Open City (26 page)

The parachutists did not resist arrest. No longer encumbered by their wings, they were led away by the police. The crowd began to cheer again, and the parachutists, all young men, grinned and bowed. One of them, taller than the other two, had a full ginger beard that glinted in the sun. The parachutes remained in a glossy heap in the grass and, when the wind picked up again, seemed to give off trembling exhalations. And so we watched the parachutes breathe for a while, while the men were led away. Then, but only after what seemed like a long time out of ordinary time, we came out of the marvelous and resumed our picnic. Something had appeared in the sky, defying nature. My friend, who seemed to have read my thoughts, said, You have to set yourself a challenge, and you must find a way to meet it exactly, whether it is a parachute, or a dive from a cliff, or sitting perfectly still for an hour, and you must accomplish it in a beautiful way, of course.

Moji, Dayo Kasali’s sister, lay prone, a straw hat over her head. Lise-Anne and my friend were well matched, I thought. I had never met her, but he had assured me that she was his ideal companion. There was a balance in his seriousness and her natural lightness. She already understood him, which was more than could be said for his last several girlfriends. His love of philosophy was equaled by the way he (as he once put it to me) practiced biology. My friend was often forgiven his inconstancy; the willingness of women to forgive him came with his being the suave creature he was. For him to be understood, as she seemed to instinctively understand him, was rarer.

Near us, a wisteria’s boughs hung low, the petals on its purple blooms reticulated and busy with resurrection. There were some tulips, Sultans of Spring, I supposed, with large silken petals that were like ears. Bees collided again and again with the flowers, tracing flight paths all around us. On our way into the park, Moji had said to
me that she was more worried than ever about the environment. Her tone was serious. When I responded that I supposed we all were, she corrected me, shaking her head. What I mean is that I actively worry about it, she said, I don’t think that’s generally true of other people. I think I waste things, I have bad habits like most of the Americans around me. Like most people in the world, I suppose. My awareness of it has intensified in the past couple of months, she said.

I had attempted to meet the issue in the right way. I asked her if she worried about things like air travel. I knew that she went to Nigeria at least once a year. Wasn’t she concerned about the environmental effect of jet fuel, and all that? She responded that she was. Then our conversation trailed off when Lise-Anne and my friend, walking a few steps behind, caught up with us again, and she began to tell us about life in Troldhaugen, where she’d grown up. Now, as I watched park workers fold up the parachutes, I remembered that brief earlier exchange with Moji. I had heard the environmental concern often enough to know how earnest a priority it was for some people, but I did not, as yet, feel it seriously in my bones. I had not experienced a fervor over it. I did not pause to consider whether to use paper or plastic, and I only ever recycled out of convenience, not out of some belief that recycling made a real difference. But already, I was starting to respect those who were fervent. It was a cause, and I was distrustful of causes, but it was also a choice, and I found my admiration for decisive choice increasing, because I was so essentially indecisive myself.

Moji lifted the hat off her face, and a bee that had been troubling her reassessed the situation and flew off in the direction of the nearest bloom. The sky had turned a darker blue, and the air was cooler. She brushed her cheek with her hand. I looked at her, and found her puzzling. She was too tall, and her eyes were small. Her face was dark, so dark that it had faint purple notes in it, but she was not beautiful in the way I expected dark women to be. You know what I know about bees? she said all of a sudden, breaking into my thoughts.
That the name Africanized killer bees is a piece of racist bullshit. Africanized killers: as if we don’t have enough to deal with without African becoming a shorthand for murderous. She leaned forward to pluck a grape from its stem on the plate. She was wearing a tank top, and I caught sight of the dark curve of her breast.

Around the country, I said, bees are dying and the scientists don’t know why. I’ve always found bees inscrutable. They are obsessed in ways that elude humans, and now they are falling prey to mass death. It has something to do with weather patterns or pesticides, I think, or perhaps some genetic change is at the heart of it. Already, one in every three bees has died, and more are to follow; the percentage is increasing all the time. For so long, I said, they have been used as machines for making honey, their obsession was turned to human advantage. Now they are proving adept at dying, too, dying from some terrible disorder in the order Hymenoptera.

