Part 3 (2/2)

”Join the club,” she added.

And I certainly hadn't thought of that. But then this sudden revelation-that Morris was not good with money, or not to be trusted, and that this woman and I were bound together by this- emboldened me.

”I'm Keith,” I said.

”Hi, Keith,” she said. ”You'd like to get a beer, wouldn't you?”

”Yeah,” I admitted.

She stepped aside. As I reached in, I thought of something. I said, ”Would you like one?”

”Yes.”

I took out two and opened them carefully with the Miller Genuine Draft bottle opener on my key chain.

”Nifty,” said the woman, accepting her beer. ”I'm Emily,” she now said, proffering her hand.

So I said, again, ”Hi.”

”So you go to Harvard?” she said, and when I nodded, she went on: ”Does it suck?”

”Kind of.”

”Yeah. I went to Swarthmore and we were always pretty sure Harvard sucked.”

”Yeah. Kind of.”

When she told me what school she'd gone to, it gave me some a.s.surance. Not the school, but just the fact that she'd gone to a school, at one time.

”We always thought there was something wrong with everyone who went there,” she went on. ”Just-something weird.”

I thought about this a moment. ”That's true,” I said. ”But it raises a kind of epistemological problem. Because I can tell you what's wrong with everyone else-but what's wrong with me?”

She laughed. ”Ah,” she said. ”That's the thing.”

I was immensely pleased. I was holding a conversation with a real woman, and I had made her laugh. Wait till-but who could I tell who would understand? Not Ali Dehestani. And Amy Gould would only get angry. As I pondered this problem Morris materialized beside us. Emily's countenance changed. He leaned over and hugged her more intimately than seemed appropriate with me standing there. She knew him well. But-I half stutteringly thought to myself-he'd been married until recently! And he was such a jerk! Emily! Hey!

Then again, I did not begrudge Morris this beautiful woman with her sharp tongue and her simple grown-up jewelry. He had published so much more than I had.

That was the turning point in the evening. Pretty soon Morris took both me and Emily home in a cab, and they set me up nicely on the couch, and they did not make too much noise in Morris's room, which was considerate, and in the morning they made me eggs, and I sight-translated some pa.s.sages from Babel's story ”Guy de Maupa.s.sant,” about a young man, like me a little, who helps a rich man's beautiful wife translate some stories by Maupa.s.sant and then seduces her. I had not seduced anyone, but I had seen something, or I had begun to see something, there was a glimmer that I saw, of how things worked-and that was what the story was about. I explained this to Morris and Emily, though leaving myself out of it, of course, and they were pleased, Emily especially. ”Keith's a lot smarter than I was when I was twenty,” she said. It had turned out that Emily was closer to thirty than to twenty. ”Is he smarter than you were, Morris?”

Morris smiled, and held the smile a beat too long. ”Nadezhda Mandelstam once wrote about her husband at the beginning of the Terror,” he said, going back to pouring coffee and divvying up the remains of some crumb cake. ”He looks out the window of their Moscow apartment at all the people going about their business-it's 1936 or so-and says: 'They think everything's fine, just because the trams keep running.'” He put the coffeepot in the sink. ”There's this thing about guys from Harvard. They think everything's fine, just because they went to Harvard. And for them, you know, it is. Even the most mediocre mediocrity can make a nice life for himself in New York if only he went to Harvard.”

Emily blushed-I saw it, I still see it now-and I looked at Morris, looked at him anew. Because the whole thing seemed to be directed at Emily, not at me: This is how brutal I am, Morris seemed to be saying, this is how much of a d.i.c.k I can be. Any promises I made you are null and void and not to be believed.

He turned now to me and added quickly, ”I'm not saying you're a mediocrity. I'm just outlining the sociology of the thing. You might be a genius, for all I know.”

