This is a waking blog
Yesterday it was the hottest day of the year so far, and the heaviest with humidity. In the middle of the afternoon there was a cloudburst and rain fell in great big drops. Chris opened the back door of the office and went out on the fire escape.
"It's raining but it's still just as hot. Check it out," Chris said. Denis and I stuck our heads out. It was true. It was pouring but the air was still thick and hot. It occurred to me that I had maybe never felt that before.
Kevin and I went to the downtown Olympic Park to watch boxing that night. The arena was really an elaborate circus tent built around steel scaffolds and bleacher seats, ready to be taken down and forever disappear. Inside the vibe was edgy and mean – I wondered why and then I realized there were virtually no women at all in the entire place. Starving, I got in line for more of the awful, bland food they were serving at all the events. And beer.
We watched a succession of semifinal fights graduating up the weight classes: tiny, wiry light flyweights giving way to bantamweights, lightweights, bigger, slower, stronger. We struggled to make sense of what was happening in the ring and sometimes the outcome was obvious and sometimes it was not, and sometimes the judging seemed arbitrary and maybe unfair. Many boxers were from former Soviet Republics: Russia, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan. It was hard for American boys like us not to root against them in a "Rocky IV" kind of way. With their unpronounceable polysyllabic names and machinelike demeanor they seemed immediately forbidding, their humanity calloused by years of tortuous nationalistic training.
In the audience men shouted at each other in different tongues. They cursed in Russian, Spanish, English and everyone understood everyone else perfectly well. Several times I thought men might wade furiously through the crowd to grapple with each other. We sat directly behind fans of the British super heavyweight Audley Harrison, a black family – maybe his family – carrying a Union Jack. Evander Holyfield sat at ringside and got up between each bout to greet fans across a partition. He posed grandly for pictures, signed autographs. Kevin went down there with his camera and it was funny to look down and watch him stare dully at Evander and the clamoring throng.
I remember when I was a kid, I would watch sports on TV with a ravenous passion. I didn't much care who was playing. I had teams I liked but it was enough to watch the formal green expanse of any field fill up the shimmering screen and to see things happen on it; balls bouncing, flying; officials at their marks, measuring, assessing; cleated players with uniforms bearing bold, block digits. A numerological world of ineffable mystical representations. Formal chaos.
I once watched, enrapt, an indoor soccer game on the dining room TV of the Colbys' apartment in New York. It was me and Lis and Lenny, the parents had gone out. What delight there was to be visiting this manic, thrilling place; and within it to be safe at a table looking up. Watching the ball careen ferociously around the curved boards, to be cleared or kicked on goal with momentous urgency by this player or that one or the other; the ones in lime green or the ones in orange, it didn't matter, it was happening.
Lenny's mom had left us a pan of brownies with Swiss milk chocolate bars melted on top.
I walked from the subway, 1:30 in the morning, and P. C. was up, tip-tapping away at his computer, playing Scrabble online or God knows.
"Hey," I said.
"Hey, Campesino."
It had been a longer night than I expected, hustling out of work at six and going to dinner and then going to the one-woman show by my co-worker's sister. It was quite good and funny, she talked about how their dad had a mail-order bride from the Philippines. Later we asked Geoff how much of it was true and he stuck his tongue between his teeth and laughed.
We all went out drinking after that and talked about seeing celebrities, how they seem small in person, how they disappoint us, how we want to connect with them and how they fill us with rage.
On the way home from the train my mind was preoccupied with a fantasy rant against religion: ALL these doctrines, I thought: Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Shinto, Nazi, Buddhist – all of them, right? – they all distance man from God. All their mechanisms for piety, for, rationalization, for redemption, they can only serve to distance us from God, and what insanity that is! What reckless, awful insanity. Because out of that you get all the strife, the killing, the hatred, the torture. That's what you get when you deny the one truth: everybody knows. Let them know. Let them feel.
We went to the New South Wales Art Gallery and saw some Australian abstract art, lots of it earth-toned and sandy-looking, as if such pigments were the only ones available in this desert continent. Then we walked through the Botanic Garden, where plants and shrubs and flowers and palm trees strained the margins of our path. We had lunch on the veranda of a café in the middle of the park. It was incredibly beautiful, tree flowers at eye level, birds chirping. Kate and Kevin were still sort of fighting. We had a bottle of wine that tasted like blackberry, and I had steak, and Kevin ate almost nothing but buttered bread. After lunch we wandered to the harbor and the Opera House, through the weird international throng of Olympic tourists.
When we got out of the train Kevin didn't know which way to go. It was raining even harder and I was wearing a thin wool sweater that got soaked through and that stifling wet-wool smell filled the air around me. We got on a bus going the wrong way and finally we got off and got in a taxi cab.
