The Ecstasy of Influence

by Jonathan Lethem

  Also, I grew up in a Brooklyn neighborhood with more brown faces than white. So it was thrilling and consoling—not only righteous but intuitively right—that splashing around alongside us paler kids in the motel pool in Maryville, Missouri, during those ’70s family reunions were my dark Egyptian cousins, Randa and Amir. And by the poolside, arguing politics with my World War II veteran uncles, and with my outspoken radical Jewish mother, was their growly, bearded, imperious, and quite lovable father, Saad. In fact, though we might by some current standards seem conceptually “opposed,” we half-Jewish and half-Egyptian cousins were more like each other than we were like the many dozens of pure midwestern cousins surrounding us. We’d brought a new flavor to the Lethem family, a scent of the wider world, of cosmopolitan cities and oceans to a landlocked tribe. Though in New York City I made a very unconvincing Jew to other Jews—unobservant, un–bar mitzvahed, attending Quaker Sunday school—in Kansas I was hot currency. One of my cousins once walked me down a suburban street in Overland Park, Kansas, in order to brandish me on a mission of mercy: There was an adopted Jewish kid on the street, shy and ashamed at being the only Jew anyone in the neighborhood knew. He was perhaps seven or eight years old. I was proof that a kid like him could turn into a normal teenager: See, Jews are okay! Even Chris Lethem’s got one in his family! I felt I was a token of a world improved by mongrelization. I was by that time enamored of Arthur C. Clarke, whose Stapledonian socialism thrummed just under the surface of his glossy futures. “We must not export our borders into space,” he said. Those visions seemed to me then an obvious extension of my parents’ hippie values. I remember once disconcerting my father by explaining, with the patronizing certainty of an adolescent lecturing an adult, that the chimera of nationalism would dissolve into a single planetary government within my lifetime, if not his. We were all going to intermarry and brownify and hold hands and honor our essential human cousinhood—weren’t we?

  Well, 2001 wasn’t Clarke’s year. I remember sitting with Saad twenty-five years earlier, watching the 1976 Olympics on a Missouri motel-room television. If at that time he had any inkling that the Islamist right, soon to slaughter Sadat, or the Reagan right, soon to slaughter FDR’s and my parents’ hopes for American society, were together going to keep the Fluttering Ducks among us in abeyance for another millennium or so, he didn’t say anything to damage my own hopefulness. Certainly his outlook must have been more realistic than mine, or even my parents’. Still, it’s unlikely he could have imagined the degree of slippage in his own culture—the extent to which the educated urban middle classes to which he and his students belong would be squeezed on either side by Islamic activism and what he has called the “Oriental despotism” of the “pharaonic” Mubarak regime.

  In the immediate aftermath of the New York attacks Saad wrote a new postscript for the reissue of Egypt, Islam, and Democracy. Writing from his jail cell, he reminded us that, for Egyptians, September 11 has a relevant local precursor, one rarely mentioned in American discussions of the World Trade Center disaster—the attacks at the Temple of Luxor in 1997, in which Islamist militants killed sixty tourists, mostly Swiss, British, and Japanese, as well as a number of Egyptian guides. Saad describes what happened at Luxor as “the bitter harvest of the last decade.” “It was like an earthquake: it was swift and devastating at the epicentre, but its economic and political aftershocks were longer and more pervasive.” The terrorists “exposed the vulnerability of the state, the fragility of the economy and the soft underbelly of society.” As New Yorkers must fear al-Qaida living next door, so must Egyptians. It isn’t only the Lethems who would, given the chance, sooner be sunning themselves at a motel poolside.

  —London Review of Books, December 2002

  Writing this now in February 2011, in the weeks of lull after the Cairo revolution, I still can’t know whether my small petition for confidence in the presence of a substantial secular civil conversation in the Arab world was prophetic or not. I hope so. Saad was freed in 2003, and worked in exile in Europe and America until a few days ago, when after Mubarak’s resignation he returned to Cairo. Meanwhile, I recently heard from a man who’d been trying to locate his childhood suburban friend, so had Web-searched “Chris Lethem+Overland Park” and found himself on the London Review’s website. He wrote to say, “I was that one Jewish kid in Overland Park.” Sometimes the Internet’s nightmare of eternal return conjures something better and technotopian shivers run through my body like it is 1992 all over again.

