His grandmother died. It was summer—late summer—and he lived in Rhode Island, where he’d been to the beach only twice since July. It wasn’t a big deal; grandmothers passed. This was what they did. It wasn’t a parent but someone over one hundred years old, her mind soft now, her speech ever-pregnant with questions. She lived a good life, a long one.
What was a good life?
“Who’s there?” was the refrain of her last days—her last two years—as her eyesight degraded. People would enter her bedroom and she would try to tell by the sound their steps made, their breathing made, who it was.
He got on the Amtrak to Philadelphia—he took the train. To say it again, he was living in Rhode Island at the time. He was me. The world outside the train—the sheer plenitude of greens and yellows, the clouds daubed in the sky—made him sick with its beauty.
When he was a child, he liked trains. They seemed so American, but the irony was that there were very few trains in America. He remembered the train ride in the mall in Miami at Christmastime—the perversity of riding it as a little Jew, the tinsel on the tracks like shards of glass. What did trains have to do with Christmas?
In New York he had fifteen minutes. His girlfriend, who lived in Brooklyn, was waiting for him. They kissed in an ashamed but hungry way as he stood in line; it was kissing made more intense by the impossibility of realizing its potential in sex. Though he had a couple flashes of self-consciousness, imagining that other travelers were watching him in disgust, his horniness kept this at bay for the moment, like a talented but ultimately doomed general repelling an enemy who would soon overwhelm him.
When they said goodbye, he had the strange sense, and not for the first time, that his pleasure was never just pleasure. It was also death, but not in the sense of “little death,” a premonition of annihilation. It was the death of death, the death of the linear procession of moments toward one’s demise. In sex, the passive act of orgasm, it wasn’t the body that erupted so much as it was the very structure of time, present, past, and future splashing on everything, a kind of cum covering the walls of sensation. He less thought this than felt its mystical truth as he hid his erection, searching for a window seat. When he found one, he thanked God.
Rural Pennsylvania rolled by through the window. This was late August and the glass was covered in pollen, the yellow husk of the end of summer. Light fell on everything, shifting his attention from his long-distance relationship to the erotic motions of trees and flowers beyond the window: lilac, jack pine, sumac. What was it Spinoza said? Sex, God, and nature are all the same. Well, Spinoza didn’t say that, but it was heavily implied in his work.
“Is that my handsome nephew?” asked his aunt when they met him at Penn Station—the one in Philadelphia, its scale that of a cathedral, pew after pew after pew.
“No,” he said. Once, he had been a handsome nephew and son; he knew as much from pictures on the internet, which occasionally he clicked through, admiring himself as he had been. His aunt and mother made faces of polite worry.
“Are you hungry? Can we get you a snack? I saw they have Au Bon Pain,” his mother, who was his aunt’s sister and his dead grandmother’s daughter, asked. He saw his reflection in the window and the question answered itself.
“I ate a bagel,” he lied as they walked toward the exit. His mother’s expression became that of a police investigator letting a suspect go whom she absolutely knows is guilty but lacks enough evidence to detain; a priest who knows the penitent is lying but has no other recourse but to forgive. I know you’ve eaten no bagel, said her side-eye, and then they emerged into the toughness of Philly in the summer heat.
While it was true his girlfriend said he looked better now, that he had seemed frighteningly thin and almost wraith-like to her back then, the dominant and less logical part of A.’s brain told him she was only lying to make him feel better. He knew that she hoped to convince him to eat cheeseburgers with her, the food they once agreed was their favorite, and which for the past two visits he had proudly refused to enjoy—and so for this reason, he distrusted her.
Now instead of trains, there were cars. And instead of cars, there were vans: a kind of giant car for families.
