"\u003Cimg src=\"http:\u002F\u002Fp1.pstatp.com\u002Flarge\u002Fpgc-image\u002FRXKefncAcpda6M\" img_width=\"400\" img_height=\"524\" alt=\"短篇小说｜Zadie Smith: Escape from New York\" inline=\"0\"\u003E\u003Cp\u003EIt had been a very long time since he’d been responsible for another human. Never had he organized travel for himself or anybody. But it was his fault they were all three in the city, and so it fell to him. There was perhaps even something a little exciting about discovering, for the first time in his life, that he was not useless, that his father was wrong, and in fact he was capable. He called Elizabeth first.\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003E“I’m in a state of terror,” Elizabeth said.\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003E“Wait,” Michael said, hearing a beep on the line. “Let me bring in Marlon.”\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003E“The world’s gone crazy!” Elizabeth said. “I can’t even believe what I’m looking at!”\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003E“Hi, Marlon,” Michael said.\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003E“So—where are we?” Marlon said.\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003E“ ‘Where are we?’ ” Elizabeth said. “We’re in a state of terror, that’s where we are.”\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003E“We’re all right,” Marlon grumbled. He sounded far away. “We’ll handle it.”\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003EMichael could hear Marlon’s TV in the background. It was tuned to the same channel Michael was watching, but only Michael could see the images on the screen replicated simultaneously through his own window, a strange doubling sensation, like when you stand on a stage and look up at yourself on the Jumbotron. Elizabeth and Marlon were staying uptown; normally Michael, too, would be staying uptown—until five days ago he’d almost never set foot below Forty-second Street. Everyone—his brothers and sisters, all his West Coast friends—had warned him not to go downtown. It’s dangerous downtown, it’s always been that way, just stick with what you know, stay at the Carlyle. But because the helipad near the Garden had, for some reason, been out of commission it had been decided he should stay downtown, for reasons of proximity and to avoid traffic. Now Michael looked south and saw a sky darkened with ash. The ash seemed to be moving toward him. Downtown was really so much worse than anyone in L.A. could even begin to imagine.\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003E“Some things you can’t handle,” Elizabeth said. “I’m in a state of terror.”\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003E“There are no flights allowed,” Michael said, trying to feel capable, filling them in. “No one can charter. Not even the very important people.”\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003E“Bullshit!” Marlon said. “You think Weinstein’s not on a plane right now? You think Eisner’s not on a plane?”\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003E“Marlon, in case you’ve forgotten,” Elizabeth said, “I am also a Jew. Am I on a plane, Marlon? Am I on a plane?”\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003EMarlon groaned. “Oh, for Chrissake. I didn’t mean it that way.”\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003E“Well, how the hell did you mean it?”\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003EMichael bit his lip. The truth was, these two dear friends of his were both closer friends to him than they were to each other, and there were often these awkward moments when he had to remind them of the love thread that connected all three, which, to Michael, was so obvious; it was woven from a shared suffering, a unique form of suffering, that few people on this earth have ever known or will ever have the chance to experience, but which all of them—Michael, Liz, and Marlon—happened to have undergone to the highest degree possible. As Marlon sometimes said, “The only other guy who knew what this feels like got nailed to a couple of planks of wood!” Sometimes, if Elizabeth wasn’t around, he would add, “By the Jews,” but Michael tried not to linger on these aspects of Marlon, preferring to remember the love thread, for that was all that really mattered, in the end.\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003E“I think what Marlon meant—” Michael began, but Marlon cut him off: “Let’s focus here! We’ve got to focus!”\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003E“We can’t fly,” Michael said quietly. “I don’t know why, really. That’s just what they’re saying.”\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003E“I’m packing,” Elizabeth said, and down the line came the sound of something precious smashing on the floor. “I don’t even know what I’m packing, but I’m packing.”\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003E“Let’s be rational about this,” Marlon said. “There’s a lot of car services. I can’t think of any right now. On TV you see them. They’ve got all kinds of names. Hertz? That’s one. There must be others.”\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003E“I am truly in a state of terror,” Elizabeth said.\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003E“You said that already!” Marlon shouted. “Get ahold of yourself!”\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003E“I’ll try and call a car place,” Michael said. “The phones down here are kind of screwy.” On a pad he wrote, Hurts.\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003E“Essentials only,” Marlon said, referring to Liz’s packing. “This is not the fucking QE2. This is not fucking cocktail hour with good old Dick up in Saint-Moritz. Essentials.”