Through the Children's Gate (29 page)

If you had asked me why I avoided the bus, I suppose I would have said that the bus was for old people, or that taking the bus was one step short of not living in New York at all, and that if you stayed on the bus long enough, it would take you right out of town. Riding the bus, I thought, was one of those activities, like going to Radio City, that was in New York but not really of it. My mother-in-law rode the bus when she came to New York to visit, and that, to me, said whom the bus was made for: elegant older women who didn't mind traveling forty-five minutes every morning to visit their grandchildren.

And then I didn't ride the bus because when we first arrived here I loved the subway so. The subway was anxiety-filled. Compared with the vivid, evil, lurid subway, the bus seemed a drab bourgeois necessity—Shirley Booth to the subway's Tallulah Bankhead. In the late seventies and early eighties, the subway was both grander and stranger than a newcomer can imagine now. The graffiti, for one thing, was both more sordid inside—all those “tags”—and more beautiful outside. When the wild-style cars came roaring into a station, they were as exciting and shimmering as Frank Stella birds. The air-conditioning was a lot spottier, too, and sometimes the windows were open, driving the stale and fetid air around in an illusion of cooling. When the air-conditioning worked, it was worse. You walked from steambath to refrigerator, as if changing continents, and your perspiration seemed to freeze within your shirt, a phenomenon previously known only to Antarctic explorers.

Feral thugs and killer nerds rode the subway together, looking warily at one another. And yet there was something sublime about it.

Although it was incidentally frightening, it was also systematically reassuring: It shouldn't have worked; it had stopped working; and yet it worked—vandalized, brutalized, a canvas and a pissoir, it reliably took you wherever you wanted to go. It was a rumbling, sleepless, snorting animal presence underfoot, more a god to be appeased and admired than a thing that had been mastered by its owners. If the stations seemed, as people said, Dantesque, that was not simply because the subway was belowground, and a punishment, but also because it offered an architectural order that seemed free from any interfering human hand, running by itself in its own grim circles. It was religious in the narrow sense as well: Terror and transportation were joined together, and fear propelled you to a higher plane. (The taxis, an alternative if you had the money, were also alarming then—a silent or determined driver in a T-shirt, resting on a mat of beads and demanding, fifty blocks before your destination, which side of the street you wanted, without being at all sublime.)

The bus also has its order, old-fashioned and patriarchal, maintained by an irritable chief. The driver has control over his world and delights in the exercise of arbitrary authority, like a French bureaucrat. On the bus, if your MetroCard turns out to be short fifty cents, the driver will look at you with distaste, tell you to find change from fellow passengers (surprisingly, to a subway rider, people dig into their purses cheerfully), and if this doesn't work, he will wearily wave you on back. You are included, fool though you are, and this grace is often bestowed even as the driver ignores the pounded fists and half-audible pleas for admission of the last few people who, running for the bus, arrived a second too late. The driver's control of the back door is just as imperious. A zone of acceptable access, a five- or six-foot expanse exists around the bus stop, known only to the driver, who opens and closes the door as he senses the zone appearing and receding.

When I first started riding the bus, I mentioned it to people sheepishly, almost apologetically, as one might mention having had a new dental plate put in, or the advantages of low-fat yogurt—not downright shameful, perhaps, but still mildly embarrassing. But to my surprise, almost everyone I talked to (women, I think, in particular) turned out to feel the same way I do about the bus. “The bus lets you
feel that you're in control, or that someone's in control,” one woman said to me, and another friend said flatly, “You can see what's coming.” The bus feels safe. Of course, there is no reason for the bus to feel safe. (A friend from Jerusalem got on the bus with understandable watchfulness.) Yet we have decided to create in the city a kind of imaginary geography of fear and safety that will somehow make us safer from It—the next attack, the Other Shoe, the Dreadful Thing that we all await.

I have thought about it a lot (there's time to think on the bus) and have come to the conclusion that while anxiety seeks the company of excitement, fear seeks the illusion of certainty. Anxiety is the ordinary New York emotion. It is a form of energy, and it clings, like ivy to a garden wall, to whatever is around to cling to, whether nationalism or the Knicks or Lizzie Grubman, as readers of the
New York Post
recognize. At the height of the bubble, anxiety was all around us: the anxiety of keeping up, of not falling behind, of holding one's place.

