Friday, January 18, 2008
Walking past the towering building where the news agency's New York offices were in the heart of the noisy city, I thought how so much had changed in my life since I sat in that office and engaged with the the places which I would see, where I would live, only by phone and email, gathering and editing the wires that told fragments of the story of the place where I lived now. Though I was in my late twenties at the time, I thought of it now as if it were childhood, an innocent time, a period of callow youth, where I spent days in a quiet office in a slumber of sorts, awakening only at six, when Uzbekistan only was waking up to its day, to shut off my computer and run around the city, numb away the day's news in bars where you couldn't hear the sound of your own voice, in crowds of people, with drink. It was easy, in the never-ending buzzing of this city to shut out worlds far away, forget, or even not know of their existence.
Those days started with a phone call with my predecessor, who would file his stories at what was a late hour in Tashkent. Our conversations were always brief and rushed, and he seemed irritable, impatient, and tired. He never had much information to share, but from what I could gather, the place sounded like a shithole: poor, sad, quiet, boring. Even when a series of bombings went off in 1999, he was able to provide little more information than the official statements from the Uzbek government about a union of Islamic fundamentalists and political opposition in collaboration to overthrow the government setting off bombs at four separate sites on the president's itinerary that day. Nothing else could be confirmed, he would say, though there were doubts about the government line. A few years later, when I was living there, in the bazaars, leafs of samizdat detailing the nefarious working in the corridors of power in Uzbekistan written by a mysterious Usman Haknazarov were circulating, proposing a piquant version claiming it had been an inside job by competing clans in the power elite.
The incident of the 1999 bombings was the only incident during my time in the New York office that major news outlets were interested in picking up a story about Uzbekistan, as more frequently the news cycle was interested in picking up on the growing threat of terrorism by fundamentalist Islamic groups and the news networks wanted to patch in our correspondent for phone interviews for broadcast, since we were one of the only people with someone on the ground. We would send over a photograph of him to be used on screen, looking like the shiny, fresh faced, clean cut ivy league graduate, which was what he was, apparently, when he was first hired many years earlier. This was the visual over his tired, irritable voice offering laconic statements, qualifying them regularly that it was hard to get accurate information in Uzbekistan.
I finally saw him in person months after the bombings, shortly before he was to be dismissed and thus freeing up the overseas spot that I eventually filled. I couldn't recognize the figure roaming the halls who looked like a homeless person who had wandered in from the street, with the long unwashed hair, grizzled beard, and dirty, slovenly get up. Rumors had it that he went mad after all those years in Tashkent and it was evident in his somnambulist demeanor. When I arrived in Tashkent, no one mentioned his name. No one knew him and it seemed that he didn't get out much, a recluse. He gave the impression that besides living in this remote country, he lived in an isolation that seemed beyond just geographical.
Moving there would be a challenge for me, would force me to confront one of my biggest demons -- a desperate fear of solitude. New York was a well tuned machine to prove the escapism from the inevitability of solitude with plenty of crowds to hide in at all hours, noisy spaces to make you forget, and many people like you offering the occasional relationship or friendship with benefits that promised respite from it. There were so many reasons not to get too close to someone; when you did, when they disappeared and stopped returning your phone calls, say, after you were stuck home alone for a weekend with a cold, the pain of solitude was only worse. Everything that there was to fear, anything I read about in the newspapers, I was susceptible to, be it virulent strains of HIV, a serial killer at large who preys on gay men, horrible stories from the advice column about the way people treated each other only made me more afraid of contact. You were alone, regardless, alone in the world and anything you thought you had today like your relationship, your coop apartment, your health could be gone tomorrow. Leaving, dropping out, throwing it all away in Uzbekistan, I hoped I would learn something along the lines of the lessons of Emerson's self reliance, or Thoreau's self imposed solitude at Walden Pond. I wanted to hear, what Emerson called "the voices which we hear in solitude." It seemed impossible in the big city as "they grow faint and inaudible as we enter into the world." Maybe, confronting solitude, I could grow stronger, and possibly find that calm that Emerson and Waldo found. But would the price mean going a bit mad?
