From ‘Notes from Underground’
And yet, calmly en route to his destination, the N and R stop at Eighth Street, he’d been waylaid by Danielle. He wanted to loathe her―in principle, he knew he loathed her-but her manner was kind, and sincere, and even though he maintained his chill (surely to her mystification, because how could she guess what he knew?), he’d felt guilty about it. He’d wondered whether the e-mail he’d read―inadvertently, of course―had been a figment. Perhaps he didn’t know what he knew he knew? And if he did, then was she not doubly a villain, to smile and chat in the July haze on that steaming street-corner, as though the world were still in its place? It was like the endless news, the scandal in Washington, the missing intern―Chandra Levy―and the congressman. He married, she just a picture, dark curls and a charming white smile. Now look. He should have said to Danielle, “Think of Chandra Levy. It isn’t worth it.” He should have warned her. Because in the end, one way or another, the man was always the culprit. Just like some greedy child, demanding a second dessert while still hoarding the first, taking a mere bite, discarding it. Danielle ought to know this. She shouldn’t have let him, shouldn’t be hurting her friend, or her friend’s mother, in this way. He, Bootie, bore a responsibility in this mess. Knowledge brought responsibility. But he wasn’t yet entirely sure of how to proceed. What was public, and what private? What his to contend with, and what his simply, painfully, to know?
And why, in the summer, was the air beyond the turnstiles quite so fetid, a blooming composite reek of piss and sweat and enveloping garbage rot, borne on furious steaming gusts through the foul tunnels? The woman beside him covered her nose with her manicured hand, squinting toward the tunnel mouth. Flat and small, she wore a red sundress pulled tight across her breastbone, carried a beachbag; perhaps she, too, was on her way to an illicit tryst. The entire city was doubtless rife with deceit, with rot, like the rot in the subway air. Murray Thwaite claimed that honesty was paramount, but the word had, for him, only his own meaning. He claimed that he fought injustice, that his life had been devoted to what he deemed a “moral journalism”. He claimed that he lived for and by his independence, his own wits. He presumed to opine on paper about how life should be led, about the very meaning of the word, when he was evidently― Bootie meant this in all seriousness: Bootie had evidence―someone for whom words had no fixed meaning. Someone needed to make this clear, and public.
Sitting on the train, the malodor around him leached somewhat by the climate control, Bootie perused the papers in his lap. Heh ad copid out quotations from Murray’s manuscript, some inspiring, some silly, but all of them problematic in context, and tried to make order out of them. Interspersed among the Thwaiteisms, Bootie had recorded his own comments, ranging from the exploratory (“Is it actually possible for intention and actuality fully, purely, to overlap? Can we really be who we want to be?”) to the vituperative (“MT is a liar. This is a bare-faced lie”). When Botie had begun his article draft, the day before, he had done so in a state of high emotion. he could see that now. As the train rattled along its track, he reread his introduction and caught in its rhythms the keening of sentimentality, the weakness of a disciple wronged. No: for the article to be any good, it had to do precise, and calm and clear. It had to be patient, frank, substantiated. It had to be accessible and germane. It had to be true.
He realized his adjectives had been chosen to match the train’s music. He realized that the train was slowing, in the tunnel. That the train was stopped.
He looked up, peered through the greasy window at the tunnel wall, its close blackness. They must be outside Times Square, where he would change trains. He always remembered, in such moments, Marina’s soothing nonchalance as she assured him, on that first subway ride, that the trains always stopped in the tunnels outside the big stations. It was perfectly normal.
Perfectly normal, too, when the lights flickered, then went out. It had happened before, and while he didn’t much care for it―did not like it at all― he could handle it. He concentrated on his breathing, the swish in his nostrils, which had replaced the fans’ whirring. The fan, like the lights, had died. A wan emergency bulb strobed near him, an epileptic’s nightmare. Down the carriage, in the gloom, two older women spoke to each other in Spanish. The woman in the sundress coughed ― a fake cough, Bootie thought, nerves ― and rummaged in her bag. The lights did not come back on. Already, the carriage grew hot, a particular windless, stagnant heat. There were no fetid gusts, no bursts of furnace air, just a slow seepage of weight ,a feeling that the air sat on them, on his legs and arms and above all his neck, the heat licking at his throat and closing it, little by little, making it hard to breathe. Still the lights did not come on. No trains rumbled past in neighboring alleys. There was no audible movement outside the carriage.
Inside the carriage, though, passengers moved in small, furtive, anxious ways. A cocoa-skinned youth in massive, dragging jeans stood, muttered, made as if to move, sat again, stood and stomped to the end of the aisle. As he yanked the door, and the next door, making his way to the t rapped room beyond, he cursed. “Fuck this shit, man. Fuck this shit.”
Bootie checked his watch. It had only been a few minutes; less than five. The carriage held its breath. The air weighed. Bootie licked his teeth, again and again, the inside of them, with the tip of his tongue. His glasses, slick, slipped down his nose. His fingers slithered against one another. The woman in the sundress had been fishing, so furiously, for her Walkman, and now clutched the headphones to her ears. She kept her eyes shut, and the muffled bounce of her music filtered along the carriage. Something sunny. Maybe she was pretending to be at the beach.
