The End of the End of the Earth Read online

  We were living on a margin. Before full-scale gentrification, before mass incarceration, the city seemed starkly drawn in black and white. When a young Harlem humorist on the uptown 3 train performed the “magic” act of making every white passenger disappear at Ninety-sixth Street, I felt tried and found guilty of whiteness. Our friend Jon Justice, who that summer had Thomas Pynchon’s V stuffed into the back pocket of his corduroys, was mugged at Grant’s Tomb, where he shouldn’t have been. I was aesthetically attracted to cities but morbidly afraid of being shot. In New York, Amsterdam Avenue was a sharp dividing line, and I stood on the east side of it only once, when I made the mistake of riding a C train to 110th and walking home from there. It was late afternoon and nobody paid attention to me, but I was light-headed with fear. Deepening my impression of menace were the heavy, light-blocking security gates on our windows and the police lock in our entry hall, its steel rod anchored to the floor and angling up to a slot on the front door. I associated it with our next-door neighbor, an elderly white man with raging senile dementia. He would pound on our door or stand on the landing, wearing only pajama bottoms, and asseverate, over and over, using a vile epithet, that his wife was having relations with black men. I was afraid of him, too, and I hated him for naming a racial division we liberal kids accepted in silence.

  In theory, V and I were trying to write fiction, but I was oppressed by the summer heat and by the penitentiary gloom of the Atkins place, the cockroaches, the wandering neighbor. V and I fought, wept, made up, and played with our black panther. We practiced cooking and semiotic criticism and ventured out—always going west—to the Thalia, and Hunan Balcony, and Papyrus Books, where I bought the latest issue of Semiotext(e) and dense volumes of theory by Derrida and Kenneth Burke. I don’t remember how I had any money at all. Conceivably my parents, despite their disapproval of New York and of my cohabitation with V, had given me some hundreds of dollars. I do remember sending letters to various magazines, inquiring about paid internships, and being told that I needed to have applied six months earlier.

  Luckily, my brother Tom was in New York that summer, doing a loft conversion for the hotshot young photographer Gregory Heisler. Tom, who was then based in Chicago, had come east with a Chicago friend of Heisler’s who wanted to start a renovation business and hoped to pick up some skills from my brother and split the profits. But Heisler could see that Tom had all the know-how. Before long, the friend was sent back to Chicago, leaving Tom without a laborer. This became my job.

  Heisler was a portraitist, eventually best known for his double-exposed image of George H. W. Bush on the cover of Time. His loft was at the corner of Broadway and Houston, on the top floor of the Cable Building, then a den of sweatshops, later the home of the Angelika theater. The building was zoned for commercial use, and Tom and Heisler hadn’t bothered with city permits, and so for me, at least, there was a frisson of illegality to the hidden apartment that Tom was building behind the photo studio’s south wall. Heisler wanted every surface in the apartment covered with a trendy gray plastic laminate whose little raised dots made edging it with a router a nightmare. I spent long afternoons in a cloud of acetone fumes, cleaning rubber cement off the laminate, while Tom, in another room, cursed the raised dots.

  My main job was to fetch things. Every morning, Tom gave me a shopping list of construction staples and exotica, and I made the rounds of supply stores on the Bowery and Canal Street. East of the Bowery were the dangerous alphabet streets and the projects, a zone of no-go on my mental map of the island. But in the rest of lower Manhattan I found the aesthetic experience I’d been looking for. SoHo’s transformation was still larval, its streets quiet, its iron pillars peeling. Lower Broadway was peopled with garment workers, and the city below Canal seemed hungover from the seventies, as if the buildings were surprised to find themselves still standing. On the Fourth of July weekend, V and Jon Justice and I got up onto the old West Side Elevated Highway (closed but not yet demolished) and went walking under the new World Trade Center towers (brutalist but not yet tragic) and didn’t see another person, white or black, in any direction. Romantically deserted vistas were what I wanted in a city when I was twenty-one.

