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Rendezvous 19 Waiting for you, I flick through the poems of Nazim Hikmet—it’s the kind of casual literary encounter railway station bookshops specialize in—and come across the lines “statues of whoever invented airplanes / should grace thehotelroomsofallreturns.”1 Possiblyit’sbecausethemarble-flooredlobbies behind me and the miscellaneous jigsaw of flatnesses in front of me could be the ruin of runways (if you extracted the street furniture and the horizon-hugging office blocks), but his strange thought captures my situation . A hotel room is booked for your return, the place of rencontre beyond the customs hall has been fixed. All that remains is that the inventors of airplanes should keep to their schedules. But it’s not just the ability of aviators to direct the sky dragons, soliciting them to alight along appointed roads, that minimizes the risk of erotic shipwreck. Rencontre of one kind or another seems inscribed in the very design of contemporary public space. Where it is so open, where steadily lit public interiors and immense corridors stretching like runways to the horizon turn space into a treadmill of approach and recession, where you can see a lover or an enemy approach from an almost infinite distance, how can encounter of one kind or another not occur? I wonder how much is spent annually on the creation of places where people can meet. There isn’t a private developer from Dubai to Brisbane, from Canary Wharf to Savignyplatz, who doesn’t promise to produce safe, environmentallyfriendlyplaces,wherepeoplecanthrive,whodoesn’tinsist (in an admirable spirit of commercial self-abnegation that emulates Hikmet ’s inventors of airplanes) that the spaces between buildings—plazas, streets, and parks—are just as important as the rentable structures rising from their plinths. It is as if a greater transparency translates into expanded opportunities for intimacy. The concertina of glass facades folds together 20 rendezvous passing strangers as never before. Utopia would be a machine for meeting from which the smallest chance of error had been removed, where deviations were like options managed on behalf of the very rich. It would be every hotel keeper’s dream—full occupancy of all bedrooms every night. It would be the elimination of accidents in the interests of performance. It would be the world as meeting place, where phrases like “I’ll be at the airport in two hours” would no longer carry an undertone of pain, and where suchexpressionsofanguishas“Timedoesn’tmove,/it’sfrozensolid”would be rendered obsolete. It is odd that you are fractionally late. But surely after a year’s waiting and plotting—“Myplan:toarrive,”aswesaid—afewextrastridesoftimehardly count. It’s just as well that we didn’t leave it longer, though. To judge from the long-necked cranes feasting on the flesh of the building site out front, this capital of democracy is on the move. Shortly the pavement where we firstembraced will have beensweptaway,andwhateverhappenedtherewill be a soul without a body. If no physical trace of our touching remains, perhaps we only have ourselves to blame. We said we stood outside history. Thestormthatdrovedowntheboulevardinvestingusinacloakofrainwas, we said, more than coincidence; it concealed us from the customary surveillance of street lights and security cameras. We felt hidden inside the full glare of the night. What claim then can our love make on modernity’s landscape when we prided ourselves on eluding its coordinates? Our secret, like the anecdotes of power that cannot be published in the dictator’s lifetime , will be preserved, if at all, in the future conditional tense.2 It will exist as stuttering does in relation to running, or leaning toward unbalance in relation to stability. But the technological culture of scission, with its master planning of change, its sprocketing of time into distinct frames, has no room for these in-between, bipedal states. It dismisses the history of the instant between two strides as a decisively missed opportunity. It is on the side of the Fate that hid Tess Durbeyville’s letter under a rug. We had enough philosophy to know that repetition was strictly impossible , however much the clocks might insist on its possibility. There was always going to be a swerve from the original footsteps if return was to be possible. After we last parted, idling at another railway station, I picked up Italo Svevo’s Diary for the Fiancée. There is this moment where, after talking on the phone to the fidanzata, promising her yet again that he will give up smoking, Svevo hangs up and lights a cigarette. He...

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