Shame and Wonder Read online

  Today, another Sunday, I’m to meet with Dave again. We live on opposite sides of the city so he picked a public ballpark pretty close to the halfway point. Last week I drove out there to have a look. They’re nice fields—four fields actually, numbered one and two and five and six. I didn’t see the others. But those four are well maintained. The rust-red baseball dirt is clean and cleanly chalked. Signs stress the need for reservations. There are bleachers. That was Friday and I had it to myself. A couple of cyclists. Someone working on his car. Nobody playing, though, so I just walked around.

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  I SUPPOSE IT MIGHT BE SAD because there’s so much standing around and waiting. Guys positioned out there, waiting pretty much like people everywhere. You’re standing out there waiting, so your thoughts—I’m guessing, surely, at some level—naturally tend to spread back out into the ordinary world. At least a bit. There’s some uncertainty on the field. The catcher wants to have a private conversation with the pitcher. Batter’s stepping out of the box. But that’s okay. We’ve nothing else to do. These specialized conditions start to seem a little hazy in the hazy afternoon. It is a semipermeable membrane. Thoughts leak out and leak back in. It’s like you’re standing out in the middle of the whole wide world and waiting for the worst to happen. Here’s the world, here’s you, and what’s about to happen is to happen, start to happen, at the smallest and most concentrated point of least control. Right off the bat.

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  SO NOW IT’S SUNDAY and I’m here a little early; there he is, though, by the backstop in his Texas Rangers cap. He’s got a ball and glove. I should have brought my glove. It’s just a softball glove, but still. And, once again, nobody else around. I should have brought a bat. We could have got some serious sadness going here, at least on my part. “Hey,” we say. Shake hands. It’s perfect. Everything. The empty fields, the day, the breeze at body temperature. A center fielder, say, could wait around out there forever in a kind of equilibrium. I guess everyone’s at church. Memorial Day tomorrow, Dave suggests. They’re probably getting ready for Memorial Day. He tosses the ball and catches it in his glove. Then takes the ball and holds it, turns it in his hand. Again and again the toss and catch and contemplation. A line of trees and scattered shrubs contain the outfield imprecisely. You can see the tops of houses just beyond. It must get touchy making plays out there where the boundary seems so fuzzy.

  So, where’s SaberBoy? He’d told me he’d be wearing that again but instead it’s the face of hope, Yu Darvish, our new pitcher, whose Iranian-Japanese good looks are clearly made for T-shirt iconography. They’ve got him down already. Schematized in white on blue above the declaration “Yu is my homeboy.” Yet another variant of the Jesus one. But here it goes straight Buddhist. Naked-shouldered, arms extended open-palmed. Khmer bodhisattva just awakened from serenity to smile at us. It’s perfect. All is perfect. All is suffering. I must say that’s just about the rattiest glove I’ve ever seen. He holds it up. His dad’s, he says. I take some pictures. It’s a Franklin Slingback, model number 4083. He says his father, Bobby England, second baseman, won the Dallas City Championship in eighth grade, back in 1958 or ’59. The glove is probably from the seventies. Needs to be restrung, he says. I’d say so. That’s about as broken in as a glove can get, I’d say. Well past that oil-stained point of confident utility, extending toward the purely philosophical.

  So. Here we are on the tiny-wildflowered grass between fields five and six. We’re standing out in the sun, it’s getting warm, but there’s a breeze and you can see pretty well from here the way the fields are all laid out. So where are three and four, I wonder. Huh. He looks around and shrugs. He’s just turned forty but seems younger. Fortieth season for the Rangers too. He smiles. He’s been to seventeen straight opening days. Sometimes he sleeps with baseball stuff—a glove or a ball or something—under his pillow for good luck. To bring the Texas Rangers luck. He’s kept a photograph, he says, of Nelson Cruz not making that catch. Oh yeah, that catch. Game six. I’d put that out of my mind. Boy, when it’s time to lose—you know? He does. He knows. I keep expecting Sunday backyard barbecue smells to drift across. But that’s tomorrow. They’re all waiting, holding off until tomorrow—all those people in those houses you can see beyond the trees, beyond the outfield. Rules get hazy. Thoughts drift in and out. He seems to be okay with this. Just standing out here. All my generalities, not knowing what to ask. He’d probably be okay with hanging around out here all afternoon. His wife, Joanna, will be fine at home with Cooper. That’s the baby. Cooper. Cooperstown, you know. The toss, the catch, the contemplation. I can ask whatever I want.

