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another. I felt like a child who wanted her mom or Sima to protect her from her father and like a mother who was failing to protect her child, who was at risk of becoming one of the Men (I wasn’t keeping the promises I made when you were unconscious; I wasn’t learning to behave);
As the seniors approached graduation, neared the end of their minority, the ritual reincorporation of Darren into their society closed the symbolic circuit of their childhood, Klaus’s voice in the dark.
The persistence of the mind of childhood—its plenitude and purposelessness—into the sexually mature body, which has succumbed to historical time, must log its hours.
The man-child
child represented a farcical form of freedom, magical thinking against the increasingly administered life of the young adult. A teller of fantastic stories. Almost every object in the man-child’s world reflected this suspension between realms: his alcohol that was also soda, his weapons that were toys, how he might trade you two paper dollars for one of silver, valuing not credit so much as shine. He had trouble managing his height or facial hair and when he injured actual children while demonstrating a wrestling move (clothesline, facehammer, DDT), it was a case of his “not knowing his own
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Of course they knew better, but knowing is a weak state; you cannot assume your son will opt out of the dominant libidinal economy, develop the right desires from within the wrong life; the travesty of inclusion they were playing out with Darren—their intern—was also a citation and critique of the Foundation’s methods; if they were at once caring for and castigating Darren, they were also modeling and mocking their own parents.
one could argue that sustaining the fiction of his inclusion and puncturing it were after that point at least equally unkind; easier to let him be a mascot through graduation,
While he physically resembled Eric much more than Sima, while he was thought of by most of his peers as white—which meant for most of them the question never arose—an element of ethnic difference was nevertheless
slightly less foreign than those Foundation Jews like Adam whose houses were not appropriately strung with holiday lights. Like a missing tooth on Greenwood, the Gordons’ dark house in December. Phenotype and class and the insufficiency of available categories (at Topeka High, you were, in the minds of most white people, white, black, Mexican, or Asian; Pablo Figueroa, the one Chilean in the senior class, had long since given up on getting peers to make finer distinctions) meant that, for most of his childhood, Jason passed without knowing he was passing.
The summer before their freshman year, after Jason refuted a few of his lies, Darren had called him a “half-breed” and other names straight from the Surplus, then leveled his toy pistol; Jason hit him twice, the right cross opening a cut above Darren’s eye. The violence was out of character for Jason; was he now including Darren to make it right? Yes, and the opposite: he was further punishing the perverted privileged subject of the empire.
At some difficult-to-determine point, among middle-class white boys in the Middle West, fights, instead of ending when a combatant hit the ground, took on new life there, the “boys will be boys” chivalry of boxing giving way to the archaic regression of overkill, a term that dates from 1946; every opponent must be spread; every offense, however minor, leads to holocaust.
They felt at once profoundly numb and profoundly ecstatic to be young and inflicting optional damage on each other; the heat was its own justification, but so was the cold—there was a second-order thrill in knowing you could kick someone in the chest without emotion. To have violent conflict without competing notions of the good, a kind of surplus. To have something to do on the weekends.
poems were spells, were shaped sound unmaking and remaking sense that inflicted and repelled violence and made you renowned, or renowned for being erased, and could have other effects on bodies: put them to sleep or wake them, cause tears or other forms of lubrication, swelling, the raising of small hairs.
The key was to narrate participation in debate as a form of linguistic combat; the key was to be a bully, quick and vicious and ready to spread an interlocutor with insults at the smallest provocation. Poetry could be excused if it upped your game, became cipher and flow, if it was part of why Amber was fucking you and not Reynolds et al. If linguistic prowess could do damage and get you laid, then it could be integrated into the adolescent social realm without entirely departing from the household values of intellect and expression. It was not a reconciliation, but a workable tension.
this was the most shameful of all the poses, the clearest manifestation of a crisis in white masculinity and its representational regimes, a small group of privileged crackers often arrhythmically recycling the genre’s dominant and to them totally inapplicable clichés.
to say he was “practicing” implies that he could choose to stop; in fact, while he was often barely aware of the rhyming, just as one might be unaware of a bodily tic, he did not feel that he could turn it off.
Like any two men or man-children meeting in the playground or the marketplace they quickly, almost instantly, calculated who could take the other. They
the presence of the mother remained, even at this age, a structural embarrassment:
Was being in the presence of two generations of women worse than one?
Was it more, or less, emasculating to have a famous mom?
He had no interest in becoming a nationally competitive policy debater; that would have required endless hours of research, filling those plastic tubs with evidence and briefs, summer “institutes.” It would have meant, in his own mind, choosing the company of Joannas over Ambers, abandoning the fiction of his manliness.
One learned to stud a speech with sources the way a politician reaches for statistics—to provide the affect of authority more than to illuminate an issue or settle a point of fact.
the supposedly disinterested policy wonks debate the intricacies of health care or financial regulation in a jargon designed to be inaccessible to the uninitiated while the more presidential speakers test out plainspoken value claims on civilians, a division underwritten by petrodollars.
