Luminous Airplanes

THE RETURN OF RIP VAN WINKLE

I stayed that night in a Kingston motel, where I lay awake listening to the trucks pass on the Thruway, and the next morning I drove to New York City. I stayed with a friend named David Rice who I knew from college. He worked for a company that invented financial instruments of increasing complexity, not options, not derivatives, but derivatives of derivatives, products so complex that he and his colleagues referred to them simply as colors: Rose, or Lime, or Buff. David had done well with Peach, which went to telecommunications companies in the Southwest; now he owned a brownstone in Brooklyn, which had belonged a century before to one Elijah Scruggs, the captain of a whaling ship. Although neither David nor anyone else knew anything more about Elijah Scruggs, since he moved in David had created a kind of myth of Scruggs, and decorated the house with knickknacks from the sailor’s supposed travels: coconut-husk masks from the South Pacific, whalebone toys, the shell of a Galápagos tortoise, and, above the fireplace, an oil portrait of a white-bearded man who David swore was Scruggs himself. Apart from the ghost of Scruggs, David lived alone; there was a guest room on the second floor that overlooked a weedy garden and the neighbors’ better-kept yards. David was working late, so I ate leftover samosas from the fridge, showered and fell asleep at nine o’clock.

I slept until the middle of the next afternoon, an incredible sleep, which made me feel as if the last ten years had been a dream and I was twenty again, ready to begin my life. A voicemail from David told me to meet him in an East Village bar. It was only when I came out of the subway in Manhattan and saw people on the street with little I VOTED stickers on their lapels that I realized it was Election Day. I hadn’t followed the campaign; no one in Thebes had talked about it. I had no idea whether Bush or Gore was favored to win. I was like Rip Van Winkle, coming down from the mountains after a long sleep to find his country changed; all I lacked was the long white beard.

“Are you shitting me?” David said when I told him about this. “What were you doing up there?”

“I told you, I was cleaning out my grandparents’ house.”

“Don’t they have a TV?”

“They did, but …”

“Get this man a fucking drink,” David said to the bartender. We watched the returns come in, the states turning red and blue. Each was a shock to me: an entire state full of people who had remembered to vote! It was the most ordinary thing, but it seemed incredible that all over the country people had gone to their polling places and voted for the candidate of their choice, who would in a few months’ time be president. We had a president! We were a nation! The size of it, after the smallness of Thebes, was thrilling. All those blank states waiting to be filled in! Then it became clear that this was not an ordinary election. “What the fuck?” David howled as the newscasters called it for Gore, then for Bush, then for nobody. His thumbs composed urgent messages to politically connected friends, begging them to explain. We forgot to eat dinner and by the time the bar closed we were very drunk. The East Village was full of people like us, drunk people staggering to the subway, asking each other silently, what was going on?

David took the next day off from work and we sat on his sofa, drinking coffee and shouting at his plasma-screen television. David’s appreciation of the sporting-event side of American politics was contagious, and besides, I had to affirm my citizenship, to compensate with insults and groans and hurled popcorn for my weird absence from the world. We watched television until midnight, then David went to bed and I kept watching. I watched for days, following in numbing detail the recount of the Florida ballots. I meant to call Yesim. I knew she would be wondering where I was, but it had only been a couple of days, and she had her program at the Pines to get through. Maybe it was better that I didn’t call. Anyway, I needed to think things over. Hadn’t Yesim herself told me at one point that she couldn’t see me because she needed time to think? I felt like I had the right to do the same thing, even if it wasn’t exactly the same thing. So I waited, tortured by an inarticulate feeling that I was on the wrong track. Like the rest of America, I was in the middle of making a costly mistake that I could not stop myself from making. It was as if I were watching my own life on David’s TV set: the person who shouted No! at the screen was hundreds of miles from the person doing the bad action, and although I could see that person, we were separated by a distance that my No! was powerless to cross.