In their family, eating was religion. It was Pascal, the gesture that issues in belief, and so within thirty minutes they were eating at a Friendly’s off the highway. It was all of them: his father and mother, his little brother, and his brittle aunt who seemed to eat only raw or roasted vegetables, and even then, not many of those. She was on a diet that his parents had declared cultic because of the “accountability group” that she texted after most meals, confessing all she had eaten. But he could identify with this ritual of penance—the secret was they all could. Food was never just food, but a negotiation between pleasure and physical beauty. The members of his aunt’s group had spent decades emphasizing pleasure, and now to undo this sinfulness, did the opposite. His immediate family tried to balance both, enjoying themselves in the evenings, exercising in the afternoons—Jews with a Catholic attitude toward repentance.
At Friendly’s he struggled not to order ice cream, or anything. “I’ll have the Friendly’s house salad. Dressing on the side,” he told the server, setting down the menu to avoid the photographs of food. They screamed bright from the laminated pages, seeming to dance—the burgers and fries and the pedestals of dessert.
If he grew thin enough, he could become like the pictures of himself on social media, and the slow onslaught of time, killing people, aging them, confusing them, would then be reversed. His mother and aunt and father and brother, everyone he loved, would become young again. Messiah-like, he contained the thread of time, he felt, and through suffering could wind it back to around 2010 or 11, the time when he looked his hottest and death was not yet present for him.
When the dishes arrived, they were like elderly, slightly ill versions of the items on the menu: soggy chicken sandwiches for his father and brother, liquefied beef brisket for his mother, withered salads for himself and his aunt. He imagined the food items, as they were being served, becoming nostalgic for the past photographs of themselves preserved in the eternity of the menu.
As he applied minimal dressing to his salad, his mother looked at him as if he had just declared he was becoming, say, a goat. Why would you become a goat when you could be a human? he imagined her asking with confusion. “Did Mama like Friendly’s?” he asked, hoping to distract her.
Hunger, A. found, gave him energy and a highly precarious joy. Though the pains of his transformation might confuse his mother now, she would too be joyous—it would all have been worth it—once he was skinny again. “I don’t think she ever ate at Friendly’s, no,” said his mom. She turned to his aunt. “Did Mother ever eat at Friendly’s?”
“Oh, sure,” said his aunt, without much confidence. She was cutting a carrot slice on a bed of dressing-less lettuce that seemed inedible, and yet he envied her level of self-denial. She was like a hairshirt monk muttering hungry prayers in the dusts of old Europe, and he was following her lead. “Many times,” she said. “She liked Friendly’s.”
They got back in the car, the van, all of them. A. listened to music and fantasized about ice cream as John Updike country passed by—the small cities of Pennsylvania that he would never see. Of course, he was aware that he was, in fact, going to one of these towns; his grandmother would be buried in Philipsburg. But he would never see them as they were in their essence, the cities and villages of the past, just as his essence stemmed from 2010 or 11 and was available for any of his Facebook friends to enjoy at any time, the menu of the self where his pictures were clickable and preserved.
*
His mother and aunt cried at random moments. They cried as a yawn passes from one person to another. Mother was dead; long live Mother. He wished he could cry with them—longing for catharsis—but instead he looked away, embarrassed by his inability to cry alongside them in the van, and replied to a sext from his girlfriend.
His aunt usually was the one to cry first, and then his mother’s lips would crimp and the feelings would spring to the surface like poetry whose meaning is suddenly obvious. He didn’t think he’d ever seen his grandmother (whom he called Mama) cry. She was usually neutral about most things except in her last years when she felt she was being left alone—when she couldn’t see who was entering or leaving the house, when she had to rely on the resources of her ears.
She had lived with his parents in Alabama during her last years. Now, as if to resist the all-annihilating power of death, her corpse would come home to Pennsylvania. Time was a line, pointing toward the end of life, and to return in a coffin to the site of one’s childhood and middle-years was a way of making this line into a circle; but the ultimate hope, A. knew, was to wind the circle into a spiral, all moments repeating, ever to be renewed.
It was the sight of a tree that could make them cry, a bird on a tree or a telephone line, or simply the sky. The nature that Mother, which was their word for her, had always loved. They laughed a lot too, in the van, talking about her eccentricities, her short body and her long coats.
A. and his brother listened to music, but occasionally he paused the song to hear the memories being passed back and forth like candy in the car, in the van.