My mother had said that I was "touched in the head." And yet no one eyed me with that look of unease they cast upon someone who looked a little off-kilter. The man in the newspaper kiosk was completely normal when I bought a newspaper. The woman with the newborn sitting next to me on the bench where I sat down smiled, didn't move away with her child that she held protectively close. I scanned the paper; it was so easy to be distracted by the noise all around, the soft steps brushing by of fit bodies jogging by, the spirited dogs barking and their owners calling out to them in the nearby dog run. I wondered how anyone here ever found peace and quiet for the concentration needed to read a newspaper.
But I could not tear myself from an article about a new wave of HIV infections among gay men in New York and San Francisco. As new treatments made HIV a manageable disease, and with the popularity of new recreational drugs on the scene fueling recklessness in sex, a new wave of epidemic hit these gay communities. I read and reread the article before putting down the paper. Living so far away, I knew nothing about this. It was the first time I'd heard of it, and if it was already being written about in the New York Times, it was probably old news.
Funny that HIV was something that I didn’t worry much about anymore. But then again, I stopped worrying about many things there. In Uzbekistan, there was little evidence of HIV, people weren't worried, government statistics were incredibly low; though, I should know better than that. Little evidence of anything in Uzbekistan meant nothing at all, except possibly that people were ignorant or something was well hidden, like the violence, the poverty that people put a nice face on, the corruption that people seemed too embarrassed to talk about. So naturally, I always used condoms though it seemed that no one there ever insisted I do so. Yulia included. For all I knew, she was sleeping around, had many boyfriends, earned her living as a prostitute.
The news about HIV in New York depressed me, New York depressed me. HIV had been a specter that loomed over my sexual coming of age as I watched it destroy a generation of men older than me. It had taught me fear of death. I thought, "here's yet another thing to be scared of, another horrible saddening thing." And it was saddening that I had no idea about it until now, since I had been so far away and out of touch. It felt like there had been a funeral of a friend and no one bothered to invite me.
I heard the steps of a horse and looked up from my paper to see a dashing, smiling New York City Police Department policeman, mounted on a horse, trotting past me, not looking to check my documents or make me feel out of place, a completely non-menacing presence. How quaint the policemen were in New York, unlike their surly peers in Uzbekistan. Every place in the world, it seemed, had something to be afraid of, to bring you down.
Those days started with a phone call with my predecessor, who would file his stories at what was a late hour in Tashkent. Our conversations were always brief and rushed, and he seemed irritable, impatient, and tired. He never had much information to share, but from what I could gather, the place sounded like a shithole: poor, sad, quiet, boring. Even when a series of bombings went off in 1999, he was able to provide little more information than the official statements from the Uzbek government about a union of Islamic fundamentalists and political opposition in collaboration to overthrow the government setting off bombs at four separate sites on the president's itinerary that day. Nothing else could be confirmed, he would say, though there were doubts about the government line. A few years later, when I was living there, in the bazaars, leafs of samizdat detailing the nefarious working in the corridors of power in Uzbekistan written by a mysterious Usman Haknazarov were circulating, proposing a piquant version claiming it had been an inside job by competing clans in the power elite.
The incident of the 1999 bombings was the only incident during my time in the New York office that major news outlets were interested in picking up a story about Uzbekistan, as more frequently the news cycle was interested in picking up on the growing threat of terrorism by fundamentalist Islamic groups and the news networks wanted to patch in our correspondent for phone interviews for broadcast, since we were one of the only people with someone on the ground. We would send over a photograph of him to be used on screen, looking like the shiny, fresh faced, clean cut ivy league graduate, which was what he was, apparently, when he was first hired many years earlier. This was the visual over his tired, irritable voice offering laconic statements, qualifying them regularly that it was hard to get accurate information in Uzbekistan.
