The Folded Clock (28 page)

Today I received an e-mail from a friend who might introduce me to some people he knows. He and I once spent a summer together in Morocco twenty years ago. I requested these introductions because I want to offer these people some work. I realized, however, that I was not just asking to be introduced; I was asking to be recommended. He and I are both academics and so even innocent introductions have a whiff of
putting one forth
or
putting one up
(tenure language) about them. Character evaluations are required.

My friend said he would introduce/recommend me to the people I wanted to meet. Then he related a story about Paul Bowles, the cultish American writer of
The Sheltering Sky
who lived most of his life in Tangier, and about whom
this friend had been writing his dissertation the summer we lived in Morocco. Every weekend he'd take the train from Fez to Tangier to hang out with Bowles.

He wrote, “Did I ever tell you the story of when I asked Paul Bowles to write a letter of introduction for me to William Burroughs?” I told him he had not. He described the encounter.

I thought this was such a great story—I laughed about it quite a bit. Then I stopped laughing and wondered: did this mean he
wasn't
going to make the introductions I'd requested? Such is the inconvenience of e-mail. I could not dig beneath his bed for proof of what he maybe had not written.

Today I was searching online for a place to stay in the Bavarian Alps. Ask me where the Bavarian Alps are located (beyond “in Europe”) and I could not tell you. A few months ago I might have claimed that “Bavarian” is just a snowier synonym for “German,” but I recently had the occasion to learn a little bit, not much, about German states. I'd Googled
frankfurt what german state
, because I was making an e-mail joke to my new agent about posing as my husband's mistress while he was in Frankfurt. My agent is savvy about Europe and presumably also those ancient feudal European subdivisions about which most Americans know nothing. His suits suggest as much. He is a man whose suits say of him, “I know quite a lot about kingdoms.” I initially wrote that I was my husband's
Bavarian
mistress, but then I wondered—why was I not his Tyrolian mistress? Or his Thuringian mistress? To claim to be his Bavarian mistress when really I was his Tyrolian or Thuringian mistress (in this joke formulation, at least) might reveal me to be the Old World-ignorant American I totally was and preferred to appear not to be. (Frankfurt, it turns out, is in the state of Hesse, and therefore I was my husband's Hessian mistress. I have begun to fact-check my e-mail jokes, and my e-mails generally, even though I do not use capital letters or proper punctuation. “we write everything lowercase in order to save time,” said Herbert Bayer—herbert bayer—of the Bauhaus school. When I discovered this quote I felt so reassured. I'd always worried that I'd naturally defaulted to lowercase letters because I lacked courage or conviction or a healthy sense of self-worth.
But in fact it was because I was so busy writing functional and unornamented sentences. I just needed to save time.)

But the Bavarian Alps. Wherever they are, I want to go to them soon. I was trying to find an inexpensive lodge where I might stay; a travel article named a promising sounding place and included a link that led instead to a warning.

PAGE NOT FOUND. This page is unavailable, it might have been deleted or worse: it could never have existed!

I couldn't tell if this warning was sincere or if it was meant to be cheeky. The hotel (to which this unfound page was attached) seemed capable of boutique cheekiness (there was an oversized service bell on the front desk), and, given, the hotel was French—somehow my “Bavarian” search term landed me at a French hotel—and the French are not typically cheeky, well, it would make sense if their cheekiness might unintentionally read, despite their best efforts to loosen up, as philosophical.

Perhaps it was a matter of language. Ideas stated in French sound more dignified than they do in English. I translated.
Page non trouvée. Cette page est indisponible, il aurait été supprimé ou pire: il n'aurait jamais existé!

