A Wrong Turn

A visit to my hometown. Show me the suburbs, W. says. Give me a guided tour. He wants to know where it all went wrong. – 'You started well enough, didn't you? You had advantages in life'. Where did it go wrong?, W. asks. When did it go wrong?

Hadn't I told him about the last patches of wilderness – the sand dunes, the long grass where we'd play as children? We'd bring our bikes along there and scramble up and down the cliffs. We'd start fires in the dry grass …

But the dunes were transformed into a golf course. The wilderness closed up. We were stuck in the suburbs, which were growing around us. Vandals' trips to the new houses. Thieves' trips to the construction sites. We'd cycle out to the army range. We'd climb the low hills and look out into the distance. Something was missing from our lives – what was it?

Was that when it happened?, W. asks with great avidity. Was that when it all went wrong? 

The suburbs were completing themselves, I told him. No wilderness left. Time had stopped going forward. We lived the same day again and again … When did my friends disappear into drugs? When did they disappear into drinking?

Had it happened yet?, W. says. It was happening, I tell him. When did it happen – at what point? I tell him I'm not sure. 

Like many others, I went to work for the new companies. There were an infinite number of them. All interchangable, more or less. Vast grey boxes set in vast car parks. Sometimes a pond of koi fish. Sometimes a view of the Swiss chalet style hotel and the dry ski slope. An infinite number of them, and an infinite number of us, too, contract workers, temps …

Which company was it that had a suite of meeting rooms named after philosophers? We'll have a meeting in Berkeley. Let's book Locke. Is Hume free? … -'Did you try and persuade them to call a room Rosenzweig? Did you get them to call one Rosenstock-Huessy?'

A new kind of wilderness: I wandered all day through the corridors in the great grey boxes, from coffee machine to coffee machine. I'd stare off out of windows. I'd admire koi ponds or the Swiss chalet style hotel. I'd plant myself in the foyer and read trade magazines at lunchtime.

It had already happened, hadn't it?, W. says. Oh yes, long ago, I tell him. I'd taken a wrong turn, he says. But there were only wrong turns. My life, in its entirety, was a wrong turn.