Exit Ghost (7 page)

I shed the tyranny of my intensity—or, perhaps, by living apart for over a decade, merely reveled in its sternest mode.

It was on the last day of June 2004 that the name "AK-47" returned to alarm me. I know it was on June 30 because that's the day that the female snapping turtles in my part of New England make their annual trek out from their watery habitat to find an open sandy spot to dig a nest for their eggs. These are strong, slow-moving creatures, large turtles with sawtooth armored shells a foot or more in diameter and long, heavily scaled tails. They appear in abundance at the south end of Athena, troops of them crossing the two-lane macadam road that leads into town. Drivers will patiently wait for minutes on end so as not to hit them as they emerge from the deep woods whose marshes and ponds they inhabit, and it is the annual custom of many local residents like me not merely to stop but to pull over and step out onto the shoulder of the road to watch the parade of these rarely seen amphibians, lumbering forward inch by inch on the powerful, foreshortened, scaly legs that end in prehistoric-looking reptilian claws.

Every year you hear pretty much the same joking and laughter and wonderment from the onlookers, and from the pedagogical parents who've brought their children around to see the show you learn yet again how much the turtles weigh, and how long their necks are, and how
strong their bite is, and how many eggs they lay, and how long they live. Then you get back in the car and drive into town to do your errands, as I did on that sunny day just four months before I traveled down to New York to inquire about the collagen treatment.

After having parked diagonally alongside the town green, I ran into several of the local merchants I know who'd come out of their shops to momentarily bask in the sunshine. I stood and talked for a while—about very little, all of us assuming the amiable attitude of men who think only the best of everything, a haberdasher, a liquor store owner, and a writer all exuding the contentment of Americans living safely beyond the reach of the nerve-racking world.

It was after I'd crossed the street and was on my way to the hardware store that I suddenly heard "AK-47" muttered into my ear by the person who had just passed me, heading in the other direction. I swung around and from the mass of his back and the pigeon-toed gait recognized him right off. He was the painter whom I'd hired the summer before to paint the outside of my house, and whom, because he failed to turn up for work just about every other day—and when he put in an appearance did so for no more than two or three hours—I'd had to fire less than halfway into the job. He then sent me a bill so exorbitant that rather than argue with him—and because, on the phone or in person, we'd had noisy arguments nearly every day about either his hours or his absences—I turned the bill over to my local lawyer to deal with. The housepainter's name was Buddy Barnes and rather too late I learned that he was one of Athena's leading alcoholics. I'd never much liked the bumper sticker on his car that read
CHARLTON HESTON IS MY PRESIDENT,
but I paid little attention to it because, though the legendary movie star had been renowned as the celebrity president of the recklessly irresponsible National Rifle Association, he was well on his way to dementia by the time I got around to hiring Buddy, and the bumper sticker struck me as foolish and innocuous more than anything else.

I was stunned, of course, by what I'd heard on the street, so stunned that rather than give myself a moment to contemplate how best to respond or to determine whether I should respond at all, I raced across to the green, where he had just climbed into his pickup truck. I called his name and banged a fist on his fender until he rolled his window down. "What did you just say to me?" I asked him. Buddy had an almost angelic pink-complexioned look for a gruff-mannered man in his forties, angelic despite the blond hairs growing thinly under his nose and on his chin. "I got nothing to say to you," he replied in his customary high-pitched howl. "What did you say to me, Barnes?" "Je-
sus
," he replied, rolling his eyes. "Answer me. Answer me, Barnes. Why did you say that to me?" "You're hearing things, nutcase," he said. Then, throwing the truck into reverse, he backed out, and with a teenage tire-screech, he was gone.

In the end, I decided that the incident had nothing like the dramatic meaning I had first lighted on. Yes, "AK-47"
was what he said, and yes, I was so sure that as soon as I got home, I placed a call to the New York office of the FBI to speak to M. J. Sweeney, only to be told that she had left the agency two years earlier. I reminded myself that those postcards had been sent to me months before I had moved up here and before anybody like Buddy Barnes knew of my existence. It was impossible for Barnes to have sent them, especially as they were postmarked from cities and towns in north Jersey, over a hundred miles south of Athena, Massachusetts. His intending to harass me with the very word that I'd been harassed with through the mails some eleven years earlier was nothing but the weirdest of coincidences.