Finally, I did call Yesim. Six days had passed since I came to New York, and the terror that had driven me out of Thebes, the need to disappear from my own life, was beginning to fade. I told myself that Yesim was a fallible, changeable person too, so there was reason to hope that she would forgive my error. Eventually we’d laugh about it: Remember that time you ran away? — Sure! I was scared shitless! But the duty nurse told me that Yesim was no longer at the Pines. She’d checked out early, was all she could, or would, say. I called the Regenzeits’ house, and Kerem answered.

“Where are you?” he asked.

“New York.”

“Have you been there all this time?” He sounded less angry than puzzled.

“Yes. Listen, is Yesim there?”

“My sister is in Turkey, with our parents.”

“Oh?” I remember thinking, that was fast. “I thought she didn’t want to go.”

“What are you doing in New York?”

“I had some things to take care of.”

Kerem was offended by the blandness of my lie. “Things?”

“Can you give me Yesim’s number? I really want to talk to her.”

“She doesn’t want to talk to you,” Kerem said. “I don’t want her to talk to you. I don’t want to talk to you. What the fuck is your problem, anyway?”

If I could have answered his question, maybe he would have helped me, and this story would have a different ending; but I couldn’t answer him. My problem was Richard Ente; my problem was myself. “I’m trying to figure some things out,” I said. There it was again, that terrible word things, which soared like an airplane over life’s specificity, lumping together fields and trees, cities, lakes, rivers, mountains, places where people lived and places where they didn’t. Things was what the world became when you didn’t love it enough to pay attention. “Please,” I said, “just tell me how to reach Yesim.”

“Why should I?”

“Because we’re going to have a child.”

Kerem laughed unhappily. “If it were my decision, there wouldn’t be a child. As it is, if I ever run into you again, you’d better fucking watch out.” I could hear the bravado in his voice, the fifteen-year-old punk making a threat. It was almost as if he were giving me, as a parting gift, a memory of the friendship we’d once had.

Gore conceded to Bush, and I felt only the mildest indignation. Really, I was beyond caring. I spent most of my time playing Final Fantasy IX on David’s PlayStation and accumulating empty beer bottles which I arranged in vaguely nautical clusters on his kitchen counters. Finally, at the end of December, David asked me to move out. He was worried about me, he said, but he couldn’t have me around anymore. I was becoming a fucking downer. I understood. With the money I’d saved working at Cetacean, I rented a room on West Fifty-fourth Street, in the apartment of a fifty-something Broadway costumer named Elena. The second millennium of the Common Era came to an anticlimactic end, and in January I looked fitfully for work as a content manager, but the slowdown that was now making my friends’ lives difficult in San Francisco had flattened the new economy in New York, and no one was hiring. I remembered my old plan to move to Europe, or to Canada, maybe I could still go, maybe if I left America things would be different; but the idea of leaving was utterly abstract. More and more, my own mistakes were the only things that seemed real. It wasn’t fair that Yesim had left America so fast, one part of me raged, but another part, the part I was, increasingly, coming to hate, even as its voice grew louder in me, asserted that what had happened was merely just. As it had been with Richard Ente, so it was with me, and so it would be, unto the end. After a few weeks I stopped going to the library. I spent a lot of time sleeping and playing with Elena’s cat. I was allergic to the cat, but it didn’t matter; my watering eyes were a small price to pay for the pleasure of being near a living creature and having it not recoil in horror. I went to bed every night with the idea that tomorrow I would get my life back on track, but I must have known the truth, that my life was on its track, which had been laid down for it thirty years earlier.

LOW-FLYING STARS

At some point during this period I got a letter from Marie, and cut it up.

