Vivian Is In a State of Terror

Content warning: mentions of suicide

To quote Zadie Smith, Vivian is in a state of terror.

Then again, the quote doesn’t work very well in this case: the character who said this line in Zadie Smith’s story, “Escape from New York,” which takes place on September 11th, 2001, was in a state of terror both emotionally and geographically speaking, while on June 2nd, 2020, Vivian in an emotional state of terror within the geographical state of New York, but the state of New York is in a state of emergency (plus, more recently, of civil unrest) and is not currently a state of “terror” if we’re speaking in the most literal sense, but regardless, Vivian mentally uses this quote on a pretty much biweekly basis to describe her internal climate, and at this time in particular it feels especially relevant. 

Vivian has been reading Zadie Smith the way a marathoner might pour water in the general direction of her open mouth. It is mile fifteen of the race and it is ninety-six degrees outside. Ironically, Vivian’s life feels more meaningful when it’s been reduced to a near nothing—it’s truly amazing how so many lives can just dehydrate and fall apart at once like that, like the dream collapsing in Inception, how one day a person can be biking over the Williamsburg Bridge at 11PM on her way home from running around a very tiny East Village restaurant for six hours, then, not two weeks later, find herself localized to a house in Long Island which is not her home (to avoid exposure with her mother, a doctor), squinting to remember what it’s like to be tired from physical exertion and deriving real joy from a trip to the grocery store—when she’s allowed to see people and places. Truthfully, though, Vivian doesn’t find this situation all that ironic; she had found herself thinking about Camus’ “The Myth of Sisyphus” a lot lately, how the body can be confined but the mind can still roam free (perhaps even more so than before), until she read the essay fully through and found out that it was actually mostly about whether or not it logically made sense to commit suicide. (Regardless of logic, Vivian chooses to opt for “no” in the suicide department on account of her desire to not die yet, so this essay was less useful to her than expected.)

But anyway, two months since arriving in Long Island, Vivian has just finished Zadie Smith’s White Teeth in under seventy two hours. She feels as though a new and essential portal has been opened up in her mind. She realizes now what fiction can be; it can be—pardon her French—whatever the fuck she wants. Earlier this week Vivian had been lying on the very white bed in the very white bedroom which has recently been designated her own and figuring out what to do with the blank easel that is her current life, but now that White Teeth has filled her with that familiar sort of mania that she experiences when she reads books that she especially “vibes” with, she has decided that she is going to write a novel apparently. That is The Project which she has been searching for—not just in quarantine, but in life. Vivian is very bad at finishing projects. She has tried and failed at finishing various novels, along with a musical about the college application process (she’s returning to that one for sure) but she knows that this will be different. This is The One. Vivian is going to vomit her mind onto her laptop through the perspectives of three characters—Michael, Luce and Brittany, her children, as she will call them when she is crossing under the BQE to her Brooklyn apartment with Ronnie three months from now when she can safely have human interactions again—and maybe it will be semi-almost-Great (in the least pretentious sense), but even if it’s not at least she can say that she has a good reason to be alive, and if someone asks her something like, “Vivian, what the crud are you doing working in a pharmacology lab, hanging around jazz bars until three AM, bussing tables on Avenue A and yet generally getting nothing done in life,” she can at least direct them to these something-hundred pages of words as a bible of her mind and an explanation as to why she is so often in turmoil. (Not to be melodramatic about it or anything—Vivian is very much over her own melodrama, especially considering the fact that she has not been diseased or lynched and is not truly suffering in her present state of unemployment. Actually she has about seven hundred percent more money in her bank account than she had when she was working, because the government is weird like that and decided to give her $800 per week for existing during the pandemic but left her Venezuelan co-worker who has a family back at home with $0 per week for existing during the pandemic because his application for benefits never went through or something.)

Say his name. Vivian didn’t know his name right away; she doesn’t have Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat or TikTok (she does have LinkedIn), because she would rather be tied to the back of a Jeep by the ankles and dragged across the desert of Wadi Rum than voluntarily provide Mark Zuckerberg with any additional information about herself to be monetized and subsequently used to manipulate her behavior. (She knows she might sound overly paranoid, but she can provide you with valid sources on this topic. [1]) Vivian does read the New York Times, though, so now that she remembers the world exists outside of White Teeth, she knows his name and can say it. She can’t say his name in a crowd, because her father is almost seventy and there aren’t crowds of that kind where she is right now. Vivian has not seen the video; the audio clip alone left her feeling as though she had just inhaled cinnamon. The only visual information she has is of the chaos resulting from the video. It is now, “now more than ever,” that Vivian realizes how far she is from Manhattan. The window of her pre-March 22 workplace—which will close on September 16th—has been shattered, which is probably one of the least frightening things which has happened. A month or two ago Vivian walked the streets of lower-ish Manhattan on Google Maps and found herself crying (and feeling quite melodramatic for crying), but now seeing images of the place where she emerged from the N/R/W to work in that boushie athletic wear store of Fifth Ave and walked south from Gramercy to class every day and descended to the L train on her way back to Brooklyn for the last time sometime in March, seeing the intersection of the past three years of her life turned into a war zone, brings her a feeling of diaspora. She might as well be on another planet from the city right now. This is probably a good thing since she is safe, but when a loved one falls ill one generally wants to be there by their side even it means exposure to things which are dangerous, but of course hospitals are not currently accepting visitors and Vivian will not set foot in Union Square until her first night back in her home city on July 18th, when she will walk there with Ronnie and see that all the lights are off and feel her chest hollow because there’s still a long way to go until the end of the tunnel. No one can see that light yet.

[1] Read Jaron Lanier. Please.