I nodded gratefully, and that was that. In between sips of coffee Morris had concluded that I was a mediocrity-or a genius. I happened to know already that I was neither-that if I applied myself, I'd be fine, more than fine, and if I didn't, I would probably fall through the cracks. I knew that. What I hadn't known was something else. Looking at Morris looking out the window across the Hudson, I suddenly wanted very badly to cry. Not for myself, for the first time, maybe, in my life-I had managed just by sitting here quietly to get the better of Morris, to cause him to falter into rudeness-but for myself in ten years, because the other thing I suddenly knew was that Morris's life was a very likely life, the sort of life one could end up having, if one was not very careful, and I knew, already, in addition to knowing that I was neither mediocrity nor genius, that I was not very careful at all.

”When you are young,” Morris said now, looking out his window, his back to us, ”and you're on your way, and you have everything before you and everyone with you-you don't know anyone else-and you look at all the others with their screwed-up lives and you know you'll do things differently, you know you will, and you do. You are kinder, gentler, you are smarter. And then one day you look up and you've done all the things you said you were going to do but somehow you forgot something, something happened along the way and everyone's gone, everything's different, and looking around you see you have the same screwed-up life as all those other idiots. And there-you are.”

He turned back to us and bravely smiled.

Ten years later, when I stood in a room in Brooklyn-a slightly younger room than the one Morris had taken me to, then, though that may have been an optical illusion, and there were women in the room who looked at me, now, the way Emily had looked at Morris then, sort of, because like Morris I had won a place for myself among them, among them and above them, and also because I had made a mess of my life in the way that Morris, in his time, had made a mess of his-and, standing in this room, I suddenly apropos of nothing heard someone make an unkind remark about Morris, and then look up at me, for approval, not knowing what I thought-what did I think? Well, I thought that if you have made a career of denouncing careerism, eventually some-one's going to call you a nasty name. Someone had called Morris Binkel a nasty name and I did not speak up in his defense. In fact I agreed. And I thought of the train ride home from New York that weekend, with $500 in my pocket after all, and still high on the things I had seen, wanting to tell people on the train about them, share this with them somehow, knowing that Ali and Ravi and Amy would not really understand, sensing already that they would not be interested in what I'd learned in New York, in fact no one would be interested-despite Morris's remark, which by then I had dismissed, I shone on that train and glowed, and I launched, self-important, into Morris's first chapter-it was the only chapter he'd ever write-of his book on Isaac Babel.

Babel had moved to Petersburg when he was nineteen years old. He met Maxim Gorky, who told him that his stories were good, but his writing was too pretty. He should learn something about life.

Babel was in Petersburg when the Bolsheviks seized power. Later on, he claimed to have been an officer of the Cheka-most likely, he had run some errands for them. Then he went off as a journalist with a Cossack division invading Poland. This experience formed the basis for his cla.s.sic book of stories, Red Cavalry. Red Cavalry.

Red Cavalry made Babel famous. It was the first great Soviet book. Gorky protected him, and he was beloved. made Babel famous. It was the first great Soviet book. Gorky protected him, and he was beloved.

Then Stalin came and Babel stopped writing. He claimed to have become a ”master of silence,” but it was clear to everyone that he was simply a sensitive instrument; under conditions of total fear, it was impossible to write.

In 1936 Gorky died. ”No one will protect me now,” Babel told his wife. Three years later, he was arrested, interrogated, tortured, and shot. He was forty years old.

I still remember-how well I remember-looking out the window of that train. We were blazing down the final stretch of rail before Baltimore, toward the roads and mult.i.tudinous lacrosse fields and the late-night ice cream shop of my youth; Ali was going to meet me at the train station in exchange for a six-pack of beer. No one would ever arrest me at my house, take me to the bas.e.m.e.nt of Lubyanka, and shoot me in the back of the head. Nonetheless I knew what Morris's book was telling me, what the book he never finished was telling me. In that train, on those rails, some premonition of the truth brushed against my side.

His Google.

Something in reference to a man who subscribes to an agency for ”clippings,” to send him everything ”that appears about him”-and finds that nothing ever appears. That he never receives anything.

-Henry James, Notebooks

His Google was shrinking. It was part of a larger failing, maybe, certainly, but to see it quantified... to see it numerically confirmed . . . it was cruel. It wasn't nice. Sam considered the alternatives: he knew people with no Google at all, zero hits, and he even knew people like Mark, Mark Grossman, who had never published, who had kept silent, but whose name drew up the hits of other Mark Grossmans, the urologist Grossman and the banker Grossman and Grossmans who had completed ten-kilometer runs. But Sam wondered-the afternoon was young and there was time for it-whether Mark might not be better off. He would finish his dissertation eventually; it would receive a listing in an electronic catalog. There, he would finally say when that moment came, I too am Grossman.

