What was the “this” we could never leave? The delirious, spontaneous outburst had been a polished routine for the camera. “This” had left us, like the youths striding off to their next location shot, even as we kept blindly clinging to thin air.

  We blinked and the streets of Bed-Stuy and Crown Heights were full of people with studied postures zipping by in short chinos and sockless loafers on electronic scooters, or careening down the sidewalk like extraterrestrial junkies, faces melted to their devices, thumbs flea-dancing the keys, furrowing solitary or wide-loading their way in oblivious squads to favorite all-you-can-drink brunch places, followed by the new, faster, CrossFit joggers, pounding everywhere in bolts of sweaty lightning. These sorts of changes had been happening for years—were we just seeing them differently in light of the election, or had they really gained traction to where they marked a paradigm shift?

  Some days we walked west to the walls of the Navy Yard, alongside roads loosely paralleling the course of the river, down Flushing and Kent into the zones of the Satmars. Pale men, pushing up the bridges of their glasses and stroking their beards, tugging down the glistening brims on their black fedoras, darting around corners, into shuls and yeshivas. Jangly prayers battling for God’s ear from behind barred windows. On Saturdays, mothers and fathers sauntered by in Sabbath finery, hands curling to the grip of old-fashioned baby carriages, preceded and trailed by scrambling, skipping, loping children beyond number. When I lived in New York in the 1980s I’d found a strange, poignant dignity in their bearing, those fantastically antiquated costumes, the insatiable passion for Torah. Now all I could think about was the stories of their rotten doings as landlords and the fact that this community had voted en masse for Trump. What a degradation of the Baal Shem Tov’s original emancipatory vision!

  We kept walking on through Bushwick into Greenpoint. The snazzy new apartment buildings with their own lush parks along the waterfront appeared holiday tropical: Rio de Janeiro on the East River. Picture-perfect people lolled in the grass, playing games with artisanal paddles and new types of electronics, wearing tight, flame-tint bathing suits on uniformly ripped bodies. Everything looked carefree. Perhaps all we needed was a little change of scenery. We could sell our place in Fort Greene and move half an hour away into one of the tiny, cute houses near these swank glass complexes, making a new home on one of the blocks with suggestive old seaport names. Think of all the money we’d save by splitting our house size in half and living somewhere with such lousy public transportation links! We’d bike everywhere and learn to kayak, and maybe finally to salsa. Some places had mini-beaches and marked-off areas where one could swim, and there were so many restaurants we’d never stop grazing. Every day after writing we’d take a walk along the river and we would sort of have escaped our current life without really having had to leave anything behind.

  Burdened with less debt, I might even approach my bosses at the PR firm (or “shop” as the bosses now preferred to refer to the workplace, as though massaging people’s images to make them appear less egregious resembled the labors of hale tradesmen in heavy canvas aprons), broaching the possibility of reducing my work schedule. I hadn’t made any grand, principled decision to resign after the election, but I kept quietly dwindling the time I spent in the office. Coming in later and later, leaving earlier and earlier, until whole days would go by without my traveling into Midtown at all—and without anyone seeming to notice my absence. It was as if I’d quit without telling anyone I no longer worked there, a less dignified, not-so-mysterious Bartleby the Scrivener who preferred not to come in while still sotto voce pocketing the paychecks. I’d been there so long I’d become more or less invisible inside the bureaucratic labyrinth. How could you reprimand a nonentity for failing to show up?

  Then we went to a broker and learned that all those sweet little houses on Java and India streets cost as much or more than our current home with its giant outstanding mortgage was worth. Then I tentatively raised the idea of paring back my schedule to my supervisor, who looked at me with a steady, clinically diagnostic gaze and said, simply, “That’s not our culture.”

  “My blood pressure just keeps getting worse, even though I’m on medication and I think if I didn’t have to commute so frequently or—”

  Her eyes lowered. “I understand, but that’s not our culture.”