  * * *

  On the evening of the Fourth, when Morningside Heights began to sound like wartime Beirut, V and I went over to East End Avenue to watch the official fireworks from our friend Lisa Albert’s family’s apartment. I was astonished when her building’s elevator opened directly into the apartment’s front hall. Her family’s cook asked me if I’d like a sandwich, and I said yes, please. It had never occurred to me that my background and Albert’s weren’t more or less the same. I hadn’t imagined that an apartment like hers existed, or that a person only five years older than I was, Greg Heisler, could have a team of assistants at his disposal. He also had a willowy and dumbstrikingly beautiful wife, Pru, who came from Australia and wore airy white summer dresses that made me think of Daisy Buchanan.

  The city’s dividing line of wealth was not unrelated to the other dividing line, but it was less distinctly geographical and easier for me to cross. Under the spell of my elite college education, I envisioned overthrowing the capitalist political economy in the near future, through the application of literary theory, but in the meantime my education enabled me to feel at ease on the wealth side of the line. At the formal midtown restaurant where V’s visiting grandmother took the two of us to lunch one day, I was given a blue blazer to wear with my black jeans, and this was all it took for me to pass.

  I was too idealistic to want more money than I needed to subsist, too arrogant to envy Heisler, and so to me the rich were mainly a curiosity, interesting for the conspicuousness of both their consumption and their thrift. When V and I visited her other grandparents, at their country estate outside the city, they showed me the little paintings by Renoir and Cézanne in their living room and served us stale store-bought cookies. At Tavern on the Green, where we were taken to dinner by my brother Bob’s in-laws, a pair of psychoanalysts who had an apartment not a lot smaller than Albert’s, I was appalled to learn that if you wanted a vegetable with your steak you had to pay extra for it. The money seemed of no consequence to Bob’s father-in-law, but we noticed that one of the mother-in-law’s shoes was held together with electrical tape. Heisler, too, was given to grand gestures, like flying Tom’s soon-to-be wife out from Chicago for a weekend. But he paid Tom $12,500 for the loft conversion, approximately one-eighth of what it would have cost with a New York contractor.

  It was people like Tom and me who didn’t recognize the value of what they had in hand. Tom realized too late that he could easily have charged Heisler two or three times as much, and I left Manhattan, in mid-August, owing $225 to St. Luke’s Hospital. To celebrate the end of the summer and also, I think, our engagement to be married, V and I had gone to dinner at a Cuban restaurant on Columbus Avenue, Victor’s, which her former boyfriend, a Cuban, had frequented. I started with black bean soup and was a few spoonfuls into it when the beans seemed to come alive on my tongue, churning with a kind of malevolent aggression. I reached into my mouth and pulled out a narrow shard of glass. V flagged down our server and complained to him. The server summoned the manager, who apologized, examined the piece of glass, disappeared with it, and then came back to hustle us out of the restaurant. I was pressing a napkin to my tongue to stanch the bleeding. At the front door, I asked if it was okay for me to keep the napkin. “Yes, yes,” the manager said, shutting the door behind us. V and I hailed our only cab of the summer and went directly to St. Luke’s, our neighborhood hospital. Eventually a doctor told me that my cut would heal quickly and did not require stitches, but I had to wait a couple of hours to receive this information and a tetanus shot. Directly across from me, in one of the corridors where I waited, a young African-American woman was lying on a gurney with a gunshot wound in her bared abdomen. The wound was leaking pinkish fluid but was evidently not life-threatening. I can still see it vividly, a .22-caliber-size hole, th
e thing I’d walked in fear of.

  * * *

  Fifteen years later, after being married and divorced, I built a work studio in a loft on 125th Street, following Tom’s example and hanging my own drywall, wiring my own outlets. I’d gotten smarter about money, and I was able to jump on a cheap space in Harlem because I wasn’t scared of the city anymore. I had a personal connection with the Harlemites in my building, and after work I could go downtown and safely walk with my friends on the alphabet streets, which were being colonized by young white people. In time, on the strength of the sales of the book I’d written in Harlem, I bought my own Upper East Side co-op and became a person who took younger friends and relatives to dinner at places they couldn’t have afforded.

  The city’s dividing line had become more permeable, at least in one direction. White power had reasserted itself through the pressure of real-estate prices and police action. In hindsight, the era of white fear seems most remarkable for having lasted as long as it did. Of all my mistakes as a twenty-one-year-old in the city, the one I now regret the most was my failure to imagine that the black New Yorkers I was afraid of might be even more afraid than I was.

