Essays from the Nick of Time (6 page)

Others did not. Fairly regularly, somewhere along the line, the trains that punctuated the hours of our days passed through men like a stick through an egg: men walking to the canyons to sleep, men thick with tequila, men, like the four who died together one night, playing cards on the ties. I’d seen the warning signs on Highway 5—the stenciled silhouettes not of a leaping deer or elk but of a migrant family running across a road, a man dragging a woman dragging a little girl nearly airborne like the tail of a kite—but the signs were in the wrong place. It was the locomotive, appropriately enough—that grand, nineteenth-century emblem of our imperial reach, our elect status—that killed them. After a day spent moving the Anglos’ dirt or muscling trees with hundred-pound root balls into the desert soil, they went down before the iron horse, symbol of God’s approbation and love for us, not them. Destiny made manifest.

I knew these things—it would have been impossible not to—and yet there was time enough, life enough, separating one incident from the next, large tragedies from small, that I was able to keep them and the questions they brought with them at bay. My life, the dough of my days, folded them in. Our neighbor became our friend, played with our children, brought another dog home from the pound, and grew to love it. Little boys threw sticks in the trench; dogs peed in it. Eventually the city covered it up. The men who died on the tracks were strangers to me; I knew neither their faces nor their stories.

Julia Toledo’s death, though distant, cut closer to home. Like tens of thousands of others, I didn’t know she had lived until the day the news, traveling through the threads and ganglia of the nation’s web, told me she had died. Three thousand miles away, preparing to move east (my destiny no longer manifest), I heard about her fate, saw her face and the faces of her sons, and felt that in a world of unspeakable wrongs, some manner of crime had been committed. A crime as gratuitous as it was wretched. A crime, like so many others, that demanded a wider reckoning.

I traveled to Connecticut. I walked the tracks at night as the trains came rushing out of the north like great, speeding walls. There was nothing to know, no one to speak to.

IV

During the American Civil War, observers noted a curious fact: the sounds of a battle, clearly distinguishable at ten miles, could be utterly inaudible at two. These weird wrinkles in the landscape were called “acoustic shadows.” Modernize the phenomenon, let it expand into metaphor, and you have as good a trope as any for the other America, the one living (below the embankment, behind the Lucky’s supermarket) in the very shadow of our prosperity.

I went to Connecticut expecting neither revelation nor redemption. I did not go hoping to experience that frisson of tragedy that can help the emotionally stunted feel alive. Hardly a member of the overclass, I had no specific sin for which I felt the need to atone. I went, I suppose, because certain odd details—the red, white, and blue logo of the Amtrak locomotive, spattered with blood, or the red, white, and blue lettering of the Memorial Day edition of the
Connecticut Post
that reported Toledo’s death—seemed to suggest some wider meaning. I went, at least in part, to conduct a kind of inquest, not of the dead but of the land they had died in, to report on what I sensed to be our many sins of omission, committed daily, from sea to shining sea.

I was not unfamiliar with the dark side of American exceptionalism. In the California I had left, entire towns constructed of plastic sheeting and cardboard could be found hidden in canyons only a quick walk from some of the priciest real estate in the Western Hemisphere. Julia Toledo, I realized, had more in common with the migrants who somehow daily emerged from the mud and the manzanita brush, miraculously shaved and cleaned, than she did with the people she worked for. Like them, she had lived in the shadow. Only her death—and that only for a short time—had made her visible.

After midnight the area between Clinton Avenue and the tracks in Bridgeport is not a good place. There is little light. Plywood boards cover broken windows, shattered walls. I walked quickly past a group of men standing by a brick building, then took a right onto Railroad Avenue, a narrow, buckled road with weeds coming through the cracks that runs tight and dark against the brownstone wall of the raised rail bed. I was halfway down Railroad Avenue when the full reality dawned on me: they had walked through this wasteland of abandoned warehouses and vacant lots at almost the same time. I could see them, stepping around the piles of moldering furniture and broken brick and crushed Styrofoam boxes, walking past the papers and trash glued to the wall like seaweed by a tide.