\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003E“It’ll be a big car,” Michael murmured. He hated arguments.\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003E“It’ll sure as hell have to be,” Elizabeth said, and Michael knew she was being sarcastic and referring to Marlon’s weight. Marlon knew it, too. The line went silent. Michael bit his lip some more. He could see in the vanity mirror that his lip looked very red, but then he remembered that he had permanently tattooed it that color.\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003E“Elizabeth, listen to me,” Marlon said, in his angry but controlled mumble, which gave Michael an inappropriate little thrill; he couldn’t help it, it was just such classic Marlon. “Put that goddam Krupp on your pinkie and let’s get the fuck out of here.”\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003EMarlon hung up.\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003EElizabeth started crying. There was a beep on the line.\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003E“I should probably take that,” Michael said.\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003EAt noon, Michael put on his usual disguise and picked up the car in an underground garage near Herald Square. At 12:27 p.m., he pulled up in front of the Carlyle.\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003E“Jesus Christ that was fast,” Marlon said. He was sitting on the sidewalk, on one of those portable collapsible chairs you sometimes see people bring along when they camp outside your hotel all night in the hope that you’ll step out onto the balcony and wave to them. He wore a funny bucket hat like a fisherman’s, elasticated sweatpants, and a huge Hawaiian shirt.\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003E“I took the superfast river road!” Michael said. He didn’t mean to look too smug about it, given the context, but he couldn’t help but be a little bit proud.\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003EMarlon opened a carton he had on his lap and took out a cheeseburger. He eyed the vehicle.\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003E“I hear you drive like a maniac.”\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003E“I do go fast, Marlon, but I also stay in control. You can trust me, Marlon. I promise I will get us out of here.”\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003EMichael felt really sad seeing Marlon like that, eating a cheeseburger on the sidewalk. He was so fat, and his little chair was under a lot of strain. The whole situation looked very precarious. This was also the moment when he noticed that Marlon wasn’t wearing any shoes.\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003E“Have you seen Liz?” Michael asked.\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003E“What is that hunk of junk, anyway?” Marlon asked.\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003EMichael had forgotten. He leaned over and took the manual out of the glove compartment.\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003E“A Toyota Camry. It’s all they had.” He was about to add “with a roomy back seat” but thought better of it.\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003E“The Japanese are a wise people,” Marlon said. Behind Marlon, the doors of the Carlyle opened and a bellboy emerged walking backward with a tower of Louis Vuitton luggage on a trolley and Elizabeth at his side. She was wearing a lot of diamonds: several necklaces, bracelets up her arms, and a mink stole covered with so many brooches it looked like a pin cushion.\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003E“You have got to be kidding me,” Marlon said.\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003EA logician? A negotiator? Michael did not usually have much call to think of himself in this way. But now, back on the road and speeding toward Bethlehem, he allowed the thought that people had always overjudged and misunderestimated him and maybe in the end you don’t really know a person until that person is truly tested by a big event, like the apocalypse. Of course, people forgot he’d been raised a Witness. In one way or another, he’d been expecting this day for a long, long time. Still, if anyone had told him, twenty-four hours ago, that he would be able to convince Elizabeth—she who once bought a seat on a plane for a dress so it could meet her in Istanbul—to join him on an escape from New York, in a funky old Japanese car, abandoning five of her Louis Vuitton cases to a city under attack, well, he truly wouldn’t have believed it. Who knew he had such powers of persuasion? He’d never had to persuade anyone of anything, least of all his own genius, which was, of course, a weird childhood gift he’d never asked for and which had proved impossible to give back. Maybe even harder was getting Marlon to agree that they would not stop again for food until they hit Pennsylvania. He leaned forward to see if there were any more enemy combatants in the sky. There were not. He and his friends were really escaping! He had taken control and was making the right decisions for everybody! He looked across at Liz, in the passenger seat: she was calm, at last, but her eyeliner continued to run down her beautiful face. So much eyeliner. Everything Michael knew about eyeliner he’d learned from Liz, but now he realized he had something to teach her on the subject: make it permanent. Tattoo it right around the tear ducts. That way, it never runs.\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003E“Am I losing my mind?” Marlon asked. “Or did you say Bethlehem?”\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003EMichael adjusted the rearview mirror until he could see Marlon, stretched out on the back seat, reading a book and breaking into the emergency Twinkies, which Michael thought they had all agreed to save till Allentown.