Month: October 2020

How long could I continue to endure the trapped isolation and constant disorienting uncertainty at the Hôtel? Or the apprehension that my perception of what was real and what was not was distorted. That what I took for my own identity was fragile and figmentary? That my thoughts, my very substance and existence was a nightmarish fiction. Worse still, that the Hôtel itself was insubstantial, discarnate, incorporeal. That the space it occupied, and myself within it, did not exist beyond the workings of my own mind.

And so, at some point, while immersed in this all-encompassing interiority, I began to question my sanity. I could not, though, determine when or how long it may have taken me to arrive at this point. For, at the Hôtel, time, like space, had no value, it had no presence in my life, no meaning. Time did not exist for me. There was no chronology to events. There was no before or after. There was, therefore, no sense of cause and effect. No such thing as, if A, then B.

Whatever sense of personal agency I felt I had, it was both false and limited solely to my intention to put one foot in front of the other, so to speak, and even that could be negated, obliterated, in an instant. I might imagine taking a step in one direction, say to locate the room in which I was staying, and immediately find myself in another, an entirely different space, a different realm, one totally untethered to that in which I had sought to extend my foot in that very same heartbeat. And, at that, I had no awareness that anything had been altered. I was simply in a new moment, a frame-shift, and for that moment it was all that existed.

I sensed, in some moments, a deep despair which I attributed to a lack of anything resembling intimacy with any others. While I might have imagined that others may have been present, I had no sense of human contact. I heard not a word, saw neither a glance nor a gesture. I felt that this privation was, like a vacuum: an absolute absence of materiality.

Without human contact, I felt unable to do anything either self-affirming or of any value in the world, as limited and ephemeral as it was. My world was seemingly without end and removed from the very substance of humanity.  

At the point to which I am referring, I began to experience a nascent level of introspection. I came to fear that a certain degree of psychopathology becomes not only possible but predominant when one sees oneself as separate from both meaningful experience and social interaction. Thievery, duplicity, misanthropy, delusion, and worse, seemed possible. I had enough cognition to know that that possibility was inherently immoral. I needed to find my way out. Without the restraint of the social contract, when we are deprived, for one reason or another, through some willful act of oppression or through happenstance, we are left without the righting forces of compassion and punishment. We become untethered, unmoored, and a danger.

Perhaps only through the force of will or a weakening of the forces that bound me, one evening I found myself, inexplicably, outside of the Hôtel. I was walking through one of a number of revolving doors at the exit and found myself outside of a modern office building in midtown New York, somewhere in the 50s, perhaps around Madison Avenue. It was a building I had once worked in, though I cannot recall either the organization or what exactly I had done there. It was in the fall and I was not dressed for the coolness of the evening. I had neither coat nor a briefcase nor any personal items. In that moment, I found myself thrust back into that situation. And in so doing I returned into the building and told the security guard that I worked upstairs and had left my ID card and my coat in my office and of course he recognized me and showed me up to the floor and a cubicle which I easily recognized by the state-issued utilitarian furniture, the rather non-descript appointments such as the fluorescent lighting and grayness of the walls and the disarray of papers I had left on my desk.

Standing beside it I was awash in a feeling of dread. Everyone had apparently left. Perhaps it was the weekend. I looked through my desk drawers to see if my belongings were there and they were. And under the file boxes I had kept under the desk, I found several thick business envelopes of cash that I had hidden there and, in that moment, I felt how distanced I was from the staff I worked with. Perhaps as the result of some slight or perceived injustice and, how, after they all had left at the end of the workday, which for some of them was quite late into the night, I would riffle through their drawers and personal belongs and take whatever cash I could find, amassing quite a sum, hundreds of dollars sometimes in one evening. I was convinced, simultaneously, that it had come to me by chance as if I had found it on an empty sidewalk and that I had committed a reprehensible act and that I would be severely punished if I were to be caught. Looking clearly, for the first time, since leaving the Hôtel, I had an awareness of the consequences of my own actions. This was, as one can imagine, both a blessing and a curse, an inkling of agency and culpability.

I stuffed my pockets with the cash. I was flushed with fear and ambiguous good fortune. My heart beat heavily.

In the lobby, the guard who had shown me up no longer recognized me and asked for the ID which I did not have. I broke toward the door making it through into the cold night at which point I stood looking up and down the cavernous avenue, a dark street in Brooklyn I was not familiar with, with no idea how I was to find my way home. To safety. And with no tangible knowledge, in fact, of what or where home might be. I was lost. My pockets were empty. My fingers could not dial the cell phone that appeared in my hand. I could not recall what number I might call for help. I was beset with a frantic sense of desolation. I felt myself being reclaimed by the dark pull of unbounded lunacy.

And there, standing in the darkening cold, the Hôtel was revealed to me to be a haven of sorts. I had no control there. No responsibility for my actions. There, I did not have to parse what was real from what was false. And in that, with no distinction between the two, an enticing degree of comfort could be found. 