Nonetheless, for the first time since I'd bought the .22 and practiced firing it in the woods, I opened the box of ammunition and instead of keeping the weapon as I had all these years, standing unloaded at the back of my bedroom closet, I slept with it loaded, on the floor by the side of my bed. And I did this until I left for New York, even after I wondered whether Buddy had said nothing at all to me, even after I concluded that on that beautiful early summer morning, when I'd enjoyed the sight of the female snapping turtles laboriously crossing the road to fulfill their reproductive function, I'd had the most lifelike of auditory hallucinations, one whose cause was inexplicable, at least to me.

The incontinence was wholly unaffected by the collagen treatment, and when I reported this on the morning of the
election, the doctor's office recommended that I schedule an appointment for a second procedure the following month. If there was an improvement in the interim, I could always cancel it; if not, the procedure would be repeated. "And if it's not effective?" "Then we repeat it. The third time, we don't go in through the urethra," the nurse explained, "but through the scars from the prostate operation. Just a puncture. Local anesthetic. No pain." "And if a third procedure doesn't work?" I asked. "Oh, that's a long way off, Mr. Zuckerman. Let's just take one step at a time. Don't lose heart. This is not going to come to nothing."

As if incontinence weren't indignity enough, one had then to be addressed like a churlish eight-year-old balking at taking his cod liver oil. But that's how it goes when an elderly patient refuses to resign himself to the inevitable travails and totter politely toward the grave: doctors and nurses have a child on their hands who must be soothed into soldiering on in behalf of his own lost cause. That, at any rate, was my thinking when I hung up the phone, drained of pride and feeling all the limitations of my strength, the man at the point where he fails whether he resists or acquiesces.

What surprised me most my first few days walking around the city? The most obvious thing—the cell phones. We had no reception as yet up on my mountain, and down in Athena, where they do have it, I'd rarely see people striding the streets talking uninhibitedly into their phones. I remembered a New York when the only people walking up Broadway seemingly talking to themselves
were
crazy. What had happened in these ten years for there suddenly to be so much to say—so much so pressing that it couldn't wait to be said? Everywhere I walked, somebody was approaching me talking on a phone and someone was behind me talking on a phone. Inside the cars, the drivers were on the phone. When I took a taxi, the cabbie was on the phone. For one who frequently went without talking to anyone for days at a time, I had to wonder what that had previously held them up had collapsed in people to make incessant talking into a telephone preferable to walking about under no one's surveillance, momentarily solitary, assimilating the streets through one's animal senses and thinking the myriad thoughts that the activities of a city inspire. For me it made the streets appear comic and the people ridiculous. And yet it seemed like a real tragedy, too. To eradicate the experience of separation must inevitably have a dramatic effect. What will the consequence be? You know you can reach the other person anytime, and if you can't, you get impatient—impatient and angry like a little stupid god. I understood that background silence had long been abolished from restaurants, elevators, and ballparks, but that the immense loneliness of human beings should produce this boundless longing to be heard, and the accompanying disregard for being overheard—well, having lived largely in the era of the telephone booth, whose substantial folding doors could be tightly pulled shut, I was impressed by the conspicuousness of it all and found myself entertaining the idea for a story in which Manhattan has turned into a sinister collectivity where everyone is spying on everyone else, everyone being tracked by the person at the other end of his or her phone, even though, incessantly dialing one another from wherever they like in the great out of doors, the telephoners believe themselves to be experiencing the maximum freedom. I knew that merely by thinking up such a scenario I was at one with all the cranks who imagined, from the beginnings of industrialization, that the machine was the enemy of life. Still, I could not help it: I did not see how anyone could believe he was continuing to live a human existence by walking about talking into a phone for half his waking life. No, those gadgets did not promise to be a boon to promoting reflection among the general public.

And I noticed the young women. I couldn't fail to. The days were still warm in New York and women were clad in ways I couldn't ignore, however much I wanted not to be aroused by the very desires actively quelled through living in seclusion across the road from a nature preserve. I knew from my trips down to Athena how much of themselves college girls now exposed with neither shame nor fear, but the phenomenon didn't stun me until I got to the city, where the numbers were vastly multiplied and the age range expanded and I enviously understood that women dressing as they did meant that they weren't there only to be looked at and that the provocative parade was merely the initial unveiling. Or perhaps it meant that to
someone like me. Maybe I had got it all wrong and this was just how they dressed now, how T-shirts were cut now, how clothes were designed now for women, and though walking around in tight shirts and low-cut shorts and enticing bras and with their bellies bare looks like it means that they're all available, they're not—and not only not to me.