There were nods and smiles. Lise-Anne looked at me with some admiration, and my friend mocked me with his eyes. Moji said she’d read something about the phenomenon, that it was called colony collapse disorder. It is quite widespread by now, she said, common all over Europe and North America, even as far as Taiwan. And isn’t it something also to do with genetically modified maize? My friend put his head in Lise-Anne’s lap, and said, That sounds like something out of imperial history: colony collapse disorder! The natives are restless, Your Majesty, we can’t hold on to these colonies much longer. Lise-Anne said, Does any of you know
El Espíritu de la Colmena
? It’s a film by a man named Erice, made in the seventies. In that film, bees represent, I don’t know what, but it seems that, in a violent and sad time in Spanish history, they represented a different way of thinking, a way of thinking and being that was specific to bees, but that was related to the human world. There are some scenes in that film that, really, are under my skin now. I think of the ones where the father—he has two young daughters, and one of them is called Ana, just like that little girl who was over there a moment ago—the scenes where
the father is kind of shell-shocked, or in the cage of some memory he cannot talk about, and just works at the beehive. Those scenes are very moving, they are without dialogue or plot, but they are effective. Anyway, I don’t know what my point is, but maybe bees are sensitive, unusually sensitive, to all the negativity in the human world. Maybe they are connected to us in some essential way that we haven’t figured out yet, and their death is a warning of some sort to us, like the canaries in a coal mine, sensitive to an emergency that will soon be apparent to dull, slow human beings.

I hadn’t seen Erice’s film, but the collapse of the bee populations made me think of something else, which I now connected to what Lise-Anne had just described. The lack of familiarity with mass death, with plague, war, and famine, seemed to me a new thing in human history. These last few decades, I said to my friends, in which wars flare up in patches instead of being all-consuming, and agriculture no longer evokes elemental fear, and the seasonal variations in weather are not harbingers of starvation, is an anomaly in human history. We are the first humans who are completely unprepared for disaster. It is dangerous to live in a secure world. Look at this harmless and beautiful stunt by the parachutists. We know that they are in the right, right for having made something memorable for us, at some personal risk, but the police are charged with keeping us safe at all times, empowered to secure us with the force of arms, and protect us even from pleasure. I often think of the long nineteenth century, which, in all parts of the world, was one interminable bloodbath, an orgy of continuous killing, whether in Prussia or in the United States, or in the Andes or in West Africa. Butchery was the norm, and nations went to war on the slightest pretexts. And it went on and on, interrupted by brief pauses for rearmament. Think of the epidemics that wiped out ten, twenty, even thirty percent of populations in Europe: I read somewhere recently that the city of Leiden lost thirty-five percent of its population in a five-year period in the 1630s. What could it mean to live with such a possibility, with people
of all ages dropping dead around you all the time? The thing is that we have no idea. In fact, when I read it, it was as a footnote in an article talking about something else, an article about painting or furniture.

Families that lost three of their seven members were not at all unusual. For us, the concept of three million New Yorkers dead from illness within the first five years of the millennium is impossible to grasp. We think it would be total dystopia; so, we think of such historical realities only as footnotes. We try to forget that other cities in other times have seen worse, that there isn’t anything that immunizes us from a plague of one kind or another, that we are just as susceptible as any of those past civilizations were, but we are especially unready for it. Even in the way we speak about what little has happened to us, we have already exhausted ourselves with hyperbole.

I’d been going on. It was Lise-Anne who saved me from myself by changing the subject. She said, But, Julius, you’re a shrink. I’ve always wondered about that. I’m obviously crazy, or I wouldn’t be with this guy over here. So never mind the bees or the plague and all that. Who’s the craziest person you’ve treated recently? I bet you get some really whacked-out ones. Or are you sworn to secrecy? We promise not to tell anyone.