Bootie, like the others, started at the crackle of the PA. A fresh clamminess sprang along his palms. A man’s voice, sharp and high like a dog’s, spoke largely unintelligibly.his last words were “as soon as possible.” These he repeated two times. When silence fell again, Bootie could hear people asking one another, quietl, what had been said. He did not himself ask. It wasn’t clear that anyone knew the answer. He, like the woman with the Walkman, closed his eyes. He concentrated again on his breath, tried to measure his breath to slow his heart. His heart made more noise, more sweat, than anything else in the carriage. He couldn’t let himself think about all the possible outcomes – fire and explosions chief among them ― that might be causing their stop. He must not think about the walls pressing in, about the earth weighing down, about thetrain like a burrowing earthworm, arrested, eminently squashable. Bootie’s throat was very tight now, the noise in his ears thunderous, so loud that when the barking conductor came again over the PA, Bootie was barely aware of it. He screwed his eyes shut; he dug his nails into his palms; he tried again to concentrate on his lost breathing. He was still breathing.
Twenty-three minutes. They were stopped twenty-three sweltering minutes, like lost miners, like spelunkers without egress, like dead men. For Bootie, it was a mind-altering experience: he wasn’t at once sure exactly how he had been changed by it, sure merely that he would always be different. He knew something he hadn’t known before, about himself and his limitations. He would never, never allow that to happen to him again. But at least, he thought as he walked, at speed and with great determination, up Sixth Avenue the good two miles to the Thwaites’ apartment, gulping almost the thick air, so relieved to find it around him, in abundance, however soupily, at least he hadn’t given in and screamed. He had drawn blood on his left palm from the force of his gouging, and had brought on a headache of migraine proportions from the screaming inside his head; but he’d kept his mouth closed and his eyes closed, had concentrated on the swish in his nostrils (he could still hear it, the way a shorebound sailor feels the roll of the earth), and had made it through. That nobody in the carriage could tell how close he had come to eruption, insanity―not even, he imagined, the young woman in the red sundress, who had smiled conspiratorially at him as they disembarked – struck Bootie as a near miracle.
He’d often imagined, as a boy, that his parents or teachers, Big Brother-like, could penetrate his skull and eavesdrop on his thoughts, could even, conceivably, usurp his self; and even in adulthood, he carried a vestigial faith in and fear of transparency. But his Earthworm Hour, as he came to think of it, reinforced for him the opacity and isolation of his soul, and of everyone else’s. It made clear to him the need to speak clearly, to try and be heard above all the blood rushing in people’s ears. Nobody should be allowed to be the woman with the Walkman, willfully, artificially blocking out experience and truth: it was Bootie’s job to engage, and to speak. Not unintelligibly, like the conductor, but in the clear voice of reason. But the whole thing drove him half crazy, no two ways about that.
(241-5)
Claire Messud, The Emperor’s Children
...
i read this book over the summer, and am re-reading it now since i got it for cheap at the strand - i feel there is something in it, that it knows something about me, about what i want to write about. personal myth and the disappointment of knowledge. stuff that martha nussbaum understands in ways that i do not. but i also want to write about albert cohen - help! i am no closer, and the deadline approaches. the fat man cometh.
yesterday was beautiful. in fact, the whole week since tuesday, when P came, has been beautiful - then T, then N - we are going places, in new york. not entirely literally. i mean, there's something about showing people around that makes you see a place differently, not least, when you aren't from this place at all. i love the city, even though sometimes it gets me down (yes, yes, encore that lcd soundsystem song that EVERYONE exploits), in the words of the sticker i bought (for the homeless, hrm) 'mean people suck'. yes the theory of meaningless jobs dictates that subway control attendants sucker everyone else; also, encounter with big black dude selling aretha franklin t-shirts after the concert:
bbd: t-shirts, 5 dollars, 5 dollars
r: how about 2?
bbd: 5 dollars!
r: fine, 3? 4?
bbd: you know what, this is AMERICA! THIS IS NOT CHINA! you are CHEAP! you are FROM CHINA! THIS IS AMERICA! you are cheap!
p: SHE'S FROM SINGAPORE!!!
amazing. quote of the week. well, yes. it's been hectic. this is the helterskelter list: hungarian, moma, fifth avenue, central park, radio city,times square, brooklyn bridge, east village, union square, greenwich, soho, chinatown, roof of the IAB (where i exorcised my demons by chucking my spent clope down the same now-smelly shaft, damnit), tribeca, williamburg bridge, brooklyn, and of course, columbia itself, copious amounts of tea, some wine, and so much love. hooray! and the lovely street bookseller yesterday whom i bought three books from (auster, verlaine, and sherwood anderson) who saw me leap on a volume of edna st vincent millay's lyrics and mouthed, generously, (shyly?) you can have it. oh, and that dress - stripes and polka dots, front and back, all handsewed charm. now, to work.
(random thought: franglais or yaourt - which is worse?)