multiracial, multiethnic, multicultural state that has already committed itself to the world of the future. Of course he hates any mandate that asks Americans to accommodate the health of an atmosphere that we share with the rest of the world. Of course he needs to go on pretending that human enterprise knows no limits and is accountable to nothing.
Henry Ford, the man who put the automobile within reach of the average American consumer, once famously said that the public could have a car painted in any color that it liked, so long as it was black. Trump’s daily message to his base may well be precisely this: America can have greatness in any hue that it wants, so long as it is dominant, unilateral, unaccountable, and white.
By afternoon, Trump, the consummate “reality” entertainer, has rolled on to other, more exciting, more outrageous episodes in his never-ending Season One. His war against California’s efforts to save itself quickly gets buried under new and novel escapades: Battles with the Koch brothers and other alpha males within his own party. Tweets ordering his Attorney General to end the investigation into Russian election meddling, collusion, and obstruction of justice. So it goes, every day, on The Trump Show. It does not matter what the issues are, so long as the man in the White House has all eyes on him.
By evening, shell-shocked and twitching as I fall asleep, I begin to see that I’ve gotten the formula slightly wrong. We, the American audience to this commandeering of democracy, are allowed to have a country in any color we want, so long as it’s orange.
THE OUTSKIRTS OF THE CITY
By
Marie Darrieussecq
Translated by
Penny Hueston
Iwas born in Bayonne, in the French Basque Country, so for a long time I daydreamed about going to Bayonne, New Jersey. In March 2019, my daughter and I were staying at a friend’s place on the forty-third floor of a tower in Brooklyn; our trip to New York was a present to my daughter for her fifteenth birthday. We were hypnotized by the extraordinary view of the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island. And every morning, on the other side of the Hudson, a broad, pale smudge lit up beneath the rising sun. Bayonne. I didn’t have binoculars, but I could make out a port area, warehouses, silos, and two very big bridges straddling the water like skeletal dinosaurs.
The geography of New York City is complex. The satellite images show landmasses that seem to have been carved out of the sea with a knife. Bayonne is on a peninsula, Manhattan is an island, and Brooklyn is the western tip of Long Island. There are islands everywhere. In some places, a sandy strip runs along the coast, like on Long Beach or on Fire Island. And, directly opposite, on the other shore of the Atlantic, is the other Bayonne.
One evening, Antoine, a friend of a friend, attended a lecture I gave at New York University, and we discovered that we shared a taste for what are known as “non-places,” places on the periphery. He had been living in New York for twenty years but had never been to Bayonne—why bother? Using the pretext of a promotional flyer he had received that very morning, he thought it would be amusing to attend the grand opening of an enormous supermarket over there. We were to meet at the Hoboken train station, from where we’d head to Bayonne by car. My daughter raised her eyebrows, but the prospect of seeing Manhattan from the other side—and her kindness in indulging her mother’s whims—meant that we set off early and in a good mood.
Hoboken is lucky enough to have the PATH train, which crosses the Hudson in fifteen minutes. The neighboring Jersey City became gentrified through the same public-transport magic and now resembles Brooklyn with its brownstones and its hipster city center. But it takes more than an hour to get from Manhattan to Bayonne. A proposal for a ferry, which would take ten minutes from one side of the river to the other, has been agreed on, and, if all goes to plan, the service could start operating as early as September 2020.
You begin to understand Bayonne when you realize that the Statue of Liberty has its back to the place. You can see only the crown on top of her green copper hair, her face turned toward Manhattan. Bayonne’s small city center is made up of pretty streets, neat rows of modestly proportioned, almost identical wooden houses in pastel shades. All of a sudden there’s a colorful, sixties, Florida-style building that jars with these East Coast surroundings. The public high school, like a huge gothic mansion, is an impressive sight. The public library is housed in a beautiful colonnaded building that dates back to 1904. And then, at the end of the city’s few streets, two colossal bridges sever the space. Light pours forth, the sky is vast, but every walkway is a dead end, cut off by the water. The streets peter out into indeterminate areas, where we drive past gigantic warehouses.
It’s very cold. Wire fencing everywhere. No one around. The chemical factories seem deserted, as if they were operating of their own accord, enormous pipes, pumps, winches, nuts and bolts the size of our heads. At the base of some massive spherical silos, a man in overalls, alone, rails against God. Endless oil tanks lined up ad infinitum. Hummocks of gravel and other materials. A strong sulfurous smell lingers, just as in the much smaller port of my birthplace. We can see only a few workers in fluorescent vests on a military frigate in the dry dock. An abandoned mobile home, covered in brambles, strewn with old domestic items, seems to belong in the opening scene of a David Lynch film. Imagine Twin Peaks without the mountains or the forest, and with the sea instead, broken up by a military-industrial port. It’s as if Bayonne has been breached by a dream fault line that makes strange places accessible.
We pluck up our courage to push open the door of “Starting Point,” which, indeed, turns out to be the departure point for this expedition. We have been wandering around for a little while beneath the vast pylons of a metal bridge that is mind-bogglingly high. From the outside, Starting Point is nothing more than a sign on an off-white, windowless shed. Pole dancing, maybe? A brothel for sailors? We enter a friendly restaurant-bar, open in the middle of the afternoon, where overweight families are eating fried food and old men are watching a football match on the TV.
We gather by the bar. A Budweiser in front of him, Francis Murphy is waiting for his washing to finish its cycle in the laundromat next door. He’s immediately amused by the fact that I was born in Bayonne, France. This anecdote will be my passport everywhere in the city—if in fact I need one, because everybody is extremely welcoming. “Bayonne ham!” Francis exclaims. “Nice and sweet.” He used to be a chef and can’t speak highly enough of the ham from my Bayonne. In the past he found some in Weehawken, not far from here, in a deli that has since closed down. Francis used to work at the Chart House, an upscale restaurant with a view across to Manhattan. The Chart House burned down. Francis launches into a complicated explanation of electrical fires.
I don’t know if Murphy is his real surname, but that’s what he’s called by his buddy, who is as Irish as he is, and who is laden with green scarves he’s selling for St. Patrick’s Day. The two friends have red faces and cube-shaped heads and are downing as many Buds as I am Cokes. Francis is around sixty. He had another buddy here, a native of Tromsø. Tromsø, in Norway, is inside the Arctic Circle. “Well, it turns out that it’s warmer there than in Bayonne, New Jersey. It can get down to minus ten degrees here,” Francis declares, and when I realize he means degrees Fahrenheit, I agree with him: that’s really cold, the equivalent of twenty-three below in degrees Celsius. “It’s because of our geographical position,” he says, “right at the end of the landmass. Because of the sea and the wind. Everything is flat here.”
Bayonne, at the very end of the world, and at the very end of the wind. Francis’s retired buddies have all left the city to go farther south. “You only need to go as few as a hundred miles down this fucking icy coast to find some warmth,” he tells me. Soon, he’s going to move to Atlantic City, the casino town. “I want to gamble myself to death!” Francis used to love Bayonne. But the