I indulged them, and told them stories about my patients, about the alien visitations and government surveillance, the voices in the walls, the suspicions of family conspiracies. There is always a fund of humorous tales from the horror of mental illnesses, particularly in the ranks of the paranoid. I called on these stories now, even passing off some of my colleagues’ patients as my own. My friends laughed as I recalled a case in which the patient had “successfully” jammed signals from other planets, carefully lining every window in her apartment with aluminum foil, placing receptors elaborately woven from paper clips in the soles of her shoes, and always carrying a small piece of lead in each pocket, even when she was asleep. Paranoid schizophrenia lent itself especially well to such narratives, and the sufferers
of the disease were good storytellers because they engaged in world building. Within the parameters of their own realities, these worlds were remarkably consistent: they only looked crazy from the outside.

Do doctors actually use the word
crazy
? Moji asked. We most certainly do, I said. Some people, in fact, are simply nuts, and that’s what we write down in the chart. I did this just last week. Forty-nine-year-old salesman: I talked to him for a few minutes and wrote down, as he spoke: The patient is as crazy as a sack full of ferrets. Another patient I once diagnosed: Just plain nuts. I think you’d be surprised at what doctors actually say when no one is looking.

Do you know that shop near TriBeCa, Lise-Anne said, We Are Nuts About Nuts? Well, my friend said, I know I definitely am. There are actually lots of insane people in this town, maybe the majority of New Yorkers. Well, no, he went on, I don’t mean that. But, really, everyone just finds a way to cope, no one is completely free of mental problems, so I say let everyone sort themselves out. Insanity is used as an excuse for suppressing dissent, just as it has always been. Julius, I’m sure you know all about this: there used to be floating prisons in medieval Europe, ships of fools sailing from port to port, collecting the undesirables. People whom we would think of as a little depressed today were put through exorcisms. It was all about removing the contaminants from society.

And if we’re talking about real insanity, my friend went on, and I’m not going to pretend that doesn’t exist, if we’re talking about deep down, in-the-gut disjunction between actual reality and a sort of personally invented reality, well, there’s been plenty of that in my own family. What you said about Leiden, well, in a way, my family was Leiden. My father went crazy and became a cocaine fiend. Or maybe it was the other way around, maybe the cocaine came first. Anyway, he’s out there in South Carolina somewhere right this minute, looking to score some blow. That’s what he lives for. Understand that I use the word
father
in a loose sense. I haven’t seen the man in four years, and the times I saw him, I wish I hadn’t. My mom,
on the other hand: six children from five different men. That’s kind of crazy, too, isn’t it? I mean, how do you not quit doing that after the third or fourth kid? I’ve got an older brother who’s doing time for dealing. And that’s without mentioning my uncle Raymond. Uncle Ray was a mechanic in the Atlanta area. He had a wife and three kids. Salt of the earth type, never strayed, never did drugs. Then, when I was eleven, he lost his mind over God-only-knows-what, and he went into the backyard and shot his brains out. His youngest kid, my cousin Yvette, who was seven at the time, found him.

A silence fell on the group. I knew the story. This was the appalling family background my friend had had to overcome to go to university and to graduate school, and to become an assistant professor in the Ivy League. Now, having spoken, he had a peaceful expression on his face. Ahead of us, in the lengthening shadows of afternoon, the parachutes had been folded and were being carted away on vehicles belonging to the Department of Parks and Recreation. The stuntsmen would probably get slapped with a charge of reckless endangerment and be fined. I suppose, Moji said at length, that the things black people have had to deal with in this country—and I don’t mean me or Julius, I mean people like you, who have been here for generations—the things you’ve had to deal with are definitely enough to drive anyone over the edge. The racist structure of this country is crazy-making.

Oh, man, Lise-Anne said, don’t give him excuses! We all laughed, with some relief. Lise-Anne was immediately likable. In contrast, I was struck by Moji’s brittleness, the defensiveness she seemed to have so readily at hand. Speaking of her boyfriend, whom I had not met yet, she’d demanded of me: Are you trying to find out if he’s black? I was startled. I assured her that no, I had no such interest. It was trite, it suggested a sort of unformed mind to me. But I found it appealing, and even sexual, and I suddenly imagined us together in a sexual situation. She was no Nadège; this attraction was of a different valency. I wasn’t even certain if I could term it attraction. But
there was something interesting in the mood she gathered around her like a robe. She was forthright, she spoke freely, she was always spoiling for a fight, and yet she gave the impression of being an observer, a close watcher of people and words.