Make It Scream, Make It Burn, page 6
Back in my room, I google the name she’s given me. It’s fairly unusual and involves a body part. The first ten hits are all the same porn star; the next hit is an article about a stabbing spree in New York. A homeless man lunged at several strangers with a half scissors. The face of the woman with the voice is one of the five faces. I enlarge her on my screen. I try to remember her limp, which part of her was hurting.
When I see her in the morning, I won’t tell her what I know. The etiquette of our era demands that we pretend we are still unknown to each other, though she will know I probably googled her, and I will know she probably googled me. But I find myself reframing everything I’ve seen her do—every complaint, every demand, every annoying attempt at small talk—as if a victim couldn’t also be a solipsist. Now I want to read everything about her more generously, in order to compensate her for the indignity of becoming a character in my story, the woman with the voice, when she was already another kind of character, in another story entirely.
The next morning, I try to help the woman with the voice as best I can. I carry her bags through the Houston airport. I offer to stay with her while she waits for her wheelchair. I barely grimace when she speaks rudely to the airport staff. She’s been stabbed. She asks me to preboard the plane with her and get her bag stowed above her seat. She asks if I’d help her get from Newark to the city, once we arrive—if I can get her through the airport train station in New Jersey, through New Jersey Transit, then through Penn Station itself, in New York—all those stairs and escalators and platforms and doorways and crowds and crowded baggage racks. I say yes, yes, yes. Yes to all of it! She has a story and now I’m part of it. I’m swollen with virtue. I’m so swollen with virtue I can hardly believe it when the man sitting next to me on the flight wants to have a conversation. Doesn’t he understand? My virtue has already found its object; I have none left for small talk with strangers. The woman with the voice is sitting in the front of the plane, probably making someone wish they were sitting in the back.
The man next to me starts talking about driving his sister out to Texas, where she was moving for work. She’s a traveling nurse and they drove through an ice storm in Atlanta and I really couldn’t care less. This guy is just a kid, complaining about the Houston airport not having enough vending machines. I feel like his mother, as if I should offer him a snack. On the tiny monitors above us a nature documentary plays: a baby bison is getting cornered by a pack of wolves. What will happen next? Only one thing, we all know. Back home in Brooklyn, no one is waiting for me. I’m newly single and not-so-newly thirty and leaving lots of crumbs between my couch cushions from dinners made of crackers that don’t seem like the dinners of an adult.
Now this guy is talking about his tour in Iraq. He says he got used to desert skies. Oh. His life is a little different than I’d thought. I don’t know how to ask him about the war. But I ask him anyway. I ask him about the guys he was there with—that seems safe, possible. He shakes his head: the best crew of guys ever. “Now here I am,” he says, nudging his duffel bag. “Flying home with an army bag full of hermit-crab shells.” I ask how many are in there. Maybe fifty, he says. He has a daughter and she has four pet hermit crabs. I ask if they have names. “They’ve got so many names I can’t keep track,” he says. “Their names are always changing.” Right now there is one named Clippers and the others are Peaches. All three of them? Yep. Just Peaches and Peaches and Peaches. He says they need a bottomless buffet of shells. They keep getting bigger, so they keep needing new ones.
So the shells in his bag aren’t hermit-crab shells because they were made by hermit crabs, but because hermit crabs might someday use them? Yes, he says. That is correct.
Perhaps there is profundity in this. We claim something not by making it, but by making it useful. What we squat inside can begin to constitute us. And now he’s saying something else, something about the new aquarium he’s building for Clippers and the Peaches. He’s using old shower doors from his construction company. He has over twenty large sheets of glass, he says, and more than fifty smaller ones. And I’m trying to run the meaning-making logic over this one too: we have the big and the small; we have more than we can use. But it doesn’t yield; Houston all over again. And how big will his crab aquarium be, anyway? An entire city block? This guy can’t decide whether to be interesting or not—like someone who is mostly late but every once in a while, unaccountably, on time. Why would I possibly believe he owed me interest, anyway? Other lives are shells I want to scavenge only when the mood strikes right, only when the shells are good enough.
