Dangerous Laughter (12 page)

I was still able to do some work, during the day, a little work, though I was also staring a lot at the screen. I had command of a precise and specialized vocabulary that I could summon more or less at will. But the doubt had arisen, corroding my belief. Groups of words began to disintegrate under my intense gaze. I was like a man losing his faith, with no priest to turn to.

Always I had the sense that words concealed something, that if only I could abolish them I would discover what was actually there.

One evening I looked for a long time at my hand. Had I ever seen it before? I suppressed the word “hand,” rid myself of everything but the act of concentration. It was no longer a hand, not a piece of flesh with nails, wrinkles, bits of reddish-blond hair. There was only a thing, not even that—only the place where my attention fell. Gradually I felt a loosening, a dissolution of the familiar. And I saw: a thickish mass, yellowish and red and blue, a pulsing thing with spaces, a shaded clump. It began to flatten out, to melt into surrounding space, to attach itself to otherness. Then I was staring at my hand again, the fingers slightly parted, the skin of the knuckles like small walnuts, the nails with vertical lines of faint shine. I could feel the words crawling over my hand like ants on a bone. But for a moment I had seen something else.

I am a normal man, wouldn’t you say, intelligent and well educated, yes, with an aptitude for a certain kind of high-level work, but fundamentally normal, in temperament and disposition. I understood that what was happening to me was not within the range of the normal, and I felt, in addition to curiosity, an anger that this had come upon me, in the prime of life, like the onset of a fatal disease.

It was during one of those long evenings in my study, while you prowled somewhere in the house, that I recalled an incident from my childhood. For some reason I was in my parents’ bedroom, a forbidden place. I heard footsteps approaching. In desperation I stepped over to the closet, with its two sliding doors, then rolled one door open, plunged inside, pushed it shut. The long closet was divided into two parts, my mother’s side and my father’s side. I knew at once which side I’d entered by the dresses pressing against my cheeks, the tall pairs of high-heeled shoes falling against my ankles as I moved deeper within. Clumsily I crouched down among the fallen shoes, my head and shoulders buried in the bottoms of dresses. And though I liked the sweetish, urine-sharp smell of the leather shoes, the rub of the dresses against my face, the hems heavy on my shoulders, the faint perfume drifting from folds of fabric like dust from a slapped bed, at the same time I felt oppressed by it all, bound tightly in place by the thick leathery smell and the stony fall of cloth, crushed in a black grip. The dresses, the shoes, the pinkish smell of perfume, the scratchy darkness, all pushed against me like the side of a big cat, thrust themselves into my mouth and nose like fur. I could not breathe. I opened my mouth. I felt the dark like fingers closing around my throat. In terror I stumbled up with a harsh scrape of hangers, pulled wildly at the edge of the door, burst outside. Light streamed through the open blinds. Tears of joy burned on my cheeks.

As I sat in my study, recalling my escape from the dresses, it seemed to me that the light streaming through my parents’ blinds, in the empty room, was like the silence around me where I sat, and that the heavy dresses, the bittersweet smell of the shoes, the hand on my throat, were the world I had left behind.

I began to sense that there was another place, a place without words, and that if only I could concentrate my attention sufficiently, I might come to that place.

Once, when I was a student and had decided to major in business, I had an argument with a friend. He attacked business as a corrupt discipline, the sole purpose of which was to instill in people a desire to buy. His words upset me, not because I believed that his argument was sound, but because I felt that he was questioning my character. I replied that what attracted me to business was the precision of its vocabulary—a self-enclosed world of carefully defined words that permitted clarity of thought.

At the office I could see people looking at me and also looking away from me. The looks reminded me of the look I had caught in the eyes of the girl with the little rings in her ear, as I tried to understand her words, and the look in your eyes that night at the Polinzanos’ barbecue, when I opened my mouth and said nothing.

It was about this time that I began to notice, within me, an intention taking shape. I wondered how long it had been there, waiting for me to notice it. Though my mind was made up, my body hesitated. I was struck by how like me that was: to know, and not to act. Had I always been that way? It would be necessary to arrange a sick leave. There would be questions, difficulties. But aside from all that, finally to go through with it, never to turn back—such acts were not at all in my style.

And if I hesitated, it was also because of you. There you were, in the house. Already we existed in a courteous dark silence trembling with your crushed-down rage. How could I explain to you that words no longer meant what they once had meant, that they no longer meant anything at all? How could I say to you that words interfered with the world? Often I thought of trying to let you know what I knew I would do. But whenever I looked at you, your face was turned partly away.

