A Visit From the Goon Squad - Jennifer Egan [73]
(3) It’s one of those quantum mechanical mysteries.
Apparently so. All that can be said for sure is that in the presence of Kitty Jackson, the rest of us become entangled by our sheer awareness that we ourselves are not Kitty Jackson, a fact so brusquely unifying that it temporarily wipes out all distinctions between us—our tendency to cry inexplicably during parades, or the fact that we never learned French, or have a fear of insects that we do our best to conceal from women, or liked to eat construction paper as a child—in the presence of Kitty Jackson, we no longer are in possession of these traits; indeed, so indistinguishable are we from every other non–Kitty Jackson in our vicinity that when one of us sees her, the rest simultaneously react.
2. Occasionally, life affords you the time, the repose, the dolce far niente to ask the sorts of questions that go largely unexamined in the brisk course of ordinary life: How well do you recall the mechanics of photosynthesis? Have you ever managed to use the word “ontology” in a conversational sentence? At what precise moment did you tip just slightly out of alignment with the relatively normal life you had been enjoying theretofore, cant infinitesimally to the left or the right and thus embark upon the trajectory that ultimately delivered you to your present whereabouts—in my case, Rikers Island Correctional Facility?
After several months of subjecting each filament and nanosecond of my lunch with Kitty Jackson to a level of analysis that would make Talmudic scholars look hasty in their appraisal of the Sabbath, I have concluded that my own subtle yet decisive realignment occurred at precisely the moment when Kitty Jackson dipped her finger into the bowl of salad dressing “on the side” and sucked the dressing off.
Here, carefully teased apart and restored to chronological order, is a reconstruction of the brew of thoughts and impulses that I now believe coursed through my mind at that time:
Thought 1 (at the sight of Kitty dipping her finger and sucking it): Can it possibly be that this ravishing young girl is coming on to me?
Thought 2: No, that’s out of the question.
Thought 3: But why is it out of the question?
Thought 4: Because she’s a famous nineteen-year-old movie star and you’re “heavier all of a sudden—or am I just noticing it more?” (—Janet Green, during our last, failed sexual encounter) and have a skin problem and no worldly clout.
Thought 5: But she just dipped her finger into a bowl of salad dressing and sucked it off in my presence! What else can that possibly mean?
Thought 6: It means you’re so far outside the field of Kitty’s sexual consideration that her internal sensors, which normally stifle behavior that might be construed as overly encouraging, or possibly incendiary, such as dipping a finger into salad dressing and sucking it off in the company of a man who might interpret it as a sign of sexual interest, are not operative.
Thought 7: Why not?
Thought 8: Because you do not register as a “man” to Kitty Jackson, and so being around you makes her no more self-conscious than would the presence of a dachshund.
3. For those who will inevitably interpret this caprice as further evidence that I am, indeed, a “numb nuts,” a “creepazoid,” or a “sick puppy” (—excerpts from correspondence received from strangers while in jail), I can offer only the following: On a spring day almost four years ago, I noticed a girl with short thick legs and a long narrow torso, wearing a pink tie-dyed T-shirt, picking up dog poop with a Duane Reade bag. She was one of those muscley girls who turn out to have been a swimmer or a diver in high school (though I later learned she’d been neither), and her dog was a mangy, wet-looking little terrier of the sort that would seem, even by the most neutral and objective standards, unlovable. But she loved it. “Here, Whiskers,” she cooed. “Come on, girl.” Watching her, I saw it all: the small, overheated apartment strewn with running shoes and leotards, the biweekly dinners at her parents’, the soft dark fuzz on her upper lip