  Two years ago, on a tour described by the sponsoring (and financing) Gülen Movement as an encouragement to intercultural dialogue, as well as a way to save a lot of money, Nancy and I found ourselves traveling with a group of friends in Turkey. I had thought to finish a novel there. The novel, titled Santa Claus, concerned a failed cartoonist who, in middle age, begins to suffer nightmares of the sort he’d always had as a child at Christmas. But the story had curled in upon itself, self-meditated as it were, to the point where it needed to expand, to get this poor cartoonist out of the house, into the wide historical world—to Turkey, say, where the legends of Saint Nicholas originate. Let him seek the mystery there, I thought, right out in the open, out there by the Aegean in the glare of one of those Pasolini long shots, I imagined, like the ones in his Medea, where the narrative might withdraw in a way to leave him stricken, blinded by some awful realization I felt certain we’d discover on our tour.

  But it would not work out that way. I’d get back home and write it up and it would hang there like some Lowell Thomas travelogue appended to the feature presentation. I would find I’d written past the proper claustrophobic ending, and I’d have this little journal full of wonders that no longer spoke to anyone but me. That left me out there in pursuit of an idea I’d sought to delegate. How strange to find yourself—to turn around in a way and find yourself in retrospect—exposed. It makes a difference taking all that in directly. Standing out there in the ruins getting sunburned on your own. No hat, no shades, no cover story. Noon at Ephesus is blinding, for example. All that marble like a mirror. Bleached-white history like a mirror to the blazing here and now. So here’s your long shot. There’s no Santa, you suspect. Yet here’s your notebook and you know where this is leading. You’re just not sure what it means.

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  TWO YEARS AGO—TO THE DAY almost; ten days from now it makes two years—we all checked in to a small hotel in Istanbul. Or maybe not so small; I’ve got a card here, pasted in: Grand Anka Hotel, it says. It didn’t seem so grand. A tiny lobby, shadowy hallways, rudimentary rooms. Compressed but nice enough. You felt inserted. And the windows opened. How about that. A sense, at last, of actual air, of openness of place after a fourteen-hour flight into the big end of the funnel of the ancient world then swirled past all that perfectly established ancient scenery that I remember rendering in black-construction-paper silhouette in third grade, down into the tributary avenues increasingly complex with life specific and approachable until, no room for gawking anymore, no distance from it, there you are, squeezed into the narrow end of things, straight through and up into your quarters with a view onto the alley. This is it, you think. A sigh. A pause. And then the windows open. It’s the alley, sure. But still. My journal entry:

  ISTANBUL, HOTEL ANKA 7-12-10 7:15PM Room window opens onto orange wall across the alley. Clear, empty evening sky still bright. Sounds of conversation, sounds of birds echoing in the narrow two-story gap between the buildings—then crows or something angry-sounding. Terrible echoy [sic] racket from nowhere in particular, no visible source, for a couple of seconds. Then just faint, ambient sounds of the city. Nancy in the bathroom. It’s the Grand Anka Hotel, actually—Molla Gürani Caddesi No.: 46 Findikzade www.grandankahotel.com I’m drinking a Fanta orange soda as I write this.

  Now, this really does feel odd to quote myself, to [sic] myself, but I think t
his is how you do it, looking back like this—two years seems long enough to keep its distance and allow enough uncertainty to fill the gap, to warrant reexamining the evidence as if there’s something there almost like history, by itself worth looking into. I have a photograph right here that Nancy took of me, emerging from the bathroom with her surreptitious camera. I’d not seen it till the other day. But there I am. Backlit and slightly blurred against the orange light through the window. Pen in hand. A can of Fanta on the little plastic table. You can see one of the blue-framed vertical window panels open just a little on the right. While on the left I block the view so you can’t see if that one’s open, but the gauzy drapes behind me seem to move. Look how I’m hunched above the table. Such a strange, sweet Fanta soda–colored light. Am I aware of that? I wonder. What a strange, sweet light that is? I probably need to go to bed. But there I am. Ten minutes more to jot this down, we’ll go to bed, awake refreshed more or less, and set out on this madly overscheduled tour our hosts with the mysterious Gülen Movement have arranged. Everything will open up again. We’ll all be out in the glare and squinting around at everything. But look how things have narrowed to this point—and what a strange, false light to sit and listen into. Sounds in alleys probably always tend to sound, in a way, historical, residual like the ocean in a shell. But here, my goodness, in this light like cartoon sunset, orange-construction-paper sunset to be placed behind the black-construction-paper silhouette of domes and minarets and all that blinded history going back as far as you like. Right back to the origins of windows onto alleys, I imagine. Clatter of dishes. Angry crows.

