The Long Summer

The two of us sit together in a beach town raising drinks with shaking hands. She mentions death often. I gather dying is like falling asleep reading a book. It's hard to find where you left off, because there is nothing special about the last thing you read. I have to listen carefully to what she is actually saying, because her tone is always the same, accepting, optimistic- even when she is drawing attention to something she detests. Growing up is realizing how often people say the opposite of what they feel- its the simplest rule. My generation has absorbed this truth by making irony a physical law, engineering a world to confound us. It is a dense fabric of inverted meanings, an inside out computer. But her world is memorized around her, the position of the laundry switch, the placement of the remote control, the location of items at the supermarket, the bus schedules. Her mind fills the gaps that her eyesight has left, mental acuity behind a cloudy squint. She is a New Yorker, sleeping with talk radio on full blast to drown out the silence that is killing her friends. I hear the lightning in the radio broadcast at the same moment I see the flash, ten seconds before the thunder arrives.

Somehow I have become a commuter, exhausted allegory of the 20th century, enacting rituals of pilgrimage and exodus daily, barreling home to collapse where it is silent, where families are hidden. As the train slowly rolls out of the station, a track worker is revealed, peeing in between giant high voltage boxes. I can actually see his penis and the stream of pee clearly. Business people on the train feign productivity with laptops and blackberries, as if the world has become a video game that they can access through these devices. I think of the train of the future, frictionless, generating only musical buzz, always on time. Then I emerge into the city: a cop dangles a pen from his mouth while he ties a bow. They are feeding Victorian furniture into a trash compactor. We confer with the woman who was nearly hit by a bus. Two rich girls in sweatpants call each other dirty skanks. I feel a strange contempt for the the oldest women on the street, whose bodies have invented new postures beneath tweed skirts and over-sized blouses, whose organs are failing asynchronously, like a foreign car of unknown make. Somehow they exist as a criticism of me. It is a summer of old women. Walking out of the aging artist's building into a mist rain that seems artificially generated. Her apartment, five floors walking up, crammed in every corner with plexiglas models of empty Gap clothing racks. A fixation on wordplay, the gap, allowing the gap to remain, empty space.

Back on Long Island I go to the beach alone. My options there are: I can oggle women, or build sand castles. I tend to start with the first and move on to the second, then resort to the first again as I leave. It is amazing how so many attractive women can be so unbeautiful. Their faces convey the wrong things to me. Their belly buttons are filled with diamonds. When there is a beautiful woman, I usually switch to bulding sandcastles. I am trying to ignore her as well as lure her into my passionate understanding of the world. Instead I attract another woman's child over.
On a park bench in the city I read a newspaper article about a new power source, running off the heat in the air. I imagine this; global cooling and not warming. Ancient civilizations added detritus to the world; poison gases, discarded monuments, crumbling sewers. Modernity subtracts instead, until that final moment, in societies producing no trash, when the last machine will slow to a halt, frozen in abiotic perfection.
In the supermarket I read labels to her. Suddenly it occurs to me- I should have picked a profession. This toothpaste fights cavities. I have no idea how it performs such a miracle. This detergent lifts 99 different popular stains. Some team of people is out there, 9 to 5, battling chocolate milk, barbeque sauce, lipstick. All of their truimphs are contained in this jug of blue liquid. I have added nothing to the library of domestic weapons. Outside SUVs line the sandy streets, pristine and discreet. They shed nothing into the crumbling world- they are mobile emblems of self-containment. They make me think I should have been a doctor, someone whose free time is precious, someone who toils to purchase the sensation of savoring time. I am the beach instead. The bleached hair on my arms is beach grass. My sunburnt skin flakes out from under it like sand, my white shirt is stained from the high tide mark of my sweat. I don't even have the focus to invent a character, I am here with no plot to align me. My only tool is the compression of observations, a summer in motion that will end without wrapping itself up, in my life in motion that will end without wrapping itself up. Long Island is the place where a black man's severed leg falls from the sky and lands in your backyard. They said he was killed by stowing away in the wheel well of a jet that left Johannesburg. The leg was clad in only a white sneaker and sock. I think about it a lot, although it is not mentioned again on the news. I want this man to be my character, I should be able to find a story that would drive someone to something so bold and desperate. But he is just a horrible anecdote. Why should I spend this time collecting the horrible, distilling my experience to the tragic? I want light, vivid colors, drug-like experiences of vitality. I don't know how to alter my sense of beauty.
Our dining room table is set from the night before. Unused, the plates are gathering dust. Sometimes when I see how fragile she is I get a chill, as she slices a tomato with her shaking hands. I am learning the logic of meat marinade, growing up in strange little accidental ways. The parts of the cow are named after major cities. Now she is conducting a wobbly orchestra as the television plays Sinatra's New York. This is her city, this is her song, she came from Milwaukee to be a part of it.

I set out to take a vacation from my vacation. The greyhound lumbers into the catskills. Upstate in the summer is something I forgot. Describing it would be trite, the feeling is atmospheric, something between big clouds and green hills, a layer that you can live in and remember from, a slice of air connecting all summers through time. I want to be honest, I want to present the truth of myself on the surface. On my dad's sailboat, he and my step mother are learning the alternate language of boats, words to obscure the couch, kitchen, toilet. I dive into the water. It is not cold as I strike it, then cold rushes in before actual adjustment starts warming me slowly. It is a mathematic curve, I can feel calculus in my body. The actual temperature is irrelevant, science has switched its focus from phenomena to sensation. At night, everybody a little stoned, my father is teaching my half-brother and I what he has learned about living- by examples, narrated in code. We look at the stars and try to find the little dipper. I think about the consensus, old, that surrounds this faint symbol. I think about rock and roll's resurrection of primitive energies. My half brother and I stay up after everyone to bond. He tells me about a baseball player whose value was overlooked, until he was traded to Boston to become a home-run hero. He tells me this story, this pious baseball allegory, because it means that potential can be latent. We are princes of latent potential, crafting its fa�ade skillfully, avoiding contact with its surface. We talk about George Lucas.
Back on Long Island I dine with my grandmother's friends, I cook steak for them. They are sharp as hell, masterful bitchers, and I open my eyes a little as I realize: I am dining with the ladies of the great depression. This priviledge, this sudden compression of history, forgives their fears and predudices. It lends them an awesome endurance. I make no allusions to my dirty secret of liberalism, or my collection of unemployment. I am a coward, and the best observer I know. Nasa's launch is delayed on the television. Going to the moon was the greatest art ever produced by capitalism. But as soon as it was over we were fucking stuck. What's next? We have to go back up there, right? Space travel is a beautiful nightmare; too complicated, too symbolically heavy. Our national consciousness is stuck in the launch window doldrums. 10 minutes is just not enough time for so many wires, safety protocols, cloud formations. We are strapped to building-sized tanks of explosives, and we are waiting.