Far Afield

XIX

133 XIX “People really only want something when you try to take that something away.” This was a saying my bookish and otherwise preoccupied father used to utter when I was small, repeating it whenever I misbehaved and he’d threatened to remove a favorite toy or other plaything. At the time, I wondered if he was saying this to comfort me (telling me in essence that my want for the thing outweighed the thing itself), or to steel himself so he could pursue what he thought was a prudent but difficult course of action. Years later, it occurred to me that he was doing both and was attempting in a concrete moment to pass onto me some of his ambivalent feelings concerning desire and its fulfillment. By then, though, I was already launched into the world of accounting for myself to know firsthand his rueful stance. Yet because of my understanding of Trevor as someone who responded best on the level of primal interaction, I reflected on this as Wilkie’s underpowered car bore us through the morning traffic crawl of Momo-Jima City. In his want of the thing, I thought, Trevor was not much more than a child, though to be fair not many of us evolve that greatly in how we desire. We only learn to tell ourselves that most of what we want is unavailable, silence our needs, and thus call it maturity. Indeed, from infancy to adulthood, I believe the nakedness in our wanting remains the same, despite our ever-growing sophistication in how we avoid confronting this fact. 134 Far Afield Still, I felt there was something I could apply of my father’s principle to my situation. At the very least, I knew that trying to convince Trevor to reject the limited success he was now enjoying was not something he could consider, no matter what the circumstances were (I told myself this so I wouldn’t dare count on his cooperation, and to anticipate his ready lack of maturity). To jog myself towards a solution then, I performed a mental trick that I’ve often used to discover a path of action: as an observer might, I viewed myself as another anonymous figure on the landscape, one completely absorbed into his present surroundings and unaware of the larger psychological demands upon his being. This exercise usually had the effect of distancing me from my feelings and clarifying my thoughts. Thus from the stale sanctuary of the car’s backseat, I watched as the stationary world stole by, a low panorama filled with haphazard housing, unreliable-looking restaurants, and customer-free businesses . Now and again, an Asian-style tavern with a French name appeared (“La Poubelle,” “Le Ciel Noir”) and at the sight of these, I was tempted to tell Wilkie to stop, leave Trevor in the car (where he would drowse for hours if unmolested), and down two or three quick beers to further reflect on myself. I envisioned the cool, wet air of these places, myself in a seat at the deep end of the bar and the low drift of barroom conversation. As we slowly passed them, I felt envy for those so safely lost inside. Perhaps it was this vision of such unassailable solitude that led me to think of how little use my previous life was in combating my new problem. Seeing myself in sudden relief, almost like a line on a resume, I realized how my background as a reporter had steered me away from dealing with these kinds of dilemmas, given that my professional skills had been used mainly to provoke desires, not restrain them. With every story I wrote, not only did I have to make people want to read more about what I’d covered, but I also needed to convey all the feelings of those I wrote about, as well as the usually disastrous consequences of those emotions. That every other journalist was attempting exactly the same thing did not make me or my colleagues consider alternative methods Scott Brown 135 of reporting; it only increased the competition among us, and the overall clamor of our efforts. But to kill desire is a far subtler and less resolvable act than to provoke it, and as such, it generally had no place in the meager emotional palette of journalism. Ideally, I’d discovered, the best way to erase that sort of...