Stories

by Susan Sontag

  People are videotaping their bedroom feats, tapping their own telephones.

  My good deed for November 12: calling Julia after a lapse of three weeks. “Hey, how are you?” “Terrible,” she answered, laughing. I laughed back and said, “So am I,” which wasn’t exactly true. Together we laughed some more; the receiver felt sleek and warm in my hand. “Want to meet?” I asked. “Could you come to my place again? I hate leaving the apartment these days.” Dearest Julia, I know that already.

  I try not to reproach Julia for throwing away her children.

  Lyle, who is nineteen now, called me the other morning from a phone booth at Broadway and Ninety-sixth. I tell him to come up, and he brings me a story he’s just completed, the first in years, which I read. It is not as accomplished as the stories that were published when he was eleven, an undergrown baby-voiced pale boy, the Mozart of Partisan Review; at eleven Lyle hadn’t yet taken all that acid, gone temporarily blind, been a groupie on a cross-country Rolling Stones tour, gotten committed twice by his parents, or attempted three suicides—all before finishing his junior year at Bronx Science. Lyle, with my encouragement, agrees not to burn his story.

  Taki 183, Pain 145, Turok 137, Charmin 65, Think 160, Snake 128, Hondo II, Stay High 149, Cobra 151, along with several of their friends, are sending insolent messages to Simone Weil—no Jewish-American Princess she. She tells them there is no end to suffering. You think that, they answer, because you had migraines. So do you, she says tartly. Only you don’t know you have them.

  She also says that the only thing more hateful than a “we” is an “I”—and they go on blazoning their names on the subway cars.

  What Relieves, Soothes, Helps

  It’s a pleasure to share one’s memories. Everything remembered is dear, endearing, touching, precious. At least the past is safe—though we didn’t know it at the time. We know it now. Because it’s in the past; because we have survived.

  Doris, Julia’s Doris, has decorated her living room with photographs, toys, and clothes of her two dead children, which, each time you visit her, you have to spend the first half hour examining. Dry-eyed, she shows you everything.

  A cold wind comes shuddering over the city, the temperature drops. People are cold. But at least it clears off the pollution. From my roof on Riverside Drive, squinting through the acceptable air, I can see—across New Jersey—a rim of the Ramapo hills.

  It helps to say no. One evening, when I drop by Julia’s apartment to retrieve a book, her psychiatrist father calls. I’m expected to answer the phone: covering the mouthpiece, I whisper, “Cambridge!” and, across the room, she whispers back, “Say I’m not home!” He knows I’m lying. “I know Julia never goes out,” he says indignantly. “She would have,” I say, “if she’d known you were going to call.” Julia grins—heartbreaking, childish grin—and bites into a pomegranate I’ve brought her.

  What helps is having the same feelings for a lifetime. At a fundraising party on Beekman Place for the New Democratic Coalition’s alternate mayoral candidate, I flirt with an elderly Yiddish journalist who doesn’t want to talk about quotas and school boycotts in Queens. He tells me about his childhood in a shtetl ten miles from Warsaw (“Of course, you never heard of a shtetl. You’re too young. It was a village where the Jews lived”). He had been inseparable from another small boy. “I couldn’t live without him. He was more to me than my brothers. But, you know, I didn’t like him. I hated him. Whenever we played together, he would make me so mad. Sometimes we would hurt each other with sticks.” Then he goes on to tell me how, last month, a shabby old man with stiff pink ears had come into the Forward office, had asked for him, had come over to his desk, had stood there, had said, “Walter Abramson, you know who I am?” And how he’d gazed into the old man’s eyes, scrutinized his bald skull and shopping-bag body, and suddenly knew. “You’re Isaac.” And the old man said, “You’re right.”

  “After fifty years, can you imagine? Honestly, I don’t know how I recognized him,” said the journalist. “It wasn’t something in his eyes. But I did.”

  What happened? “So we fell into each other’s arms. And I asked him about his family, and he told me they were all killed by the Nazis. And he asked me about my family, and I told him they were all killed … And you know what? After fifteen minutes, everything he said infuriated me. I didn’t care any more if his whole family had been killed. I didn’t care if he was a poor old man. I hated him.” He trembled—with vitality. “I wanted to beat him. With a stick.”

  Sometimes it helps to change your feelings altogether, like getting your blood pumped out and replaced. To become another person. But without magic. There’s no moral equivalent to the operation that makes transsexuals happy.

  A sense of humor helps. I haven’t explained that Julia is funny, droll, witty—that she can make me laugh. I’ve made her sound like nothing but a burden.