The casino was disappointingly similar to every other casino everywhere else: a vast room with muted gold light, a ceiling high like the sky, the faint stink of cigars, a carpet with a tessellated turquoise and purple pattern. People from all over the world but a prevalence of Pacific Islanders and Asians; businessmen from Hong Kong, Bangkok, Kuala Lumpur. I had some noodles with greasy duck from the noodle shop on the concession floor downstairs. Everything there was sad and ugly in harsh white light. Dazed families, packs of bored teenagers, not quite knowing what they were doing but doing it anyway. We lost at blackjack for awhile – I think I lost about a hundred. And that was it, we went home to Kate and the baby.
Thursday was strikingly beautiful. We went walking with Julia sleeping on Kevin's chest and Kate and Kevin arguing: Kevin was meant to get swimming lessons at the gym; he said he would but he hadn't and Kate was hectoring him and Kevin was snapping back at her defensively. I walked a few paces behind them, between them, watching them keep a mean little distance from each other. It seemed they had always fought like this and maybe always would and that's not necessarily bad, as long as they stay together – maybe it's worse the day they stop.
The other morning on the bus to work I was in a mildly hung over reverie, slouched in my seat with my forehead leaning bumpily on the cool glass. I became vaguely aware of a man in front of me barking loudly into his cell phone. An older man, with a gruff Brooklyn accent.
Suddenly a woman in the front yelled out, "Sir! Would you please stop that?"
"What? I can't talk? Mind your business," he protested. And at the same volume as before he said into the phone, "I don't know, some woman is telling me to quiet down."
"You're very loud, sir," she continued.
"I'm not bothering anybody. Am I bothering anybody? Everyone raise their hand if I'm bothering you. See? No one raised their hand."
Another woman, sitting across the aisle, said to him, "You know, it really is annoying."
Things more or less calmed down after that.
There is no God and there is no devil but there is temptation. And there is righteous resistance to temptation borne of an instinctive apprehension that to succumb is wrong. Not wrong because God says so. Not wrong because man says so. Wrong because on a deep level, an unconscious level, we all know this: When you harm another you are harming yourself. Why? Because there is no other. "Other" is an illusion. We are all manifestations of the same being. And in spite of ourselves, in spite of our desires, in spite of our religious delusions, we know this is the only real truth. Though I deride all organized religions, the Christian notion of "do unto others" comes close to expressing this. The thing they got wrong, once again, is that the dictum does not come from God – it's much simpler than that. It comes from pure logical truth. To harm another is not sinful; it's perverse.
Somewhere in the course of the development of civilization we forgot this simplest truth, oneness. (Animals, incidentally, have not forgotten. They never do anything that is not morally justifiable. Animals do not – they can not – "sin." And it's not because they wouldn't take pleasure in doing so. It is simply not in their nature to violate nature.) And we had to invent an apparatus to maintain order in the face of this fracturing of consciousness. We had to invent God. How foolish – and foolhardy – to imagine that God is something outside ourselves. Because if it's outside of ourselves we can never be fully reconciled with it, and so our religions themselves become elaborate means to rationalize and support our transgressions. And in many cases, to exploit them.
The current wave of child molestation and denial in the Catholic Church is a clear example of the failure of religion, and religious orthodoxy in particular, to save man from temptation. These men who seduced young boys, young girls – who violated their vows but did much worse of course – are not inherently evil. Banish that facile interpretation from your head. They were sorely tempted, and the gravity of their temptation was proportional to their piety. These were not cynical men who entered the priesthood without faith, intending to rape the mouths and asses of the first altar boys they got their hands on. Of course not! They were religious men. Their faith – not just the hierarchy of the Church itself (though that counts for a lot) – actually enabled them to repeatedly molest children.
The Christian notion of forgiveness is to blame. Sin and redemption – that magical, compelling moral narrative that seems to invest every Christian life with meaning – actually provokes terrible deeds by the faithful. Original sin and inherited sin mark believers as sinners and they live down to that expectation. But there is no original sin – there is only original sanctity! And it's by denying our sanctity – and embracing our "sinfulness" – that we have gone so far astray.
"Look in your sister's room," P. C. said, as he walked past me to the kitchen.
"Look in my sister's room?" I said.
"Yeah."
"You want me to look in my sister's room."
"Look in her room."
I got up and walked over uncertainly and peered in the open doorway to find her slumped sideways on her bed, shoes on, face buried in a tangle of bedspread and pillow.
"She came home earlier and I said how are you and she said, ‘I'm shitfaced'," P. C. explained. "She went into her room."
"Did she tell you why she was shitfaced?"
"She went in and I expected her to come back out and tell me but she just like that, went down and that was it. Like that."