The light was dying. Spinoza would love Pennsylvania, A. thought, the Dutch Jew grinding out eyeglasses and scribbling out apostasies until he died in—what was it?—the seventeenth century? He tried to remember, and then seventeenth-century people appeared.
They saw Amish people in carts. This went unremarked on. It remarked on itself, he felt. Amish in carts; Jews in a van. What, ultimately, besides many things, was the difference?
They arrived at an inn in State College, Pennsylvania, at around five o’clock. One could tell they were Jews almost instantly—the way their souls spilled from their bodies like apples from an overturned cart. A. and his father carried their baggage into the Fieldstone Inn through which ran a hush of absence, as if there were a surprise party waiting. But instead of a surprise party there was a gigantic empty bar. A. saw it as soon as they walked in, burdened with the bags, feeling strong and lightheaded from hunger, its walls decorated with an impersonal library of antique books that you weren’t allowed to open, that perhaps were not real.
They checked in. He was somehow allowed a room to himself that the inn let him have for free, but before retreating into it, he watched his parents settle into theirs. One day he would have to occupy his time on the eve of their burials, and he looked to them as models for how to use these, he was sure, quite emotionally complex hours. A.’s father was on his phone, checking his work email—he would work until he died, he said frequently, trying to be funny about it—while A.’s mother watched the State College news and lay in bed.
A. vanished into his room, in which he considered television but then discovered the jacuzzi, the pleasure of heated water. He immediately stripped his clothes and, so hungry he was almost no longer aware of his hunger, avoided the unavoidable sight of himself in the mirror; he saw flashes of his pallor, fragments of it, but not enough that he could judge himself. In the tub he started to read the book he brought but ended up touching himself, unavailingly, underwater, where he stayed soft like his grandmother’s brain. But it was the touching of water-skin that he loved, the clean movement, the suspension of any friction.
As A. got dressed, still wet, he sexted with his girlfriend. Though he managed to achieve an erection, he had to ignore it because the sexting exchange was so intense, its pace so very rapid, he couldn’t spare a hand. Though their real sex was halting and often distant once they expended their initial horny energy, in the dimension of sexting any degree of intimacy was possible, and the very existence of sexting generated an active sext life, because there was no conceivable final release; one was always never satisfied.
In sexting, as well as starvation, he became young. He merged with the sexier and, as he recalled it, flirtier self of his early twenties and late teens, when he had gone to parties and been torrid with life. In the dominant part of his brain, the one which actively resisted the draw of rationality, his family returned to 2010 or 11 alongside him. As if a missionary somehow converting people in secret, he drew them into the spiral of permanent renewal, in which every instant contained every other. He was God or nature, the messiah of still-wet sexting on a free hotel bed.
Before dinner, the family agreed to have a drink in the parlor, like British people. At one point he took on a British accent as a joke, swirling his cocktail and saying, “This is a fine cocktail” and his father said, “Yeah, mine is good too,” not responding to the joke, simply accepting his accent as fact, and so he stopped.
It was weird to think he could become temporarily English and no one would know, or else it was the case that they were, each of them, enclosed in a personal world, a walled compound of the self, a phone, a song, a television station, a memory.
The menus at the restaurant, which was inside the hotel, were bizarre.
Again, it was Pascal’s gesture of belief, the five of them bent over the same menus in the same way, bound closer through their reverence for this sacred text, the menu. Pascal or Spinoza—who would win, Frenchman or Dutchman? The motions of grace, the hardness of the heart, external circumstances, said the epigraph to Updike’s masterwork, written in his late twenties, still the American wunderkind but not much longer. Those were Pascal’s words.
It turned out that Updike country was pretty much like the rest of the country, except for the Amish in carts and the free hotel room. The motions of grace, external circumstances.
Anyhow, the restaurant was dark, so management had somehow installed electronic backlights into the paper menus, and the names of the dishes were in illegible fancy computer-generated script. The desire to make the food items readable competed with the need to make them serve America’s nostalgic ideation of the British aristocracy. It was so funny to him, the blue glow of these menus along with the digitally generated copperplate. He started laughing without explaining why, and then so did his brother and father, like the crying in the car, or rather the van, which had passed from mother to aunt.