For now, I want to know what these crabs eat. He says they’ll eat pellets, but they prefer fresh fruit. What kind of fruit? Pineapples, he says. They love pineapples. He explains they have a lot of preferences. For example, they need salt water and fresh water.
What about when they live in the ocean? I ask. How do they get fresh water then?
He doesn’t know. He says, “That’s what I’m still trying to figure out.”
This man punctures me. I felt like his mother until he said he was a father. I think of all the fear he’s known—the guilt, and loss, and boredom—and how I don’t know any of it. His endlessness is something I receive in finite anecdotes: big desert skies, a little girl poking crabs. Sometimes I feel I owe a stranger nothing, and then I feel I owe him everything; because he fought and I didn’t, because I dismissed him or misunderstood him, because I forgot, for a moment, that his life—like everyone else’s—holds more than I could ever possibly see.
It makes me think of that David Foster Wallace commencement speech, “This Is Water,” the one that everyone finds inspiring except the people who think it’s unbearably trite and find it pathetic that everyone else is so inspired by it. I’m so inspired by it. Wallace talks about the tedium of standing at a supermarket checkout counter, irritated by the other people in line, “how stupid and cow-like and dead-eyed and nonhuman they seem.” But, he says, you can choose to see them differently. You can regard the woman who just yelled at her kid and admit that for all you know she might have just stayed up three nights straight with a husband dying of bone cancer. Maybe she just helped your spouse get through some tangle at the DMV. Maybe the annoying woman on the bus just got stabbed by a deranged stranger on her morning jog. If you learn to pay attention, he says, “it will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell type situation as not only meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same force that lit the stars.”
The Newark airport train station in the middle of a blizzard does not feel on fire with the same force that lit the stars. I am helping the woman with the voice and the injured body get onto a train headed into the city. We get hot chocolate at the tiny station café, and wait on the outdoor platform, in the Jersey cold, while the snow comes down. I’m tired of benevolence, ready for my own apartment. She tells me it was stupid, how she got hurt. It was her own fault.
I’m a little bit confused. Is this a confession of privilege guilt? Guilt at her complicity in the systems that oppressed the homeless man who stabbed her? Is she going to tell me that he had a story too? Because he did: untreated mental illness, a life spent moving from shelter to shelter. He got sentenced to more than twenty years in prison, where most likely his mental illness remains untreated still. One of his victims was a toddler. This is the kind of story with an easy victim and an easy villain; except maybe it’s not so easy—maybe we are all the villains, maybe that’s what the woman with the voice is trying to tell me. She is also telling me she is tired of standing, though I cannot make her a chair.
Anyway, she says, she was dancing down in Cabo, and her knee started hurting, but she kept dancing anyway. It was “Mamma Mia.” How could she not keep dancing? That’s how she hurt herself. She looks at me and I nod. How indeed.
But inside I’m feeling robbed, like something has been stolen from me: the story in which I carried the bags of a woman still recovering from a stabbing attack. Now I’m in a story about a woman who danced too hard on the Mexican Riviera. It’s a story about putting bags in overhead compartments and waiting in the bitter Jersey cold, about getting to the ugliest train station in the world and weaving through its maze of underground tunnels with three suitcases to emerge into the grim bustle of a purgatory between Midtown and Koreatown.
In a way I can’t explain, I’ve started to feel attached to this woman, weirdly protective. It’s like we’ve been on some kind of odyssey together, and it has less to do with the night in Houston or the blizzard in Jersey and more to do with all her shapeshifting in my internal narrative. First she was a tyrant, then a saint, and finally just a tourist, dancing.
We part ways by the cabstand. The woman with the voice thanks me for my kindness. She’ll take a taxi home. I’ll take the subway to my empty apartment, where I’ll read another article about the stabbing, full of eyewitness quotes. In another photograph of the woman with the voice, she’s being carried by a police officer. She has one hand wrapped around his neck, the other hand pressed against her own throat. I will never hear what her voice sounded like when she was crying out, in broad daylight, for help; when she was just a difficult New York woman asking her city to save her.