Sam: not Grossman. Sam: not even the size of Sam of old, Sam of last year, Sam of two weeks ago. After he'd failed to produce the great Zionist epic he'd been contracted to produce, after he'd stopped writing the occasional online opinion piece on the Second Intifada, after Talia had returned, angrily, to Tel Aviv, and Arielle had moved, icily, to New York, and he'd resumed his temp job to begin paying back his advance, there was, in the world, increasingly less Sam. He backed away from the computer, into the dark heavy tapestry that split his living room in two and made of this pathetic little desk and shelf, with its ma.s.s of undigested papers, its pile of battered books-a tax-deductible home office. Occasionally he photographed it, this consolation, this small triumph over the masters of his fate. His Google too had been a consolation once: if in those heady days, a book deal in his pocket, a girlfriend of complex cosmetic habits in his bedroom, his little AOL mailbox was momentarily silent and unmoving, he simply strolled over to Google to confirm that he still existed. Did he ever! Three hundred some odd pages of Samuel Mitnick on the World Wide Web, accessible to people everywhere, at any time. Want some Sam? Here you go. Some more? Click, click. Even absolutist states, even China, had Google- and there were a lot of people, he'd thought then, in China.

But not enough, apparently, or maybe they just weren't clicking through . . . for here he was. He wasn't due at Fidelity until four, it was barely one, and he needed to get out. Tomorrow night his date with Katie Riesling, author of s.e.x advice, he should really stay and clean up, clean himself up, but this apartment was more than he could bear. And, in any case, if Katie hadn't seen the signs by now, she'd never see them. His unreliable car; his jeans with a hole in them just above the ankle. From what? He had no idea. They would have dinner, dinner at Jae's, the place where people saw you in the window when they walked by. He looked too shoddy to leave the house but he left the house. Out there: no Google; in here: Google; on Google: no Sam.

Or almost no Sam. Twenty-two. He was at twenty-two and plunging.

He patted his pocket for keys and moved out the door. Sam had other problems, maybe, or anyway the world did. Enter MISERY or ILLNESS or PLAGUE and what you saw was pages upon pages. PALESTINE. SHARON-ARAFAT. OCCUPATION. U.N. RESOLUTION 242. Put things in quotes and you narrowed the search, and even then ”INSTRUCTIONS FOR MAKING A BOMB TO KILL JEWS WITH” or ”DIRECTIONS TO THE NEAREST VILLAGE WHERE I CAN SHOOT ARABS”-very popular searches, page after virtual page of results. Sam would never have so many hits.

He headed to the 1369 on foot. There were sufficient humiliations in his life that he didn't need also to drive down to Inman Square and fail to find a parking spot.

The important part, in terms of your Google, was not to die. An initial spike from the obituaries, the memorial blog entries (”unfulfilled promise,” ”so much promise,” ”he never quite filled out his promise”), but in the long term a catastrophe. Yet what would be the opposite of dying, Google-wise? What would be the anti-death? He wondered this as he bought his Ethiopian coffee to-stay and sat down in the gloom of Cafe 1369. He arranged himself at one of the tiny tables and began his work hour by staring with disbelief at the praise lavished on the book he'd brought with him. The living writers of the world were Sam's enemies, Sam's nemeses. Sam was once a living writer himself, even better than a living writer, a future writer-there'd been a picture of Sam in one of the publisher's catalogs.

Fame-fame was the anti-death. But it seemed to slither from his grasp, seemed to giggle and retreat, seemed to hide behind a huge oak tree and make fake farting sounds with its hands. He unfolded his notebook. Inside, his notes toward greatness. Though he seldom read them over, the thought of losing the notebook troubled him. Consider Emerson: where would we be without his notebooks? Sam had recently photocopied the entire thing, just in case.

Yesterday's work was a list:

Melissa Jenna Sally S.

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