The Unspeakable (10 page)

Gumbel:
Katie said she thought it was “about.”

Couric:
Yeah. Or “around.”

Vargas:
Oh.

Gumbel:
But I'd never heard it said [out loud].

Couric:
Yeah.

Gumbel:
I'd seen the mark but never heard it said and then it sounded stupid when I said it. Violence at nbcge com. I mean …

Couric:
Well, Allison should know—

Gumbel:
What is Internet, anyway?

Couric:
Internet is that massive computer network.

Vargas:
Right.

Couric:
The one that's becoming really big now.

Gumbel:
What do you mean, it's big? How do you mean? Do you write to it? Like mail?

Couric:
No, a lot of people use it … I guess they can communicate with NBC, writers and producers. [Calling to someone offscreen] Allison, can you explain what Internet is?

Gumbel:
No, she can't say anything in ten seconds or less.

Vargas:
Uh-oh! Allison will be in the studio shortly.

Couric:
What does it mean?

Male voice offscreen:
It's a giant computer network made up of, uh … started from—

Gumbel:
Oh, I thought you were going to tell us what this [makes @ symbol with finger] means.

Vargas:
It's like a computer billboard.

Male voice offscreen:
It's a computer billboard.

Vargas:
Right.

Male voice offscreen:
It has several universities that are all joined together.

Vargas:
Right.

Gumbel:
And others can access it?

Male voice offscreen:
And it's getting bigger and bigger all the time.

Vargas:
Right.

Gumbel:
Just great.

Vargas:
It came in really handy during the quake. A lot of people, that's how they were communicating out to tell family and loved ones they were okay because all the phone lines were down.

Gumbel:
I was telling Katie the other—

Couric:
But you don't need a phone line to operate Internet?

Vargas:
No. No, apparently not.

I was twenty-four when this conversation took place, a full-grown adult by most measures. The exchange, while quaint and amusing, doesn't surprise me or seem strange in any way. That's because even though various incipient forms of digital communication had by then been going on for decades, I, like most people, was similarly ignorant about “Internet.” Like Katie Couric, I was a creature of telephone landlines. Like Bryant Gumbel, who, unless I'm mistaken, appears to be rolling his eyes when he deems these rapid advancements “just great,” I was, if not
suspicious
of technology, at least left a bit cold by it. Couric and Gumbel, both bona fide boomers, are fourteen years and twenty-two years older than I am, respectively. But as a Gen Xer, my sensibility is more closely aligned with theirs than with that of a lot of people born just five or six years after me. That's because the digital revolution has installed a sense of “before” and “after” that's as palpable as any war, any catastrophe, maybe even any coming and going of a messiah. And any millennial can see that any Gen Xer, no matter how tech savvy or early adaptive, belongs to the group of those who came before.

*   *   *

A thirteen-year-old I know has a habit of phoning people repeatedly and hanging up when no one answers. Thanks to caller ID, he does not understand the concept of leaving a message. “You can see that I called you,” he says to me. “That's how you know to call me back.” I tell him that seeing that someone phoned isn't enough, that we need to know what they want and where and when to return the call. I tell him that leaving phone messages is an important skill and that, if he likes, he can practice by leaving some for me. He looks at me like I'm suggesting he learn how to operate a cotton gin. To try to explain to a thirteen-year-old the importance of leaving a callback number is essentially to bathe yourself in a sepia tint. You might as well be an old-timey portrait in a Ken Burns documentary, fading in and out between stock photos of drum-cylinder printing presses while Patricia Clarkson reads from your letters. By the time this boy is twenty, there may well be no more voice mail. By the time he is thirty there may be no more desktop computers. By the time he is forty, scientists may have learned how to reprogram human biology to turn off genes that cause aging and disease. By then I will be seventy. It will be too late to turn off my genes. It will be too late for a lot of things. Maybe not to travel or to try, again, to read Chaucer but definitely too late to assume any role that's preceded by the word
young
. It's already too late for that. Any traces of precocity I ever had are long forgotten. I am not and will never again be a young writer, a young homeowner, a young teacher. I was never a young wife. The only thing I could do now for which my youth would be a truly notable feature would be to die. If I died now, I'd die young. Everything else, I'm doing middle-aged.

*   *   *

I am nostalgic for my twenties (most of them, anyway; twenty and twenty-one were squandered at college; twenty-four was kind of a wash, too) but I can tell you for sure that they weren't as great as I now crack them up to be. I was always broke, I was often lonely, and I had some really terrible clothes. But my life was shiny and unblemished. Everything was ahead of me. I walked around with an abiding feeling that, at any given time, anything could go in any direction. And it was often true. In the same way that, for the first few weeks of my first year of college, an errant stroll down the hall of any dormitory might lead to an invitation to come into someone's room and talk about some indie band, after which my body almost seemed to convulse from the electrical surges of “making a real connection,” I found my twenties to be a time of continual surprise. I would leave a party in a brownstone apartment, hear another party behind the door of another apartment on the way down the narrow stairs, and decide I had enough wind left in my sails to walk on in. I didn't want to miss anything. I wanted to stretch out over the city like a giant octopus. I wanted enough appendages to be able to ring every door buzzer simultaneously. There was some switch turned on in my brain that managed to make 90 percent of conversations feel interesting or useful or, if nothing else, worth referencing later if only by way of describing how
boring
this person was who I got stuck talking to.