French did not clarify matters. The problem was not the language but the punctuation. The exclamation point drained all gravity from the sentiment. It rendered it bouncy and nonthreatening.
It never could have existed! Wheeeeeee!!!!
Once exclamation points were scary and loud; they made you jump. You were in trouble when the exclamation points came out. They were the nun-chucks of punctuation. They were a bark, a scold, a gallows sentence. Not any longer. The exclamation point is lighthearted, even whimsical. If someone responds with an exclamation
point you can be sure that you failed to make a lasting impression on her. If your friend says,
I love it!
she means she was temporarily but forgettably energized by the photo you attached or the e-mail observations you so carefully fact-checked before sending. Your contribution to her in-box is the equivalent of a whippet hit. If she says, however,
I love it
, she means she has been soothed by your quotidian display of greatness into a state of contemplation. I wanted to soothingly contemplate the question of whether it was worse never to have existed than it was to be deleted; I love (as in
love
, no exclamation point) an existential reckoning moment with an auto response. But my only possible responses to this auto response (which I understood as a question
—is
it better to never have existed?) seemed to be
Yes!
or
No!
These were not convictions so much as they were hiccups in my attention span. No, I want another whippet, I mean what I meant is—sorry, yes! Please, I want another.

Today I was walking to class when I heard a couple fighting on the sidewalk. The other pedestrians and I craned our necks to eyeball the participants, but cautiously, so we wouldn't get busted. Looking is impolite. Space is tight in this city; loved ones have to take it to the streets, sometimes. They deserve a little privacy.

The two fighting people quickly rumbled into view; they resolved themselves into one person fighting with herself. She wore a giant maroon sweatshirt advertising a mid-western college and a sagging pair of chinos. Despite her
other-college varsity gear, her rant was about Columbia. “Fuck Columbia University! Fuck Columbia University!” It was her fight song.
If only all cheerleaders suffered from psychotic breaks
, I thought.
They might help their teams to win more games
.

I noticed a few people on the sidewalk, despite themselves, smiling. Columbia University is the gleaming beneficiary but also the occasional victim of its city circumstances. The students and faculty fight like everyone in New York fights for money and for space. Also the university was expanding into a new neighborhood, igniting local protests. Most of the pedestrians on that sidewalk had probably thought at one time, or were thinking right now,
Fuck Columbia University!

This woman was the voice of the people.

I crossed Broadway. I was far enough away that I could now safely look at her. She was just another anonymous and lumpily dressed outraged person until she wasn't. The body was foreign to me, and so was the voice, but I recognized the face. The face belonged to a student of mine from many years ago, a woman who'd come to my office and was so depressed that when she cried, her tears moved slowly down her face, her whole being enervated to the point where even gravity failed to have an effect on her.

I stood on the street corner. I thought about chasing after her, but she was churning swiftly through the neighborhood—she was already almost a block away—so instead I entered a coffee shop. This is why I was on the street. I was going to a coffee shop, and I was buying a coffee, and then I was walking to class, and then I would teach, and then during office hours I would reassure the students who needed reassuring, and I would be tough on the students who could take it, and if someone cried in my
office for reasons unrelated but maybe sort of related to the imperfect short story they'd written, I would tell them that fiction makes you cry, the fiction you read though more often it's the shitty fiction you write that makes you cry, and I would also be thinking,
You poor person, you have no idea what awaits you
. A life awaits you, like a serious fucking life. This is what I would want to say. And then I would go home to my serious fucking life, and it would be so ridiculously unserious; it would involve soup spills and dirty dishes and lengthy logic proofs meant to coerce tired, inarticulate people to bed, and I would think how lucky I was to have this unserious life, i.e., to be forced to do somewhat or even thoroughly banal things every day. Because what awaits you if you don't? What kind of life awaits you then? A life where you don't calmly think, as you're scraping up the crystallized juice rings before showering before getting dressed before buying coffee before teaching class before reassuring people their hard lives would only get harder,
Fuck this whole existence
. You're running down the street and you're screaming at a university to which you no longer belong, you're wearing a sweatshirt not even branded with the insignia of the university on which you blame your breakdown, the university to which you are no longer affiliated, because you are so deeply unaffiliated that you are barely even affiliated with your own face.