  The next two attempt to rework 9/11 discomfort in a sidelong glance, sublimating the fact in speculation (something I’d do more extensively in Chronic City). They’re the same piece in different guises, one more or less “fiction” (“Proximity People”) the other “non” (“Cell Phones”). I like the fiction better, for its capacity to turn on itself, to eat its own voice. Here’s the thing: I’d forgotten the existence of “Cell Phones” by the time I wrote “Proximity People.” If I hadn’t, I doubt I’d have felt free to try again.

  Cell Phones

  When I was a teenager I worked in a sandwich shop, the owner of which was peculiarly obsessed with formalities and protocol: methods of wrapping paper packages around prepared food, for instance, or of cleaning the blade and sheath of the mechanical slicer with a rag moving in a certain specified direction, or sequences of giving a customer change while their ten or twenty was still visible on the shelf of the cash register. He instilled in me an anal-Zen reverence for the observation of ritual in retail work, one which stayed with me long after I abandoned sandwich shops for used bookstores.

  This shop owner insisted, as well, that we counterpersons observe a strict hierarchy as to the precedence of a real live customer, standing in front of us waiting to be served, over a caller on the telephone. Telephone customers, he explained, however preemptory and insistent, were to be considered as ghosts, nonentities, birds in the bush. They hadn’t made the commitment to appear in person in the shop, and so weren’t to be given any privileges to rival those customers who had. We shouldn’t ever make someone standing before us wait while we dealt with a telephone order; we were always to put calls on hold. I suppose this was where my notion of the morality of proximity was first instilled.

  Cell phones exaggerate this consideration. Compared to traditional (or should I call them primitive?) telephones, they break down space and time, the ordinary rules of access and proximity, to a bewildering degree. Like anyone, I’m annoyed at overhearing someone else’s mobile-phone conversation in the close quarters of a train compartment or an airplane on the tarmac. I admit I find it satisfying when that overheard conversation is curtailed by instructions from the cockpit or by the train going into a tunnel. The cell-phone line out of the sealed quarters of a train or bus or airplane seems particularly unfair, a betrayal of the we’re-all-in-this-together contract to share the discomfort, the temporary democracy, of mass transportation.

  An airplane or train car is one of life’s perfect traditional theaters, and we suffer its rupture by the Brechtian device of the mobile phone. The caller breaks the fourth wall, converting our humble story of togetherness into a metanarrative in which he is the controlling narrator. The cell-phone user has made irony of our sincere drama of grudging togetherness. As in a game of Prisoner’s Dilemma, one person’s opting out of behavior which reinforces solidarity makes everyone else want to bail out as well. The cell-phone user is like an airplane passenger who wears a parachute when nobody else has one. We wonder why he’s entitled.

  I’ve been reenvisioning my favorite filmic nightmares of transportation to include the mobile phone: movies like The Poseidon Adventure, or Lifeboat, or The Taking of Pelham One Two Three, or Alive. The John Ford Western Stagecoach is the paradigm for this genre: the disunified gathering of Reformed Prostitute, Cowardly Salesman, Drunken Doctor, Proper Pregnant Lady, Snide Gambler, Pretentious Banker, Rough Outlaw, Bumpkin Stagecoach Driver, etcetera, forced into temporary society by the marauding Indians on their tail
. In my cellular version, the Salesman certainly calls out for a quick background check on John Wayne’s Ringo Kid character. Meanwhile the Banker will have gotten in touch with his broker: “I want to divest from all stage-line and road-building holdings immediately. Put everything into bullets.” And the Drunken Doctor no longer has to fight his urge for the bottle long enough to perform the delivery of the Proper Pregnant Lady’s baby: She delivers the baby herself, out of sight of the men, while taking blow-by-blow instructions from a medical helpline. The introduction of a cell phone wrecks the traditional tale of a misfit microcosm banding together against external threat just as easily as it wrecks the banal solidarity of the daily commuter.