This is how we light the stars, again and again: by showing up with our ordinary, difficult bodies, when other ordinary, difficult bodies might need us. Which is the point—the again-and-again of it. You never get to live the wisdom just once, rise to the occasion of otherness just once. You have to keep living this willingness to look at other lives with grace, even when your own feels like shit, and you would do anything to crawl inside a different one; when you would claw one Peaches out of the way, and then another, and then a third, just for a shot at some shell of respite. A 3:30 a.m. wake-up call in Houston isn’t the respite shell. New Jersey public transit the day after a New Jersey Super Bowl isn’t the respite shell. The blizzard is no respite shell for anyone; it makes the hurt knee throb harder.
Does graciousness mean you want to help—or that you don’t, and do it anyway? The definition of grace is that it’s not deserved. It does not require a good night’s sleep to give it, or a flawless record to receive it. It demands no particular backstory.
You thought the story kept changing, but the most important part never did. She was always just a woman in pain, sitting right in front of you. Sometimes it hurts just to stand. Sometimes a person needs help because she needs it, not because her story is compelling or noble or strange enough to earn it, and sometimes you just do what you can. It doesn’t make you any better, or any worse. It doesn’t change you at all, except for the split second when you imagine that day when you will be the one who has to ask.
Sim Life
Gidge Uriza lives in an elegant wooden house overlooking a glittering creek, its lush banks lined with weeping willows. Nearby meadows twinkle with fireflies. Gidge keeps buying new swimming pools because she keeps falling in love with different ones. The current specimen is a teal lozenge with a waterfall cascading from its archway of stones. Gidge spends her days lounging in a swimsuit on her poolside patio, or else tucked under a lacy comforter, wearing nothing but a bra and bathrobe, with a chocolate-glazed doughnut perched on the pile of books beside her. “Good morning girls,” she writes on her blog one day. “I’m slow moving, trying to get out of bed this morning, but when I’m surrounded by my pretty pink bed it’s difficult to get out and away like I should.”
In another life, the one most people would call “real,” Gidge Uriza is Bridgette McNeal, an Atlanta mother who works eight-hour days at a call center and is raising a fourteen-year-old son, a seven-year-old daughter, and severely autistic twins who are thirteen. Her days are full of the daily demands of raising children with special needs: giving her twins baths after they have soiled themselves (they still wear diapers, and most likely always will), baking applesauce bread with one to calm him down after a tantrum, asking the other to stop playing the Barney theme song slowed down until it sounds, as she puts it, “like some demonic dirge.” One day, she takes all four kids to a nature center for an idyllic afternoon that gets interrupted by the reality of changing an adolescent’s diaper in a musty bathroom.
But each morning, before all that—before getting the kids ready for school and putting in eight hours at the call center, before getting dinner on the table or keeping peace during the meal, before giving baths and collapsing into bed—Bridgette spends an hour and a half on the online platform Second Life, where she lives in a sleek paradise of her own devising. Good morning girls. I’m slow moving, trying to get out of bed this morning. She wakes up at half past five in the morning to inhabit a life in which she has the luxury of never getting out of bed at all.
What is Second Life? The short answer is that it’s a virtual world that launched in 2003 and was hailed by many as the future of the internet. The longer answer is that it’s a controversial landscape—possibly revolutionary, possibly moot—full of goth cities and preciously tattered beach shanties, vampire castles and tropical islands and rain-forest temples and dinosaur stomping grounds, disco-ball-glittering nightclubs and trippy giant chess games. In honor of Second Life’s tenth birthday, in 2013, Linden Lab, the company that created it, released an infographic charting its progress: 36 million accounts had been created, and their users had spent 217,266 cumulative years online, inhabiting an ever-expanding territory that comprised almost seven hundred square miles composed of land units called “sims.” People often call Second Life a game, but two years after its launch, Linden Lab circulated a memo to employees insisting that no one refer to it as that. It was a platform. This was meant to suggest something more holistic, immersive, and encompassing.