  On my last full day in Manhattan that summer, I got a check from Greg Heisler for my last four weeks of work. To cash it, I had to go to the European American Bank, a strange little hexagonal building that sat on a bite of dismal parkland taken out of SoHo’s southeast flank. I don’t remember how many hundred-dollar bills I was given there—maybe it was six, maybe nine—but it seemed to me a dangerous amount of cash to carry in my wallet. Before I left the bank, I discreetly slipped the bills into one of my socks. Outside, it was one of those bright August mornings when a cold front flushes the badness from the city’s sky. I headed straight to the nearest subway, anxious about my wealth, hoping I could pass as poor to someone who wanted the money in my sock more than I did.

  WHY BIRDS MATTER

  If you could see every bird in the world, you’d see the whole world. Things with feathers can be found in every corner of every ocean and in land habitats so bleak that they’re habitats for nothing else. Gray Gulls raise their chicks in Chile’s Atacama Desert, one of the driest places on Earth. Emperor Penguins incubate their eggs in Antarctica in winter. Goshawks nest in the Berlin cemetery where Marlene Dietrich is buried, sparrows in Manhattan traffic lights, swifts in sea caves, vultures on Himalayan cliffs, chaffinches in Chernobyl. The only forms of life more widely distributed than birds are microscopic.

  To survive in so many different habitats, the world’s ten thousand or so bird species have evolved into a spectacular diversity of forms. They range in size from the ostrich, which can reach nine feet in height and is widespread in Africa, to the aptly named Bee Hummingbird, found only in Cuba. Their bills can be massive (pelicans, toucans), tiny (Weebills), or as long as the rest of their body (Sword-billed Hummingbirds). Some birds—the Painted Bunting in Texas, Gould’s Sunbird in South Asia, the Rainbow Lorikeet in Australia—are gaudier than any flower. Others come in one of the nearly infinite shades of brown that tax the vocabulary of avian taxonomists: rufous, fulvous, ferruginous, bran-colored, foxy.

  Birds are no less diverse behaviorally. Some are highly social, others anti. African queleas and flamingos gather in flocks of millions, and parakeets build whole parakeet cities out of sticks. Dippers walk alone and underwater, on the beds of mountain streams, and a Wandering Albatross may glide on its ten-foot wingspan five hundred miles away from any other albatrosses. New Zealand Fantails are friendly and may follow you on a trail. A caracara, if you stare at it too long, will swoop down and try to knock your head off. Roadrunners kill rattlesnakes for food by teaming up on them, one bird distracting the snake while another sneaks up behind it. Bee-eaters eat bees. Leaftossers toss leaves. The Oilbird, a unique nocturnal species of the American tropics, glides over avocado trees and snatches fruit on the fly; Snail Kites do the same thing, except with snails. Thick-billed Murres can dive underwater to a depth of 700 feet, Peregrine Falcons downward through the air at 240 miles an hour. A Wren-like Rushbird will spend its entire life beside one half-acre pond, while a Cerulean Warbler may migrate to Peru and then find its way back to the tree in New Jersey where it nested the year before.

  Birds aren’t furry and cuddly, but in many respects they’re more similar to us than other mammals are. They build intricate homes and raise families in them. They take long winter vacations in warm places. Cockatoos are shrewd thinkers, solving puzzles that would challenge a chimpanzee, and crows like to play. (Check out the YouTube video of a crow in Russia sledding down a snowy roof on a plastic lid, flying back up with the lid in its beak, and sledding down again.) And then there are the songs with which birds, like us, fill the world. Nightingales trill in the suburbs of Europe, thrushes in downtown Quito, hwameis in Chengdu. Chickadees have a complex language for communicating, not only to one another but to every bird in their neighborhood, how safe or unsafe they feel from predators. Some lyrebirds in eastern Australia sing a tune their ancestors may have learned from a settler’s flute nearly a century ago. If you shoot too many pictures of a lyrebird, it will add the sound of your camera to its repertoire.