  Sometimes it helps to be paranoid. Conspiracies have the merit of making sense. It’s a relief to discover your enemies, even if first you have to invent them. Roberta Jorrell, for instance, has humorlessly instructed Doris II’s daughter and others on her payroll exactly how to thwart the enemies of her federally funded South Philadelphia Black Redress Center—white bankers, AMA psychiatrists, Black Panthers, cops, Maoists, and the CIA—with powders, with hexes, and with preternaturally smooth flat stones blessed by a Cuban santera in Miami Beach. Julia, however, doesn’t think she has any enemies—as, when her current lover again refuses to leave his wife, she still doesn’t understand that she isn’t loved. But when she goes down on the street, which happens less and less frequently, she finds the cars menacingly unpredictable.

  Flight is said to help. Dean and Shirley, Lyle’s parents, having pulled out of the market last year, have bought into a condominium in Sarasota, Florida, whose City Fathers recently voted, in order to make the city more seductive to tourists, to take out all the parking meters they installed downtown five years ago. Lyle’s parents don’t know how many weeks a year they can actually spend in the Ringling Brothers’ hometown; but there’s never been a decade when real-estate values haven’t gone up, right? And that crazy Quiz Kid, their son, will always have his room there if he wants it.

  It helps to feel guiltless about your sexual options, though it’s not clear that many people actually manage this. After eventually finding his way back from Hunts Point into the well-lit grid of more familiar predators, the driver who had taken Doris II to 143rd and St. Nicholas picks up a pale, blond boy with a shag cut who also resembles Lyle and who says, as he gets into the cab, “West Street and the trucks, please.”

  Lately, my sexual life has become very pure. I don’t want it to be like a dirty movie. (Having enjoyed a lot of dirty movies, I don’t want it to be like that.)

  Let’s lie down together, love, and hold each other.

  Meanwhile, the real Lyle has again skipped his four o’clock class, Comp. Lit. 203 (“Sade and the Anarchist Tradition”), and is sprawled in front of a TV set in the dormitory lounge. He’s been watching more and more television lately, with a preference for serials like The Secret Storm and As the World Turns. He has also started showing up at student parties, instead of rebuffing his roommate’s kindly, clumsy invitations. A good rule: any party is depressing, if you think about it. But you don’t have to think about it.

  I’m happy when I dance.

  Touch me.

  What Is Upsetting

  To read Last Letters from Stalingrad, and grieve for those lost, all-too-human voices among the most devilish of enemies. No one is a devil if fully heard.

  To find everyone crazy—example: both Lyle and his parents. And to find the crazy particularly audible.

  To be afraid.

  To know that Lyle will be introduced to Roberta Jorrell next week at an elegant SoHo loft party given in her honor after her speech at New York University; be recruited by her; drop out of college; and not be heard from again for at least seven years.

  To feel how
desperate everyone is. Doris, Julia’s Doris, is being evicted from her apartment. She not only has no money to pay a higher rent; she wants to go on living in the place where her children perished.

  To learn that the government—using information that the law now requires be recorded on tape and stored indefinitely by banks, the telephone company, airlines, credit-card companies—can know more about me (my more sociable activities, anyway) than I do myself. If necessary, I could list most of the plane trips I’ve taken; and my old checkbook stubs are in a drawer—somewhere. But I don’t remember whom I telephoned exactly four months ago at 11 a.m., and never will. I don’t think it was Julia.

  To find in myself the desire to stop listening to people’s distress.

  To be unsure of how to exercise the powers I do possess.

  Julia had once fallen under the spell of an ex-ESP researcher, then a specialist in the North American Indian occult, who claimed to know how to help her. Most people who meet Julia, stunned by her vulnerability, take a crack at helping her; the pleasure of her beauty, which is the only gift Julia has ever been able to make to other people, helps too. The sorceress in question, Martha Wooten, was white, Westchester-born, crisp, a superb tennis player—rather like a gym teacher; I thought, condescendingly, she might be good for Julia, until as part of a program for freeing Julia from her demons, she had her bay at the full moon on all fours. Then I swooped back into Julia’s underfurnished life, performed my old rites of counterexorcism—reason! self-preservation! pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will!—and Martha Wooten vanished, metamorphosed, rather, into one of the Wicked Witches of the West, setting up in Big Sur as Lady Lambda, head of the only Lucifer cult that practices deep breathing and bioenergetics analysis.

  Was I right to de-bewitch her?

  To be unable to change one’s life. Doris III’s daughter is back in jail.