She winced a bit. "The things you do for fun in India you can't do here. I don't know, I read," she said. She ate tortilla chips in tiny bites. Sometimes a piece would crumble off and fall in her downy drink and she would pluck it out and pop it in her mouth. "I see how people live on television," she said, "and it's very different from life in India. I wonder what it would be like to live like that. I think I would like to try."
"But life on television isn't like real life," I said.
She looked across the room for a moment. "People going out to bars and drinking, and laughing, and doing things like playing pool," she said. "I think I would like someone to show me what that is like."
And I realized she was right: life in America is like life on TV. She was describing my life, and it had more in common with a beer commercial than with anyone's life in India. And I also realized what she really wanted from a man, an American man, and I realized I could give it to her if I wanted but I knew that I didn't and it was sad.
We sat at a table in the corner and she ordered a strawberry daiquiri and I ordered a scotch. I asked her if she had just ended a serious relationship and she acted a little surprised that I would ask, but she said yes, and we talked about that. The romance was gone, she said. They'd been together for nine years, almost since she'd come over, and they had done everything together. He was Indian too and he was practically her only friend in the States. She teased the frothy surface of the daiquiri with her straw and bent her head down when she went to drink.
"You've met other people though, right? At work?" I inquired hopefully.
"No. It is a very big problem with immigrants. They come over and they never fit in. They try to but they cannot. They stay with their own kind always."
We talked more about her ex, and about mine. She still lives with him, she said. He's a writer, he's trying to sell his novel but he hasn't and he's depressed. But she kept returning to this sad theme of being lost in the New World, of longing for what was all around but out of reach.
"What do you like to do for fun?" I asked, hoping this idiotic and banal question would lighten the mood.
Everything is quiet and gray-dark in the apartment. There's a half-filled glass of water on the coffee table but no one's there.
She waved to me from across the street and pointed we're going this way, across the avenue. Before we'd even crossed she asked me what do I do – oh you write? What kind of writing? If you write about your experiences, how does the reader know you're not lying? These writers who do this, they're vain, they only want to look good. Yes I suppose it's a problem, I said. We walked a few blocks, turning here and there, and she stopped across from a Mexican Restaurant.
"Do you want to go there?" she asked.
"Sure."
It was a generic blonde-wood margarita place with a basket of chips on every table and twinkling Christmas lights for décor, a sad and futile place to suit the nature of our encounter. Like me, illegitimate.
From a dream, yesterday morning: May freedom melt in your throat like ice cream.
I went to 28th Street and walked up and over to the uptown side and I waited. I watched as waves and waves of commuters got off trains and filed through the turnstiles, disappearing upstairs to leave the station quiet again. I scanned the crowd for any dark woman's face. I was calm but not serene; all I could think of was how strange this was, this dreadful anticipation. I was about to see her.
Finally she appeared. She was slender, with a long black coat and her hair tied back. She had thin lips, high cheekbones, a bit of an overbite. She looked good and I was relieved. Pat, she said, yes I said, and she smiled and we stood wordless a moment, and I said would you like to get together later and she said sure. I said what about tonight and she put her hands up to her head and said I don't know, I'm so pressed for time and I said that's OK, how about tomorrow and she said yes. I said we'd talk later and it was good to meet her and I shook her hand.
Later she called me and left a message. "It's Sajita, I want to make sure everything's all right." She was afraid I had changed my mind, I realized. I called her back and said everything's fine and she said why don't you come out to Brooklyn tonight, come out to Grand Army Plaza and call me when you get out.
I waited on the corner on Nevins Street, waited for her to come and find me, watching people walk home in the cool spring dusk. Two women, one black and one white, walked up.
"Excuse me," the black one said.
"Yes?"
"You speak English!" she exclaimed with goofy, exaggerated delight. "Do you know how to get to Park Slope?"
"I'm sorry, I'm not from around here."
"Oh."
I motioned toward the subway entrance with my head. "You could go down and ask the, uh, the tollbooth guy."
"Good idea!"
"The token booth guy."
"Good idea!"
They nodded to each other, eyebrows raised.
"Good idea! Thank you!"
And I was left to stand and wait again.
P. C. found a walk-don't walk sign on the street somewhere – just the flat part with the words on it – and put it on the wall in the kitchen. In its new context it is quite striking. Here's what it looks like, in big bold block letters:
It is a poem, a piece of found art. Stare at it for a long time and see where your mind goes.
Last night I couldn't remember whether it was 2001 or 2002. I saw 01 on a computer file I thought was recent and I thought, damn, is it still 2001? Then, is it 2002? Hard to say which was more baffling. And in the morning I was chilled by the looming date on the milk carton – it seemed so far away at the store.
We are well into the future.