Or at least it's easy to remember it that way. Probably I was far less of a bon vivant than all that. Probably the reason I ducked into strange parties was that I'd failed to meet anyone of potential romantic interest at the first one and thought there might be a few more stones to turn over at the second. Probably I actually barely crashed any parties at all. Probably the sum total over the entire decade was two or three. Probably the fact that they were such rare occurrences is the very thing that makes me remember them as a regular habit. Novelty has a way of intensifying memory. The less often you do something, the deeper the memory burrows in. I remember that at one of the parties I wandered into there were two Old English sheepdogs milling around the packed living room. I don't recall if I talked to any people but I do know that I knelt down and hugged one of those dogs as if its softness and warm, drooly breath were the only things that would give me the strength to walk home. This was a time in my life when I was so filled with longing for so many things that were so far out of reach that at least once a day I thought my heart would implode from the sheer force of unrequited desire.

By
desire
I am not referring to apartments I wanted to occupy or furniture I wanted to buy or even people I was attracted to (well, I'm referring to those things a little) but, rather, a sensation I can only describe as the ache of not being there yet. If my older self had descended upon my twenty-something self and informed her that she'd spend the next several decades reminiscing about this time in her life, the twenty-something self would have been more than a little disconcerted, possibly even devastated. I can imagine her looking at Older Self in horrified astonishment. “I'm going to be reminiscing about
this
?” she'd ask while the ATM spat out her card and flashed “insufficient funds” across the screen. “You're telling me that when I'm forty-five I'll be pining for the temp jobs and cheap shoes that now comprise my life? You're telling me this is as good as it gets? You're telling me, contrary to everything I tell myself, that it's actually all
down
hill from here?”

To which I'd hope that Older Self would have the good sense to assure Younger Self that that is not what she is saying, that indeed things will only go up from here. Maybe not right away and certainly not without some deep valleys to offset the peaks (as well as a few sharp left turns, as long as we're speaking in euphemisms) but with enough steadiness to suggest that whatever she is doing now more or less constitutes being on the right track.

“Listen,” Older Self might say. “The things that right now seem permanently out of reach, you'll reach them eventually. You'll have a career, a house, a partner in life. You will have much better shoes. You will reach a point where your funds will generally be sufficient—maybe not always plentiful, but sufficient.”

But here's what Older Self will not have the heart to say: some of the music you are now listening to—the CDs you play while you stare out the window and think about the five million different ways your life might go—will be unbearable to listen to in twenty years. They will be unbearable not because they will sound dated and trite but because they will sound like the lining of your soul. They will take you straight back to the place you were in when you felt that anything could happen at any time, that your life was a huge room with a thousand doors, that your future was not only infinite but also elastic. They will be unbearable because they will remind you that at least half of the things you once planned for your future are now in the past and others got reabsorbed into your imagination before you could even think about acting on them. It will be as though you'd never thought of them in the first place, as if they were never meant to be anything more than passing thoughts you had while playing your stereo at night.

The records I cannot listen to today without returning to that feeling of imminent heart implosion include Suzanne Vega's 1985 eponymous debut album and Jeff Buckley's 1994 debut (and final, it turned out) album,
Grace
. Specifically, the second track on the Suzanne Vega album, a slightly discordant, wintry song called “Freeze Tag,” and “So Real,” the fifth track on
Grace
, which was dark and loud and spoke of the smell of couch fabric and a “simple city dress” in a way that made me feel like New York City itself had backed me up against the wall of some dive bar after seducing me into a state of vertigo.

It's interesting that these records come nearly a decade apart. When I discovered Suzanne Vega I was a senior in high school. My parents' marriage was in the early stages of disintegration. I had recently come into an understanding that New York City, which was a thirty-minute ride away by New Jersey Transit but might as well have been across the international date line, was a place where people actually lived. My adolescence was now split into a before and an after: the time before I knew I had to live in New York City and the time after. The combination of knowing this and not being able to do anything about it was excruciating. Life was now a way station between the constraints of childhood and the endless horizon of adulthood. I remember sitting in homeroom before the morning bell, listening to “Freeze Tag” on my Sony Walkman and nearly shaking with excitement at the thought of the day when I'd pay my own bills, secure my own meals, make mistakes without my parents watching.

The lyrics bore no direct relationship to these thoughts. They painted a scene of a chilly playground where “the sun is fading fast upon the slides into the past.” They told of “swings of indecision” and of only being able to “say yes.” Maybe it was the song's spirit of limitlessness that drew me in. Very soon, I told myself, I would embark on a life in which there was time for a hundred different versions of myself. I would go through countless phases, have more iterations and incarnations than I could possibly imagine. I would know everyone and live everywhere. I would use every crayon in the box. I would be the youngest person in the room for a very long time.

The Jeff Buckley album came over my transom when I was twenty-five, one year after it was released. (Two years later, Buckley, at age thirty, would drown in an inlet of the Mississippi River near Memphis.) Twenty-five was a big year for me, a painful, wonderful, deeply necessary year. I ended a long relationship with a man who wanted to get married and have children. I bleached my hair white, dated some men I shouldn't have, tried in vain to be a lesbian, and could feel the engines of my career quietly revving up beneath me. I took a bartending class. I tried waitressing at a jazz club. I took exactly four guitar lessons and one modern dance class. In all cases, I either proved myself hopelessly inept or simply lacking in the patience necessary to develop any level of proficiency, so I gave up and went back to writing and working temp jobs in offices. I couldn't afford taxis but sometimes took them anyway. I got deeply into debt but believed I would get out of it eventually. A time would come when I would stop believing this, but, at twenty-five, the debt was a fresh wound that still had the potential to heal without a scar. I lay on my bed and listened to “So Real” and thought that I was mere inches away from being the person I wanted to be. My fingertips could almost touch that person. That person was both very specific (respected essayist, resident of the 10025 zip code, lover of large, long-haired dogs) and someone who took multiple forms, who could go in any direction, who might be a bartender or a guitar player or a lesbian or a modern dancer or an office temp on Sixth Avenue. That person was still usually the youngest person in the room.