  To live in bad air. To have an airless life. To feel there’s no ground: that there is nothing but air.

  Our Prospects

  Aleatoric. Repetitious. On a Monday, after taking Doris, Julia’s Doris, home from cleaning Julia’s apartment, the taxi driver stops to pick up three fourteen-year-old Puerto Ricans on 111th and Second Avenue. If they don’t rob him, they will get in the cab, ask to be taken to the juice bar in the alley by the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge, and give him a big tip.

  Not good. A hand-lettered sign pasted at eye level on the bare brick wall of a housing project on the corner of Ninetieth and Amsterdam reads, plaintively: Stop Killing.

  Wounded city!

  Although none of the rules for becoming more alive is valid, it is healthy to keep on formulating them.

  Here’s a solid conservative rule, deposited by Goethe with Eckermann: “Every healthy effort is directed from the inner to the outer world.” Put that in your hashish pipe and smoke it.

  But let’s say, or suppose, we’re not up to being healthy. Then there’s only one way left to get to the world. We could be glad of the world, if we were flying to it for refuge.

  Actually, this world isn’t just one world—now. As this city is actually layers of cities. Behind the many thicknesses of pain, try to connect with the single will for pleasure that moves even in the violence of streets and beds, of jails and opera houses.

  In the words of Rev. Ike, “You Can Be Happy Now.” By an extraordinary coincidence, there is one day when Doris, Doris II, and Doris III—who don’t know each other—may all be found under the same roof: in Rev. Ike’s United Church and Science of Living Institute, attending a 3 p.m. Sunday Healing and Blessing Meeting. As for their prospects of being happy: none of the three Dorises is convinced.

  Julia … anybody! Hey, how are you? Terrible, yes. But you laughed.

  Some of us will falter, but some of us will be brave. A middle-aged black woman in a brown coat carrying a brown suitcase leaves a bank and gets into a cab. “I’m going to the Port of Authority, please.” Doris II is taking the bus to Philadelphia. After seven years, she’s going to confront Roberta Jorrell and try to get her daughter back.

  Some of us will get more craven. Meanwhile, most of us will never know what’s happening.

  Let’s dig through the past. Let’s admire whatever, whenever we can. But people now have such grudging sympathy for the past.

  If I come out to dinner in my space suit, will you wear yours? We’ll look like Dale and Flash Gordon, maybe, but who cares. What everybody thinks now: one can form an alliance only with the future.

  The prospects are for more of the same. As always. But I refuse.

  Suppose, just suppose, leaden soul, you would try to lead an exemplary life. To be kind, honorable, helpful, just. On whose authority?

  And you’ll never know, that way, what you most long to know. Wisdom requires a life that is singular in another way, that’s perverse. To know more, you must conjure up all the lives there are, and then leave out whatever fails to please you. Wisdom is a ruthless business.

  But what about those I love? Although I don’t believe my friends can’t get on without me, surviving isn’t so easy; and I probably can’t survive without them.

  If we don’t help each other, forlorn demented bricklayers who’ve forgotten the location of the building we were putting up …

  “Taxi!” I hail a cab during the Wednesday afternoon rush hour and ask the driver to get to Julia’s address as fast as he can. Something in her voice on the phone lately … But she seems all right when I come in. She’d even been out the day before to take a batik (made last year) to be framed; it will be ready in a week. And when I ask to borrow a back issue of a feminist magazine that I spy, under a pile of old newspapers, on the floor, she mentions three times that I must return it soon. I promise to come by next Monday. Reassured by the evidence of those petty forms that Julia’s hold on life often takes, I’m ready to leave. But then she asks me to stay on, just a few minutes more, which means that it’s changing; she wants to talk sadness. On cue, like an old vaudevillian, I go into my routines of secular ethical charm. They seem to work. She promises to try.

  What I’m Doing

  I leave the city often. But I always come back.

  I made Lyle give me his story—his only copy, of course—knowing that, despite his promise, if I returned it to him, he’d burn it, as he’s burned everything he’s written since he was fifteen. I’ve given it to a magazine editor I know.

  I exhort, I interfere. I’m impatient. For God’s sake, it isn’t that hard to live. One of the pieces of advice I give is: Don’t suffer future pain.

  And whether or not the other person heeds my advice, at least I’ve learned something from what was said. I give fairly good advice to myself.

  That late Wednesday afternoon I told Julia how stupid it would be if she committed suicide. She agreed. I thought I was convincing. Two days later she left her apartment again and killed herself, showing me that she didn’t mind doing something stupid.

  I would. Even when I announce to friends that I’m going to do something stupid, I don’t really think it is.