I finally saw him in person months after the bombings, shortly before he was to be dismissed and thus freeing up the overseas spot that I eventually filled. I couldn't recognize the figure roaming the halls who looked like a homeless person who had wandered in from the street, with the long unwashed hair, grizzled beard, and dirty, slovenly get up. Rumors had it that he went mad after all those years in Tashkent and it was evident in his somnambulist demeanor. When I arrived in Tashkent, no one mentioned his name. No one knew him and it seemed that he didn't get out much, a recluse. He gave the impression that besides living in this remote country, he lived in an isolation that seemed beyond just geographical.
Moving there would be a challenge for me, would force me to confront one of my biggest demons -- a desperate fear of solitude. New York was a well tuned machine to prove the escapism from the inevitability of solitude with plenty of crowds to hide in at all hours, noisy spaces to make you forget, and many people like you offering the occasional relationship or friendship with benefits that promised respite from it. There were so many reasons not to get too close to someone; when you did, when they disappeared and stopped returning your phone calls, say, after you were stuck home alone for a weekend with a cold, the pain of solitude was only worse. Everything that there was to fear, anything I read about in the newspapers, I was susceptible to, be it virulent strains of HIV, a serial killer at large who preys on gay men, horrible stories from the advice column about the way people treated each other only made me more afraid of contact. You were alone, regardless, alone in the world and anything you thought you had today like your relationship, your coop apartment, your health could be gone tomorrow. Leaving, dropping out, throwing it all away in Uzbekistan, I hoped I would learn something along the lines of the lessons of Emerson's self reliance, or Thoreau's self imposed solitude at Walden Pond. I wanted to hear, what Emerson called "the voices which we hear in solitude." It seemed impossible in the big city as "they grow faint and inaudible as we enter into the world." Maybe, confronting solitude, I could grow stronger, and possibly find that calm that Emerson and Waldo found. But would the price mean going a bit mad?
My mother had said that I was "touched in the head." And yet no one eyed me with that look of unease they cast upon someone who looked a little off-kilter. The man in the newspaper kiosk was completely normal when I bought a newspaper. The woman with the newborn sitting next to me on the bench where I sat down smiled, didn't move away with her child that she held protectively close. I scanned the paper; it was so easy to be distracted by the noise all around, the soft steps brushing by of fit bodies jogging by, the spirited dogs barking and their owners calling out to them in the nearby dog run. I wondered how anyone here ever found peace and quiet for the concentration needed to read a newspaper.
But I could not tear myself from an article about a new wave of HIV infections among gay men in New York and San Francisco. As new treatments made HIV a manageable disease, and with the popularity of new recreational drugs on the scene fueling recklessness in sex, a new wave of epidemic hit these gay communities. I read and reread the article before putting down the paper. Living so far away, I knew nothing about this. It was the first time I'd heard of it, and if it was already being written about in the New York Times, it was probably old news.
Funny that HIV was something that I didn’t worry much about anymore. But then again, I stopped worrying about many things there. In Uzbekistan, there was little evidence of HIV, people weren't worried, government statistics were incredibly low; though, I should know better than that. Little evidence of anything in Uzbekistan meant nothing at all, except possibly that people were ignorant or something was well hidden, like the violence, the poverty that people put a nice face on, the corruption that people seemed too embarrassed to talk about. So naturally, I always used condoms though it seemed that no one there ever insisted I do so. Yulia included. For all I knew, she was sleeping around, had many boyfriends, earned her living as a prostitute.
The news about HIV in New York depressed me, New York depressed me. HIV had been a specter that loomed over my sexual coming of age as I watched it destroy a generation of men older than me. It had taught me fear of death. I thought, "here's yet another thing to be scared of, another horrible saddening thing." And it was saddening that I had no idea about it until now, since I had been so far away and out of touch. It felt like there had been a funeral of a friend and no one bothered to invite me.
I heard the steps of a horse and looked up from my paper to see a dashing, smiling New York City Police Department policeman, mounted on a horse, trotting past me, not looking to check my documents or make me feel out of place, a completely non-menacing presence. How quaint the policemen were in New York, unlike their surly peers in Uzbekistan. Every place in the world, it seemed, had something to be afraid of, to bring you down.
Labels: Another horrible saddening thing
¶ 7:43 PM
