I and some college friends were taken out to dinner by the parents (rich, in politics) of one of our dorm mates. Among us was their daughter's “friend”—who was, evidently “unsuitable,” at least for anything beyond that ambiguous designation. At one point the matriarch of this conservative Catholic family leaned over to the young man—Latin, also Catholic, but of a very different stamp—and said, “It can be very lonely, being young. We feel the want of touch. But if you ever feel the need for touch”—here her tone warmed to its most maternal, most overtly sexless—“you talk to me.”
Cab driver the other day: “I knew a guy, buddy of mine, used to make his living robbing trust companies. You know, they can be anywhere—top floor of a store, wherever… So that’s what he did—for thirteen years. Then, one day, he went on this one job, a big job, and he needed a driver and a backup. So he took on two partners. My buddy, he never carried a weapon or nothing. But one of these guys—he had a sawed-off shotgun. And, when the police were coming after them, he took a shot at them with the twelve-gauge out the back window of the car. It wasn’t like in the movies. My friend told me, ‘Jim, when I was in the courthouse, I couldn’t hear the judge.’”
My father, bleedingest of bleeding hearts, outdoes himself. Speaking of some recent school shooting in Georgia, “What was strange about it,” he said—strange, that is, apart from what one might have thought was the obvious thing, the fact that a young man had shot and killed several people (though in point of fact I am unaware of the details, whether those killed were adults or other children; I grow indifferent to such things, they cease to hold my interest, I decline to inform myself), “was that they published his name in the newspaper.” (That is, the name of the fourteen-year-old shooter, who, being tried as an adult, was not entitled to a publication ban.) “It’s so brutal,” he said. Bleedingest of bleeding hearts! I refrained from comment, I had such tact, though did very gently point out the pallor of such brutality as compared with shooting up a school! (Is that we measure only by what is in our reach? That the brutality we might plausibly commit—saying a wounding word—extinguishes, in its glare, that brutality of which our hands and souls remain ignorant? Perhaps.) At the time, I thought merely: here is a man whose love of the victim is so strong that it rejects the pharmakos. Even the killer must be redeemed! The man whose love of the victim is so strong that it becomes universal—that it extends itself over every least child, including the child who kills children. And yet, vengeance is not to be bought off so easily. Still, there must be someone to blame. It is the adults, those with cruelty in their hearts. Those who administer retribution—those who publish the name! May they gnash their teeth over it. So the thwarted will reasserts itself. Oh well.
The buildings nearby seemed oddly familiar, despite the heat; and he suddenly had an unplaceable thought, somewhere between a memory and a premonition. It wasn’t hard to see what was so familiar about them. It was like that time when, on a research trip in Nottingham, in the English midlands, he had felt that odd familiarity among the houses there, in the residential district where his hotel was, near the university, just off from the city center. It wasn’t that the houses in that neighborhood were identical to the houses where he grew up—the houses in the neighborhood where he grew up were semi-detached, not these block-long row houses, and they had, as a rule, wooden or shingle siding, or facing, rather than this unbroken orangey-red-brown brick, but still, the resemblance was enough to bring the point across, and he realized he had lived in a simulation, a simulacrum. That the North American city he had grown up in, such as he had, was in fact a surprisingly detailed recreation—down to the boxy, threefold bay-windows on the private houses and the little flinches of stained glass above the doorways, and in the windows at the sides of the houses, facing the alleys, of just such a midlands English town of the late nineteenth century. The sense, formed in the residential precincts, was one that the civic architecture of the downtown—big red brick ceremonial and commercial buildings, with their playful masonry, Romanesque, substantial, rough and pleasing to the touch, as you knew just by looking at them—reinforced: all were simulated, replicas. This sense of disequilibrium, of what you thought was yours and real suddenly absconded with, taken away, transposed into a key you couldn’t sing—it was not unlike that feeling he had had, walking his old neighborhood, that last time visiting his parents at their house, when he had wandered off, alone, and realized: I own nothing. (Nothingham, Nottingham.) I used to live here, used to think I owned all of it, rolling my skateboard along these streets, but now I realize I own nothing, that I am nothing. And he had been thinking of this, that evening in Nottingham, as he walked back over the ridge road toward his hotel after “getting a bite to eat” in the city center, walking and pondering, in the early evening, the sky gray with darkness just beginning to precipitate out of it, like fine black powder from a smashed etch-a-sketch, when a car, driving past him on the road to his right—for a moment crazily driverless, he never got used to the driver being on the wrong side—had drifted, just ever so slightly drifted over, without stopping or slowing, going neither fast nor slow, for just long enough for you to notice something was wrong, but without forming a thought about what it was, into the empty lane to the left—until it ploughed with a crash into the back of a parked car some twenty feet ahead of him, and stopped. If it had been just twenty feet sooner… This had been a summer of knife attacks, of trucks ploughing into crowds, of guards suited in black like cheap James Bonds gunning down foreign ambassadors with a well placed bullet in their fat back, before going down in the provoked hail…
Earlier that day he had seen a long-bearded man moving about in white robes. And so, after the crash, and a pause to see what would happen—nothing—without stopping, but merely slowing, tensed, he sped up his pace again to reach the car. He arrived there at the same time as a blonde girl, about his age, who had clearly been walking behind him, in the same direction, but had not felt the same hesitancy, and quickly overtook him—thus shaming him and prompting him to attempt to overtake her (he succeeded merely in catching up), as if to suggest, too late, that he was fortifying her and not the other way around. (She did not seem fooled and did not take much account of him.) What they found behind the wheel was a startled young man—British, English, that is, white—perhaps a bit younger, or about the same age as them. He was bleeding from the bridge of the nose and had a phone in his hand. “Fuck. My mum’s gonna kill me. It’s my mum’s car.” Just drifted over, just like that, crash.
Ive often felt that toronto is a simulation, a movie ranch of a city; a strong gust of wind could take the buildings down (this impression isnt helped by the tyranny of façadism). Ive characterized it to friends as an airport terminal, a “non-place”, in marc auges words, with no relationship to any particular tradition or culture, so that “people are always, and never, at home”
And time in our camp is moving, as you’d anticipate it to.