  In the dire lifeboat of the real, however, things are not quite so simple. For if mobile phones offer a path out of the humble, everyday communities created by the close proximities of transportation, they’ve also recently proven to offer an eerie path into the privacies of the communally doomed. In September 2001 I was, as a New Yorker, asked to erase any stored messages in my voice mail, because the citywide system had been strained by the families of World Trade Center victims all desperately saving last phone calls made from burning and collapsing buildings. The phone company wanted to find a way to preserve those messages, and their computer system was at a breaking point. More famously, the calls made in and out of the fourth and final hijacked airplane were the key to creating a passionate and instantaneous unity among those temporary heroes who are presumed to have smashed into the cockpit to bring the plane down, causing a crash which harmed only themselves and their attackers, sparing any target on the ground. Without knowledge of the larger situation they’d have remained as passive—and, perhaps, as distrustful of one another’s theories or plans—as the four squabbling actors in Jean-Paul Sartre’s No Exit. The image of their action, in turn, has become an irreducible evocation of fortitude and grace among strangers, too selfless to arouse any cynicism, though, alas, not too pure to appropriate for reprehensible politics.

  Communication with the ground enabled those passengers to understand that they were seated in the larger stagecoach of history. Our Poseidons and Pelhams and Lifeboats are only, after all, poignant stand-ins for the whole world, for the vast continents of Bankers, Bumpkins, Prostitutes, Proper Ladies, Outlaws, and Drunk Doctors who must find ways to coexist. Yet if all men are brothers why does it still stir our annoyance when one of them opts to speak with those brothers-not-visible-at-this-precise-moment-in-space-and-time? Perhaps we’re not ready to admit to the largest, the most global priorities, at least not until the choice is between crashing our airplane into a building full of others or an open field. Short of crisis, we prefer to keep our attention on local, visible, fleshly humans, not remote, theoretical, staticky ones. And so we neglect the ringing telephones from remotest precincts, unsure whether those passengers are even really in the same stagecoach as ours.

  I wonder what it will feel like when the cellular phone is invented which can receive calls from the future? Will we choose to take the calls of those generations following us, whose needs we barely manage to acknowledge between our batterings away at the polar ice and the rain forest, or will we let them go through to voice mail? I suppose it will annoy me, the first time someone I’m speaking with puts me on hold to take a call from 3006. Shouldn’t a call from a co-inhabitant of the same year be more important? What’s that person from the future got over the immediacy of me? I suppose the answer will be that the person from the future has something to tell us. Perhaps a suggestion about where exactly we might want to crash this plane.

  —BBC Radio, 2002

  Proximity People

  People who work at counters and make you wait while they answer the telephone, privileging the customer on the phone over the one right in front of their face, the one who made the trip, got out of bed, appeared in person. People who interrupt the phone call with the person who called first to use call-waiting to take the call from the person who called second. People who get to the counter and make the person waiting at the counter wait while they talk on their cell phone. People who glance at their e-mail when you’re in the room. People who use handheld devices to glance at their e-mails while in your house. People who borrow your computer or handheld device in order to glance at their e-mails. People who answer e-mails from people they do not know with great alacrity and full capitalization and punctuation while replying slowly and with few if any capitals or punctuation marks to the e-mails of their devoted friends. People who unfriend their friends while friending their unfriends. People who do not acknowledge the person. Persons who are not personal.

  People who visit parties and ignore their friends, do not dance with the one that brung you. People who have more time, more munificence, more courtesy, for strangers than for their friends. Children who love their uncles and aunts more than their father and mother, their cousins more than their siblings. People who have a picture of Jesus Christ or John F. Kennedy or Abraham Lincoln on their wall, as if Jesus Christ or John F. Kennedy or Abraham Lincoln was their relative. People who use the first names of celebrities. People who shorten the names of or create nicknames for those they don’t know or barely know, in order to seem more familiar, especially in cases where people who are actually familiar with those named would never shorten their name or use a nickname. Rotisserie-baseball fans who never go to a baseball game or follow a “real” team. Married people who develop crushes on waitresses or bank tellers.