I tried to remember what it was like to be a very young child, before the time of words. And yet, weren’t words always there, filling the air around me? I remember faces bending close, uttering sounds, coaxing me to leave the world of silence, to become one of them. Sometimes, when I moved my face a little, I could almost feel my skin brushing against words, like clusters of tiny, tickling insects.

One night after you’d gone to bed I rose slowly in my study. I observed myself with surprise, though I knew perfectly well what was happening. Without moving my lips I took a vow.

The next morning at breakfast I passed you a slip of paper. You glanced at it with disdain, then crumpled it in your fist. I remember the sound of the paper, which reminded me of fire. Your knuckles stuck up like stones.

When a monk takes a vow of silence, he does so in order to shut out the world and devote himself exclusively to things of the spirit. My vow of silence sought to renew the world, to make it appear before me in all its fullness. I knew that every element in the world—a cup, a tree, a day—was inexhaustible. Only the words that expressed it were vague or limited. Words harmed the world. They took something away from it and put themselves in its place.

When one knows something like that, Elena, one also knows that it isn’t possible to go on living in the old way.

I began to wonder whether anything I had ever said was what I had wanted to say. I began to wonder whether anything I had ever written was what I had wanted to write, or whether what I had wanted to write was underneath, trying to push its way through.

After dinner that day, the day of the crumpled paper, I didn’t go to my study but sat in the living room. I was hoping to soothe you somehow, to apologize to you with my presence. You stayed in the bedroom. Once you walked from the bedroom to the guest room, where I heard you making up the bed.

One night as I sat in my leather chair, I had the sensation that you were standing at the door. I could feel a hot place at the back of my neck. I imagined you there in the doorway, looking at me with cold fascination, with a sort of tender and despairing iciness. I saw your tired eyes, your strained mouth. Were you trying to understand me? After all, you were my wife, Elena, and we had once been able to understand each other. I turned suddenly, but no one was there.

Do you think it’s been easy for me? Do you? Do you think I don’t know how grotesque it must seem? A grown man, forty-three years old, in excellent health, happily married, successful enough in his line of work, who suddenly refuses to speak, who flees the sound of others speaking, shuns the sight of the written word, avoids his wife, leaves his job, in order to shut himself up in his room or take long solitary walks—the idea is clownish, disgusting. The man is mad, sick, damaged, in desperate need of a doctor, a lover, a vacation, anything. Stick him in a ward. Inject him with something. But then, think of the other side. Think of it! Think of the terrible life of words, the unstoppable roar of sound that comes rushing out of people’s mouths and seems to have no object except the evasion of silence. The talking species! We’re nothing but an aberration, an error of Nature. What must the stones think of us? Sometimes I imagine that if we were very still we could hear, rising from the forests and oceans, the quiet laughter of animals, as they listen to us talk. And then, lovely touch, the invention of an afterlife, a noisy eternity filled with the racket of rejoicing angels. My own heaven would be an immense emptiness—a silence bright and hard as the blade of a sword.

Listen, Elena. Listen to me. I have something to say to you, which can’t be said.

As I train myself to cast off words, as I learn to erase word-thoughts, I begin to feel a new world rising up around me. The old world of houses, rooms, trees, and streets shimmers, wavers, and tears away, revealing another universe as startling as fire. We are shut off from the fullness of things. Words hide the world. They blur together elements that exist apart, or they break elements into pieces, bind up the world, contract it into hard little pellets of perception. But the unbound world, the world behind the world—how fluid it is, how lovely and dangerous. At rare moments of clarity, I succeed in breaking through. Then I see. I see a place where nothing is known, because nothing is shaped in advance by words. There, nothing is hidden from me. There, every object presents itself entirely, with all its being. It’s as if, looking at a house, you were able to see all four sides and both roof slopes. But then, there’s no “house,” no “object,” no form that stops at a boundary, only a stream of manifold, precise, and nameless sensations, shifting into one another, pullulating, a fullness, a flow. Stripped of words, untamed, the universe pours in on me from every direction. I become what I see. I am earth, I am air. I am all. My eyes are suns. My hair streams among galaxies.

I am often tired. I am sometimes discouraged. I am always sure.