THE RICHARD ENTE PERIOD

One morning in February I got up early and walked along the Hudson, past the great gray bulk of the Intrepid bristling with defunct warplanes, past weedy lots of suspicious parked trucks. The river was deep blue and calm, still benighted at six-thirty a.m. I picked up the path that rounds the tip of the island, past the World Trade Center and the Battery, park, cannons, plaques commemorating the days when lower Manhattan was the frontier between one world and another: the British and the rebels, the Indians and the Dutch. The sun rose and the Staten Island Ferry pulled into its terminal, huge and orange, honking. Soon people were coming out of the terminal, their faces sad, as if something terrible awaited them, and perhaps it did, perhaps it did, there in the Financial District, what did I know about the days that were waiting for all those people? They walked north, their heads tucked down against the cold wind. I slipped through them, blown along by my personal weather. Past South Street Seaport with its lovely reproductions of human transport from a century and a half ago. The wind slacked off. A few tourists in brightly colored anoraks gathered on the wooden planking of the pier, as though they were about to leave for an expedition to the North Pole. When I was in high school I used to cadge drinks from a Mexican restaurant in the seaport mall: I had no taste. And look what I became, a content manager, a pioneer of the new commerce, brighter and cleaner even than the mall. I walked north, past Fulton Fish Market, already closed for the day. I’d never seen it open. Everything is like that, I thought, everything keeps its own hours. The only traces of the fish trade were some puddles of slick fishy water, three pallets stacked by the shuttered front of a market stall. A coil of green hose. What does a world leave behind when it goes? A question for archaeologists, historians. Of the three of us, Victor and Alex and me, it was Victor who believed most in the evidence of the past. Then he gave history up and founded MySky: maybe the evidence of the past wasn’t so appealing. Maybe it was better to leave nothing behind, or as little as possible. I kept to what became a path beside parks. A track, a ball field. The middle-aged businessman’s basketball league at morning practice, brokers in sweatsuits and headbands trying to grab hold of the sky’s rim. A parkaed kid riding in circles on a trick bicycle. Nothing to stare at. What would any of us leave behind? E-mails, files on our laptops. As long as we didn’t print out we’d disappear, or maybe even if we printed. A professor at Stanford once told me that toner isn’t archival; the day will come when the letters literally fall from the pages and turn into a layer of black dust at the bottom of countless filing cabinets. Our legacy, our gift to the next civilization, will be blank pages and black dust. Scuff marks from our exercise shoes. Fouled weather. The Brooklyn Bridge soared over the waterside path; I turned inland. The old heart of the city in systole, workers gathered into the buildings, the streets nearly empty. Breakfast carts packing up, lunch trucks not yet arrived. I found the path onto the bridge, joined the crossers. There’s an old joke: a man walks up to a bridge, gives the toll collector fifty cents. The toll collector says, hey, buddy, toll on this bridge is a dollar. That’s OK, the man says, I’m only going halfway across. I went halfway across and stood at the bridge’s highest point, looking out at the water. A friend of mine in high school knew someone who jumped from the Brooklyn Bridge and lived. A classmate’s father: apparently he swam to Chinatown and got lunch there. Ginsberg wrote about him in Howl. How he jumped is a mystery to me; you’d have to climb over the traffic lanes; more likely you’d fall and get run over. But how had I, who grew up in New York, not known the layout of the Brooklyn Bridge? Embarrassed, I turned back, and walked up Centre Street to Canal, the Manhattan Bridge. The pedestrian walkway was closed for construction but it looked solid enough. I was just swinging my leg over the CLOSED sign when a red-cheeked Chinese woman looked at me, alarmed. I nodded to her. Yes, I’m going. Everyone makes their own accommodations to the city, the crowding, the noise. She passed me and didn’t look back. I climbed over the sign and walked halfway across the bridge. I put my hands on the railing and looked south at the Brooklyn Bridge, and, past it, the widening of the river. Governors Island. The invisible place where the ocean begins. It wouldn’t take much: one foot on the low bar, other leg over the fence. Leap or just let go. Then do what I’d always wanted to do: disappear. I thought about the so-called pioneers of flight. How many of them wanted to fly, really? And how many knew what they were doing. All those hours in the workshop, building their complicated machines, trying out steam engines, pulleys, gearing schemes, nights and weekends, while their wives complained, all that time they knew what the end would be. Not up, down. The guy who invented the ornithopter was surely a suicide at heart. A water taxi crossed from Manhattan to Queens, and I thought of my old neighbor Robert, waiting in an apartment in San Francisco. Waiting for what? The inspiration that would allow him to fix his life, to fix the world? Let someone else get it right, I thought. Someone always does. Someone will get it right and we’ll go on. I put my foot on the rail. There wasn’t anything more to think about. I grabbed the top of the fence and pulled myself up, a monkey hanging now from the monkey bars. Curious George. The shirt Yesim had liked so much. The air smelled of ice and ocean. Even the ones who fail get us somewhere, my grandfather had said. Maybe some future person would learn from my mistakes, invent a better version of me, a non-fucking-up human being, but I didn’t want to know about it. The failures were the ones I had always loved. Let the explorers find their new world, let the believers go to Heaven, let the entrepreneurs get rich and take to the air in their private jets. I wanted to remain here, on the ground. Huh, I thought, then I let go of the fence. And landed on my feet, I mean, on the walkway. How would I be writing this, otherwise? A miraculous survival? Flight unassisted by any sort of machine? No. All I did was get down and walk away, back toward the Manhattan side of the bridge. I wasn’t ready to die, and I had nothing to do in Brooklyn.