  Those who speak to the invisible, the remote, those not present, while disfavoring the visible, the proximate, the present. Those concerning themselves with ghosts. Clergy of all types. People who wear pictures in lockets of grandparents they never knew, even as they disdain or neglect living uncles or aunts. People who construct family trees or visit genealogical websites but are brusque and rude to strangers on the subway. Those who adopt animals but not children. Eaters of fish but not pork.

  People who concern themselves with the fate of slaves in distant capitals they have never visited and would never visit. People who read the International section before they read the Metro section, or never read the Metro section. People who read eagerly of discoveries of planets orbiting distant stars in unreachable galaxies. Anyone interested in SETI (the search for extraterrestrial intelligence). People who watch the Oscar telecast but don’t go to movies. People who watch a telecast of celebrations in Times Square at midnight on New Year’s Eve. Lip-synchers. Karaokeists.

  People who read stories about imaginary people while real people stand before them unsung and unappreciated. People who read stories and experience real emotions while finding it difficult to feel real emotions when presented with the difficulties of their living friends. Science-fiction people. Historical reenactors. Pen pals. Those who fall in love remotely, projecting cherished values onto those distant from them, values that they never identify among those nearest to them. Constructors of time capsules. People who write in journals or diaries never intended to be read during their lifetimes. Anonymous authors. Anonymous donors. People who comment anonymously on the blogs of their friends. People who at parties glance over your shoulder while they speak with you, searching for a better option. Necrophiliacs.

  Those studying foreign languages, especially dead languages. Students of Esperanto or Klingon. Those mourning the deaths of royalty. Those who love or hate anyone they’ve never met. Catholics drinking wine and eating wafer. Readers of secondary sources before primary sources. Archaeologists and anthropologists. Those cherishing extinct species. “Pay It Forward” people. Sexaholics. Doctors Without Borders. Mimes who follow people on the street.

  People who use time machines to prevent the crucifixion of Jesus Christ or the Kennedy or Lincoln assassination but would not use time machines to apologize to those they personally disregarded in fourth or fifth grade. People from the future who use time machines to send lawyers from the future back into the past to place injunctions on the use of the resources of the present because of th
e effect of diminishing the resources available to those in the future, people who by some measures do not yet exist. Lawyers from the present who accept those from the future as their clients in class-action lawsuits against present-day people.

  Lawyers for the unborn. Pro-lifers. Autograph hounds. Strangers who interfere in private arguments on the street. Fans. Ventriloquists. Ventriloquists on the radio. People who listen to podcasts while in the presence of others. Ham-radio operators. Stamp collectors, with their glue tabs and albums, adorers of the tenuous papery whisper of what comes from afar, soaking envelopes to reclaim canceled stamps, discarding the envelopes, ignoring the addresses, never noticing the names of the original recipients, the persons for whom the letters were intended, cherishing instead the postage.

  Above all, writers.

  —Granta, 2009

  Repeating Myself

  But questions about 9/11 weren’t the only questions I answered. Pieces about 9/11 weren’t the only commissions I took. I backed into a thousand remarks on dystopia, Brooklyn public schools, Tourette’s syndrome, alphabetizing my record collection, John Wayne, and my top-ten or top-five neglected anything, including sandwiches. I turned out to be one of the garrulous ones, not something I’d necessarily have known in advance nor bothered to predict due to the aforementioned expectation of being neglected myself. The novelist Lawrence Shainberg, friend of Beckett and Mailer both, asked the Irishman his opinion of the Brooklynite, at which Beckett produced the typically pained epigram: “He’s a bit … copious … for my taste.” Some Beckett part of me endlessly muttered “copious,” trying to interrupt my Mailerations on so many subjects, but was drowned out.