And still you’re waiting, Elena—even now. Even now you’re waiting for the explanation, the apology, the words that will justify you and set you free. But underneath that waiting is another waiting: you are waiting for me to return to the old way. Isn’t it true? Listen, Elena. It’s much too late for that. In my silent world, my world of exhausting wonders, there’s no place for the old words with which I deceived myself, in my artificial garden. I had thought that words were instruments of precision. Now I know that they devour the world, leaving nothing in its place.

And you? Maybe a moment will come when you’ll hesitate, hearing a word. In that instant lies your salvation. Heed the hesitation. Search out the space, the rift. Under this world there is another, waiting to be born. You can remain where you are, in the old world, tasting the bitter berries of disenchantment, or you can overcome yourself, rip yourself free of the word-lie, and enter the world that longs to take you in. To me, on this side, your anger is a failure of perception, your sense of betrayal a sign of the unawakened heart. Shed all these dead modes of feeling and come with me—into the glory of the fire.

Enough. You can’t know what these words have cost me, I who no longer have words to speak with. It’s like returning to the house of one’s childhood: there is the white picket fence, there is the old piano, the Schumann on the music rack, the rose petals beside the vase, and there, look!—above the banister, the turn at the top of the stairs. But all has changed, all’s heavy with banishment, for we are no longer who we were. Down with it. You too, Elena: let it go. Let your patience go, your bitterness, your sorrow—they’re nothing but words. Leave them behind, in a box in the attic, the one with all the broken dolls. Then come down the stairs and out into the unborn world. Into the sun. The sun.

IMPOSSIBLE ARCHITECTURES

THE DOME

THE FIRST DOMES,
the precursors, appeared here and there in affluent neighborhoods, on out-of-the-way roads, where they attracted a certain attention before growing familiar and nearly invisible. The few outsiders who actually witnessed them tended to dismiss them as follies of the rich, comparable to underground heating pipes for winter gardens or basement bowling alleys with automatic pinsetters. Even the early newspaper reports did not quite know what tone to take, shifting uneasily from technical description to ironic commentary, with moments of guarded praise. And that was hardly surprising, since the domes, while having features that were judged to be admirable, displayed themselves in a way that could readily strike an unsympathetic observer as pretentious or irritating.

Each of the early models, made of transparent Viviglas, was designed to fit directly over a house and its property. Now, emerging from the front or back door in summer, the owner of a dome could step comfortably into a world of air-conditioned lawns and gardens, thanks to a highly efficient system of filters and evaporator coils built into the Viviglas. There were other advantages. Recessed fluorescent lighting with dimmer switches permitted the property to be illuminated at night, so that you could read a book or newspaper in the cool outdoors on the hottest, muggiest evenings. Owners were encouraged to practice their golf swings, play badminton after dark, and enjoy a bit of night gardening, in the always perfect weather under the dome. In fact it was a boast of the manufacturer, much quoted at the time, that “Inside our dome, rain never falls.” As if that wasn’t enough, the manufacturer promised future models that would heat the enclosures in winter, though a number of difficulties still needed to be ironed out. It was above all as technological achievements that the early domes impressed most observers, who nevertheless remained skeptical. Questions were raised about the extent to which such excesses were likely to be shared by the average American household, since the domes at that time cost nearly as much as the estates they encapsulated. Nor could a number of journalists resist reflecting on the metaphorical implications of those glistening, crystalline structures, which enclosed the rich in little princedoms that insulated them even further from the everyday world.

There were, moreover, serious flaws in the early domes, which became apparent soon enough. Grackles, jays, and sparrows settled in great numbers on the dome-tops, where they blocked the sky and left broad smears of yellowish-white excrement. To make matters worse, many birds, deceived by the transparent Viviglas, flew directly into the thick walls and fell dead or injured to the ground below. Now the manufacturer had to send out daily cleaning crews, who washed the outsides of the domes, gathered up the dead and injured birds, and installed small boxes that made a grinding noise intended to discourage wasps, bees, birds, and Japanese beetles from settling anywhere on the shiny surfaces. Other problems began to reveal themselves. Rainwater as it evaporated left dusty streaks, which had to be removed; airborne particles gradually formed a layer of grime. Trouble developed even on the insides of the domes, where mist from sprinkler systems collected on the inner surfaces, increasing the humidity and obscuring the view. The manufacturer devoted itself assiduously to every complaint, while pointing out in its own defense that many of the little annoyances were due strictly to summer and might be expected to vanish with the season. The owners waited; and as the weather turned cold, frost formed colossal and oppressive patterns on the transparent surfaces, which were further darkened by the falling of the first snow.