Fear, well earned or not, is a different thing. People who live with the higher kinds of fear—the sick, the soldier—go on living mostly by making structures of delusional domesticity. They try to create an illusion of safety, and of home. At Waterloo, soldiers welcomed the little signs of farm-keeping evident around them; in the dugouts of the Somme, every rat-ridden alley had a designation and every rat itself a pet name. The last time New Yorkers were genuinely afraid, as opposed to merely anxious, was during the great crime wave of the sixties and mid-seventies, and they responded in the same way: by constructing an elaborate, learn-it-by-heart geography of safe and unsafe enclaves, a map of safe rooms. The knowledge that your map of safe rooms could not truly protect you from what you feared then, any more than riding the bus can save you from it now, did not alter the need to have a map. People say that twenty somethings have sex out of fear—that terror sex—but twenty somethings have sex out of sex, and the adjective of the decade is always attached to it. In the eighties, they had safe sex, and in the nineties boom sex, and they will have sex among the ruins, if it comes to that.

What we have out of fear is not sex, or any other anxiety-energized
activity, but stillness. It's said that people in the city are nicer now, or more cooperative, and I suppose this is true. But it is true for reasons that are not themselves entirely nice. The motivation of this niceness is less rectitude and reform than just plain old-fashioned fright. There are no atheists in foxholes, but there are no religious arguments in foxholes, either. The fear we feel isn't as immediate or as real as the fear soldiers feel. But our response is the same. These structures of delusional domesticity are the mainstay of many lives in New York now. The bus, a permanently running dinner party among friends, a fiction of family for a dollar fifty, a Starbucks on wheels, is the rolling image of the thing we dream of now as much as we wanted the broadband pipe to wash away our sins three years ago, and that is the safe room. For the first time, the bus has something strange enough to symbolize.

B
ut then fear and the delusions that go with it are everywhere. After Thanksgiving, my friend the great property developer invited me to dinner, and there I met men who were planning a war. In his huge apartment on Fifth Avenue he had them all, the wise men and gurus of the neo-con initiative. The guru spoke on the Arabs: “They either want to be at the table or on the menu,” he said dismissively. Seeing the worry on my face, F.A., who a year ago had been wise about the concentric circles of culture, reassured me. “This is no big deal,” he said. “It's two weeks, three weeks, at most.”

It occurs to me, walking home, that they are seeking their own delusional domesticity; a familiar place, and a very weird safe room. Invasion, occupation, radical reform—all of this belongs not to a new agenda but to an old and, in its way, comforting one, where states hit other states over the head with billy clubs and drag them to the slammer. To think of terrorism as a police problem, rather than a military one, is not to minimize it in a comforting way; it is to confront the real fear in its true, even more terrible dimensions. Since terrorism starts off as the weapon of war's losers, another victory in war will not make terrorists disappear. It will only make them multiply. The true thing we have to fear—the “non-state actor,” the atomic bomb smuggled
into Times Square—is more real as a problem for the overmatched police right here than one that can be solved by the overweening military somewhere over there.

I didn't say any of this, of course, but listened, made a small squeak of doubt, was silenced, and then went home.

A
nd the children—are they frightened, too? It is hard to know. There are moments when they seem warped, in some way, by what has happened. Luke is certainly fearful in ways that I don't think I was at his age. Is it him or the time? He quizzes us about the possibilities of catastrophe—what would happen if a tornado hit, an earthquake, a tsunami. But his class did a “theme” project on the Empire State Building, and they don't seem to make any particular connection between height and height, tall building and tall building. They are fearful but not phobic.

On the train in Canada, we are playing Twenty Questions. Olivia says, “Something that is a thing and isn't a thing.” We ponder it, used to the metaphysics of Twenty Questions as four-year-olds play it. “The Twin Towers,” she says happily, and we shudder—but she doesn't. I think often of that movie
Hope and Glory,
children of the Blitz, completely nonchalant.