His mother smiled and his aunt kept studying the menu for something she could permit herself to order. For his part, A. had had enough cocktails to permit himself to order fish. His aunt followed his example: fish could never make you fat.
In the period between the ordering of the fish and its arrival, he became tipsy enough to wonder: why fish? I want a steak—why didn’t I get a steak? What is the difference, besides many things, between fish and steak? A car and a van? A hotel and an inn? Meanwhile, his mother looked at him with the dreamy relief of someone who has woken from a day-long personal nightmare in which her son has become a felonious goat. “Mama would love that we’re all together,” she said as their food came, and he knew she too would die. Even the dominant, irrational part of his brain knew it. No matter how much he starved himself, it was going to happen.
He wondered if at that moment—when it came—he and his brother would cry at random moments in a van. And so he ordered another drink, hoping this would make him sad enough to generate tears. But ultimately it just made him drunk enough to keep speaking in a British accent, which his family continued to treat as a normal occurrence, replying to him as if he were speaking in his actual voice.
What was the end of life? Not the terminus, the final moment, but the aim? Was it starving yourself, sexting in your free room—or was it being mourned? What if to live a good life meant for your family to get in a van, gather in your hometown, and mourn you? Well, that would be pretty dispiriting, he thought as his father’s body sighed while paying the check for everyone.
“Dispiriting,” he thought to himself in a British accent, thinking of all the fake-autistic online writing people he pretended to be friends with but secretly hated because they had a casual, drugged-out hotness and horniness, whereas he was—what? What was he?
He was me.
After dinner he was full, fat, and almost drunk. The food was made with too much oil. Fish might not make you fat, but the oil would. His father paying made him depressed. He shuffled into his room and shed his shirt and stood in the mirror for a long time, squeezing his belly as if he could tear it off and toss the pieces in the small hotel-branded trash can. The ultimate puzzle was that, he knew, no one would ever be able to love him in the way that he loved himself, with the intensity of this collision between the infinite—the properly divine—and these drawers and shelves of flesh, this closet body.
He fell asleep thirsty.
At six-thirty, A. enjoyed an English muffin with bacon on it. As he ate the food slowly (if he was going to add these calories to his face, he was going to fucking enjoy it) his mother beamed at him with the joy of the Virgin Mary seeing her chad son resurrected.
In the car, the van, on the way to his mother’s hometown, they played a mix his brother had made of songs his grandmother had supposedly loved, swinging ballads from the fifties, lots of Sinatra. Song after song about the twisted and almost sociopathic pursuit of a woman portrayed in the most dulcet of tones.
Outside of the van there were trees and, in these trees, the sky. They passed a passenger train scaling a mountainside, its sides gleaming bright, the faces inside it invisible, going in the other direction.
Trains were like scars of an earlier America, he believed. He seemed to have an inbuilt image of a group of mythical commuters in dresses and suits, riding the train through the glittering iron night into the cozy suburbs of John Updike country, gathering their topcoats, saying good night to one another—the swollen dream of a traditional evening, the orgasmic pleasure of coming home. Sex, God, nature, home.
“Did Mama like trains?” he asked in the van.
“Mother loved trains,” his mom said. “I remember when we went to Philadelphia, I was maybe nine. No, I must’ve been ten. Just turned ten. I remember the outfit I wore and what she wore—I had a plaid dress that her sister had sewed, she had her little pearls on. ‘We’ll have lunch,’ she said and I thought, ‘What!?’ I couldn’t believe you could eat while moving. Eating was something you were supposed to be still for, it was stillness, it was order, and the train was going so fast… But still, here we were. The dining car, the white tablecloths, the silverware, and the bone china—the scenery slipping by, out the window, as Mother ate her soup.”