One might have been forgiven, at this point, for predicting the death of the domes. In many instances the owners did in fact have them removed, a costly business requiring a small army of workmen and fleets of flatbed trucks. Others remained steadfast through the winter, during which a number of benefits became evident. No snow fell on the walks and driveways, bushes and hedges were protected from harmful layers of ice; the air inside the domes, though still unheated, grew pleasantly warm on cold but sunny afternoons. Such discoveries were offset by a burst of new drawbacks. Accumulations of thick-crusted snow froze to the tops of the domes, while spears of ice clung to the sides, and sweeps of high-drifted snow pressed up against the Viviglas doors. By the end of the first winter, it was clear to most customers that the domes were more trouble than they were worth.

The change came in early spring. Three separate events took place within one crucial ten-day period: the manufacturer discovered a cheaper and stronger substance, Splendimax, that reduced the cost of the domes by half; a pollution alert lasting an entire week drew new attention to the domes as pure environments; and a rash of kidnappings in small towns in Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Vermont led to a sudden interest in the domes as protective shells. Now the domes began to appear in less exclusive neighborhoods, where crowds gathered to watch enormous strips of Splendimax being lowered into place by towering cranes. Newspapers and weekly magazines paid close attention to the new middle-class phenomenon, which some journalists attributed to the influence of the mall, with its habit of combining disparate elements under a single roof. Others saw in the trend still another instance of a disturbing tendency in the American suburb: the longing for withdrawal, for self-enclosure, for expensive isolation.

As the domes began to spread slowly, rival manufacturers produced less costly varieties, composed of improved materials and marketed under an array of names (Vitrilon, XceliPlex, Amphiperm, Colossotherm), often with new and attractive features. One dome was equipped with a heating system for winter, another had retractable panels for controlling frost and mist, and one well-advertised version, promoted by educators, came with an artificial night sky that displayed constellations, planets, and other heavenly bodies, scientifically adjusted to latitude and longitude, which moved slowly across the inner surface and were far more vivid and convincing than those in the actual sky.

Yet this activity too might have run its course, leaving behind a scattering of domed properties in towns that had gone on to new diversions, had it not been for an event that took many observers by surprise. Just when it seemed that the market for domed houses had reached its limit, a developer decided to enclose several blocks of newly constructed homes on fourteen acres of land, beneath a single dome. The vast span of Splendimax rose not only over individual properties but over a small park with swings, a communal swimming pool, a stretch of oak and beech woods, and nine freshly paved streets. Two weeks later, in a nearby town, a gated community voted to endome itself; and as the fashion for doming continued to spread, citizens at town meetings and city halls began to debate the question of enclosing commercial districts and public lands, while keeping them accessible to area residents.

It was during this phase of enlarged domings that the first town voted to enclose itself, in a massive dome that was reputed to be one of the great engineering feats of the new millennium. The immensity of the structure, the sheer drama and bravado of it all, caused a sharp increase of interest, for the new magnitude represented a decision that could no longer be dismissed as a passing trend. Critics attacked the hostile apartness of the town, which in its hemisphere of VeridiGlo was said to resemble a walled medieval city, as if the advance in technology served only to conceal a secret atavism. Admirers, as might be expected, hailed the brilliance of the engineering, the grandeur of technological accomplishment, which placed the new dome in the noble line of the skyscraper, the suspension bridge, the hydroelectric dam, and the ancient pyramid. Others praised the domed town for its clean air—a system of escape vents permitted the expulsion of factory pollutants and gasoline fumes—while several took a more aesthetic approach, finding in the space enclosed by the dome a spirit of gaiety, of pleasurable artifice, reminiscent of the old European plaza with its fountain and shade trees or the American mall with its food court and Santa’s workshop, for under the roof of the dome the inhabitants of the town were said to feel a bond of community, a sense of uninterrupted gathering in a special place set aside for their common pleasure.

