something sensible to fix their awe upon. A little preliminary data and identifying detail—is that too much to ask?
Cynics may quibble, but science is no different, really, when it goes pioneering, trying to snag something unprecedented on a radio frequency or an algorithm. A reassuring density is what everyone is after. A verification of more than we are. “What is the difference between a cathedral and a physics lab?” asks Annie Dillard in Teaching a Stone to Talk. “Are not they both saying: Hello?” Mass consciousness is equally on the minds of the forensic and the faithful in the end. In the end, everyone wants to be haunted.
The host of the show tunes in a distant channel and is not amazed. He is never amazed on any other episode, either. He treats his supernatural endowment much the way a professional basketball player might his gift for elevation or a musician his perfect pitch. In an epilogue, he soberly reviews the messages left by the dead. His recap does not vary much from show to show. We are witnessed. We are loved. Even if we feel neglected or ourselves neglect, no one is ever lost or lonely, no one left out or left behind.
“I knew that if anyone would come through the other side, it would be Phil,” explains one member of the Callison family. She is tearful but content. “He’s the type to, you know, barge to the front of the line.” Then four Furillos, representing three generations of descent from their own deceased, congratulate one another on having cajoled Anthony out of the atmosphere like a convict hidden in the woods. “As soon as I heard ‘poker chips,’ I nudged Connie—didn’t I, Con?—and said, ‘That’s got to be Anthony. Absolutely him.’” It is always a good visit and always too short.
Watching them rejoice over the reemergence of vanished family members, I perversely think of my brother’s appointment books. When Jeff completes a task, he doesn’t just check it off the calendar, he obliterates it with a vengeance. When he does something that he had not previously noted down as a thing that needed doing, he goes back to the appropriate date, inscribes the assignment, then annihilates it, too. He shrouds September and soaks October in shade; he chars March, eradicates May, wipes July from sight, plunges December in drear. Ultimately, all of his weekends are overcast, his holidays sunk in mourning, his weeks featureless. He refuses even one hour of illumination. What remains is month after month of uninterrupted murk, entire seasons of tar. Eventually, every day is filled in like a grave.
Jeff isn’t trying to impress posterity—he trashes his annual record as soon as the new January arrives, when he starts a new book with pristine resolutions. He means only to consummate the year in total gloom, grinding out the hours, the well spent together with the squandered, smothering every circled, underscored, and arrowed errand and dousing every irritating asterisk in black. He leaves no doubt: what’s past is past and without horizon. My brother’s brutal bookkeeping reminds me of Beckett’s Clov, with his dream of ideal proportions and immutable order, which only extinction can guarantee: “A world where all would be silent and still and each thing in its last place, under the last dust.” My brother’s Doomsday Books, his yearly installments of shadow, appreciate in much the same way individual days in nature do: the steady, predictable evacuation of all the world we’ve known, until it is inked in to its edges with night.
Maybe he’s imitating the kind of timeless sky God sought, too, showing off His supreme elevation, blowing us away with His perfect pitch. If that’s the case, it’s strange that convention has us choose to celebrate incandescence, however brief and uncertain, when it comes. We tend to presume that darkness is worthwhile only when it sets off His disclosures. (“Quiet, please,” begs our host, who relies on silence to help him to find the secret frequency of hospitable sounds.) Against a solid heaven, it may be easier to see the contrails of God. But space may be the feature presentation, not merely the screen. “This thing of darkness I / Acknowledge mine,” declared Shakespeare’s Prospero, who could not restrict belief to lighter spirits after all. If memory serves, it would not be long before he cast away his book forever.
6 Reason Not the Need
A telephone, its shorn cord dragging after, a few ripped filaments licking the pavement. A bag of Christmas wrapping. A mobile made entirely of CDs. There is no predicting what someone will rush to salvage from the fire. There is no knowing what an intruder will choose to carry off from an unlocked apartment. A cocker spaniel. Metal chessmen simulating Union and Confederate forces. You’d think they’d think alike, occupant and outlaw, but that’s seldom the case. Nor does either one automatically seize what you’d seize. A cabinet that once housed an old-fashioned radio, now nothing but a husk. An ashtray that had been painstakingly shaped by the thumbs of an eight-year-old at sleep-over camp or one that advertises a restaurant an uncle once owned, now, restaurant and uncle alike, gone under. An assonant series sounding like something out of Doctor Seuss—a hat, a bat, a cat, a doll named Pat, and a basketball that’s flat—whose rhyme does not guarantee a reason. There is no system to infer from the compulsions that litter the news. A tornado smashes storm doors and storefronts, and the thieves are one step ahead of the Samaritans. The home team blows the pennant or wins it: the host city braces itself for invasion either way. A revolution breaks open the marketplace like a piñata, and the mad scramble is on.
Or not so mad: what seems at street level like chaos and abandon may seem from the distance of sociology understandable. Michael J. Rosenfeld, a Stanford University professor, has inferred an underlying logic from his data on looting. “You get a sense, from what people loot and destroy, of which things they think are legitimate,” he discovers. “The things left standing are the parts of society that people feel some solidarity with.” Occasionally, the protocol of what gets protected and what gets plundered is obvious, such as when during the Viet Nam War students ransacked the private bookstore on my campus while leaving the Union Bookstore, which gave a superior student discount and funneled money back into the university’s general fund, undisturbed. (They also savaged the local phone company outlet and shattered the windows of a bar notorious for carding undergraduates, but the inspiration was not determined to be political in either of these instances.) When the cash register at the dime store remains intact although all the candy bars and gum are gone, the cops rightly forego interrogating suspects from grown-up syndicates in favor of neighborhood kids. Money and jewelry spark obvious motives, and no one wonders about neurosis when they are made off with. Only a handful of culprits might be held accountable for missing vials of anthrax, and while editorialists debate the repercussions, none question the rationale. In a word, thefts tend to make sense.
But just as often, it seems that there is no concept or consistency behind what the violent bear away. Eight mannequins were stripped naked and abducted from a department store in an Ohio suburb. A rack of costumes was filched from a party supply store in the same mall. (A fraternity scavenger hunt? An outbreak of transvestitism? Officials claim that it would be premature to connect the robberies to one another, much less to some eccentric fascination more disturbing than the break-in itself.) All the brass instruments—only the brass instruments—were hauled off from the band room of a community college. In one night a week before Thanksgiving, three cases of Merlot were taken from a Bloomington, Indiana, liquor store and, from a farm less than two miles away, half a dozen baffled, crated turkeys. (Police surmised that the feast would take place somewhere in the same county. Citizens, lock your pantries! Keep your eyes on your pies!) From a barbershop in Pasadena, two electric clippers. From a sports card shop, a baseball signed by Tony Oliva. (Be on the lookout for the only Twins fan in Kansas City, where the robbery was committed.) From an open garage just outside of Nashville, a drill, a weed trimmer, some guttering, and two pair of work gloves, one so worn that it had stiffened permanently into the contours of the guy who’d been using them for so long, so they’d accept no substitute hands. (Credit the criminal with a dedication to home maintenance, despite his other moral lapses, that’s undeniable, as well as with a willingness to supervise his own rehabilitation through work detail.) From a dentist’s office in Lincolnwood, Illinois, a glittering fistful of picks. The plastic letters from the sign outside the First Presbyterian Church of Jefferson