Second Life has no specific goals. Its vast landscape consists entirely of user-generated content, which means that everything you see has been built by someone else—an avatar controlled by a live human user. These avatars build and buy homes, form friendships, hook up, get married, and make money. They celebrate their “rez days,” the online equivalent of a birthday: the anniversary of the day they joined. At church, they cannot take physical communion—the corporeality of that ritual is impossible—but they can bring the stories of their faith to life. At their cathedral on Epiphany Island, the Anglicans of Second Life summon rolling thunder on Good Friday, or the sudden illumination of sunrise at the moment in the Easter service when the pastor pronounces, “He is risen.” As one Second Life handbook puts it: “From your point of view, SL works as if you were a god.”
In truth, in the years since its zenith in the mid-2000s, Second Life has become something more like a magnet for mockery. When I told friends that I was working on a story about it, their faces almost always followed the same trajectory of reactions: a blank expression, a brief flash of recognition, then a mildly bemused look. Is that still around? Second Life is no longer the thing you joke about; it’s the thing you haven’t bothered to joke about for years.
Many observers expected monthly-user numbers to keep rising after they hit one million in 2007, but instead they peaked there—and have, in the years since, stalled at about eight hundred thousand. And an estimated 20 to 30 percent are first-time users who never return. Just a few years after declaring Second Life the future of the internet, the tech world moved on. As a 2011 piece in Slate proclaimed: “Looking back, the future didn’t last long.”
But if Second Life promised a future in which people would spend hours each day inhabiting their online identity, haven’t we found ourselves inside it? Only it’s come to pass on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram instead. As I learned more about Second Life and spent more time exploring it, it started to seem less like an obsolete relic and more like a distorted mirror reflecting the world many of us actually live in. Perhaps Second Life inspires an urge to ridicule not because it’s unrecognizable, but because it takes a recognizable impulse and carries it past the bounds of comfort, into a kind of uncanny valley: the promise of not just an online voice but an online body; not just checking Twitter on your phone, but forgetting to eat because you’re dancing at an online club; not just a curated version of your real life, but a separate existence entirely. It crystallizes the simultaneous siren call and shame of wanting a different life.
In Hinduism, the concept of an avatar refers to the incarnation of a deity on earth. In Second Life, it’s your body: an ongoing act of self-expression. From 2004 to 2007, an anthropologist named Tom Boellstorff inhabited Second Life as an embedded ethnographer, naming his avatar Tom Bukowski and building himself a home and office called Ethnographia. His immersive approach was anchored by the premise that the world of Second Life is just as “real” as any other, and that he was justified in studying Second Life “on its own terms” rather than feeling obligated to understand people’s virtual identities primarily in terms of their offline lives. His book Coming of Age in Second Life, titled in homage to Margaret Mead’s classic about adolescent girls in Samoa, documents the texture of the platform’s digital culture. He finds that making “small talk about lag [streaming delays in SL] is like talking about the weather in RL,” and interviews an avatar named Wendy, whose creator always makes her go to sleep before she logs out. “So the actual world is Wendy’s dream, until she wakes up again in Second Life?” Boellstorff recalls asking her, and then: “I could have sworn a smile passed across Wendy’s face as she said, ‘Yup. Indeed.’”
One woman described her avatar to Boellstorff as a truer manifestation of her interior self. “If I take a zipper and pull her out of me, that’s who I am,” she told him. Female avatars tend to be thin and impossibly busty; male avatars are young and muscular; almost all avatars are vaguely cartoonish in their beauty. These avatars communicate through chat windows, or by using voice technology to actually speak. They move by walking, flying, teleporting, and clicking on “poseballs,” floating orbs that animate avatars into various actions: dancing, karate, pretty much every sexual act you can imagine. Not surprisingly, many users come to Second Life for the possibilities of digital sex—sex without corporeal bodies, without real names, without the constraints of gravity, often with elaborate textual commentary.
