Security Devices Then and Now

The spider soul might save the boiling frog

There was a small metal rectangle set in the floor of the entryway of Lisa’s apartment. It looked like some kind of socket, but she said “remember that metal bar?” and it came back to me, those metal bars that you fit into a hole in the floor at night, and swung at an angle into another hole set in the middle of the front door to brace it shut, so that no matter how much force was applied from the outside, the door would never open. The system looked medieval, one away from boiling oil poured from turrets.

The tactile memory of the bar—thin, cold, hard, painted black, sometimes a little sticky, took me back to when menace heaved and clawed at the front door, restrained only by the metal bar that, had it continued through the door, would have pierced the heart of any menace. The rectangular hole on the floor brought back the uncontrolled rolling-grinding helter-skelter city I’d gone to at 18, and loathed.

New York in 1969 was menace, dirt, disarray, heating pipes that clanged and seared, apartment window frames thick with innumerable sloppy layers of glossy paint, windowpanes inset with wire grids through which I’d glimpse piles of strange objects— boxes, tires, a pyramid of shoes— littering intersections in the East Village, screaming strangers in the night, squat slow women in brown rags pushing carts full of God knows what.

Many of the fears New York City set off in me came true. I learned tragedy before I was 21, and went home to London. There, my parents took me to dinner parties where we ladies in long dresses retired from the dinner table after dessert to sit in the hostess’s dressing room, touch up our faces, gossip and take turns peeing while downstairs the men discussed dark matters over port.

When I was 21, the London bourgeoisie still wore full evening dress to each other’s private dinner parties.

The contrast between unruly New York and serene London with proof of two realities at work.

The metal rods to keep the bad things from coming through apartment doors are long gone, the long dresses are long gone because the women of the rich must now dress as fuck dolls. I have no idea how the older women of the rich are dressing, because that border where the non-rich and the insanely rich used to mingle has become a wall.

I think they’re trying to keep contact with us to a minimum so they won’t miss us when we are swept away by plague and famine as they bob off into an endless cruise on their protective vessels. The same way teenage mothers aren’t supposed to bond with the babies they are giving away.

The old time binary structure allowed you to move through apprehension with certainties intact. Absolutely nothing is intact anymore

The eye changes as you get older, and taste, preference, even curiosity. The books I bought because I should read them will go out the door because they will never be read. The books I have loved I keep because I owe them what I am today, but at some point soon I will have changed so much that I won’t owe Lucretius, Montaigne, Suetonius or Van Loon anything, because I will have mislaid the chain of title to my thoughts.

Times like this demand hyper-vigilance. Times like this justify hyper-vigilance. But hyper-vigilance is fatiguing.And perhaps not ideal when a toddler is driving this bus off the cliff.

There’s an imaginary second self, lithe and hard, agile, unfathomably but usefully clad in a green and black hooded neoprene diving suit and reflective green goggles, a champion of Parkour and mixed martial arts , a crack shot, an expert grower of nourishing crops in tiny spaces with no water, no sunlight, no air, a creature of infinite cunning, resources, courage, a stranger to claustrophobia and self-doubt, springy, fearless, the survivor spider soul, who will see me through , who will see us through.

I’d like an army of these imaginary second selves, gifted spider soul humans trained to act, aware and capable, strong and unflappable. And if David Wallace Wells’s terrifying El Niño essay in The Times is to be believed, I, we, they, will have to have perfectly calibrated homeostasis, so that whatever the temperature used to boil the frog, we will survive .