Christopher Sorrentino - The Fugitives

I Nthe city, I’d found myself distracted by unwieldy and complicated arguments I got into with complete strangers on the Internet, people whose militant opinions, buttressed by a facile authoritativeness carved on the surface of the Web, seemed to cry out for an aggressive response. It would consume hours of time, when I let it, and often once the day was over I would feel a vague shame, as if I’d spent my time having anonymous encounters of an intimate nature. Which, in a sense, I had. Of course I did all this under a number of different pseudonyms, frequently engaging people using pseudonyms of their own. It was absolute candor, with no revelation, as if to their very depth our personalities were made up of no more than the glassy surfaces of our opinions, folded back on themselves to reflect their own light. The rule was to say anything, to mine the untellable hostility from where it was deposited in our real lives and fire it at an echoing voice. A peculiarly empty intimacy; the gratification of hearing myself, loud and confident and bloated with the gaseous feeling of well-being that accompanied unbridled and risk-free self-expression. Now and then I’d tip my hand regarding my imposture, reassuring myself that, whatever else I may have been, I surely was not like them, pathetically defining myself within the limits of the comment box. And yet the authority that box bestowed. I pretended to be gay. I pretended to be a woman. I pretended to be black. I pretended to be a senior citizen living on a fixed income. I pretended to be a disabled war veteran. I pretended to be a Republican. I tested the limits, in a way I hadn’t in my “real” fiction, of what I could persuade myself it would be worth saying for no reason other than to feel what it was like to have said it.

In Cherry City, I could see that this wouldn’t do. Now the virtual terrain I escaped to from my life became the accustomed thing; reality no longer provided a familiar frame of reference. It was too scary: the love of an invented voice became the coddling of a fragmented self; to play the self-righteous crank in the night — Cade the long-haul trucker or Bruce the midnight movie enthusiast or Hector the community activist — was to actually experience his piercing evangelical desire to persuade others. That was when I began taking my walks, when work no longer interested me or began driving me nuts with frustration. I needed to show myself that I was someplace real.

And it was hard not to believe that I was, strolling down these streets in those mellow late-summer days; hard not to believe that the greatest minds in all of the United States lived here, it was so neat, so logical, so convenient, so beautiful as a perfectly realized ideal; hard not to believe that this was the genius of American life right here in its jejune excellence: surely the flag that people had died for had, in their minds, snapped in the wind over a place like this — not some medieval capital like New York, not some vast and agitated conurbation like Los Angeles, and certainly not over the kingdom of placeless enfranchisement, the Internet. Just walking, no one around. Occasionally a car door would shut and I’d turn my head to meet another’s gaze, visible over the roof of the car, and thrill to the familiarity of the feeling as I reflexively raised my hand, saluting a stranger. Rae and I had sometimes passed through places like this, fantasizing, deciding which house looked like it could be ours. The nice thing about a house was the way it let you project an entire imaginary existence onto its visible architectural features, as if the house had thought about your life for you. You sat out here at twilight with a cold bottle of beer, you held the birthday parties back here, this was where you read in the evenings, this snug room with the dormer window and the sloped ceiling was just right for working in all day. I’ve never met a person living in a house who’s confused in the slightest about what purpose, ceremonial or otherwise, each room should serve, whereas in New York everybody shares the same neurotic habit of pushing the furniture against the walls, muscling past each other in the cleared space.

You want to find a peg to hang the damage from — could it have been the city, remaining enmeshed in all the staticky hassle, the maneuvering? In New York we’d all been swindled by the promise of something better, or at least realer, that justified the expense and the crush, only to be told a hundred times what it was that we’d arrived too late for. I didn’t even have any genuinely hair-raising stories from my years in Brooklyn, only anecdotes of improperly paced gentrification. Would Rae and I have been happy or miserable in a place like this? Felt marooned or settled? Would fame have had more value, or less? Susannah wouldn’t have happened, of course, but would there have been something sadder and more tawdry, noontide adventures in one of the Grandview motel rooms?

IF IT MAKESa kind of heavily literary sense to abandon the shallow omniscience of the Internet and follow a meandering but inevitable line to that deep archive of the passé, the public library, what first guided me inside the library’s double-hung panic-barred security doors and through its sophisticated metal-detection equipment (What did I expect? The smells of stamp-pad ink and poster paint? Tall arched windows admitting dusty shafts of sunlight?) was no more than routine infirmity, the slightly enlarged prostate that is time’s gift to men my age, and after finding the john I browsed around, as a sort of courtesy to the spirit of home-cooked civic mindedness that provided public restrooms as well as books. The place has made all the usual concessions to the chain-store merchandising sensibility — ranks of bestsellers given pride of place, stacks of “media,” popular periodicals whose covers tracked the separations and reunions of the same two or three celebrity couples, an extensive section given over to Local Interest — but it’s still unmistakably a library (it’s amazing how many contemporary pursuits are completely shut out by the prohibition of noise). It was acceptable: it was real. It was, as I’ve said, a good mid-point place to stop during these morning walks, usually to piss, but sometimes to leaf through the pages of the latest Big Book to touch down here, stripped of the fabulous shimmer lent by its having been the cynosure of all nine hundred people in New York paid to be attentive to these things; the author’s gaze in the photo on the flap looking out not at those commoners arrayed around the scarred tables here in the heartland but at steeples of light in distant cities, the xenon flash of distinction.

I take a certain satisfaction in noting that my own books are not part of the local collection.

EVERYTHING IS “SMART”now. The library cataloging system is smart, classification and indexing information entered into a uniform online database. People wept and lamented the loss of the old cards, then forgot them. They pretty much forget everything they weep over and lament. Clop-clop of hooves on the street. The humble art of carrying a block of ice up the stairs, pincered by a pair of tongs. Rotary phones and 33 rpm records. Stamp-pad ink and poster paint.

The books themselves are smart; terminologically accurate expositions of systems, grouped data, specialized knowledge, inhabited by ghosts chanting the facts. And that’s just the fiction. Who even knows why there are still books? Odd, strange, falseheartedly mandarin; amazing that someone who would never dream of adding something up on an abacus or even of sending a letter by U.S. Mail demands his yearly hardcover, his vacation page-turner. But they’re here, the books, and so are the people who do read them. And it makes sense, too, that it was in the library that an attempt would be made to reach back further, to the oral tradition (I literally thought these words, “the oral tradition”). A museum for this, too: why not? The old foxed reference texts, the framed display of typewritten and hand-annotated cards from the original library (a Victorian brick building now boarded up and awaiting renovation), and John Salteau.