I walked into Chinatown and ate lunch, such an enormous lunch as I’ve never eaten before, dim sum from every cart. Beef noodles, taro cakes, spare ribs. As I ate, I felt a strange thing happening: Richard Ente was relaxing his grip on me, and almost physically leaving my body, as if he had been the ghost all along, not me. Not me. I ate until my stomach hurt and I kept eating, filling the void that Richard Ente had been. Shrimp in translucent shells, pork buns, rice in lotus leaves. Phoenix feet. After a while, even the cart ladies looked at me with wonder. What would happen? Would I burst? How much longer could I go on? Then I was full. I paid the check and headed north, back to Elena’s apartment.

THE GREAT DISAPPOINTMENT

I think I understand now why some Millerites preferred to believe that the world did indeed end on October 22, 1844. There’s something terrible about the fact that things go on. It’s not just the embarrassment of having been wrong, of having not Gone Up in your ascension robe, like a little luminous airplane; it’s the sheer overwhelmingness of the world, where the wind keeps blowing and the sky darkens with rain, where people sell bread and sharpen scissors and pack up their wagons, their cars, and go on trips and fall in love and none of it seems likely ever to stop. Here it all is and no one will tell you what to do about it, where to go, how even to begin to understand all the things that are taking place. Compared with the world’s bigness, the apocalypse would be a relief.

After I decided not to leave the world, the world grew around me, grew immeasurably, and I blew through it like a leaf. Everywhere I looked people were doing things: ripping up the streets and paving them, waiting purposefully for subways, hailing cabs, striding in and out of buildings, their eyes turned a little upward, not to the sky, which they didn’t care about, but to the invisible goals which floated above everybody else’s heads. For lack of anything better to do, I returned to the public library on Forty-second Street, the same one I’d visited as a child, trying to prove that America was discovered by the Chinese, but even the people in the Reading Room, tourists and semi-homeless seekers of respite from the unwelcoming street, knew what they were doing more than I did. Like Mr. Casaubon in Middlemarch, they were looking for the key to all mythologies, or the lost continent of Atlantis, or, more mundanely, for a job, a lover, a place to spend the night. Whereas I had no goal; when I looked up, all I saw was the blank air. I envied the disappointed Millerites: at least they had one another. They could (and did!) hole up in abandoned houses, singing and praying and promiscuously washing one another’s feet. I would have welcomed the chance to wash someone’s feet, to wedge my soapy fingers between a set of warm human toes, never mind how gross, but by the winter’s end I had no friends in the city.

