A month after Hurricane Sandy struck New York, I got lunch with the first friend I ever made in NYC. All the TVs in the dining hall were playing news stories about the Sandy Hook shootings. So strange, looking back, how it was one Sandy after another. But I didn’t notice this. I was going through a long, winding break-up, and it was all that I could think or talk about. My world felt like it was ending, but everyone else seemed ready to trudge through the wreckage and move onto the next tragedy.
My first friend and I had been in the city two years at that point, but we already recognized a fated quality to our relationship. We were both gay, both writers, both petite Scrappy-Doo types. We both dated toxic, half-closeted musicians right when we got to New York, though that was all over and done by this lunch date. Still, we got together one-on-one pretty rarely, relying as we did on the parallel motion of our lives. But I was going through a sniveling, melodramatic break-up, and I had begun resorting to old friends to provide me with hints of who I am.
We’ll call her Joan, like Jett or Baez.
All my heartbreak was lost on Joan. She was distracted, still, by Hurricane Sandy. I thought my experience had been difficult: when the electricity went out in the East Village, my recent ex reluctantly invited me to Astoria to stay with him for a few nights. He had also invited his new beau to stay with him, the one he’d started sleeping with at the same time he stopped sleeping with me. The three of us in one tempestuous bed. This was okay with all of us because we earnestly believed ourselves waist deep in a queer, fluid relationship ethic, when in fact it was over our heads. At least, it was over mine.
Speaking of waist deep, Joan had still been living in campus housing as the city started to flood. The university forgot to evacuate her, it seemed, or hadn’t done enough to warn her of the hurricane’s severity. It was unclear, despite her explaining it to me over and over. Whatever oversight had happened, things escalated, and she sent a furious email to the university President, which I didn’t realize you could just do. This triggered some kind of a wellness protocol, which stressed Joan out further. She was mounting a war with the university over Hurricane Sandy, and they were dismissing her as a crazy person. Ardently, she defended herself to me, and I just nodded along, struggling to follow. It only occurred to me a few months after our lunch that Joan had been speaking in non-sequiturs about paranoid delusions, that while I was moping about a boy, she was in the midst of a psychotic break.
Hurricane Sandy is the point of departure for Andrew Durbin’s debut novel MacArthur Park. It’s tempting, at first, to sneer at the frieze editor’s suggestion that this event so terribly wounds his protagonist, Nick Fowler, who scores access to his boss’s lavish apartment during the disaster and subsequently flees to Miami. It turns out, however, that we are being taken on a tour of all the very gay places, from Fire Island to Los Angeles to London to Brooklyn to a commune upstate. As the story progresses, Nick’s anxieties about a disintegrating planet fade into those about a disintegrating romance, but it remains clear that Hurricane Sandy constitutes a major break from which the narrator feels uprooted and undone.
Durbin’s style oscillates between narrative and criticism, sometimes superfluously, as though by force of habit, but these shifts also help sculpt a protagonist who is respectably sharp and prone to detachment. Durbin fucks and has fucked, as does/has Nick, and it is always a relief to encounter such a post-coital point of view amid the pre-orgasmic terrain of gay fiction. Reading someone else describe places you’re fond of can be embarrassing, but in this case, it was comforting, except for a digression about following around Wolfgang Tillmans. As a whole, I liked it.
Reading MacArthur Park, I thought often of where I was during Sandy, and of Joan. I thought of how even at the most privileged end of climate catastrophe— globally speaking— these events are maddening. In fact, it is precisely that faith in one’s security from disaster that, once scratched, shatters us. There are so many metrics of loss to our ecological emergency, that we haven’t begun to account for our minds. How bad could it be by the time it gets up here? Who will we be after the flood?
After Joan and I had lunch, I felt all too aware that my head must be too far up my own ass, the way I couldn’t wrap it around what she was saying. Later on, I pieced together from Facebook posts that she had returned home and then checked in to a mental health facility. She eventually came back to school diagnosed and medicated, and although we had a nice conversation afterward about it, it was apparent that our lives had finally, irrevocably diverged. She seems to be doing well now. But I wonder all the time, as both mental illness and natural disasters drift into normalcy, if she merely got a head start on a delirium awaiting us all.
XO
TY
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