They had been afraid—I knew that now—and their fear frightened me. Back beyond the razor wire I could make out odd, bristling shapes (hills of twisted pipe and scrap lumber) and wondered, for a moment, how they must have looked to children no older than my own. I didn’t like Railroad Avenue—the darkness of it, the glass and gravel crunching underfoot—and I knew in my bones they’d been glad to leave it. Compared with what lay behind, the yellow billboard advertising McDonald’s bagel sandwiches for breakfast, even the blue railroad trestle in the dark overhead, must have seemed almost welcoming.

I climbed the stonelike steps of the bridgework to the trestle, squeezed through the foot-wide gap between the fencing and the bridge (the three bagels, huge and yellow, now only an arm’s length away), and entered the tracks. The traprock embankment made for difficult walking. About a mile down, tired of stumbling, I moved up to the track, and, thoroughly spooked, glancing continually over my shoulder like a man afraid of ghosts, I walked onto the North Benson Road overpass where the accident had occurred.

There was nothing there. Like everyone else, I suppose, I’d wanted a narrative, an explanation. I’d found none. Some measure of guilt—vast, disembodied, cultural—yes. But nothing to explain the magnitude of what had occurred over the North Benson Road overpass on the night of May 24. I picked up a couple of railroad spikes, heavy and crude as Roman nails. The ground seemed to charge with current, and suddenly the train was there, already flying by, gone. I stood for a while in the silence it left behind, then began the long walk back.

V

On Sunday, July 8, 1741, Jonathan Edwards, last of the great New England Calvinists, preached a sermon at Enfield, Connecticut, less than sixty miles from what was then the thriving fishing community of Bridgeport. A spare, almost delicate man, he waited for the knock and scrape of boot soles to still, for the sawing of insects to rise again, and began. His voice that morning, according to an account left by the Reverend Eleazar Wheelock, was level, clearly modulated. He held the small sermon book in his left hand, carefully turning the pages with his right.

The sermon left the audience hysterical. God was angry, Edwards told them, tried beyond all measure. The whirlwind of their destruction would come at any moment, was already overdue; they all—the farmers with the sunburned hands, their stolid wives and frightened children—would be as the chaff on the summer threshing floor.

And he reminded them of the full ferocity of God’s wrath (“And the people shall be as the burnings of lime, as thorns cut up shall they be burnt in the fire”), of His eagerness, tempered only by His sovereign will, to make the fallen suffer: “I will tread them in mine anger, and will trample them in my fury, and their blood shall be sprinkled upon my garments, and I will stain all my raiment.”

Edwards’s sermon that morning contained the only extended metaphor he would ever use, a tidbit of literary history I find strangely eloquent. “The bow of God’s wrath is bent,” he told the small congregation of weeping sinners, “and the arrow made ready on the string, and justice bends the arrow at your heart, and strains the bow, and it is nothing but the mere pleasure of God, and that of an angry God, without any promise or obligation at all, that keeps the arrow one moment from being made drunk with your blood.”

Meaning is made, not discovered, and the materials from which it is cobbled can be very small indeed; a footnote can be the button, the joint, that moves the arm of history. Set in context, made to speak, it can allow the past to touch the present, link the living to the dead. Edwards’s bloody metaphor, its point properly honed, should extend to the turn of the millennium. It doesn’t. Which is precisely what makes it significant to us.

In 1741, in Enfield, the arrow trembling on the string could both explain our tragedies and terrify us to righteousness. Two and a half centuries later, it can do neither. It is a metaphor, nothing more; a gremlin in a disenchanted world; a spook-house prop. The problem, as always, is the actual blood. It’s real enough. And it requires an explanation. A context, a story.

Where do we turn? Lacking God, should we reacquaint ourselves perhaps with His fallen Other? The pagan god gone bad, his horn and hoof retained, his marsh reed pipes exchanged for a pitchfork? It won’t do, any more than “fe-fi-fo-fum” or “the better to hear you with, my dear.” No, something older is needed, something darker, nearer to the blood. The Greeks’
dia-bollein
(distant progenitor of all things diabolical), for example, meant “to tear apart, to rend.”

