Dear America, Are you wearing pajamas? I do not mean to begin this letter by getting personal. I was just wondering if you people leave the house anymore–something that seems to be increasingly unnecessary these days, a hundred years ago. Not that leaving the house is always a good idea. Outside lies the wide and brittle world of wars, gunplay, scandal, disease, superstition, categorical hatreds, willful ignorance, envy, pettiness and cant. In your perfected age, all such things undoubtedly have been eradicated. Are you six-feet-six? Are you fly-fishing on Mars? Are you talking on a cell phone? We are, usually. We are talking on a cell phone as we walk among the blazing office towers and the gridlocked SUVs, along a frozen sidewalk on the Avenue of the Americas in New York City, from which we call a colleague in an airplane who, while speaking to us, is faxing an application for a Platinum card and e-mailing a color photo of his beaming children, taken with a digital camera and put on a CD, to a screen in his home in Connecticut, where the kids are playing Pokemon , auctions off the cabin in Vermont, then orders one set of tickets to a black-tie dinner for breast cancer and another to the latest off-off-off-Broadway play, about a man talking on a cell phone as he walks among the blazing office towers and gridlocked SUVs, along a frozen sidewalk on the Avenue of the Americas. I am not, of course, accounting for the Mexican boy in South Central Los Angeles who lies on his bed staring up at paint chips on his ceiling; or for the pale girl gazing out a high-floor window in one of those blazing office towers at a pale boy in the tower opposite, gazing back; or for the bearded hermit crouching near the statue of a general on horseback in a city park and talking on a cell phone that does not exist. As lovers leaving lovers say, By the time you read this, I’ll be gone. Or possibly I won’t. Given the way life is being prolonged these days, I–with my pig’s liver, titanium hips and knees, artificial heart, transplanted kidney and reconstructed DNA–could write this letter in my century and pick it up in yours. No thanks. It is enough to be able to send these words across the abyss of years to tell something of who we are. We are members of a narrative species, you and I–two eras connected by a story that changes just enough to keep it interesting. I write you in the dead of winter from a summer village by the Atlantic Ocean. The last of the houseflies beats its body against the window, through which I watch the tremors of a berry bush and the shorn stoic trees. Afternoon lowers on evening; the sky is the color of unpolished silver. A Cole Porter song, In the Still of the Night, goes through my head. I do not know why.
