbery paw. Glasses filled with ice have materialized in the children's hands. Kool-Aid Man fills them up and the kids quench themselves greedily.

"Tastes great! Our friend's cool," says the girl.

"Our friend's Kool-Aid," says the boy.

"Kool-Aid brand soft drink mix!" says the girl.

Oh yeah, Kool-Aid's here bringin' you fun
Kool-Aid's got thirst on the run
Get a big, wide, happy, ear-to-ear Kool-Aid smile!