The Law of Miracles

Missing, Believed Wiped

78 Missing, Believed Wiped 0 It was as if he had been there, with his parents and Speedy Alka-Seltzer and his nonexistent kid brother: in the den of their Levittown house, in front of the black-and-white Philco, with Ernie Kovacs and the dancing Lucky Strikes and outside the Fifties happening like a mushroom cloud. Or in the turn-of-the-century tenements: say, this time, the Lower East Side with the smell of cabbage in the airshafts, the laundry strung from fire escape to fire escape, the pushcarts, the Yiddish, the rotting vegetables in the gutter, the tots singing “Ring-a-Rosie” and the fire at the Triangle still to come. Or Main Street on a summer evening, the cars cruising past, Studebakers,Chevies,theT-birdherdaddyhadyettotakeaway: the soft Indiana night blooming, and him with his made-up buddies—Andy Carlson, Scooter McKane, The Douchebag— passing cigarettes and french fries and on the lookout for girls who never happened. He lived in the patina of these things, in the surface glow of a past that was not his. LPs picked up from thrift stores, from eBay, advertising jingles downloaded in MP3 files. They had a heft that was lacking in his own life. He had only to see them, hear them, touch their worn surfaces and it was as though some archeology of his imagination uncovered in them—in the grass-stained baseball, in the mitt with the rotting stitching —drifting summer evenings, a halo of moths in the corner streetlamp. Piece by piece he had shed his own life, dropped the subdivision outside Fresno where he’d grown up and adopted other, more iconic, origins: sometimes Levittown with its little prefab houses and struggling lawns and midget trees, other times the green ease of the Louisiana bayou, the windy blankness of Nantucket. Jazzman, Jew, whitebread kid from Muncie: who he was depended upon what he surrounded himself with, every inch of his NYU office covered with ephemera, postcards, advertising slogans, antique toys, bills, deeds. To pick one of them up—Stalling Is Eliminated by Using Esso!—was to have the rich vista of a past world open before him. By contrast anything from his own life, anything from 1975 onward, seemed impoverished , not quite there. Even the New York he’d found four years ago when he came to do graduate work had disappointed him. It had taken him months to begin to feel the antique under the modern, to see the ghosts of the garment runners on Hester Street, to hear the roar of the crowd that ran like rebar through the Ebbets Field Apartments. He began telling people he’d grown up in the East Village, had a pair of beatniks for parents. When September 11th happened he was thankful it wasn’t the Chrysler Building or the Empire State. There had been no aura surrounding the World Trade Center. His girlfriend of the time had taken that as the last straw. When she left, he put on his Guy Lombardo records and leafed through his copy of The Saturday Evening Post. Ever since he’d been a boy he could spend whole days by himself. If he needed other people he found them in the statistics on the back of his baseball cards, or in his model railroad where August 8th, 1938 endlessly recurred (milkcans loading at the Central Dairy siding; No. 7 being rebuilt in the roundhouse ). It was an empathy without consequences. There was the occasional actual person to indulge, nowadays his thesis advisor, the freshmen in his American Technostalgia seminar, the necessary girlfriend. He went to second-run movie houses missing, believed wiped 79 80 THE LAW OF MIRACLES with them, talked Barbie dolls and advertising slogans with the other Cultural Studies grad students, argued which came first, the Lucky Strike dancing cigarettes or the Kool dancing penguin? It passed for human interaction. Was sometimes more than he wanted. So when the phone rang that day he didn’t answer it. He never answered it, so this was no different. But the voice, half-heard from the living room after the answering machine kicked in, made him get up and walk into the kitchen to listen. He knew it was a wrong number—the emotion, the choking incontinence. Whoever it was, she was fighting to control herself . He stood there, embarrassed, unsure whether he should pick up the receiver...