There was a billboard for guns. “Arm Yourself,” yellow letters said, and then a picture of a rifle and a toll-free number to call, he guessed if you wanted to buy a gun. Then they passed a retro-style diner surrounded by pine trees and it occurred to him, repeating his mother’s statements back to himself in his brain, that eating was stillness amid disorder. It made ritual out of the day, the week, and the year, transforming the chaos of our separate lives into one shared experience. Eating out had the extra benefit of paying other people to conduct this structuring activity, placing the process of creating order—buying and cooking ingredients, making the table beautiful—onto the shoulders of restaurant employees who needed money. This was one of the ways that America continued to fulfill its fundamental promise of republican democracy. The food was uniformly decent everywhere one went, he thought, probably even in train cars.
Where was Spinoza buried, exiled by his people for praising God in the wrong way?
Soon it was as if there were only trees, a heavenly tent of them over the desert of the world. Though this was not a desert, in fact, but a piney mountain. He wiped his face on the sleeve of his shirt and found he had begun to cry, finally—not legitimate tear-drips, however, just enough to rim his eyes. “The dining car, the white tablecloths,” he kept thinking, like he was there with Mama and his mother in the dining car, watching his mother’s throes of ecstasy.
In the cushioned booth, he imagined her, watching the scenery change as rural Pennsylvania transitioned into the city—the moronic and paradoxical beauty of nature that moves and yet at the same time stays still.
In a month he would move away from Rhode Island (it was already planned) and there was a sense in which he was already gone. He would live in New York with his girlfriend and suffer the bourgeois suffering of the overworked, whiny, overeducated millennial. The future was only a certain curve of the present, which itself was an involution of the past, he thought.
When he found out his grandmother fell to the floor and required a hip replacement, he’d been visiting her, his girlfriend. (Grandmother, girlfriend, similar words.) They were walking by the Manhattan side of the Williamsburg Bridge on a fiercely hot day, the kind of day when you feel simultaneously sexy and disgusting. The East River was splashing against a breakwater, the pedestrians echoing, the airplanes taking people away. It was the kind of day that I remember now and know I can never have it again. “She might die,” he said, as if there were some chance his grandmother could live forever. He remembered Mephistopheles: all things go down, zu Grunde geht. Then they got ice cream and argued about something dumb that he couldn’t remember. At that time, about five weeks ago, he hadn’t been starving himself yet.
The family in the van stopped for a second breakfast at McDonald’s. Like his aunt, A. had a salad without dressing—a salad, at McDonald’s, at ten-thirty in the morning. As he chewed, he felt himself slowly becoming a photograph of himself from Facebook, the social media site that he only ever used anymore to yell about politics with people he had never met and admire pictures of himself from half a decade ago or more. Rarely did he appear in new ones; it was difficult to know whether people took fewer pictures now or he carefully avoided cameras. Though there was, of course, the possibility that he was so unappetizing to look at that people had no interest in photographing him anymore.
As he force-fed himself the ridiculous salad, his mother looked at him as if he had betrayed her to the secret police and she was being dragged into a van—her sad face asking: Why? Why have you done this? Then, recalling them all to their purpose for being there—not to eat, but to bury—she held up her last bite of hash brown, its edges slicked with ketchup, and said, “You know, Mother loved these.”
*
Mama’s body stunk. Months later the smell remained in his nostrils—the untreated Jewish flesh, shipped from his parents’ home. They shouldered the coffin onto the bier and he felt like a man, bearing the weight, inhaling the musk of the corpse as the salad from McDonald’s turned to shit in his guts.
They sang things in Hebrew that no one could understand except the rabbi, who had met Mama exactly once and, after recounting this meeting, spoke for about ten minutes, for some reason quoting the co-founder of Apple in his encomium. The name Steve Jobs blew across the long grass of the small Jewish cemetery like the utterance of a curse. He used the word “iPhone” as people sniffled and coughed.
A. was terribly hungry—it was as if the salad had only made him hungrier, less like eating nothing than the absence of something, a negative food. He was beginning to reach the point where he fantasized about a giant cheeseburger. It floated in front of his face like a cartoon; it tormented him, levitating in the air and saying, “A., come eat me,” sort of like his girlfriend’s email that morning, which had been a formal request for head.
