G: Some of that was the era though.
M: Maybe.
G: —and you know the blinding glory of city-administration work.
M: My calendar this year, by the way: our nation’s top comptrollers, topless.
G: Ooh. I hear March is a total CPA’s wet dream.
M: He’s posed with like a lamb, a lion cub, and a double-entry ledger.
G: In a hammock.
M: In a windowless municipal alcove.
G: But so you’re saying people didn’t feel on intimate terms with Moses. His fame wasn’t bound up in enacting a social persona.
M: Which is probably exactly the difference between celebrity and fame.
G: And which is funny because a lot of what makes us interested in the celebrities as real people, right, is their always appearing to us as fictional people.
M: We want the fantasy. We also want the fantasy to be real.
G (with a mischievous relish): And we want to see them crash and burn.
M: Yeah. We want to see them crash and burn so we know they’re like us. And we want to see these perfect façades so we can imagine there’s some more exalted life out there.
G: A paradox.
M: Yup.
G: But there’s another contradiction too, because the more we tune in to this celebrity gossip, the more we realize they aren’t different from us, aren’t experiencing some, I don’t know, transcendent spiritual election.
M: Well, I think this is sort of where the dark turn comes.
G: I just got chills.
M: Because at some point it’s not about the fantasy anymore, right? It’s not about the thing we’re looking at. It’s about the fact that we’re all looking.
G: The most photographed barn in America.
M: Exactly.
G: And we want to be the barn.
M: It seems better than just staring at the barn.
G: Barn watching, the Amish call it.
M: Right in that sweet spot between hobby and venial sin.
G: Very strong prohibitions on coveting thy neighbor’s barn.
M: Thirteen-year-olds sneaking Architectural Digest into the outhouse …
G: But then why do we want to be the barn if we know it’s all bullshit fantasy? There are plenty of other ways to make money and get laid, right?
M: I think it comes down to a sense that if God’s not watching, maybe thirty million Americans are the next best thing.
G: That’s the dream.
M: Not necessarily a dream we quite articulate to ourselves, but yes.
G: So the longing behind celebrity worship, if I’m understanding you, is for proximity to God.
M: One way to put it.
G: Or …
M: Proximity to God’s absence. The innermost circle of our aloneness.
G: Ooh. You make it sound fun.
M: Dante’s ball pit.
G: I don’t think I made it to that ring. I got stuck with a gargoyle in a Velcro maze.
M: …
G: But is there comfort in this inner circle? It doesn’t relieve whatever loneliness or despair drove you there, does it?
I told Gaby I didn’t know but I assumed she was right; I was pretty sure the aloneness was only deeper at the center, where you could hear it echo, where enfolding the contingency of your existence always was the weightless, transparent envelope of the idea of you, a public action having expropriated part of you into the social body, culture’s eminent domain exercising its claim on your soul, when all we really wanted were resting points, or so I thought — God, celebrity, accomplishment, sex — weren’t they all just pleas for arrival, for the moment sufficient in itself, that feeling of getting there, dropping your bags, pouring yourself a drink, and sitting down with an old friend on the porch? The spiritual equivalent of saying, Ah, here we are.
Gaby thought about this for the span of two unhurried sips. “But then the morning after the day of arrival.”
“Yeah. I know.”
I did. I was not only coming down off mushrooms just then and getting drunk, but also, due to a mix-up in my prescription, going off the SSRI I usually took. It had been five days since my last pill, and as we talked and drank I felt an increasingly tenuous line connecting me to my life, a line I imagined as the tether that keeps astronauts from floating away on spacewalks; I was floating, letting something go, possibly myself, possibly because I was in a different story and felt the need to sever ties with the old, test the tensile strength of the new, even as the game of musical chairs I seemed to be playing with my somatic chemistry had set off a sort of inner vibration in me, starting in my abdomen and radiating outward, a proprioceptive fuzziness, like the atomization of my cells experienced from the inside out, the feeling of what it would be like for them independently and all at once to question whether they belonged together, whether we could come to some flawed consensus that pooled our fortunes and coexist under an umbrella dispensation we would call identity. I trusted that I could ride this feeling out. I trusted that despite its buffetings I wouldn’t decompose or unspool too far, that after years of holding myself together in what felt like an act of will I could unclench, release myself, and let the environmental pressure contain me, like the ocean depths, and that as long as I had one hand on the line, like a grip on Ariadne’s yarn, I could find my way back.
I want to say that there was something comforting, liberating, ludic in this feeling, but I can’t and remain honest. As we walked the cobblestone streets of downtown, where the faux-gas streetlamps scattered yellow bands in the shadows, and the colored lights jostling on the harbor water below us were flecks of candy on its jellied skin, it was rather placelessness I felt, an indifference to orientation, the way standing on the North Pole gives you only one cardinal direction in which to head; for through the darkness paneling my mind, what I saw at the far end of my tether, far from anchor or cleat, was instead a face, not the face of any person, but the aureole-enclosed fantasy of a smiling recognition, the face that is emblem and locus of celebrity, visible seat of the invisible being, so that rather than securing me to anything firm, I understood, like the velvet rope outside a club, this line was my invitation to the sanctum of celebrated space, my invitation to let go, that is, to give myself over to the idea of me, and like an acrobat transferring lines midair, to swing up up up into the divine and unanchored Valhalla of our debased world.
I admit that this may be somewhat overstated. Grandiose vis-à-vis the facts. I didn’t mention it to Gaby, to whom, if this was true of one person on earth, I could say anything. But it was the endpoint of this train of thought, I think, that underlay the self-disgust and wretchedness that led me, when we’d shut down all the bars, to buy street drugs from a figure who appeared at my elbow calling himself Little D. I glanced at Gaby, who sort of shrugged at me, as though to say, Sure, why not? And I wondered if there weren’t a bigger D out there somewhere, whether the adjective might not be relative, because our friend looked to me to epitomize male height.
“And this is MDMA?” I said.
“Um-hmm.”
“’Cause I don’t know it from rat poison.”
Little D looked disappointed in me. “I wouldn’t play you like that.”
“Okay, sure. But someone who would play me like that would say the same thing, right?”
“Nah…” He kind of swatted the paradox away.
And with the streetlights hissing their miasmatic fire and a deeper quality of night shaking out through the city, I knew my imp of the perverse had made its decision in accordance with the folk wisdom that says maybe it’s better not to be, but to let yourself dissolve into the social body, the superorganism, enfolding ecology, the apprehensive moment itself.