Creation Lake

by Rachel Kushner

It’s the same, whether you’re in a relationship with a man or pretending to be in one. They want you to listen when they tell you about their precious youth. And if they are my age, which Lucien is—we are both thirty-four—their younger boyhood, the innocent years, are the 1980s, and their teendom, the goodbye to innocence, is the 1990s, and whether in Europe or the US, it’s similar music and more or less the same movies that they want to trot out and reminisce over, from an era I personally consider culturally stagnant.

Stealing is a way to stop time. Also, it refocuses the mind, the senses, if they become dulled, for instance by drinking. Stealing puts reality into sharper relief.

The culprit seems clear, Bruno said, but human history, the story of us, was still a great riddle. Examinations of the past, of dirt and DNA, could show us new ideas of where the entire project on earth might have headed. Currently, he said, we are headed toward extinction in a shiny, driverless car, and the question is: How do we exit this car?

But if it was all of us on planet Earth inside this shiny, driverless car, then what would we be exiting, besides reality? What would we tumble into, if not a void?

I peed in the wooded area beyond the open lot. While squatting, I encountered a pair of women’s Day-Glo-orange underpants snagged in the bushes at eye level. This did not seem odd. Truck ruts and panties snagged on a bush: that’s “Europe.” The real Europe is not a posh café on the rue de Rivoli with gilded frescoes and little pots of famous hot chocolate, baby macaroons colored pale pink and mint green, children bratty from too much shopping and excited by the promise of the cookies, the ritual reward of a Saturday’s outing with their mother. That is a conception of Europe cherished by certain Parisians and as imaginary as the pastoral scenes in the frescoes on the walls of the posh café.

The real Europe is a borderless network of supply and transport. It is shrink-wrapped palettes of superpasteurized milk or powdered Nesquik or semiconductors. The real Europe is highways and nuclear power plants. It is windowless distribution warehouses, where unseen men, Polish, Moldovan, Macedonian, back up their empty trucks and load goods that they will move through a giant grid called “Europe,” a Texas-sized parcel of which is called “France.”

The pinball machine seemed to me some stationary and atavistic workhorse wagon, the old work reformulated as play. No longer a plow or a tinker’s cart, this old box was now in a Paris bar, a game for boys and men to play. It enticed, with its pulsing lights: activate me.

Debord rejected all official culture—the “spectacle”—which reduced modern people to imbeciles. He had a legendary status that seemed to endure even now. I could see why. Who wants to argue that consumer culture, whether it’s fast food or franchised movies or duty-free cosmetics, is wholesome and beneficial? If people do not start out as imbeciles, they are made imbecilic by the corporate contours of their daily life, lulled into a sleep, a sleep which, according to Debord, prevents them from wanting a more authentic life. True enough. Which isn’t to say I agree with Debord’s insistence we should never work, or some of his other proclamations.

That scene later stayed in my mind. The waves, the waist-deep water, the families, those brothers, and the riot cops who tear-gassed everyone. Cops whose vans were stationed at that beach, in order to harass and rough up beachgoers. That environment helped me to understand something. It gave me an idea, a plan. Paul Platon, my deputy minister, could be, for instance, the cop in the waves. And the people trying to drown him, the Moulinards. Pascal would be blamed.

“Serge only flies business class, by the way,” Vito replied, as he picked the thin chocolate sheathing off his ice cream bar. “He’s furious about the snobbery of rich Parisians but he refuses to empty a recycling hamper. Our housekeeper has to come every day, so that Serge won’t have to touch bottles and cans. He’s full of contradictions. I find that incredibly sexy.”

There is so much we don’t know, Bruno said. But a lesson in this curious hybrid skull, of Thal face and Rectus braincase and brain, seems somewhat obvious to me, he said. The lesson is that you cannot judge a book by its cover. Because just as this individual looked like a Neanderthal but could have thought like Rectus, there may be modern individuals with similar developmental disjunctures, with modern faces but the mind and instincts of an older ancestor. Even if someone looks like you, they may not think like you.

we think of time, of history, as a deep and long spike driving down into the center of the earth, into the earliest hominin life, Homo sapiens is right up near the surface, the mere head of this spike that goes a very, very long ways down. And how bitterly ironic, Bruno said, that H. tardissimus strolls in at the end of a gaping stretch—unfathomable to the mind, so much time, lived by an enormous variety of people. At the end of an endless saga, H. tardissimus, aka “Tardie,” arrives on the scene, only to destroy everything.

It’s rare for Italians to acknowledge their nation’s cultural limitations. Vito is different, in this way and in other ways. Italians often want to tell you that the pasta and wines from their particular locality are the best. They want to pretend that different shapes of noodle are different culinary sensations. Spaghetti is made of flour and water and wherever it comes from it all tastes the same. Italian wines don’t vary much either despite what Italians say. They call it Nebbiolo or tears of Christ and they claim the grapes are grown from volcano ashes or Sardinian sand, but to my palette Italian wine is more or less table wine. It is wine in a box.

But why would you want to survive mass death? What would be the purpose of life, if life were reduced to a handful of armed pessimists hoarding canned foods and fearing each other? In a bunker, you cannot hear the human community in the earth, the deep cistern of voices, the lake of our creation.