“Dear A.,” she had written, “I would like to submit a request for your tongue on my labia. Is this the correct point of contact?”
Sitting in the van on the way to the burial, A. had typed a detailed reply, in which he described himself “licking her up and down,” like the vagina was ice cream and he was a hungry child, which in a sense he was. Yet the violent stupidity of pornographic rhetoric was a modest price to pay for becoming, at least in email form, the cute and flirtatious person he was in pictures on Facebook, rather than the soft-brained casualty of time he felt like he was.
After the burial they ate at something called an Elks Club. He’d never heard of an Elks Club before but pretended to know what it was. “We’re going to the Elks Club!” A. yelled in the car, the van. Perhaps he would allow himself a cheeseburger. He could allow himself only a half or a quarter, and then the floating cheeseburger, like a god accepting its pagan sacrifice, would stop bothering him. “This is amazing!” he declared. “Elks Club!”
“Elks Club, Elks Club, Elks Club!” he said. Sometimes he felt like a failed philosopher from central Europe who was perennially discovering, and being astonished by, the grand adventure of American culture. Except he didn’t understand any languages but English. Even then, he felt the English he spoke was like a translation of some zero language, some cuneiform tattooed on his tongue.
They met up with his mother’s childhood friend, who he believed was named Cindy but afterward couldn’t remember, and her husband, Greg or something. Cindy worked in a doctor’s office and Greg was a contractor for God. His company was Christian and it built churches—specifically the frames of them, the bones of homes of the Lord. It was Cindy and Greg who were members of the Elks, and so it was thanks to Cindy and Greg that they could have this wonderful meal in Philipsburg, Pennsylvania, America.
In the Elks Club hallway, a sheet on an easel showed the tallies of Elks members who voted yes to allowing weapons on the premises, and those who voted no. It read: “Votes for Open Carry on Premises.”
He almost ordered a cheeseburger but hesitated, knowing that after the meal there would be a family picture. He knew this was stupid, but if he could stop doing something simply because he knew it was stupid, there were many things in his life he would not have done—too many even to conceive of. And so he enjoyed his grilled chicken salad even though it was bad, except for the strangely warm grapes on top.
Eventually, a manager appeared to yell at them. “The guest limit is five people,” he said. He was tall—wearing his Elks Club vest, which said “Elks Club” in gold thread on the left flap—and he would be handsome if not for the protrusion of his chin. “It’s not your fault,” the manager said, calming down. “It’s our fault—it’s whoever’s fault that sat you down.”
“Our father was an Elk,” his mother and aunt said at basically the same time.
“He was a member many, many years ago,” said his aunt, as though the longer ago her father’s membership was, the more claim they had to it. “You can check the records.”
“We used to come here every Sunday,” she said, “and no one would’ve dared treat us like this.”
“We aren’t open on Sunday,” said the manager, and left.
“I don’t know what happened to Philipsburg,” said his mother, eyeing A. suspiciously, as if it were his fault, him and his goddamn salads. “They never used to love Jesus this much.”
Greg, or whatever his name was, moved in his chair.
They took a picture together on the deck. They got Greg to do it because he didn’t matter. A. didn’t know what he wanted—to look at the picture and see how fat he was, or to let his image go. In the end, though, when he looked at it, he was barely visible, and hardly in the frame. He’d stood off to the side without understanding what he was doing while his aunt, her face so small and supple, illuminated the center of the scene with her smile.
If he kept eating whatever she ate, A. thought, he’d be fine. Maybe someday he would stand in the middle of pictures again, ushering in a bold new era of Facebook photos that left no space for his friends, ex-lovers, family members, or the political people he’d never met to wonder how his present face compared to the wraith of roughly 2010 or 11.
*
In Philipsburg, he saw his first Trump sign. “Make America Great Again,” it commanded from the window of a business. The store was called Ron’s Goods, and A. couldn’t tell—no one could—what these titular goods were. The window display held a wide array of things: a surfboard (obviously very useful in central Pennsylvania), a Lego set, a pair of camouflage gloves, and of course the risible sign.