Gelber clicked on the email from Ancestry.com. He’d seen his wife’s 23 and Me results. They were captivating. In a way, like a biomolecular radio telescope peering into the origins of her own personal universe. Or like a Vermeer painting you could watch in reverse. Layer by layer of paint being removed by absorbent retrograde brushstrokes, seeing that the final perfect azure of the girl with the pearl earing’s turban had once been a rejected cerulean.

Gelber, the email told him, was an Ashkenazi Jew. That cost me 199 bucks? They should have just asked me, he thought. I could have told them that two weeks ago and they could have Venmoed me the $199.

His wife’s a Brit. Ireland. Scotland. England. Blonde and shimmery grey-blue-eyes. A gene for wet sticky earwax and one for bunions. Another for a rare Mediterranean fever of little consequence. Also, a gene from a warmhearted Neanderthal grandmother, for a tendency to hold on to things. Gelber calls them tchotchkes. Things like boxes of broken holiday lights, cracked tea cups, Hummel figurines, and single-spaced Christmas letters she receives each year from distant cousins living in condos in Naples, Florida. She’s a saver. It’s a genetic trait that Gelber believes, no doubt, has some hidden survival value. 

He watches Henry Louis Gates on PBS on Tuesday evenings while he sips a glass of hot tea and wonders if Gwyneth Paltrow will have a slaveholder or a slave in her past. Or maybe a Polish rabbi, which is more likely. What could Gates tell Jerry Seinfeld that he didn’t already know? “Well, now, what’s up with that,” Seinfeld might say in that measured sardonic way he has of being both the subject and the smirking, cynical, observer at the same time.

Gelber knows little of own his past. What’s to know? What would it change if he did?

He also avoids thinking in any detailed way about his future beyond his fear, at some point, in a not-too-distant future, of not being able to breathe and that a fulminant pneumonia will be his last conscious human experience in life. COVID scares the shit out of him. The thought wakes him at night and it cringes his genitals as proof, if one needed it, that thoughts of doom are physical phenomena.

Of what good is thinking of the past? What did it matter if it was the Mongols or the Visigoths or the Nazis that his great-great grandmothers had escaped from long enough to pay forward their good fortune? What matters now to Gelber is none of that.

What matters most now to Gelber is if he will be able to escape a painful, unprovoked, death at the hands of roving vigilante Proud Boys in helmets and camo pants or the Hawaiian-shirted Boogaloo dudes standing back and standing by now in their well-fortified split-level homes with American flags flying on their front porches and re-tweeting about George Soros eating Christian children who wander into pizza shops owned by Hillary Clinton. That was more concerning to him. Is there a gene for that?

The Jews have had a hard time. Is there an allele for that? If so, what can be done about it. Nothing, he thinks. He’s not a pessimist. He’s a practical prudent paranoiac. Maybe there’s a gene for that. He instinctively senses when he’s the unwanted turnip in the soup. Westport Connecticut, for example. He once had brunch in a well-lit crepe shop there. A line of men in yellow Lacoste shirts with upturned collars, Bently Platinum sunglasses tipped back on their clean-cut hair, and cashmere sweaters loped over their shoulders, waited outside for him to leave. They were not Visigoths, but still he felt the vibe.

It’s more than an imagined driving-while-Jewish feeling. There’s more to it than that. It’s his fully-warranted healthy paranoia in the time we live in. Like the time when his sentinel genitals coagulated like a fried egg in warning as a dark green van, with peeling Trump bumper stickers on it, barreled toward him with the driver looking straight at him and giving him the finger and yelling, “All Lives Matter, you queer,” gunning the engine and swerving away from hitting him head on at the last moment as Gelber knelt on one knee on a socially-distanced busy street corner holding a Black Lives Matter sign for George Floyd and wearing a surgical mask.

Gelber is certain that the guy in the van thought that since he was not Black, Gelber must be a radical-liberal-commie-homo-tree-hugging-faggot-veggie-AOC-loving-socialist Jew, whose life, therefore, does not matter. Gelber knows he is seen by some as ostensibly, and only provisionally, “living” on borrowed time. He’s not one of those true Americans on the perverted mental list of the All Lives Matter types of people who, by dint of some vaguely defined demented criteria, are truly worthy of living and breathing.

His mother would tell him to watch out. “You’re a Jew”, she had said to him. “You look like a Jew. You dress like a Jew. They can smell Jew on you. Don’t be a fool, too.” She’s dead now. She was a true paranoiac. What would she see now hiding around every street corner? Maybe she was right. Maybe she felt the full pull of the well-earned gene for self-protection more strongly that he does. Maybe she had two alleles for that trait and he has only the one.

Maybe he is a fool, although he thinks not. May he’s a fraud. It’s relatively easy to hold up a sign on a street corner in North Whitepeopleville. But, maybe, when the real test comes and the first window is shattered or when he hears the hard knocking at his kitchen door, his DNA will know what to do.

Maybe he’s just not smart enough to know what to do when the real Visigoths come. Maybe he is. There must be a gene for that.