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  I STILL DON’T QUITE KNOW what the Gülen Movement is. It’s either a broad and loosely structured organization that encourages education and intercultural understanding or a subtle plan to Islamize the world. And if the latter, all the more sinister as it looks just like the former. But if the former, how to explain the apparent fervor and devotion of its estimated millions of supporters—all these restaurateurs, hoteliers, private families, news and cultural organizations who’ll receive us, charge us nothing, give us fancy Turkish tea sets, Iznik plates in velvet boxes, paper-marbling demonstrations (three or four of these at least)? You’d think a program founded on goals so clearly laudable they might readily find expression in a Miss America pageant wouldn’t excite much more than general approbation. Much less fervor. Much less all expenses paid and all this loot. And, to be sure, there will be those among us not so easily charmed, who will regard their fancy tea sets with suspicion. But I’m easy. Easily charmed and lured from caution with a handshake and a box of Turkish delights. The rose-flavored kind. Besides, I like these guys. Our two main guys. Our guides. Our fervent guides with unpronounceable names, advanced degrees in science—yeah, there’s something going on here—and their steady, slightly frantic sense of humor.

  I don’t even mind the forced march; we were warned about the schedule. It’s an inculcating schedule. Inculcation is the order of the day. And every day. For good or evil we’re to see the sights, by God, and meet the people. All the sights and very nearly all the people, it would seem. And every bit of it requires complete attention. Looking back to check the record, all the stuff I filtered out because it didn’t fit the story, I don’t want to miss a thing. There is no story. I will just shut up and read my notes and take my inculcation like a man. Just be a tourist. Just say thank you, do that little hand-to-the-heart thing and be grateful for the marbled-paper samples and the candy and the tea sets. So much kinder, after all, than the alternatives—the fearful things and hateful things like whipping sticks or underwear or coal.

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  RIGHT OFF THE BAT I think I spot a trace, a ghost, an afterimage almost. This is both too easy and too strange. It’s our first day. Our first full day and we’ve already been to breakfast at a famous old café above the Golden Horn. (Though not before a couple of us get lost in a nearby cemetery, wonderfully overgrown, haphazardly terraced into the cliff with leaning monuments of stone or cast concrete atop which turbans or other status-bearing headgear of various types are represented and that look like tailors’ forms to hang a coat or a cloak upon. Other vertical slabs of gentler and more undulating style, perhaps once floral in design, have worn away until they look like Halloween children wearing sheets—a pair of sad-eyed fenestrations at the top through which, it occurs to me now, I should have thought to look, like one of those children, like an imitation spirit. Bend and lean with the stone to gaze out over the Golden Horn through the eyes of the Ottoman dead.) Then after breakfast off to the gaudily modern offices of the daily, Gülen-sympathetic newspaper, Zaman, for a tour and a panel discussion of matters cultural and political and, to me at least, opaque. All this and before the day is over we shall have penetrated ancient Ottoman tunnels, paid a visit to the Jewish Museum, a former synagogue…

  …whose entrance is achieved down such a narrow passage past such a clutter of shops and small concerns and up such an odd little twisting stair at the end, you wonder if it tells, still, of a protective obscurity.