  All I’d achieved by my request was to place myself back on the radar of management. “Our culture!” You have no “culture,” I wanted to scream. You’re a gluttonous corporate beast fighting fang, claws, and nasty bits in a jungle of howling, competing agency swine-fiends for more bloody chunks of soul-voiding business! You’re the reason “culture” had to be created!

  But all the while, of course, I was inside the “You” I excoriated.

  What would it have solved to simply switch neighborhoods, anyway, we asked ourselves. Had we lost our minds?

  We just need to focus on our work, we told each other. Bear down on the life we’re already leading. Stop spending so much time floundering about in the sewer of the internet. Concentrate on family, friends, community—on nurturing political change, for God’s sake.

  We just need to focus on the things that really matter. To figure out what those things are, more specifically. Compassion. Writing. Travel. The environment. Humanity.

  Yes. We need to just concentrate . . .

  “Should we think about moving upstate?” I asked one Saturday when the sun was dancing in the leaves of an English elm in the park, and I was remembering how much I loved visiting my grandparents at 12 Main Street in Cooperstown. Swimming in the freezing, dark jade lake below the country club. Walking through the soft, dreamy hills. Hanging over the garden wall alongside my three siblings, licking strawberry ice cream cones. Making out with the daughter of belly-laughing, alcoholic doctors in a toboggan sledding down a hill toward the snow-capped statue of James Fenimore Cooper.

  “I don’t want to move upstate,” Rebecca said flatly.

  “There’s so much beautiful countryside.”

  “We’d have to drive everywhere and I don’t drive and you don’t like driving.”

  “Couldn’t we live near a train station?”

  “We’d end up commuting for hours every day and once we got home we’d still have to drive to get anywhere where we could really walk into nature—unless we were living too far away from everything else. I’d always be coming back in the middle of the night from some event or other for work. And so would you.” When would we get to enjoy where we were or where we’d just been when we were always in transit between them? And what about global warming with all that driving, and farewell even the pretense to diversity, and even if they were only a couple of hours away how often would we really see any friends or family members once we settled in, and what exactly would we do there off by ourselves as we got older? How much nature did we want, anyway?

  How lucky we were to be in brownstone Brooklyn, when all was said and done!

  One night I visited Gabriella, the woman who’d helped raise our son with unfailing grace and lucidity. She’d grown up in Trinidad and had lived the past two decades in Bed-Stuy not far from the Nostrand Avenue subway. Turning onto her street from Putnam, everywhere I looked where once there’d been bodegas, a liquor store, a law office, and a barber shop, high-end boutiques and restaurants had sprung up like mushrooms in the night. The transformation is so trite by now—why even bother to notate it? But this had happened so dizzyingly fast! I’d been there shortly before the election and now it was practically unrecognizable. I felt like Rip Van Winkle if he’d gone to sleep for a few months instead of two decades and found he’d missed a commercial rather than a political revolution—or rather found that the form of the political had become private enterprise. Gabriella raised her eyebrows when I mentioned my amazement at all the new businesses.

  “Oh yeah! It’s completely changed since about a year! The police don’t even bother coming here no more. They don’t even bother.” She laughed. I asked her what the transformation was like for her. “Well, it’s got its good and bad. It’s mixed, you know. The people that move in, everybody minds their own business.”

  “Mmm.”

  “They never look at you. Everyone’s too busy. If they go in the laundromat, they turn their face away from you.” She swung her head to the side, arching her brow haughtily. “They never smile. They never look at you, George.” I shook my head. “They’re just too busy.” My head kept shaking. “They’re all in their own world.” She laughed again. “No, it’s really true, I’m telling you! Everyone say so. If you go in the laundromat you can smile at the people there. But the new ones, never . . . You know, maybe they’re Trump people, George!” She laughed, and I laughed with her.

  But the worst of it was, I’m sure they weren’t. None of them. Just as they weren’t consciously avoiding her eyes; she was just completely invisible to them.

