War
I am writing this paragraph on a Ryanair flight, which, if you’re reading this, was fated to land safely in Vilnius, having crossed the so-called Suwalki Gap, which in the eyes of at least my parents is guarded by the Scylla of Kaliningrad’s rockets and the Charybdis of Belarussian MiGs. Indeed, the landscape is becoming more ominous the further east we fly: the earth looks browner, the lakes are still frozen, ringed by eczematic rime, and the lengthening shadows make the forests look like charging infantry. We are supposed to all meet to celebrate my grandfather’s ninetieth birthday but, at least until Ukraine gifted us spectators the frisson of feeling brave without personally facing any risk, the worry among Lithuanians has been that we (maybe better to say they) might be next. Maybe we (or they) will be. For myself I am taking comfort in the idea that Putin, under the principle that it’s beneath someone with a nuclear arsenal to go around kicking trash cans, would not shoot a missile at, of all things, a Ryanair flight.
On Twitter, the war becomes another basketball game, albeit one that is almost unlimited in court-size, duration, and number of players, such that after so many hours of looking through clips and analysis, which even in their multitude can only cover a trivial fraction of the whole, the experience begins to feel like a séance, each tweet a lamb knuckle. It’s one of our paradoxes that, although at first we’re desperate for information, the more 1s and 0s we get to paw the more we become desperate for a simple yes or no.
Waiting patiently in a forest. Creeping off a shadowed wall to fire my gun through the window. Downloading a how-to for a fertilizer bomb. Since the war started I can’t leave my computer without being inundated by these absurd fantasies, which feel all the more vivid and necessary when a friend rolls their eyes at them. Are these atavistic puppet strings, pulled from across the centuries by some greater-grandfather to marshal his progeny, under the assumption that even if half die his seed will net-net still be better off? Or is it a childhood of playing video games? Of course, I’d be useless either way. The bomb I crafted would be so pretty and intricate that I’d shrink from ever blowing it up, preferring, I guess, to put it away and hope for birth of a militaria folk art movement.
The rideshare driver who picked me up from the airport was exceedingly meek and solicitous, and without saying a word. In fact, the first sound I heard from his direction was the booming voice of his map app, which announced the coming turn in Russian. With a somewhat embarrassed discretion, he silenced it, and we rode the rest of the way in silence, him occasionally peeking at his phone.
If aggression can be pleasing to think about, even soothing, it’s because it’s the rare act that is both unconventional and deeply uncreative. A friend who’s traveling at the moment stumbled upon the super yacht of a Kremlin-connected oligarch anchored at sea. But what to do with that knowledge? The options are all cliché (destroy, deface, damage), yet I’d be impressed, even envious, if he performed any of them. Because he’d risk himself? Like someone dropping hints about their mediocre secret, we like angling to be asked: what are you willing to die for? Dying is conventional, and that’s the point. I suck on this question like a bon-bon, relieved not to be thinking about the question that actually does demand my higher faculties: how are you going to live?