But it was noticing Jamie Logan that bewildered me most. I hadn't sat so close to such an irresistible young woman in years, perhaps not since I last sat opposite Jamie herself in the dining room of a Harvard arts club. Nor had I understood how disconcerted I had been by her until we'd all agreed on the exchange of residences and I left to go back to the hotel and found myself thinking how pleasant it would be if no swap took place—if Billy Davidoff stayed where he wanted to stay, which was right there, across from the little Lutheran church on West 71st Street, while Jamie escaped her dread of terrorism by coming back to the tranquil Berkshires with me. She had a huge pull on me, a huge gravitational pull on the ghost of my desire. This woman was in me before she even appeared.

The urologist who had diagnosed the cancer when I was sixty-two had commiserated with me afterward by saying, "I know it's no comfort, but you're not alone—this disease has reached epidemic proportions in America. Your struggle is shared by many others. In your case, it's just too bad that I couldn't have made the diagnosis ten years from now," suggesting that the impotence brought on by the removal of the prostate might by then seem a less painful
loss. And so I set out to minimize the loss by struggling to pretend that desire had naturally abated, until I came in contact for barely an hour with a beautiful, privileged, intelligent, self-possessed, languid-looking thirty-year-old made enticingly vulnerable by her fears and I experienced the bitter helplessness of a taunted old man dying to be whole again.

O
N THE WALK
from my hotel up to West 71st Street I stopped at a liquor store to buy a couple of bottles of wine for my hosts and then proceeded quickly on my way to watch the election results of a campaign that, for the first time since I was made aware of electoral politics—when Roosevelt defeated Willkie in 1940—I knew barely anything about.

I had been an avid voter all my life, one who'd never pulled a Republican lever for any office on any ballot. I had campaigned for Stevenson as a college student and had my juvenile expectations dismantled when Eisenhower trounced him, first in '52 and then again in '56; and I could not believe what I saw when a creature so rooted in
his
ruthless pathology, so transparently fraudulent and malicious as Nixon, defeated Humphrey in '68, and when, in the eighties, a self-assured knucklehead whose unsurpassable hollowness and hackneyed sentiments and absolute blindness to every historical complexity became the object of national worship and, esteemed as a "great communicator" no less, won each of his two terms in a landslide. And was there ever an election like Gore versus Bush, resolved in the treacherous ways that it was, so perfectly calculated to quash the last shameful vestige of a law-abiding citizen's naivete? I'd hardly held myself aloof from the antagonisms of partisan politics, but now, having lived enthralled by America for nearly three-quarters of a century, I had decided no longer to be overtaken every four years by the emotions of a child—the emotions of a child and the pain of an adult. At least not so long as I holed up in my cabin, where I could manage to remain in America without America's ever again being absorbed in me. Aside from writing books and studying once again, for a final go-round, the first great writers I read, all the rest that once mattered most no longer mattered at all, and I dispelled a good half, if not more, of a lifetime's allegiances and pursuits. After 9/11 I pulled the plug on the contradictions. Otherwise, I told myself, you'll become the exemplary letter-to-the-editor madman, the village grouch, manifesting the syndrome in all its seething ridiculousness: ranting and raving while you read the paper, and at night, on the phone with friends, roaring indignantly about the pernicious profitability for which a
wounded nation's authentic patriotism was about to be exploited by an imbecilic king, and in a republic, a king in a free country with all the slogans of freedom with which American children are raised. The despising without remission that constitutes being a conscientious citizen in the reign of George W. Bush was not for one who had developed a strong interest in surviving as reasonably serene—and so I began to annihilate the abiding wish
to find out.
I canceled magazine subscriptions, stopped reading the
Times,
even stopped picking up the occasional copy of the
Boston Globe
when I went down to the general store. The only paper I saw regularly was the
Berkshire Eagle,
a local weekly. I used the TV to watch baseball, the radio to listen to music, and that was it.