The person who returned me to the world of time and purpose was, unexpectedly, my aunt Celeste. She came to see me on Fifty-fourth Street one day in March — there was some question of what to do about the things I’d left in Thebes, which had been annoying Charles for months, and which had finally reached a crisis because my grandparents’ house was going to be sold. A lawyer named Rich was buying it, a coincidence of name and occupation that we all preferred not to think about. My left-behind things made their way into the mail; for weeks they remained in the hall of my mothers’ apartment, and finally Celeste showed up in a taxi and told me to come downstairs and get my stuff already. She came upstairs with me, and when she saw the purple book on my nightstand, she flinched.

“God,” she said, “you took that?”

Celeste told me that my grandfather had read Progress in Flying Machines to her and Marie as children, too. “You can imagine how interested I was,” she said, “in the carrying loads of pigeons.” Then to my surprise she imitated my grandfather’s baritone: “But, Celeste, you must understand that these were important experiments.” We both laughed. “Come on,” she said, “let’s have lunch.”

We went to a French restaurant on Ninth Avenue, one of the heralds of a new neighborhood which had not yet entirely realized itself. I asked Celeste about her work and she told me she was making stop-motion animations. “Of all the stupid things I could have done.” She looked well, though: her hair had grown long and gray, distinguished. Her face was pink. I suspected that another reversal had taken place between my mothers, and Celeste was once again ascendant. “And you?” she asked. “You know, we’ve been a little worried. Do you have a job yet?”

“Not yet.”

“You should think about teaching. Couldn’t you teach computers?”

I said I’d think about it. I still had some money from Cetacean, so it wasn’t urgent.

“But it’s your life,” Celeste said. “Isn’t there something you want to do?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “How’s Marie?”

“Fine,” Celeste said, and she went back to talking about her animations. I wondered if she was avoiding the subject of Marie, whose letter I still hadn’t answered. I wondered what part tact played in Celeste’s life: for someone who was, often, unusually blunt in her speech, she seemed also to have a strange ability to know when not to speak, so that I couldn’t tell, in the end, if her bluntness was really thoughtlessness or if it was the product of an incredibly delicate calculation, the navigation of an inner landscape mined with subjects which might cause her or her listener pain. What made Celeste Celeste? What made anyone anyone? My thoughts drifted into generality. In half an hour we’d finished lunch and headed in our separate directions, Celeste downtown and me up, well-meaning but still mysterious to each other.

The box Charles had sent from Thebes contained a coat I’d left in the downstairs closet, my copy of Norwegian Wood, and, wrapped in a towel, two of my grandmother’s watercolors. One showed the woods and mountains that rolled westward from the peak of Mount Espy, and the other, snow falling in the Kaaterskill Clove. So this was what I was left with, I thought, barely enough stuff to fill a medium-sized box. After all the work I did! Suddenly I found myself laughing: at the box, the monstrous disproportion of effort to result, above all else at myself. I imagine that some of the Millerites must have felt the same way when they returned, finally, to their shuttered shops, and surveyed the bare shelves, from which they’d given everything away in anticipation of the end. What had they been thinking? What had I been thinking? The next morning I went back to the library and began to write about what had happened in Thebes.

THE LIBRARY

This account has gone faster than The Great Disappointment ever did. In three months I wrote almost two hundred pages, rarely stopping to think, carried along by the momentum of the story I was telling. As spring gave way to summer, though, I found myself thinking more and more about Yesim. I tried to imagine what her life has become: Yesim in a room with white walls and an ocher tile floor, watching television while Mrs. Regenzeit cooked her something bland. Yesim dozing in a beach chair in a courtyard among fluttering lines of laundry. Yesim swimming in a lake — apparently Anatolia is full of saline lakes, it’s one of the things I’ve learned from the Britannica in the reading room — her pregnant belly poking out of the water like the Loch Ness monster’s head. Yesim rising out of the water, shaking out her hair, arguing with her father. Yesim about to call me, then deciding not to call. I began a letter to her, asking if she could forgive me, but stopped when I realized that I didn’t know where to send it. I had no way of reaching Yesim: no phone number, no address, no e-mail, if they even had e-mail in Akbez. Kerem didn’t return my calls. The only other person who might have known how to find Yesim was her ex-boyfriend, Mark, and I didn’t know his last name. Not that he would have talked to me anyway.