Evanson sometimes appeared to him as an accomplished elder—the Harvard pedigree—and then suddenly he struck Adam as a species of man-child, a twenty-five-year-old coaching forensics at his former high school because he couldn’t cut it “back East.”
One moment Evanson struck him as a precocious young man destined for the corridors of power—a conservative judge, a senator, the president of the NRA—and at other times Evanson seemed fated to drive sleeping debaters, sleeping drivelers, home from Junction City,
Evanson was gifted at committing the plausibly deniable outrage, then taking tactical umbrage, claiming the high ground.
maybe state socialism had looked down, but weren’t American “conservatives” also doomed? The baby boomers were more liberal than their parents, and Adam’s generation, however schizophrenic, was said to be more liberal still.
Adam wanted to believe it was the end of the age of angry white men proclaiming the end of civilization.
One of them will go on, when history resumes, to be a key architect of the most right-wing governorship Kansas has ever known, overseeing radical cuts to social services and education, ending all funding for the arts, privatizing Medicaid, implementing one of the most disastrous tax cuts in America’s history, an important model for the Trump administration. And one will attempt this genealogy of his speech, its theaters and extremes.
although global warming is a total, and very expensive, hoax! Like the moon landing or the Holocaust. Like Columbine and Sandy Hook and Parkland and Russian interference.
Although he slept on freshly laundered Star Wars sheets and ate the meals his mom prepared for him and produced nothing himself that he consumed or used, Darren felt that he was trained or at least had been in training for a coming emergency that would establish the relevance of a skill set difficult to specify.
it was because imaginary disciplines were strategies, weak spells, for redescribing his exclusion as a manly way of living off the grid.
Darren found himself in the closest thing to wilderness he had known, waking cold and hungry miles and miles
from home, just as he perceived, for the first time since puberty, the glimmer of community.
When to the side of the road he perceived a dry creek bed he went down to it and hunted for fossils and arrowheads among the rocks, proving to himself that he was not afraid or lost, he was exploring.
He didn’t worship; what he feared since Bright Circle Montessori was that against his will he had been called, and now a sinister plot revealed itself, that the best night of his life had been a smoke screen, part of a plan to draw him here, if only to remind him that he both possessed and was possessed by powers he could not, if he were pushed, control.
To travel by bike after early adolescence is ignominious enough in Kansas; to walk unless you are exercising purposefully in appropriate dress or moving to or from your car is to confess some kind of deviance; how many times have men rolled down a window to remind Darren he’s a faggot?
Maybe I was only relaxed when I was with someone who wasn’t, when I knew it would be useful for me to be calm, calming?
We regress in the air.
grounded for a month in the States. We were representatives of the most powerful country on earth, the power was in our every cell, look at how the “natives” bowed, their gratitude for our supposedly civilizing force, the future was ours.
I never heard mention of the camps or of the bombs—not in the American houses, not in Taipei International School. The collective effort of repression was tremendous, made the alcohol indispensable. An intense but contentless optimism about the future was the only protection against the recent past, in which all the regimes of value had collapsed, irradiated or gassed. Public repression, private repression:
The farmer, whose life, or at least livelihood, was destroyed, showed up, to everyone’s amazement, at the International School the next day, screaming, crying; I was told that what he demanded was not compensation, or that Russell be punished, but that someone apologize, face him and apologize. I don’t remember what happened beyond the fact that kids made fun of the farmer in mock-Chinese, Jerry Lewis gibberish, mimicked how he crossed his arms and refused to budge until the police dragged him away. (Half of what came out of American adolescent mouths was that racist travesty of speech.)
Nobody was going to hit a white kid. Was there really a school play in yellow-face?
everybody knew that some of the bathhouses were brothels where you could pay for a “water frolic.” Frank claimed he’d already lost his virginity to one of the “fallen women,” a lie so obvious I didn’t bother to dispute it. With more dread than excitement, I felt that I would ultimately have to visit, that there was no way I could avoid it, that I owed it to myself to return to the States a man, that this was the only conceivable way.
I had committed a kind of sexual wrong, was becoming a man, while the man of the house, in the way of men, was betraying my mom, who was sick, who we were making sick.
we thought that if we had a language for our feelings we might transcend them. More often we fed
them. I could explain our mutual cathexis in relation to Jane’s success.
The remainder of my consciousness was devoted to trying to think of my bully of a son as a vulnerable young man passing through a complicated social and hormonal stage.
Even though I’d handed the waiter my credit card, he returned the check to Jonathan; I reached across the table for it. Then, even though I signed the receipt, retrieved the card from the little tray, even though I was the one who made more money, Amber thanked Dr. Gordon—meaning Jonathan—for the meal. I was deciding if I should ask, as lightly as possible, why people always thanked the man, if that would be good modeling for Amber or just embarrass her, but Adam, in a brief flash of maturity: “And thank you, Mom.”
You’re giving fast and fluent speeches from left on the spectrum and you’re going to easily carry judges who share that orientation. Liberal cosmopolitans. Judges from San Francisco and New York. Of which there are plenty. (My eyes met Jonathan’s; maybe I was being paranoid, but I half expected Evanson to come right out and say “the Jews.”)