L
uke and I went down to Annapolis this summer to learn to sail. I had dreamed of sailing for so long, so intensely, that it was sad to learn that I would never be any good at it. I couldn't keep straight which direction to turn the wheel—couldn't tell left from right, or port from starboard, whatever they call it. The other students in our boat came from deep in America: They were bass fishermen and recreational boaters, sportsmen who drove up in their SUVs. They wanted to know how much speed you could get up in a sailboat and whether you could hope to sneak up on the salmon in the early morning. (Not much. Yes, certainly.)

The truth was that, never having learned to drive, I could not now
substitute sailing. The necessary reflexes, the coordination of starting and stopping and turning and pointing and docking, wouldn't imprint on my nervous system no matter how I tried. There was too much else in there already, and the bits that could have learned were burnt out, neural chains long ago discarded, like Armani suits from the late seventies. My neural networks are in place now; I am their prisoner, like Jacob Marley of his little bills, enchained by my own neurons, on paths I will never leave.

It wasn't much better for Luke, even though he is young enough to be making new chains. The sailing teachers, with some combination of safety consciousness and sadism, emphasized the consequence of capsizing a boat, and they turned the boat over in shallow water and had all the kids breathe underneath it. I made encouraging noises when Luke went to do it,
it's nothing,
but I knew it threw him—and why not? Who wants to cower beneath a capsized boat? Then they showed a safety film: boats exploding, turning over, running into docks, red flame and white smoke. By the time we got back to the motel for a barbecue meal, Luke was alarmed. So was I. He crawled into my bed that night, and the next day, seeing his shoulders droop in the hundred-degree heat, and feeling my own frustration with left and right, I looked at him, and he looked at me; let's get out of here. We rented a taxi, got the train in Baltimore, and went home, playing Five Crowns, a new card game, all the way.

When we were back outside Penn Station, I could almost see him breathing easier again, could feel my own breathing ease. I thought:
I am fit for playing cards on intercity trains, walking the school street beat, doomed to foot-propelled movement, or at least to being a perpetual passenger as other people master speed, a bus and taxi rider, a New Yorker.
I bought some fresh tuna and grilled it in the cast-iron pan with the window open, and then we put on our shorts and walked over to First Avenue to Sedutto for a sundae, throwing a tennis ball from baseball glove to baseball glove as we walked and talked, playing our own game, a couple of cockneys, home for good.

* * *

T
he children become more finished every month, less like an image and more like themselves. Luke is more like his mother, graceful, Scandinavian-looking, with narrow almond eyes—good-humored, fair-minded, easily distracted, and a bit dreamy; Olivia is like one of my Sephardic aunts, sharp-jawed and -chinned, quick, soulful and a
fresser.
He accepts the city, she adores it. She even speaks, for all her four-year-old phonology, like a New Yorker, words tripping over one another, with a mouth full of Spoonerisms: her hometown, New York, becomes New Nork, or often Yew Nork. She doesn't quite care.

Coming home from the summer after Labor Day, we all went out for pizza, to an open-air place on Second Avenue. Luke, I could sense, was sorry the summer was over, but Olivia was breathing in the joy of another New York fall. One could feel the autumn alteration on the streets: the people in shorts walking one step quicker than they did only two weeks before, the fresh breeze just hinted at in the air blowing into town.

A man went by, a drunk, and called out the loud empty cry of New York rage: “F——you, a—hole,” he hollered, to no one in particular that I could see.

Olivia, having no idea what the words meant, still recognized the familiar cry of her familiar jungle, another sound you always hear back where I come from. Her eyes lit up.

“Daddy,” she said, knowing I would share the feeling, almost sighing with the pleasure, “Daddy, aren't you glad to be back in Yew Nork?”

T
he Listening Post keeps on listening. After Christmas they moved it to the Whitney Museum as an “installation.” I took Luke at the height of another terror alert, and together we sat in the dark on a bench and watched and listened as the fragments of other people's dream lives went by, spoke up, made themselves appear and then disappear again. It was a week of unseasonal snow, and the city was suddenly bright white, a peaceful and reassuring sight, but strange. The machine revealed a world of men and women standing on poles, looking
down—but gesturing to one another, too, I now saw, cupping their hands over their mouths and calling out: “I am here. Where are you?” The speech synthesizer was really a kind of mental X-ray machine; all that each of these people was doing was writing, merely writing, and the ghostlike voice that enunciated their words was making loud something that was in reality soft and inward, buried deep.