There was nothing I could do but work, so I kept working, but by the hot gray middle of July my hope had given way to frustration and disgust. Was I accomplishing anything by revisiting the past? Wasn’t my problem that I lived too much in the past already? As I got closer to the end of my story, my anxiety increased. What would I do when it was over? Was I ready to go back to San Francisco and pick up where I’d left off? I was thinking uneasily about this prospect in the first days of September, when someone whispered my name. An unfamiliar man in glasses, a V-neck sweater, a rumpled dress shirt, he could have been my double if he’d been thirty pounds lighter. “Matt Bark.” He looked at me eagerly, as though he’d presented a winning lottery ticket for payment.

“From Nederland?”

“That’s right. Man, it’s been a while.”

“Years,” I said.

We sat on a stone bench in the rotunda of the library, and Matt told me in brief the story of the last seventeen years of his life, how he’d gone to Princeton, married a woman named Dana, gone back to school after a disillusioning year at Merrill Lynch, received a Ph.D. in history from Columbia, and how he was teaching at William and Mary and had two lovely, lovely children. “What about you?”

“I was in American history at Stanford.”

“You, too? That’s great! You teach?”

“I dropped out. Now I’m a content-management specialist.” Matt looked at me blankly. “A kind of programmer.”

“Interesting. No question, academia’s a tough proposition with the job market like this.” He brightened as he told me about his dissertation, a history of corporations in early New England, which was going to come out as a book next year. Harvard was doing it, Harvard University Press. “It’s a new field. There aren’t a lot of us in corporate history. But I’ll tell you, it’s the next big thing.” He was planning a book on Silicon Valley. “The first start-ups, you know?”

“I know. I lived in San Francisco for most of the nineties.”

“Oh, hey, that’s amazing. You were in the middle of history being made, right there.” Matt bobbed his head. “What are you doing on Friday? I’m having a beer with Andy Ames. We reconnected at the reunion, I guess it was a few years ago, wow. You should come out with us.”

“I’ll try to,” I lied.

“You have to, dude,” Matt Bark said. He was about to go, but turned back. “You were in Mr. Savage’s class, right?”

“That’s right.”

“It figures you’re in history, then. Or that you were in history, sorry. It’s too bad, what happened to him, don’t you think?”

“What happened?”

“You don’t remember?”

“I don’t know. I left Nederland in the middle of the year.”

“Right, that’s right. Savage was fired. He got into an argument with David Metzger’s dad. Poor guy. He knew about history, but he didn’t understand the first thing about money.”

“That’s too bad.”

“Dude, that’s an understatement!”

Matt left, and I went back to my seat in the reading room. Across the table from me, a man with a thick, undivided eyebrow was reading a book called What Remains to Be Discovered? I tried to turn my mind back to the question of what I was going to do, but Matt Bark had stirred something else up, not plans but memories. There was David Metzger, and there was Mr. Savage, and Robert Kaplan and Gideon Peel shouting Flip him! Flip him! And there, slipping in among the people I’d already written about, was my friend Luis, moon-faced, smiling metallically: Luis who had taught me the little programming I learned at Nederland. How had I left him out of my story? But here he was, and he wasn’t the only one, I had left out all sorts of people, Momus, for example, my friend at Bleak College who came very close to killing me because of something I told his girlfriend; and Deirdre, my girlfriend at Saint Hubert’s Prep, sorry, Dee! I haven’t said a word about you or the night we set the Dumpster on fire. And they were only two of the people who had mattered to me, and to whom I’d mattered, the lovers and not-quite lovers, the enemies and friends, the people I’d worked alongside, taken classes with, argued with about historiography and the precedence of object classes, the many people who’d been kind to me and asked for nothing in return and the few who’d been mean or mad, all of them were waiting for me in my memory, as though they had gathered to give me a surprise party, as though they had been waiting in a dark living room for years, and now I had finally opened the door they were all able at last to shout, Surprise! I closed my eyes and let them come. My god, I thought, I could be writing about these people for the rest of my life. In a strange way the thought was comforting.