To the surprise of almost everyone, the new dome did not immediately spawn another. It was as if people felt that the doming process was moving ahead a little too rapidly and required a pause, during which the consequences of the new technology might be studied more carefully. It was recognized, to begin with, that the sheer cost of a dome this size far exceeded the annual budget of all but the wealthiest towns. At the same time, a broad range of practical problems had yet to be solved, such as the efficient flow of traffic into and out of the dome, the pattern and duration of nocturnal illumination, and the seasonal migration of birds living within the structure. People began to wonder whether they would be safer under a dome, or whether a permanent enclosure might prove harmful, in the long run. But even as the issue hung in the balance, decisions were being made in remote rooms, behind closed doors, that would soon change everything.

We live in the aftermath of those decisions. To say that the Dome is the single largest achievement in the history of architecture is inadequate and misleading. It is a leap beyond, into some new domain without a name. The story of its building is well known: the drama of starting on both coasts, the erection of the great pillars, the early collapse of the northwestern foundation, the construction of the offshore airports, the closing of the final gap. Many of us can scarcely remember a time when we did not live beneath a soaring roof of transparent Celestilux.

And yet the achievement is not without its detractors, even today. Critics argue that the Dome represents the complete triumph of the consumer society, of which it is the extravagant and unapologetic symbol. For the Dome, they say, has transformed the entire country into a gigantic mall, whose sole purpose is to encourage feverish consumption. The sensation of being under a common roof, of spending many hours under artificial lights, is said to stimulate in the average citizen a relentless desire to buy. And it remains true that the completion of the Dome has been accompanied by a sharp increase in consumer spending, as if everything beneath the Celestilux roof—houses, lakes, clouds—were being displayed to advantage and offered ceaselessly for sale. Some have even claimed that our Dome is the final flowering of the nineteenth-century department store, of which the American mall was only a transitional, horizontal form. According to this view, the great empty spaces of the Dome will gradually be put to commercial use; there are predictions of transparent floors in the sky, level upon level, connected by hollow Celestilux tubes containing motorized passenger platforms.

But those who dislike the Dome do not simply accuse it of serving the interests of late capitalism. They attack the name itself, arguing that the enclosure follows the irregular shape of the continental United States and is therefore no true dome. Defenders, while not denying that the lower base is irregular, are quick to remind their opponents that at the height of four hundred feet the soaring walls of Celestilux slope inward and gradually provide the base for a classic dome that rises over most of the nation. Indeed, the forging of a true dome above a vast, irregular perimeter is one of the engineering triumphs of the entire project. But defenders are not confined to such quibbles. They point proudly to a host of benefits: the national regulation of climate, the protection of our coasts against hurricanes, the creation of twenty-four-hour illumination and the consequent elimination of time zones, the Celestilux shield against ultraviolet radiation.

Without choosing sides in the debate, we may note a number of subtler changes. Because everything lies beneath a single dome, because everything is, in a very real sense, indoors, our feelings about Nature are no longer the same. The Dome, in a single stroke, has abolished Nature. The hills, the streams, the woods, the fields, all have become elements in a new decor, an artfully designed landscape—designed by the mere fact of existing under the Dome. This experience of landscape as
style
has been called the New Interiority. In former days, a distinction was made between inside and outside: people emerged from their homes or apartments and arrived “outside.” Today, one leaves one’s dwelling place and steps into another, larger room. The change is dramatic. The world, perceived as an interior, shimmers with artifice. A tree growing in a park is indistinguishable from a lifelike tree in the corner of a restaurant. A lake in the country is a more artful version of a tiled pool in a mall.

This perceptual change has led in turn to another, which has been called the New Miniaturism. Things in the world now appear smaller, more toylike. An object that once towered above us—a tall pine, a steep hill, a snowcapped mountain—is itself dwarfed by the Dome, which by the ever-present fact of its vastness miniaturizes what it encloses. The Mississippi is nothing but a trickle of water in a child’s terrarium. The Rockies are only a row of stones in a third-grade diorama. Events themselves, under such conditions, have receded in importance, have become aestheticized. Experience is beginning to feel like a collection of ingeniously constructed arcade games. Is it because, living beneath the Dome, people are reminded of playful worlds in enclosed and festive spaces, such as movie theaters, bowling alleys, laser-tag arenas, video arcades, the old fun houses and circuses? Indeed, one might argue that under the regime of the Dome, the country has become not a mall but an immense hall of entertainment, in which every citizen is a player. Certain unpleasant facts of life—rundown neighborhoods, traffic accidents, robberies, drive-by shootings—are in this view taken less seriously, since they are felt to be part of the artificial displays under the Dome. Death itself is losing its terror, has come to seem little more than a brilliantly contrived effect.