Creation Lake

by Rachel Kushner

Charisma does not originate inside the person called “charismatic.” It comes from the need of others to believe that special people exist.

Charismatic people understand this will-to-believe best of all. They exploit it. That is their so-called charisma.

“Where you from?” he asked, as he blotted sweat from his face with the neck of his T-shirt. I told him California. “Right on. That’s cool,” he said, as if “California” meant something specific, instead of a huge assortment of different terrains inhabited by forty million faceless people.

People might claim to believe in this or that, but in the four a.m. version of themselves, most possess no fixed idea on how society should be organized. When people face themselves, alone, the passions they have been busy performing all day, and that they rely on to reassure themselves that they are who they claim to be, to reassure their milieu of the same, those things fall away.

What is it people encounter in their stark and solitary four a.m. self? What is inside them? Not politics. There are no politics inside of people. The truth of a person, under all the layers and guises, the significations of group and type, the quiet truth, underneath the noise of opinions and “beliefs,” is a substance that is pure and stubborn and consistent. It is a hard, white salt. This salt is the core. The four a.m. reality of being.

In my own salt, my own core, this is what I knew: Life goes on a while. Then it ends. There is no fairness. Bad people are honored, and good ones are punished. The reverse is also true. Good people are honored, and bad people are punished, and some will call this grace, or the hand of God, instead of luck. But deep down, even if they lack the courage to admit it, inside each person, they know that the world is lawless and chaotic and random.