Back then it was still funny to them, those four accursed words. “Make America great again,” the family said to themselves, passing the storefront. Make A. great again, he thought.
A.’s father ignored the ping of his phone. There was nothing he could do, out on the streets of Philipsburg, about an email. A. saw his face wrinkle further with resistance. Would his father’s life be the humiliation of wage labor without end? Find out next time!
“I’m with her,” A. said, and walked beside his aunt, taking her knobby elbow.
They walked through the broken downtown, everyone thinking it would help them burn calories—walking slowly for ten or fifteen minutes. There was an almost totemic respect for exercise among his family members. It healed all wrongs, covered shame like a leaf in Eden. Speaking of leaves, in Phillipsburg, they were bright and green, waving madly above his family as they obeyed their collective desire to exercise.
He remembered, now, Spinoza’s edict that he made up for himself on the train, that small, probably nonsensical refrain: nature, sex, and God. In all three of them, one felt, time and eternity merged. A single moment of beauty, pleasure, or piousness could reveal every other moment. The line of time became a spiral; the hole into which absence fell, in which food was digested and spat out as shit, became a source of plenitude and prayer, shameful grace and precarious joy, erupting in sunlight, orgasm, resurrection—Nature, sex, God; Philipsburg, Pennsylvania, America.
Against this stood Pascal and his rituals, the approach of death, the Catholic trad obedience that, years later, would become cool in his generation among women who semi-ironically wanted to fuck men who resembled Trump, and men who, likewise, semi-ironically wanted to resemble him. In other words, A.’s deranged longing for the bone structure of his early twenties would become a more general condition of wishing to replenish one’s youth, to fuck daddy and become him; A. was thus the weak messiah of our more-or-less heterosexual weakness. And so perhaps Pascal and Spinoza were not so different. To survive to the end, one had to cum sunlight.
*
At dinner that night his aunt declared that she would vote for Donald Trump. It all made sense now: she hadn’t joined in the “Make America Great Again” jokes, and earlier, she had intimated she was dating again. It was doubtful whether there were any heterosexual men her age in southern Jersey, even among the Jews, who were not Republicans, or who didn’t see themselves reflected in the future president of America.
The family was eating at a barbecue place in State College. The air smelled of meat, beer, and his aunt’s shampoo as he sat beside her. Occasionally some college student or other walked by and, if her waist was level with his face, he would imagine performing oral sex, not on her necessarily, but on some disembodied vagina.
In his imagination, this act was stripped of all its physical and mental awkwardness—the discomfort of perching on one’s elbows for twenty or thirty minutes, the certainty that it was becoming boring for the other person—and refashioned as a pure cry of sexual desire.
Like an elderly man deciding what movie he would watch alone that evening, A. tried to determine how he should respond to his girlfriend on the way to the train station. “Daddy’s coming home,” he imagined saying, even though he was going back to his rented room in Rhode Island first, not New York; or, “Did you fuck anyone while I was gone?” hinting at the possibility of her betrayal turning him on; or any number of other things he would never conceive of saying or doing in person, where their intimacy was a mere shedding of built-up desire, which they subsequently reinterpreted to each other as good sex to keep the relationship going.
The adults discussed Trump. “There happen to be some things that I think he’s right about,” his aunt explained. “That Mother would think he’s right about as well.”
“Oh, really?” A.’s father asked sarcastically, sucking the meat off a rib. “What things?”
“Just certain things,” the aunt said. “We’ve lost connection with the country we used to be. The roads and train tracks are crumbling, the bridges are about to collapse. You look around and it’s a mess. When we were growing up, this was a beautiful place.”
“Okay, and how’s he going to fix it? By whining about it on a stage?” A.’s father demanded to know. As A. ate more of his salad, which due to his own over-dressing of it threatened to actually fill him up, his mother looked at him like a detective who, having finally solved the crime, must only discern its motive and the suspect is hers. “Another salad, huh?” she asked.
“In fact. it is quite good, mother,” he replied, reprising the British accent.
