of John Lennon the day he died. His family was more into Up with People.
LATE WEDNESDAY NIGHT, PAM WAS AMONG THE FIRST TO BUY THE VILLAGE VOICE AND turn to the real estate classifieds. She strode to a streetlamp to read. What she saw made her guts clench. Since her last move, her budgeted residential zone had shifted far away from Manhattan, past Brooklyn Heights. The studios she could afford were in places like Greenpoint and Astoria. Even Park Slope had apparently turned into a bourgeois hell of first-time homebuyers bent on pretending their stucco townhomes were brownstones on the Upper East Side.
She regarded Brooklyn as a cultural wasteland. A summertime stroll up Flatbush with the devoted Brooklyn fan Joe hadn’t changed her mind. In a shop window she’d seen a dead branch spray-painted gold in a silver-painted vase for eighty dollars. She had attended an art opening in Williamsburg once, down near the water, and it still stuck with her as though it might recur as a final image of vacuity before she died. She had narrowly missed the era when Alphabet City was controlled by Latino crime syndicates and inhabited by the living dead—honest-to-goodness cannibals—but Williamsburg was creepier, because there was nobody around. No buildings standing open with dim-eyed figures guarding holes leading to cellars; just walls and chain-link on all sides, and she and Joe the only pedestrians for miles. Cannibals could have eaten them right there on the street, without taking the trouble to drag them inside a building. When they got to the opening, it turned out to be site-specific installations made of found objects. None of the so-called artists could afford supplies or a studio. It was literal arte povera. Then she sliced open the top of her right ear on a splinter of broken mirror some wannabe had hung from the ceiling with twine.
She read the ads for lower Manhattan again. Her hands and feet turned cold from the adrenaline, as if she’d been caught in a trap. To all appearances she was not leaving her lease on Bleecker Street. If Simon wasn’t either, she would have to put up with him.
Operation Desert Shield marched inexorably toward war. The USA was ranging its armaments against Saddam Hussein and preparing to lay waste to his country. Pam often wished aloud that the Selective Service System would draft Simon into the battle for Kuwait.
Daniel had talked about the draft so much that she didn’t realize there was no draft. He was in touch with the American Friends Service Committee, on Joe’s behalf as well as his own, preparing for them to become conscientious objectors. He even took Joe to a Quaker meeting, but only once.
There was officially a recession on. Corporate executives were moaning that double-digit annual profit growth was a thing of the past. Even RIACD’s Wall Street clients were strapped for cash. They had installed networked PCs before firing the staff the PCs would make redundant. Two years earlier, when Pam parachuted into an office, she could be sure of seeing secretaries in motion, walking briskly in and out of their supervisors’ offices, running files from room to room, controlling the speed of Dictaphone tapes with foot pedals, typing letters on IBM Selectrics. Now those same secretaries sat at bare desks half asleep, while their bosses answered correspondence privately on Lotus cc:mail. Occasionally one would stand up to take a print job off the printer in the printer room. At a big reinsurer, Pam saw a woman typing a chapter from the Book of Ezekiel. She learned that the company’s desktop publishing pool had resolved, as a devotional exercise, to enter God’s Word into WordPerfect documents. Not because anybody needed a printout; they all had the book at home. It was a means of communion with the Divine. It could not end well.
The winter settled in like a poisonous fog around the redundant American people. The war ramped up. Yellow ribbons appeared. The streets were dark at four o’clock. The wind whistled and rattled the signage. Pam and her coworkers sat idle in the conference room, watching a lot of TV.
In mid-January 1991, things got interesting. A CNN correspondent was trapped in Baghdad. He described his fear in great detail, conveying a sense that war was ultra-scary. The battlefields looked like barbecue grills—not arrangements of discrete wrecks and craters, but greasy charcoal melted to the pavement. America the Beautiful was taking no prisoners.
Pam went to visit Daniel after work and found him downstairs in the store, huddled up in his coat, watching CBS with Victor. He pointed at the TV and said, “They’re landing Scuds on Tel Aviv. It’s Armageddon.”
Daniel was not remotely Jewish, and he didn’t know any Israelis, but he had been raised in the kind of Christian household that promotes respect for the defense capabilities of Israel and belief in the apocalyptic consequences of putting its back against the wall. Not that Israel couldn’t defend itself. Plucky little Israel had fended off repeated Arab invasions, and not through the power of prayer. It had fought valiantly and developed—with French assistance, though Daniel couldn’t imagine why that was—a nuclear deterrent. Those who aided the enemies of Israel died. That’s what they did.
For example, the British engineer who decided to help Saddam build a cannon big enough to put two tons into orbit. He just up and died of gunshot wounds in Brussels.
The respect was possibly overgenerous and the eschatological expectations overblown, but it was hard for Daniel to imagine Tel Aviv taking a Scud missile lying down. To make sure Pam knew what he meant, he added, “This is World War Three!”
“Are they with nerve gas?”
“They don’t know yet. Nobody wants to be first to take off the gas mask and find out. But it can’t be nerve gas, right? Israel would so totally nuke Baghdad. They want to draw Israel into the war, but they don’t want to die. If Israel sends even one plane into Iraqi airspace, it could draw the whole Arab world into the war.”
“What do you think, Victor?” she asked.
“Americans supply Israel with many things. Israel won’t interfere in our war.”
“I think Israel goes its own way,” Daniel said. “They play off all sides against each other. They get less American support than you think.”
“Israel and Iraq are nothing,” Victor said. “If they nuke each other, it’s not World War Three. It’s jackals fighting over a desert.”
“Whoa,” Pam said, unused to hearing anything that could possibly have been construed as anti-Semitic.
“Any war that goes nuclear is World War Three,” Daniel said. “And nuclear war involving Israel is Armageddon, any way you cut it up. So this is potential nuclear Armageddon. Babylon the great is fallen—is fallen … for all the nations have drunk of the wine of the wrath of her fornication!” He shouted the last bit because it was part of a Tragic Mulatto song.
“Let’s wait first and see whether they use nerve gas,” Pam said.
Victor offered to open a bottle of vodka to celebrate the coming American win. Daniel’s response was to proclaim, “Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die.” Victor reached under the counter, and Pam expressed admiration at his stocking bootleg vodka, which counted as agreement to help them drink.
They watched TV until eleven o’clock. Pam said she was too drunk to go straight home on foot. She went upstairs with Daniel to have some herbal tea.
There they had sex for the first time. His doubts, hesitations, and regrets were as nothing in the face of the coming apocalypse. She felt none of the above. She wished she’d had the idea of sleeping with him long before.
SEX CAME AND WENT IN PAM’S LIFE. SHE HAD PICKED UP ENOUGH OF THE TAIL END OF seventies culture to call it “love.” She never had sex unless she was “in love.” She could fall in love in the space of fifteen minutes. She had offered many appealing strangers tender kisses, some of which became hand jobs in short order, while others quickly progressed to “making love.”
As a result, all her boyfriends had been approximately as charming as Simon. She fell in love as a prelude to sex. Then she had ethical qualms about unloading people in the morning, because she was in love. Her ideal of sex was intimate and gentle, and she kept having it with strangers.