“Were you watching us in the bathroom?” Sergius heard the childish term and was embarrassed.
“Sir, you were automatically flagged by the incongruent time signature. We’re just following protocol.”
“I imagine—what I did might be some kind of misdemeanor.” There was time, still time, to melt at the gate into Boarding Group Six and, as he breached the cloud layers, to mass this interview into the jumble behind him, with Cicero, Lydia, all else.
“I can still get you on your flight, sir,” the supervisor said, mind reader now. Or perhaps this was routine carrot-dangling. “I’ll need to photocopy your ID and boarding pass, and I’ll require for you to answer a few other questions to round out my report.”
“Sure.”
“The person with whom you arrived at the terminal was known to you, I mean previous to your encounter?”
“What? Of course.”
“The distance from the rental lots to the terminal is brief here, sir, but you’d be surprised what folks can get up to.”
Sergius told himself this change in register, the unfunny salty humor, was a positive sign.
“No, known to me.”
“For how long?”
“A—a little while.”
“Did she give you anything to carry in your luggage or on your person?”
“No.” Only a lingering scent, an ache, a vision.
“Not a fellow traveler, then?”
“Sorry?”
“She’s not to be considered a fellow traveler?”
“What’s that supposed to mean? A fellow traveler? Is that some kind of code word?”
“Sir, I try to be cautious to use appropriate terminology and if I’ve offended you, I apologize. I meant that despite accompanying you to the facility she had no travel plans today—would that be accurate?”
“But that isn’t what you said.”
“Maybe you could offer a term in place of mine, sir. Put it in your own language so I’ll understand.”
“I don’t think so.”
“She was no traveler of any kind, I gather. I’ll just need to make some indication here. Would you care to give me her name?”
“Fuck you.”
“That’s unnecessary, sir. What was she, sir, if not a traveler?”
I am the backwards traveller, ancient wool unraveller—this was a lyric Harris Murphy had regularly crooned at his adopted boy, when Murphy most wished to console Sergius or lull him, in his sobbing, to sleep. Sergius had never known the origin of the tune, though in Murphy’s rendition it seemed to call to him from some distant Celtic isle. Sergius wondered now where Murphy was, whether he was still alive. Too late, it was all too late.
“No traveler at all,” said Sergius. “She’s an Occupier. Write that down. And so am I.”
“So you are what, sir?”
Backwards traveler. Time Pilot. By birthright an American Communist, Sergius wished he could say. You’ve apprehended an American Communist. Yet he hadn’t the first idea what these two words really meant even apart, let alone when you ran them together. And we were sailing songs, wailing on the moon. That was where the backwards traveler had ended up, in Murphy’s lyric.
“I meant we were Occupying your fucking bathroom.”
“Sir, I wish you to understand the seriousness of this situation and suggest you roll the untoward language back a few degrees so we can all get on the same page here.”
“We did it, right in your pokey little Jetport. You got me, you caught one.”
“One what?”
“You tell me.” This was not the rejoinder of Sergius’s wild vicarious dreams. In fact it might be a kind of plea. You tell me, please. Tell me, if you can.
“Sir, this is the very facility Mohamed Atta used to begin his journey. I was there that day and I’m not proud to say we waved him through. On that day my personal American innocence died and I’m here to say right now never again, not on my watch. Will you please put both your hands on the table there now, thank you.” In the manner of the baseball manager lifting in coldhearted reluctance the bullpen telephone, the supervisor nodded to the woman with the radio. “Go ahead,” he told her. “You better tell ’em to pick up the girl.”
Sergius lay his hands on the table. His plane by now gone. This, all this, as it was meant to be. Sergius, arrived here in this crucial indefinite place, this undisclosed location, severed from the life of the planet yet not aloft. Arrived at last at this nowhere in which he became visible before the law.
A cell of one, beating like a heart.
Thanks: Fred McKindra, Marjorie Kernan, Judith Levine, Phillip Lopate, Vivian Gornick, Matthew Specktor, John Hilgart, Sarah Crichton, Brian Berger, Peter Behrens, Jonn Herschend, Saïd Sayrafiezadeh, Ayelet Waldman, Joel Simon, Carlos Lauria, Taylor Kingsbury, Guy Martin, Michael Szalay, Lydia Millet, Karl Rusnak, Michael Chabon, Zoë Rosenfeld; Sean Howe and Rachel Cohen for walks in the Gardens; the readers in the Hole; Bill, Richard, Eric; my family.
A Note About the Author
JONATHAN LETHEM is the New York Times bestselling author of nine novels, including Chronic City, The Fortress of Solitude, Motherless Brooklyn, and the nonfiction collection The Ecstasy of Influence, a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist. A recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship and winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction, Lethem’s work has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, Rolling Stone, Esquire, and The New York Times, among other publications.
Other titles by Jonathan Lethem available in eBook format
The Ecstasy of Influence • 978-0-385-53496-3
Chronic City • 978-0-385-53215-0
You Don’t Love Me Yet • 978-0-307-38943-5
The Disappointment Artist • 978-0-307-42840-0
Men and Cartoons • 978-0-385-51415-6
The Fortress of Solitude • 978-1-4000-9534-6
Motherless Brooklyn • 978-0-307-78912-9
Girl in Landscape • 978-0-307-79177-1
As She Climbed Across the Table • 978-0-307-79149-8
Visit: www.jonathanlethem.com
For more information on Doubleday books:
Visit: www.doubleday.com
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Follow: @doubledaypub
Also by Jonathan Lethem
Novels
Gun, with Occasional Music (1994)
Amnesia Moon (1995)
As She Climbed Across the Table (1997)
Girl in Landscape (1998)
Motherless Brooklyn (1999)
The Fortress of Solitude (2003)
You Don’t Love Me Yet (2007)
Chronic City (2009)
Novellas
The Shape We’re In (2003)
Story Collections
The Wall of the Sky, the Wall of the Eye (1996)
Kafka Americana (with Carter Scholz, 1999)
Men and Cartoons (2004)
Nonfiction
The Disappointment Artist (2005)
Believeniks: The Year We Wrote a Book About the Mets
(with Christopher Sorrentino, 2006)
They Live (2010)
Crazy Friend: On Philip K. Dick (2011, Italy only)
The Ecstasy of Influence: Nonfictions, Etc. (2011)
Fear of Music (2012)
As Editor
The Vintage Book of Amnesia (2000)
The Year’s Best Music Writing (2002)
The Novels of Philip K. Dick (Library of America, 3 vols., 2007–2010)
The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick (with Pamela Jackson, 2011)
Selected Stories of Robert Sheckley (with Alex Abramovitch, 2012)
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Dissident Gardens Page 42
