The Boy Detective by Roger Rosenblatt Read Free Book Online

cruel, or whatever the reasons we gave for our leaving them. They do not even notice that we left. Knowing this does not affect our decision, of course. We were bound to be exiles, and we have stuck to our guns. Good riddance, we say. The deserted places say nothing. The world does not change according to the way we see it.
    The people we leave go on being themselves after we leave them. Imagine that. And all the influence we exerted upon them, all the delicate maneuvers we pulled off, go away in a trice. Cavafy tells us that the Poseidonians, after centuries of mingling with the corrupting Tyrrhenians and Romans, forgot the Greek language, which they had spoken for centuries before. Only an annual festival recalled the Greek presence, which once had been ubiquitous and deep. Do the people we leave hold a residual festival for us? I doubt it. They merely become the barbarians we always suspected they were before we left. Why do we leave anything? Yet we leave everything.
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    E XCEPT A FGHANISTAN, OF course. One never leaves Afghanistan. In Moby-Dick, old Melville listed his headlines— GRAND CONTESTED ELECTION FOR THE PRESIDENCY OF THE UNITED STATES, WHALING VOYAGE BY ONE ISHMAEL , and BLOODY BATTLE IN AFGHANISTAN . He chose Afghanistan because it has always seemed the most faraway place on earth, perhaps at times to the Afghans themselves. In 1851, when Moby-Dick was published, presidential elections must have seemed equally remote to the average citizen; thus by arranging his items on the bill, Melville was also posing a question: What could the story of one solitary citizen possibly have to do with the big and violent doings of the world? The connections between Ishmael’s Afghans and presidents are rarely seen until too late, least of all by the Ishmaels who go about their solitary businesses deliberately to avoid the big and violent doings.
    Ishmael minimized the significance of his adventure, yet that turned out to offer as grand a contest, as bloody a battle as any. It was the essential journey—the pursuit of the nemesis. The Moriarty. It was not Ishmael’s nemesis being pursued, but he was on the ship, as tied to the pursuit as if he had dreamed it up himself. If Ishmael learns anything from his mad ride with Ahab, it is the detective’s truth, and the writer’s—that no performance is solo, that the one thing you may be sure of is that every human decision, no matter how slight or peculiar, is within reach of every other such decision, as near as Afghanistan. In 2011, we still are in Afghanistan. We are about to hold a presidential election. Call us Ishmael. The street connects us like a hyphen.
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    S EE FOR YOURSELF. Once in a while in my wanderings, I will pass someone who looks both familiar and strange, as if his face were a concoction of features that at once suggested the categories of physiognomy and his inimitable peculiarity. Such a person could be hailed as a long-lost friend one has never met, but there is no name, no identifying label, for someone like that. Nothing would come of the greeting anyway, unless he had reached the same conclusion about me. I would toss him a warm hello, only to be rebuffed, high-hatted. We are so close to being anything but strangers to one another. Yet not so close ever to act on the thought.
    In the blazing window of an electronics store on Thirty-second and Lex, eight flat-screen TVs show a Republican presidential debate. All the candidates, including the women, wear dark blue, which makes the line of them look like the sea at night. Their blue line effects a horizon. The women wear colorful scarves, the men wear colorful neckties. As I watch them, a small Latino in a Yankees jacket and a brown wool cap walks up to stand beside me at the window. After a minute, he asks, without turning to me, “What they say?” “Beats me,” I tell him. “Beats me,” he repeats, as if my answer were a translation.
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