The force that rends. Perhaps. Something was undeniably torn in Fairfield, a world cut at the root. But it’s not enough. No metaphor today can measure up to the thing in itself: the coloring book on the embankment, paging in the wind; the monsters and fairies, half–crayoned in. Neither God nor demon can bear the smallness of the dolls found scattered along the tracks. And that is our problem.

VI

For millennia death stayed close. Life was like a Poussin landscape: tucked to the side, arbored by vines, was a small yellow skull, Virgil’s quaint reminder,
et in Arcadia ego
—I too am in the garden—scrawled across the pigment beneath. The memento mori was redundant, of course, possibly cruel; we needed no reminding. We died like midges in October, of infections and colds and tainted milk, and succored ourselves with God, with the knowledge that the causes of our grief, however inscrutable, were after all but His instruments.

Well into the nineteenth century, in other words, we lived in a legible universe, the record of our days—and their meaning—running like a never-ending stream of ticker tape from the mouth of God. The universe was didactic and was to be studied because it was the providence of God in operation. “When a man lookes on the great volume of the world,” wrote Puritan divine John Preston, “there those things which God will have known, are written in capitall letters.” In seventeenth-century New England, as in the Paris of Louis XIII and his court painter, Poussin, life was the text—a living, breathing allegory—and God was the author.

Something changed. Our lot improved. Death, though still and forever in the garden, was pushed to the margins. And God, reluctantly, went with it. Having washed our hands of blood (dinner now arrived without the quick crack of bone or the “thup” of the stick on the rabbit’s neck), having pushed even our own deaths offstage, to the quiet ghettos and discreetly lit reservations deemed appropriate to such unpleasantness, we allowed the myth that gave blood meaning to slip quietly into something like obsolescence. It became, slowly, inexorably, an anachronism: the metaphysical equivalent of the moldboard plow.

So far, so good. Many of us today miss neither the skull nor its apologists, and I, for one, harbor no hidden nostalgia for the golden age of death’s dominion or for the architecture of humility and suffering that made it bearable. But, alas, that’s not the end of the story. At the turn of the new millennium, appropriately enough, thanks to the wonder-working providences of the communications revolution, death is once again a daily companion. Open the paper on any day of the week, and there is Poussin’s skull, set among the harvest of the burgeoning market. Like an icon we can neither override nor delete. Like a boulder in the bitstream.
Et in Arcadia ego,
it whispers—arrogant, insistent—from the columns adjoining the cashmere and the chrome. Et in Zaire. Et in Rwanda. Et in Milwaukee, you fuckers. Turn the page. Delete me.

There’s blood on the tracks. A mother and four sons have died in Connecticut. Reflexively, we reach for the myth. But we’ve forgotten how to read. And we’ve forgotten how to believe. And the text has gone dark. And the author, whoever he was, if he was, has left.

Necessity and absence are giving birth to something new: a bloodier God, or a truer silence.

I moved to Prague the same time I started doing e-mail: two gestures—or embarkations, I suppose—so perfectly opposed in direction and meaning that I’ve come to think of them as linked, a kind of metaphysical push-me-pull-you; a subtle rack, on which I, subtly, am being stretched. The first, I want to say, is stone, goes deep, is mute. The second, like helium, surfaces relentlessly, is all gas and fiber-optic chatter. The first is about the endless negotiations between time and place; the second slips these coordinates, by which human beings have always plotted their position, as easily as… what? As nothing I have ever known.

A dissonance worth reckoning with, if only because it is inescapable in our age. To spend a winter walking about Prague—before the great river of tourists that begins to rise in March has transformed the city into a giant bazaar, a marketplace almost medieval in its pageantry and babble of tongues—is to bear witness to an essentially ontological conflict. On the one side is being inscribed in stone and plaster and brick, in the continual descent of sediment in whose layers our days, and the days of those who came before us, can be found. On the other is the Internet Café (whose vaulted ceiling was built two hundred years before Columbus) in which being has been, quite literally, disembodied, displaced.

