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.”The book belongs to the precocious childhood of my brother, who once read all of Plato’s Republic to my mother, a few pages every night before bed.He was twelve then.He was that kid.Though I was older, I admired him, saw something rare and auspicious in his intelligence.I’d brag to friends, reading those signs, seeing prophecy in his hungry mind, but as the years wore on, as my brother ran away, as he stole and pawned our tiny treasures, as he turned seventeen and joined the marines, as he went UA and hit the bush and lived on a meridian strip on the I-5, as he was dishonorably discharged and then locked away in the VA mental ward on Beacon Hill, as his life became ever more shadowy until the shadows alone were real, only then did I change my tune and come to understand that reading the Republic at age twelve was not a sign but a symptom, not an augury at all but an alarm, one that could hardly have been any clearer.Somewhere along the way I inherited my brother’s copy of The True Believer.It was Eric Hoffer’s first book, and I saw in it—and in Hoffer himself—what my brother must have seen—a familiar face, a face you could trust.Hoffer had the roughed-up look of someone we’d seen around.A character out of our childhood, wandered up from the waterfront, grandfathered in.A stevedore, his right thumb destroyed, the collar of his wool coat turned up against the cold.I read that book in a single sitting, I read it and I romanced it.Hoffer spoke to me, he looked me in the eye and addressed me directly, each sentence delivered like a confidence, a matter of deep mutual trust.But I also happened to be that true believer, that fanatic, the man compelled to join a cause, any cause.The actual quotation reads: “They demonstrate the fact that we can never have enough of that which we really do not want, and that we run fastest and farthest when we run from ourselves.”Our whole time together she was less a girlfriend than a hypothesis, a vague guess at the truth, in constant need of testing and verification, further research.Before Brooklyn, we’d arranged to live abroad, in Paris, but as soon as I arrived she said she wanted to go to Geneva.When I agreed to go, she said she needed time alone, and the very next morning she packed a bag and left for Barcelona with someone else.After we parted ways, I was sure I’d never see her again.But then she called me, she called and we talked, and suddenly I was waiting outside the door of my father’s den, standing there, hoping he might help me out.She took a job as the assistant to the producer of a movie, and by the time I got to Brooklyn she was fucking the director.Two weeks later she hired a helicopter for her brother’s birthday, and a party of movie people flew off the roof of some building in Manhattan to see the city from above.I hadn’t been invited, though I had been lied to, meaning I knew.Her lies embarrassed me because I could see them.I remember looking up at the sky a lot that Sunday afternoon.The whole time I lived in the city, drifting from borough to borough, I never once saw a helicopter without wondering if that was her, if she was in it.I knew she was lying to me, but that doesn’t mean I knew what was true.In this way, our relationship had the character of a rumor, something I’d heard about, something I knew only secondhand.Still, we managed to resemble a couple for a while.I’m not sure who we were imitating.Even in the passionate throes of youth, we kept up appearances, but the fit was poor and awkward and I kind of suspect people saw through the charade.I certainly felt as if people could see right through me, like I had no substance, like every tiny wheel, every whirring mechanism, every ratchet and pawl were visible.That I can’t say with any degree of certainty whether her apartment was in Cobble Hill or Boerum Hill or Carroll Gardens indicates something about the radical disorientation I felt in those days.Even now, the names of those neighborhoods sound far-off and dreamy.I remember them coming up in conversation with an almost incantatory insistence, but the borders they were meant to mark—the classes they created, the hopes they defined, the precise distinctions they were meant to articulate—completely escaped me.I know all of it mattered; it just didn’t matter to me.Every lie breaks the world in two, it divides the narrative, and eventually I fell through a crack into the subplot, becoming a minor character in my own life.The surrendering felt much like the blackening of consciousness just before you faint, the letting go, the acceptance, and whatever was good in me turned passive and strange.I knew happy love had no history, and it seemed that any history, no matter how sordid, was better than none.I stayed in the story, and we went on resembling, while I roamed in a world of lesser importance.And in that exile, far from the main action, Brooklyn welcomed me.I felt at home on subway platforms, down in the heat and stink, waiting for trains, because people avoided eye contact and no single line of vision ever tangled.Those tiny evasions turned us into strangers, and the shifty desperate feel had a dramatic pressure, like a standoff, but always, just when the tension rose to a certain pitch, a train would come and carry us off by the carload.Up on the streets it was like a foreign country.I never understood where anyone was going
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