They finished dinner and got on the road to Philadelphia, where A. would board a train to New York, and from New York, Rhode Island. He sat in the backseat sexting with his girlfriend as the by-now unbearable Frank Sinatra mix played again. It turned out that the salad didn’t fill him up.
At Penn Station he said goodbye to the people he loved in a way that escaped the means of language. It was late and there were men and women in jackets and sleeping bags spraddled on the pews. His mom, who had been quiet on the drive and at dinner, made a final attempt to implore him to eat. “You can’t only eat salads,” she said in front of his father, who was answering an email by dictating its contents into the screen of his phone. “I’ll be back in the office on Monday. I will reach out for more details then,” he said robotically, as if for the phone to recognize his voice, he had to become just as much of a machine as it was.
“You have to eat other things. You used to like to eat meat. You used to eat cheeseburgers,” his mother continued. “Mama always said about you, ‘He can eat.’ She would say, ‘Now, he knows how to enjoy a plate of food.’ Do you need to see a doctor?”
“My metabolism is slowing, mom. I want to look handsome like I used to,” he said. “I want everything to be like it used to when I looked good,” he added. Though, upon its entrance into the slightly logical system of spoken language, he could see this desire was phenomenally stupid and cruel to the people who cared about him. By worrying her, it would only age her faster.
For her part, she looked like her son was possessed by a devil. “You need to eat more things than salads,” she said, beginning to repeat herself now, since there was no way to address what he had said. “You used to like meat, hamburgers, ice cream.” She counted these on her fingers. “What happened?”
“Promise me when you get home you’ll go out with your roommates and eat something nice,” his mother said, and in a curiously perfect choreography of arm-touches, his aunt took her hand from his mother’s arm, and in turn, his mother placed her hand on his forearm. “I want you to be able to enjoy yourself again. Remember? Every Friday, we used to say, ‘What country are we eating tonight? Italian? Greek? Thai?’—and we’d sit there and decide?”
He did remember this and, in light of his graduate education and the aggressively racist campaign of the future president, understood it was a little xenophobic.
“But I do enjoy myself,” he said, which was of course true. He had nature, sex, God; but because these were associated with the monster clawing at his stomach, this chimera of irrational desire so desperate to be released, it was more like a partial joy, one blended with desperation and pain. It occurred to him that the enjoyment of food, consumed and then quickly processed as waste, was as irrational a desire as one could hope for. Why not add it to the list?
When he got on the train, he realized that everyone on board behaved in a manner quite different from his mythical commuters, who only wished to go home to their snowy suburbs. These passengers seemed more interested in the experience, the point between the lines, than where they were going; perhaps this was because trains were so outmoded, less a pathway home than an encounter with a vanished one.
People settled pleasantly into their seats, holding their chosen objects—they all had a chosen object for the train: a tablet or newspaper, a burrito—and staring at the window with longing in their eyes for the night that would soon pass by, the lampposts and their glow, the buck and sway of the haunted nostalgic towns which in the daytime were post-industrial junkyards but which in the darkness were silent sites of repetitious mystery.
What to do between this life and the next? A. thought. He ought to eat, at least more than he had been. Maybe to nature, sex, and God—Spinoza’s holy trinity—he could add a fourth item, food: the sacred ritual of studying a menu, the quickly regretted pleasure of thoughtless indulgence. Or perhaps food was just a subgenre of sex.
The only way to find out was by eating something naughty.
No—the fourth thing was not food, he realized now, but America. God, sex, nature, America. Thankfully, in America there were always restaurants present. And you could only approach the mystical experience of America through eating. He began imagining the ketchup packets, the softness of the cheese, the warm cheeseburger. He moved quickly, pulling himself along the train, his mouth watering for the sacrament. Though by the time he reached the dining car, it was closed for the evening.
Recommended reading: The Patriotic Plot by Alec Niedenthal (recently completed novel), Prisoners of the American Dream by Mike Davis, Black List Section H by Francis Stuart, The Book and the Brotherhood by Iris Murdoch, The Homewood Trilogy by John Edgar Wideman