There is always some tipping point, an incitement so outrageous among the smaller but no less hideous acts, that sweeps people into a full-scale insurrection, Bruno said. But we must not romanticize, he said. What made the peasants blind with rage was not the treatment of Jacques and of the baby. Remember, Bruno said, that Cagots were categorically subhuman. The count’s wife, for her gender, was sub-man and a baby girl sub-baby. It was Loli that was the final straw. A fiefdom that could burn an innocent horse at the stake was a fiefdom worth destroying.

Bruno told them that this memory could be considered a screen memory, in the Freudian sense—a recollection that functioned to cover his own trauma, to obscure it behind a different incident, one that was less significant. The enemy helmet and the aftermath of its discovery was always with him. In contrast, the more extreme consequences of the war on Bruno’s life, and what, exactly, he had understood of those consequences as a seven-year-old, had remained vague, something he was blocked from recollecting in any detail. Even as we do not choose a diversion from pain in the form of a screen memory, Bruno said, on account that it chooses us, we might retroactively heighten that memory, in our recognition of what it means.

He regarded this tremble as pertaining to the riddle of history, and to a dream of forging a future that did not negate the past, a dream that honored reality without occluding its own verso, its counter-reality.

As I stared at the vibrating leaves, I understood that I was having one of my vascular events, here in this walnut grove. The flutter and play of light and leaves was breaking down along the edges of my vision. It would pass, I knew, as it always does. But it had not yet passed. It was happening now, as if proving that Bruno, whom I had thought of here, as a presence in this orchard, was somehow actually here, in the confetti of light and shadow, in the tremble of the leaves.

I had the thought that the boys in the library were like higher-status monks in a medieval monastery. And that Burdmoore and René and the ones driving the postholer into the earth, they were the lower-status monks, the ones who do the backbreaking labor, forgo sleep, and endure inclement weather and unpleasant tasks. They dig irrigation canals, or carry stones up a hill, while the educated monks stay inside where it’s cool in summer and warm in winter, recopying Bible passages, a monk who cannot read running their tea tray like Florence ran ours, although I was sure that Florence could read.

I miss being at home in a culture. Using English with other native speakers is what I might miss most. For nuance and verve, English wins. We took a Germanic language and enfolded it with Norman French and a bunch of Latin and ever since we keep building out. Our words, our expanse of idioms, are expressive and creative and precise, like our music and our subcultures and our street style, our passion for violence, stupidity, and freedom.

but it wasn’t. It was just a star, but one with special powers. That I had located it, and it wasn’t obvious, made me proud. Bruno, I found it. I

If it were true, Bruno said, that instead of greedy dreams of conquest, H. sapiens had been drawing star constellations on the walls and ceilings of caves, surfaces whose curved lineaments became a model of the heavens, this could recast Bruno’s views on early man, or rather late man, Homo tardissimus. Sailor-priests-in-training had plied the heavens on the fabric of their tent ceilings. And perhaps Tardie had been engaged in a similar study, but more abstract and less schematic: Tardie had coded the stars as earthly creatures, had projected into the heavens a wild menagerie of beasts. His intention, to navigate not the seas but the zodiac.

Of astrology, Bruno said it touched him that long ago people had thought up categories of human “type” and attempted to map those types to the universe, a universe that did involve us, pertain to us. They had that part right, he said. To look up and see stars is to look inward and see ourselves.

He had been vaguely aware of a flaw in his thinking. But the logical “fix” was not an embrace of outcomes, to love the shiny driverless car headed toward extinction, and to presume that the technological prowess that had designed the car could design a viable future, solve the nihilism of progress with yet more progress. Was it Better Before? I honestly can’t say, he wrote. In looking back, what I really wanted was to know how we navigate with the knowledge we have. What future do we imagine for our present? When I reframe, he said, and think of Homo sapiens putting star maps on his cave ceilings, his attempt to imagine his own future, and of Neanderthals, with their handprints of the Milky Way, doing the same, my insistence on difference dissolves. These two iterations of human were both beset, and deeply, by a need to know, the same need that plagues me, now. No sailor-priest am I, he said. In fact, I have altogether forsaken the sky, and thus the future, in my attempts to sort the past. In my reassessments, he said, I have lost my bearings, and I will have to find new ones. With that, he signed off.

The act of speaking, of hearing a voice, my own, in this empty house, pulled some kind of stopper. It let something into the room, some kind of feeling. The feeling was mine, even as I observed it, watched myself as if from above, from up near the ceiling of this room, a room I would soon leave forever, as I would leave this false life. There was a girl below, on the bed, in this room. She had tears on her face, this girl. And her face was my face, and her tears were my tears.

I walked to a lighthouse and watched its magnificent crystal flash and turn. There’s that old myth about the humble lighthouse and the giant battleship. The ship has mistaken the lighthouse for a boat, a little pissant boat that better get out of its way. The captain of the battleship comes on the radio, to command the little boat to move, a boat that he doesn’t understand is a lighthouse on a rock. The captain believes he is in a power struggle with the thing in his path and that the more forceful and arrogant he is, the more likely it will yield. He is not wrong that he is engaged in a struggle for dominance. He’s only wrong that he’ll win.