At times, standing on some badly cobbled street in the winter dark, the smell of coal smoke in the air and someone’s cell phone digitally chiming the opening notes of the Beatles’ “Yellow Submarine,” you can almost hear the two forces crashing into each other like tectonic plates, the one going deep, disappearing, buried beneath the wedge, the other rising like air.

I held off until 2003, stubbornly sending and receiving my letters in envelopes, then bent to the prevailing winds. I say bent, not broke. I may yet bend back. In any case, I sent my first e-mail. A questionable friend plugged the machine into the wall (you’ll pardon me if I marvel at the ordinary for a moment), showed me how to tiptoe into and out of the labyrinth, and voilà!—there it was—a space in which to compose my note. Feeling oddly unsure of myself, I typed in a “Hello, just testing” kind of message, maneuvered the pointer to the “send” rectangle, and clicked the mouse, which shall forever be the thing with fur whose chaotic nest of lint and cloth and mattress stuffing containing six squirming babies the size and color of lima beans I found in my father’s typewriter in the writing shed one April when I was six, but never mind. And my message disappeared.

I’ll confess to a certain exhilaration at first. I was the Gettysburg veteran in 1924, all shaky limbs and handlebar mustache, getting into a Model T. I’d sworn I’d never do it. And yet… the wind! The speed! So this was the new age I’d resisted so strenuously. It seemed relatively easy, undeniably convenient, faster than a speeding bullet. Often I’d get a reply to my first message while I was still composing the second, an odd feeling, as though the recipient and I had met somewhere in the dark over the Atlantic. I felt very modern, light, unburdened. I could reach out and tap someone on the shoulder whenever I damn well pleased. I could look up the e-mail addresses of people I had never spoken or written to (I didn’t have anyone particular in mind) and write them… something. Never mind what. Contact! Contact! That was the thing. So what if Thoreau’s exhortation had been aimed elsewhere?

While I was waiting for my e-mails to materialize out of the ether, I took long walks through Prague and gravity began to reassert itself. To resist the flooding of the Vltava, the level of the Old Town had been raised by carting in tons of dirt from the countryside, in the process burying the town four meters underground. In some places one could still walk into the basements of buildings and find the outlines of stoned-in windows that half a millennium ago had swung out onto sunlight and rain, onto gardens and streets and courtyards. And something about the soil rising up over the doorstep, the window frame, the sill, burying worlds, moved me. When I passed a construction crew working on a broken water main by the harsh white light of halogen lamps one evening, I glimpsed, beneath the piping, old foundations and ancient sewers made of fist-sized stones and, beneath them, still other, deeper foundations. Everywhere I turned, I saw layer upon layer: stucco walls flayed to brick, brick giving way to stone, stone to a kind of gruel-like mortar. On the Charles Bridge, on the very same cobbles where tourists now bargained for Kafka cups and key chains, the Swedish dead had been piled two meters deep during the Thirty Years’ War. At the Church of Sts. Cyril and Metoděj, five minutes from my apartment, the Gestapo had laid out the bodies of the Czech paratroopers who had assassinated Reichsprotektor Reinhard Heydrich. The crypt in which the seven young men had hidden themselves was still there, like a giant honeycomb, smelling of damp and plaster, riddled with bullets.

Strophe and antistrophe. Back at the apartment, the children asleep or reading, I would plug the computer into the wall and wait for the screen to light up. Wait for the menu, click on the icon, listen to the signals dialing for access, press “enter,” then “enter” again. I found it difficult to resist. What if something required my attention? And sure enough—I had six unread messages. Or ten. When we went on a three-day trip to Moravia, where the snow in the forests had begun to melt and where we walked for hours listening to the sound of water running under shelves of ice, I returned home to twenty-three! I’d never felt so important in my life.