I opened a blank document on my computer and began to type notes for what I was already beginning to think of as the second part of my project, but then, with the total inconsistency of which I have always been capable, the flight from one thing to another which has often been my downfall, but which was, in this case, my salvation, I got on the Web and, with the last of my Cetacean money, I bought a plane ticket to Ankara, which is the city closest to Akbez. As soon as I had paid for the ticket it was clear that this was the solution I had been looking for all along. This story is done. It may not be done well but it is done enough, which is the point of writing history: not to exhaust the past, but to know it well enough that you can move on. Don’t tell anyone at Stanford I said so! Now I am leaving. I don’t know if Yesim will see me; maybe her parents will chase me off. But as long as I am alive I want at least to try to meet my child.

CONTACT WITH OTHER WORLDS

Nothing is simple, though. If you learn only one thing from history, learn that nothing is simple. On Monday I worked in the library, writing about Matt Bark. I finished my story just as the library was closing, and went down to Bryant Park. The summer heat had finally broken; there was a marine smell in the air, like a new season coming on. The leaves of some oak trees were already trimmed with rust. Everything goes on, I thought, it goes on and on … Overwhelmed by the thought of seasons succeeding one another endlessly, summer then fall, winter then spring, again and again, without ever improving on the seasons that had come before, I sat on a bench. Pigeons gathered at my feet, but I had nothing to feed them. They pecked at white pebbles on the path, as if to save me from embarrassment. A lot of people were lingering in the park, released from work but not ready to go home. They sat at the metal tables and talked on their phones, or stood on the lawn in little groups, like guests at a party. They shifted their leather bags peacefully from shoulder to shoulder. The light was beautiful; even the shadows were good. Before long the people on the lawn would disperse: some would go home to their families and others would go home alone; some would take taxis and others would decide it was a fine evening for a walk. In an hour or two they would be working out, walking their dogs, cooking dinner, listening to music, shifting their bodies tactically on the banquette of a bar and wondering how to keep talking so the person sitting opposite would go on listening, and not just listening, but listening with precisely the look they had now, as if the past existed only in words and the future would never come. For the first time in a long time, I felt like one of them. I was no longer a ghost; I was just an ordinary person who was going somewhere. It was an extraordinary accomplishment, much harder than discovering a new continent or flying off into the sky. I’d found the place where people live.

The next morning I switched on the television and saw that planes had flown into the twin towers of the World Trade Center. This isn’t happening, I thought. Then I thought, this is the end of the world. Ironically, the one thing I didn’t think about was the Millerites: their apocalypse clearly had nothing to do with the pillar of black smoke I could see from my living-room window. But later that day, when I’d stopped weeping, it occurred to me, as it must have to many other people, that the planes hadn’t come out of the blue, empty sky. All the time I had been working in the library, all the time I’d been in Thebes, and probably long before that, something had been going on. People had been preparing this event, and they had themselves been prepared by other events that I didn’t know anything about. I realized then that my ignorance was vastly greater than I had supposed. Even if I had somehow managed to tell the story of every person I’d ever known, what I would have written would be, like Thebes, only a little world, which seemed complete while you were in it, but in fact was not complete. There was always another world waiting to make contact. There was always a wave waiting to break. Now it had broken. And I sat there, staring at the screen, trying to figure out what was going on.