Just because I was moving to the Boston area didn’t mean that my body was going to stay there. Call it an occupational hazard. Should one happen to be in a profession that starts with the letter “A,”—say, for example, “assassin,” “arms dealer,” anyone in the Army, “astrologer,” “angel of Death,” “acrobat,” “anarchist,” and, ho hum, “academic,”—moving around is part of the job. I once got the equivalent of a bill from a commission of interstellar planetary overlords who decided I’d used up too many minutes in outer space, therefore I owed them a Smoot of blood and turnips. Who am I to argue with Kang and Kodos, especially since I grew up listening to the original Star Trek on cassette tapes my brother had made? Long ago, I’d dispensed with my baggage in order to live out of a suitcase. Like one of the twelve called to be an apostle (yet another job starting with “A,” I will note), I ditched my worldly possessions in order to follow an inner voice telling me to wander until the wandering was done. No emotional safety nets. No trampolines to fall back on. My entire wardrobe filled an overnight bag, and the only shoes I kept were the ones on my feet.
For years, I lived out of a suitcase and then the suitcase was stolen, leaving me with nothing but the clothes on my back and the murmurs in my head. I should have been happy, or at least content. Instead, I found myself breakfasting in a nook, with a rescue cat warming my feet, and bouquet of resentments garnishing my table. As I stared into that crystal ball holding cut flowers withering in slow motion, I saw my future clearly: it was a bowlful of tap water that smelled like rotten spinach.
How to explain misery when life is great and God is good?
It would start with a gut feeling of wrongness that descended into dark wells. Was it hormones? Hysterics? A hissy fit? I tried on every explanation and concluded: it wasn’t female trouble. Mine was the misery of the fly in the physics problem. A nameless, faceless entity had set me up for a head-on collision with modern life, and as long as I stayed obedient to the problem, indecisively hovering at 100 miles an hour, I would soon be drowning in a bowl of mass-produced chicken soup.
Mmmm, mmmm, not so good.
The trick to solving a problem is recognizing it in the first place. Flies have compound eyes made up of three thousand separate lenses. Their eyes are twice as large as their heads. Trouble is, their tiny fly brains can only process information from a few hundred lenses at a time. Their sight is blurred, because their brains are in their thorax, the part that moves their wings. Because of this, the fly pays no attention to the theatrics of history. It’s too busy staying aloft so it can spit up in your food.
To get the answer you want, ask a better question. If you spend your time whining, “how come?” at random adults in the manner of a cranky two-year-old, you’re likely to discover that all questions lead to a time-out and a cookie. If you search for answers in the wrong places, you will get the answers you deserve. It’s all about the assumptions that get built in, the most famous example of which is: “Have you stopped beating your wife?” Do you see the trap? Many people don’t, which is why Franz Kafka wrote a little fable called “A Little Fable,” about the pathos of imminent doom. Real life isn’t Saw, you see. It’s not like there are clues.
“Alas,” said the mouse, “the world gets smaller every day. At first it was so wide that I ran along and was happy to see walls appearing to my right and left, but these high walls converged so quickly that I’m already in the last room, and there in the corner is the trap into which I must run.”
“But you’ve only got to run the other way,” said the cat, and ate it.
Now, here is what’s so frustrating about this fable. Kafka pointed the trap out, explained very clearly how to escape, and yet mouse after mouse will insist that no, the human’s wrong, he’s just an insurance adjuster whose biggest accomplishment in life was writing a bizarre story about a giant bug named Gregor. Clearly, Kafka was writing for cats, so why should mice care what he thinks?
Kafka wanted the mouse to live. The mouse just wanted to be a martyr.
Time and time again, I’d returned to Paris, mulling whether to turn left or stay gauche. I was trapped in a maze of my own making, lured in by the promise of stinky cheese and lamenting the path not taken. My fetal twin still wanted to be an artist, and it wasn’t letting go of that ambition. Intransigent, it was the still, small voice in my belly that was my version of an addiction, an unreasonable craving that wouldn’t relent no matter how many times I tried quitting.
There was no way out of the trap, at least not as far as I could see. The fly did not agree, because it had 2,998 more eyes than me. All I had to do was to follow its lead . . . for at the end of the day, when the train has stopped and all the chatty mammals have departed, comes the Hour of the Fly. Released from the physics problem it didn’t understand in the first place, it’s free to flirt with other flies, and they will make baby flies called maggots. They will take over the world, because they have quick reproductive cycles and no birth control on their side.
One of the most famous cafés in Paris is Les Deux Magots (and no, it’s not a typo, though it would be funnier if it was). The café became famous because literary lovers such as Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre used to argue over his infidelities there. The word magot, which is the same in French and English, comes from Magog, as in the Book of Revelations:
When the thousand years are over, Satan will be released from his prison and will go out to deceive the nations in the four corners of the earth—Gog and Magog—and to gather them for battle. In number they are like the sand on the seashore.
Though the prophecy is grim, kids love the story of Gog and Magog because it’s almost a palindrome, “Gog am Gog,” which is pretty much how a bored child in Sunday school would expect a Gog to identify himself. Theologians haven’t decided what the prophecy actually means, but in kid-brain it’s the hellfire n’ damnation version of the joke: “Pete and Repeat were on a boat. Pete fell off. Who was left? (Repeat!)” In Bible-ese, the joke comes out: God and Gog were on a boat. God kicks Gog out. Who’s left? (Magog)! Over time, magog came to refer generically to people from heathen lands, thus the “two Magots” in the café are a pair of lifelike sculptures representing Chinese men. They are mounted near the ceiling. For a hundred years, the two Magots have hovered over countless tourists slurping bowls of soup, and there they will stay until the day when the trains stop for good.
Then what? It depends.
Satan and his minions get thrown into a lake of fire. Everyone else, including the dead, gets to stand before God, who reads about them in a Book of Life. People who aren’t in the Book of Life get tossed into the lake of fire, where they get to die for a second time, sort of like what happens when sunlight hits vampires. The only way I’d get into that book is if I wrote it myself. Now there’s a thought! If I wrote my own Book of Life and pulled off a switcheroo, could God tell? It’s not like He’d already read it. For sure He didn’t write it—that would be the Fickle Finger of Fate doing the writing. All I’d have to do is figure out where God stashes his triple-F bedtime reading. I’d already been to the Library of Hell, which is, naturally, in Paris. Where’s the library of Heaven? (Wrong answer: the Vatican.)
The world is wide, the mouse had insisted, right up to the moment when the walls converged and it was too late to form a better opinion. In a perfect world, the mouse would have whipped out a saw and hacked her way out of the trap. Not possible for me, because my hacksaw had been confiscated. It was one of two items missing from my bag when I’d rummaged around for that song in the Jardin des Plantes. (“Surely, my dear Watson,” said Sherlock Holmes, “you noticed that a hacksaw was curiously not among the items she’d had with her?”) The other missing item was my Swiss army knife. I used to carry both everywhere, until the airport people started objecting to them, asking me: “Exactly what, young lady, did you intend to do with these things?” I’d give them a dirty look. “Well, gee, isn’t it obvious? How else am I going to fix my supper?” The uniformed