Of course, the messages I received could hardly be called letters; the majority were something else: notes, afterthoughts, ephemera, doomed to their nanosecond, then floating away in the bitstream. And form followed function, by and large. This was the medium of the present tense, a world of dashes and ellipses, of missing salutations and truncated thoughts, of speed over content, speed over reflection, speed over everything. I found myself answering in kind, tapping out a line or two, getting done, and when I did take the time to write a letter-length message in which I actually described something, or speculated about someone, or recalled some time or other, it seemed forced, even unnatural. Simply put, history did not fit here. I was using the wrong tool for the job, hammering a nail with a putty knife, digging a trench with a file.

We all accommodate the world differently, negotiate toward different ends. There is no universal Greenwich time for the soul. Some buy a new set of golf clubs; others find Jesus. Still others build bombs. My sense of true, of plumb, required a smaller adjustment. I bought a pen. And not just any pen, but a steel-nib pen, meant for dipping, and a good bottle of blue-black ink. And that evening when my wife and I returned from our walk, after I’d read to the kids and we’d put them to bed, I sat down at the kitchen table and wrote a letter. It took a while. The pen blotted or skipped. I dipped too much or not enough. My handwriting, like everyone else’s in the world, had gone to hell. I made a mess, smeared ink on my fingers, awkwardly crossed out what I couldn’t delete, compensated for afterthoughts with carets and arrows, grew irritated when the ink ran out midthought or midsentence.

But it felt right, somehow. Appropriate. Perhaps even necessary. I learned how to hold the pen so the ink wouldn’t blot, so my
L
s wouldn’t disappear on the downstroke. I learned how to dip the pen and touch the rim of the well with the nib just enough to draw the excess. I learned how to sense when the ink was running out, and dip in time. And I grew to love—don’t laugh, there is a kind of love we can feel for the things that suit us—the imposed slowness of it, the messy physicality of it, the complicated rhythm of write, dip, touch, think, write. I began to see the beauty of constraint, to appreciate the things it can force from us. I began to understand the shaping force that a less malleable medium can exert on us.

A less malleable medium—it seems a fine metaphor for life. Maybe even a synonym. After all, didn’t we, each and every one of us, spend our years shaping the none-too-malleable mediums of opinion and power and love that surround us, and being shaped by them in turn? And weren’t we the men and women we were in large part because of how we had responded to the forces around us? How many of the things we did—falling in love, getting married and unmarried, having children and watching them grow at heartbreaking speed—were friction free?

I continued taking my walks through Prague, listening to the sediments settle, like Joyce’s snow, over the living and the dead. And I continued writing my letters, both by nib and by byte, trying to understand what it was, precisely, that I found so nourishing about the one and so depleting in the other. Was it the “oldness” of the earlier technology that brought it into alignment with the city I lived in? No. One of the things I found least appealing about Prague was its hawking of its own history, the ubiquitous dates on cups and T-shirts and key rings, the way it kept licking and licking every ribbed vault and architrave until they were raw. An uncritical obsession with antiquity, I knew, could be as much a fetish as the new age’s obsession with newness.

But if it wasn’t history I was after, what was it then? It came to me gradually, as insights will. I realized that what I found most compelling about the city I lived in was not just its inescapable verticality, the sudden scent of some other century on a street corner at dusk, but its arguments: the weedy battlements above the tennis courts, the fourteenth-century church between the Soviet-era warehouses, the rococo ornamentation on a facade above the
KFC.
The cobbles rising through the cracked cement.

It was this seething, this dialogue, that I missed in the digital world. E-mail was a done deal. It was efficient. It was pleasant. It was, essentially, commercial. It was like the men and women in the tourist stalls along Pařižská Street, who could say please and thank you and we have a smaller one and here is your Visa card in English and Italian and French and German, but nothing else. It was a conveyor belt, superbly designed to handle compact little parcels of information, disguised as communication. It was the cement.

It’s night. The windows are open. The courtyard smells of lilacs and kerosene,
knedliky
and metal. And this is what I believe: that most of us, whether we realize it or not, live in a steel-nib world: slow, messy, full of all-too-visible deletions and clumsy afterthoughts. A Prague of sorts. We may hate it, find it absurd, long for some cleaner place. Perhaps we should. Perhaps it’s inevitable that we evolve away from who we are. But it’s what’s best about us.