  We hated New York. The self-involvement. The entitlement. We hated the changes. Those changes we were part of, and the changes that came after us, which we swore were even worse than the changes we’d brought with us. At least we talked to people and smiled at them. We looked people in the eye! Gabriella wasn’t asking for anything from the newcomers! But just to acknowledge that we share a common space was too much for these people? Disgusting. Wretched city. Why were we there?

  Where on earth should we be? And did that easy neighborliness really even slightly justify our existence?

  Sometimes our conversation reverted to Trieste, which we’d visited several times, and where I’d savored the specters of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, along with the tickling aqua-glass embrace of the Adriatic. With its long blocks of elegant gray, yellow, and cinnabar Habsburg-era apartment buildings, in one of which elderly relatives of my father still lived, the bosky parks and languorous esplanades—that preserving absence of major tourist draws, along with the promise of quick train rides to the splendors of Venice—Trieste lingered in my imagination as a plausible elsewhere. Perhaps there we could learn how to think and see, to listen, and even to believe again. Plus, we’d learn Italian. All we wanted was a credible alternative, and Trieste seemed to have many of the really quite modest elements we were seeking: the sea, art, history, cafés, a relatively gentle way of life, breezy places to walk. Trains to everywhere in Europe. The ghosts of James Joyce and Italo Svevo. Perfectly plausible ingredients to compose a life with—lacking only schools for our son, income-generating work for myself, health care, friends, a residential visa, a real reason to be there, or even a vague notion of what sort of existence we might actually create in that airy fantasy-land.

  Well, perhaps Berlin would make the most sense then—we at least had friends in that city, and it was so progressive and rigorously cultured. We’d heard about any number of schools there with exceptional reputations. We liked the lakes and the trams, the bookstores and the art world. Only . . . Germany? Germany? Were the ghosts really just ghosts now? Plus, not to be trivial, but those long, bitter winters. And even if the ghosts were just ghosts, the idea of settling comfortably there still suggested a kind of unseemly pact with the phantoms who had nearly exterminated my own father. Why shouldn’t a place that attempted to perpetrate a genocide still be haunted, even if the people living in Germany now bore no inherited responsibility? The ground itself stank with old dreams of world-annihilating super-humanity.

  England? We couldn’t think seriously of England after Brexit. With that country’s implosion into regressive, racist jingoism we knew that transplanting ourselves to England would be a lateral move of the most flagrantly self-destructive kind.

  A friend of ours who’d moved to Bangkok was the happiest of the ex-New Yorkers I knew. There was a certain attraction to the idea of moving somewhere in Asia, where a sense of the future seemed to be magnifying instead of contracting, albeit an entirely naïve, abstract one. How would we even begin to arrange such a total transference with a twelve-year-old child, when we ourselves lacked even a toehold in the culture?

  Well, what about somewhere completely outside our frame of reference, then? The nameless wilderness? The moon? The cosmos beyond our doomed solar system?

  “Utopias are emplacements having no real place,” Foucault wrote. “They are emplacements that maintain a general relation of direct or inverse analogy with the real space of society.” The mirror is thus a utopia, he observed, for it is “a placeless place,” in which one sees oneself where one is not, in an unreal space opening up behind the surface. I stared into the bathroom mirror, trying to make out the sanctuary in its depths. “I am over there where I am not,” Foucault continued, seeing myself “where I am absent,” while at the same time, “I discover myself absent at the place where I am, since I see myself over there.” But what was I going to do in practice—crawl inside the looking-glass and live there with Alice?

  Now and then I found my thoughts wandering to something Benjamin wrote on the subject of wishes. In folklore, he observed, “distance in space can take the place of distance in time; that is why the shooting star, which plunges into the infinite distance of space, has become the symbol of a fulfilled wish.”

  Perhaps the reason we couldn’t fix on an alternative to Brooklyn was that we were really longing to move to a different moment in history. Meanwhile, away from our incessant, existential conversations about how we might reorient our lives, signs that the wind was in the sails of darkness kept multiplying, not only in the news but in the experiences of our own family.