  I want to save my soul, that timid wind.

  Some nights, I dream of dragging Julia back by her long hair, just as she’s about to jump into the river. Or I dream she’s already in the river: I am standing on my roof, facing New Jersey; I look down and see her floating by, and I leap from the roof, half falling, half swooping like a bird, and seize her by the hair and pull her out.

  Julia, darling Julia, you weren’t supposed to lean any farther into the well—daring anyone with good intentions to come closer, to save you, to be kind. You were at least supposed to die in a warm bed—mute; surrounded by the guilty, clumsy people who adored you, leaving them frustrated and resentful of you to the end.

  I’m not thinking of what the lordly polluted Hudson did to your body before you were found.

  Julia, plastic face in the waxy casket, how could you be as old as you were? You’re still the twenty-three-year-old who started an absurdly pedantic conversation with m
e on the steps of Widener Library—so thin; so prettily affected; so electric; so absent; so much younger than I, who was four years younger than you; so tired already; so exasperating; so moving. I want to hit you.

  How I groaned under the burden of our friendship. But your death is heavier.

  Why you went under while others, equally absent from their lives, survive is a mystery to me.

  Say we are all asleep. Do we want to wake up?

  Is it fair if I wake up and you, most of you, don’t? Fair! you sneer. What’s fair got to do with it? It’s every soul for itself. But I didn’t want to wake up without you.

  You’re the tears in things, I’m not. You weep for me, I’ll weep for you. Help me, I don’t want to weep for myself. I’m not giving up.

  Sisyphus, I. I cling to my rock, you don’t have to chain me. Stand back! I roll it up—up, up. And … down we go. I knew that would happen. See, I’m on my feet again. See, I’m starting to roll it up again. Don’t try to talk me out of it. Nothing, nothing could tear me away from this rock.

  At first he was just losing weight, he felt only a little ill, Max said to Ellen, and he didn’t call for an appointment with his doctor, according to Greg, because he was managing to keep on working at more or less the same rhythm, but he did stop smoking, Tanya pointed out, which suggests he was frightened, but also that he wanted, even more than he knew, to be healthy, or healthier, or maybe just to gain back a few pounds, said Orson, for he told her, Tanya went on, that he expected to be climbing the walls (isn’t that what people say?) and found, to his surprise, that he didn’t miss cigarettes at all and reveled in the sensation of his lungs being ache-free for the first time in years. But did he have a good doctor, Stephen wanted to know, since it would have been crazy not to go for a checkup after the pressure was off and he was back from the conference in Helsinki, even if by then he was feeling better. And he said, to Frank, that he would go, even though he was indeed frightened, as he admitted to Jan, but who wouldn’t be frightened now, though, odd as that might seem, he hadn’t been worrying until recently, he avowed to Quentin, it was only in the last six months that he had the metallic taste of panic in his mouth, because becoming seriously ill was something that happened to other people, a normal delusion, he observed to Paolo, if one was thirty-eight and had never had a serious illness; he wasn’t, as Jan confirmed, a hypochondriac. Of course, it was hard not to worry, everyone was worried, but it wouldn’t do to panic, because, as Max pointed out to Quentin, there wasn’t anything one could do except wait and hope, wait and start being careful, be careful, and hope. And even if one did prove to be ill, one shouldn’t give up, they had new treatments that promised an arrest of the disease’s inexorable course, research was progressing. It seemed that everyone was in touch with everyone else several times a week, checking in, I’ve never spent so many hours at a time on the phone, Stephen said to Kate, and when I’m exhausted after the two or three calls made to me, giving me the latest, instead of switching off the phone to give myself a respite I tap out the number of another friend or acquaintance, to pass on the news. I’m not sure I can afford to think so much about it, Ellen said, and I suspect my own motives, there’s something morbid I’m getting used to, getting excited by, this must be like what people felt in London during the Blitz. As far as I know, I’m not at risk, but you never know, said Aileen. This thing is totally unprecedented, said Frank. But don’t you think he ought to see a doctor, Stephen insisted. Listen, said Orson, you can’t force people to take care of themselves, and what makes you think the worst, he could be just run down, people still do get ordinary illnesses, awful ones, why are you assuming it has to be that. But all I want to be sure, said Stephen, is that he understands the options, because most people don’t, that’s why they won’t see a doctor or have the test, they think there’s nothing one can do. But is there anything one can do, he said to Tanya (according to Greg), I mean what do I gain if I go to the doctor; if I’m really ill, he’s reported to have said, I’ll find out soon enough.