  But birds also do the thing we all wish we could do but can’t, except in dreams: they fly. Eagles effortlessly ride thermals; hummingbirds pause in midair; quail burst into flight heart-stoppingly. Taken in sum, the flight paths of birds bind the planet together like a hundred billion filaments, tree to tree and continent to continent. There was never a time when the world seemed large to them. After breeding, a European swift will stay aloft for nearly a year, flying to sub-Saharan Africa and back, eating and molting and sleeping on the wing, without landing once. Young albatrosses spend as many as ten years roving the open ocean before they first return to land to breed. A Bar-tailed Godwit has been tracked flying nonstop from Alaska to New Zealand, 7,264 miles in nine days, while a Ruby-throated Hummingbird may burn up a third of its tiny body weight to cross the Gulf of Mexico. The Red Knot, a small shorebird species, makes annual round-trips between Tierra del Fuego and the Canadian Arctic; one long-lived individual, named B95 (for the tag on its leg), has flown more miles than separate the Earth and the moon.

  There is, however, one critical ability that human beings have and birds do not: mastery of their environment. Birds can’t protect wetlands, can’t manage a fishery, can’t air-condition their nests. They have only the instincts and the physical abilities that evolution has bequeathed them. These have served them well for a very long time, 150 million years longer than human beings have been around. But now human beings are changing the planet—its surface, its climate, its oceans—too quickly for birds to adapt by evolving. Crows and gulls may thrive at our garbage dumps, blackbirds and cowbirds at our feedlots, robins and bulbuls in our city parks. But the future of most bird species depends on our commitment to preserving them. Are they valuable enough for us to make the effort?

  * * *

  Value, in the late Anthropocene, has come almost exclusively to mean economic value, utility to human beings. And, certainly, many wild birds are usefully edible. Some of them in turn eat noxious insects and rodents. Many others perform vital roles—pollinating plants, spreading seeds, serving as food for mammalian predators—in ecosystems whose continuing wildness has touristic or carbon-sequestering value. You may also hear it argued that bird populations function, like the proverbial coal-mine canary, as important indicators of ecological health. But do we really need the absence of birds to tell us when a marsh is severely polluted, a forest slashed and burned, or a fishery destroyed? The sad fact is that wild birds, in themselves, will never pull their weight in the human economy. They want to eat our blueberries.

  What bird populations do usefully indicate the health of is our ethical values. One reason that wild birds matter—ought to matter—is that they are our last, best connection to a natural world that is otherwise receding. They’re the most vivid and widespread representatives of the Earth as it was before
people arrived on it. They share descent with the largest animals ever to walk on land: the house finch outside your window is a tiny and beautifully adapted living dinosaur. A duck on your local pond looks and sounds very much like a duck twenty million years ago, in the Miocene epoch, when birds ruled the planet. In an ever more artificial world, where featherless drones fill the air and Angry Birds can be simulated on our phones, we may see no reasonable need to cherish and support the former rulers of the natural realm. But is economic calculation our highest standard? After Shakespeare’s King Lear steps down from the throne, he pleads with his elder two daughters to grant him some vestige of his former majesty. When the daughters reply that they don’t see the need for it, the old king bursts out: “O, reason not the need!” To consign birds to oblivion is to forget what we’re the children of.

  A person who says, “It’s too bad about the birds, but human beings come first” is making one of two implicit claims. The person may mean that human beings are no better than any other animal—that our fundamentally self-centered selves, which are motivated by selfish genes, will always do whatever it takes to replicate our genes and maximize our pleasure, the nonhuman world be damned. This is the view of cynical realists, to whom a concern for other species is merely an annoying form of sentimentality. It’s a view that can’t be disproved, and it’s available to anyone who doesn’t mind admitting that he or she is hopelessly selfish.

  But “human beings come first” may also have the opposite meaning: that our species is uniquely worthy of monopolizing the world’s resources because we are not like other animals; because we have consciousness and free will, the capacity to remember our pasts and shape our futures. This opposing view can be found among both religious believers and secular humanists, and it, too, is neither provably true nor provably false. But it does raise the question: if we’re incomparably more worthy than other animals, shouldn’t our ability to discern right from wrong, and to knowingly sacrifice some small fraction of our convenience for a larger good, make us more susceptible to the claims of nature, rather than less? Doesn’t a unique ability carry with it a unique responsibility?