  My brother Jamie, who has become an ever more erudite, enlightening photographer of people and landscapes, lives in Bay Ridge and is married to a woman of Indian–Guyanese descent who designs toys and plays rock and roll. Her sister, who has worked in poorly compensated jobs at large, inconceivably rich auction houses, married a man from Morocco who died alone of a heart attack at home moments before she and their son walked in. The family’s past encloses other traumatic tragedies. Yet my brother’s nephew is a child of preternatural sweetness, gentle and thoughtful beyond words.

  In early 2017, this boy was fourteen and in middle school. One sparkling winter day, I met Jamie in Fort Greene, and as we walked down Dekalb Avenue toward a chic Columbian restaurant, the diversity of its residents in the bright sunshine seemed a manifest refutation of what was happening in Washington. How resplendent and progressive our neighborhood was. What did we have to worry about? We were in Brooklyn.

  That gush of feeling went into one file, while I listened to my brother’s account of a trip down to D.C. he’d just made to visit our father in Fairfax. He described the funereal mood in the nation’s capital, and some of the images he’d captured out the window of the train back to New York. He’d begun thinking of linking these photos together in a conceptual project, he added, and stopped to show me one photo he’d taken on the journey; but the first image that came up on his phone was a portrait of his nephew. I broke in to ask how he was doing, remarking how much my son missed him—it had been too long since they’d gotten together.

  “Actually, he’s not doing very well,” Jamie said, with the slight, bashful smile he habitually adopts when he has grave news to report, as if he were somehow responsible for the injury, though he persistently sacrifices himself to sustain our whole family. I raised my face. “Yeah, he’s being bullied, really badly, since the election. Kids are coming up to him saying now that Trump’s been elected he’s going to be sent back to his country—he and his mom are going to get deported.”

  “What!”

  He shook his head. “They’re mocking him, threatening him.”

  “My God.”

  “He won’t let his mother speak to the school. He doesn’t want to become known as a snitch. But it’s getting worse . . . Honestly, it’s tough for him.”

  This was Brooklyn. Bay Ridge, which had an increasingly obsolete reputation for being less diverse than most neighborhoods in the borough, yes, but anyway Brooklyn. All I could think, outside of my sorrow at what this boy was being subjected to, was that if this sort of harassment were happening to a student in the endemically heterogeneous New York City public school system, what was going on elsewhere in places where minorities actually stuck out?

  That kind of testimony went in the other file. The file registering evidence that an irreclaimable rupture of America’s promise had already occurred.

  On another bright day, we went to a robust protest in Battery Park against the new government’s ban on immigration from Muslim countries. Everyone was smiling and proudly, collectively insubordinate, and we joined in every chant and felt full of hope again. That went into the other folder. The we-shall-overcome-and-become-more-meaningfully-politically-engaged-than-ever dossier.

  Everything that happened seemed to fall into one box or another; evidence of large consequence in the search for a solution to a problem we couldn’t quite articulate, which yet consumed our consciousness.

  But even on days when the system felt more resilient, I found myself succumbing to doubt as to whether the damage thus far inflicted, especially on young people, could be fully negated or even functionally integrated. Even assuming that my brother’s nephew’s maltreatment ended with the administration, for instance, how would he fit the remembrance of this period into his larger narrative of America, and of society as such? And what about the memories of the thousands of young children separated from their parents, among them children who’d been locked into cages? Could one just vote that experience away with a traditional change in presidencies? Whisk. Hooray. Gone. Try as I might, I could not visualize a normative end to this more or less democratically elected regime of bottomless greed yoked to pathological cruelty.

  The next time I saw my brother’s nephew he looked so worn and gaunt, so much older than his years, that my arms moved to embrace him before my eyes could betray my alarm.

  All through this period, I kept thinking of Freud’s 1929 essay, Civilization and Its Discontents, in which he contends that the fateful question before us is whether the cultural development of humanity can overcome the disturbance to communal life represented “by the human instinct of aggression and self-destruction.” The duel between our love and death drives had reached a decisive phase, he wrote then.

 

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