  And whose contents—photos, clothing, old religious items mostly—seem to preserve that small and precious vulnerability of objects just unwrapped, removed from a family trunk, and all beneath a pale blue ceiling painted, as if by a careful child, with uncertain ranks of gold stars. We shall have plied the Bosporus up and down in a passenger ferry and, finally, toured an art school in a gutted, hastily modernized former palace by the water where we all sit outside for a while and watch the shadows spread and find ourselves amused and maybe comforted a little by the attentions of a small orange cat. But right in the middle of this, our first full day, and right at noon and right in the center of the city as we’re all processing—more like being herded; we are thirteen—down the Istiklal Caddesi, Istanbul’s great central avenue, I stop to look where Nancy’s pointing, up at a clear blue sky, to see a trace of Santa there, a cartoon scribble made of wire and neon tubing dangling way up there from a cable or a power line we see is part of an elevated grid of lines and cables running the whole length of the Istiklal Caddesi to provide, I guess, support for needs both practical and ritual. A dormant neon snowflake farther on, another Santa or a snowman—hard to tell. They are so faint here in the middle of July, these wintry images like dreams, like racial memory drifting down from who knows where into this vast protective net above the back-and-forth of ordinary life.

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  SO, HOW WOULD LOWELL THOMAS navigate all this? In an easy, jovial way, I’m sure. Don’t get too serious or you’re bound to run ’em off. But not so differently, I think, from Pasolini. Under all that joviality Thomas’s camera tends to start and gape as we would; in the early documentaries especially, they’ve not learned quite yet to separate the camera’s gaze from ours. It’s still a little like home movies. Mostly long shots. Our attention tends to wander from the narrative just as Pasolini seems to want it to—to sense the place where the story hovers like a mist or a cloud of dust kicked up, an accident, just barely there for a while, just sort of hanging in the ordinary air, odd bits detaching, drifting off.

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  THE POINT IS, FINALLY, to reach Demre, ancient Myra, on the southern coast of Turkey, where Saint Nicholas, to whatever extent, existed. Where his legends concentrate and his church still stands. But that’s a week or so away and there’s a lot of ground to cover, all these other points to touch upon. To try to keep in mind. I can remember having those terrible dreams myself on Christmas Eve when I was a kid. I think I probably always had them. It was part of the deal—you had to make it through. All night to wake again and again convinced that you’d misunderstood somehow. That you had got it wrong, completely wrong and in the morning you would find yourself unwrapping—such a precious, vulnerable thing to have to do in any case, to have to kneel beneath the tree, remove the ribbon and the paper—but you’d find yourself unwrapping nothing much. You’d find that there was really nothing much at all. How worse than nothing that can be. You can’t
imagine. So, you’d shake it off and try to go back to sleep but it would be like that till morning. Nancy says she and her brothers never quite got what they wanted. Which is not the same at all. To be expecting the Lone Ranger and get Tonto, long for Barbie and get Midge (I never even heard of “Midge.” Who gives their daughter “Midge” for Christmas?), but that’s still okay. Midge represents, at least, the higher order. The transcendent possibility inheres. I had to wonder, though, if she had ever thought to be perverse and ask for Midge to see if, maybe, she’d get Barbie. No, she said. We never did. We didn’t want to not believe. Which is exactly what she said. She didn’t want to not believe.

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  THE FOUR GREAT HIGHER-ORDER ANGELS gazing down from under the dome of Hagia Sophia are of that complicated many-winged variety that has always seemed so strange to me—so tangled yet compelling, as the record of some garbled close encounter and the iconographic struggle to make sense of it. Like Antoine Sonrel’s amazing scientific illustration of the gazillion-tentacled jellyfish Cyanea arctica, less about what’s there than what’s required to make it graspable at all. These mosaic angels seem as freshly, forcibly drawn into reluctant comprehension as some creature never seen before hauled straight up from the depths, laid on the deck, exploded, wrecked and uninterpretable—each one a somewhat differently contorted blast of feathers as if captured in a net, pulled from the vacuum down, in this case, into regions so compressed and dense with longing there is little left to deal with but distortion, this implosion of desire to be addressed as best we can, with no less care than if it were a scientific illustration. Nancy thinks at first they’re “thrones,” among the most exalted angels. Later on deciding “seraphim,” the highest of them all. The ranks of angels seem as grand, obscure, and powerful as those of champagne bottle sizes. Potent with a certain risk, you sense from restorations under way on one of the angels, who’s been opened, as it were—his gold Islamic cover taken off to show the fourteenth-century Christian face, which looks not altogether pleased to be let out into the thin ambivalent air.