\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003E“It’s a town in Pennsylvania,” Michael said. “We’ll stop there, eat, and then we’ll go again.”\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003E“Are you reading?” Elizabeth asked. “How can you be reading at this moment?”\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003E“What should I be doing?” Marlon inquired, somewhat testily. “Shakespeare in the Park?”\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003E“I just don’t understand how a person can be reading when their country is under attack. We could all die at any moment.”\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003E“If you’d read your Sartre, honey, you’d know that was true at all times in all situations.”\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003EElizabeth scowled and folded her twinkling hands in her lap. “I just don’t see how a person can read at such a time.”\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003E“Well, Liz,” Marlon said, laying it on thick, “let me enlighten you. See, I guess I read because I am what you’d call a reader. Because I am interested in the life of the mind. I admit it. I don’t even have a screening room: no, instead I have a library. Imagine that! Imagine that! Because it happens that my highest calling in life is not to put my fat little hands in a pile of sandy shit outside Grauman’s—”\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003E“Oh, brother, here we go.”\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003E“Because I actually aspire to comprehend the ways and inclinations of the human—”\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003E“_These people are trying to kill us! _” Liz screamed, and Michael felt it was really time to intervene.\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003E“Not us,” he ventured. “I guess, like, not especially us.” But then a thought came to him. “Elizabeth, you don’t think . . . ?”\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003EHe had not thought this thought until now—he had been too busy with logistics—but now he began to think it. And he could tell everyone else in the car was thinking it, too.\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003E“How would I know?” Liz cried, twisting her biggest ring around her smallest finger. “Maybe! First the financial centers, then the government folks, and then—”\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003E“The very important people,” Michael whispered.\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003E“Wouldn’t be at all surprised,” Marlon said, turning solemn. “We’re exactly the kinds of sons of bitches who’d make a nice trophy on some crazy motherfucker’s wall.”\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003EHe sounded scared, at last. And hearing Marlon scared made Michael as scared as he’d been all day. You never want to see your father scared, or your mother cry, and, as far as Michael’s chosen family went, that’s exactly what was happening right now, in this bad Japanese car that did not smell of new leather or new anything. It made him wish he’d tried harder to bring Liza along. On the other hand, maybe that would have been worse. It was almost as if his chosen family were as crushing to his emotional health as his real family! And that thought was really not one that he could allow himself to have on this day of all days—on any day.\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003E“We’re all under a lot of strain,” Michael said. His voice was a little wobbly, but he didn’t worry about crying; that didn’t happen easily anymore, not since he’d tattooed around his tear ducts. “This is a very high-stress situation,” he said. He tried to visualize himself as a responsible, humane father, taking his kids on a family road trip. “And we have to try and love each other.”\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003E“Thank you, Michael,” Elizabeth said, and for a couple of miles all was peaceful. Then Marlon started in again on the ring.\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003E“So these Krupps. They make the weapons that knock off your people, by the millions—and then you buy up their baubles? How does that work?”\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003EElizabeth twisted around in the front seat until she could look Marlon in the eye.\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003E“What you don’t understand is that when Richard put this ring on my finger it stopped meaning death and started meaning love.”\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003E“Oh, I see. You have the power to turn death into love, just like that.”\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003EElizabeth smiled discreetly at Michael. She squeezed his hand, and he squeezed hers back. “Just like that,” she whispered.\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003EMarlon snorted. “Well, good luck to you. But back in the real world a thing is what it is, and thinking don’t make it otherwise.”\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003EElizabeth took a compact from a hidden fold of her stole and reapplied some very red lipstick. “You know,” she told him, “Andy once said it would be very glamorous to be reincarnated as my ring. That’s an actual quotation.”\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003E“Sounds about right,” Marlon said, spoiling the moment and sounding pretty sneery, which seemed, to Michael, more than a little unfair, for whatever you thought about Andy personally, as a person, surely if anybody had understood their mutual suffering, if anyone had predicted, prophet-like, the exact length and strength and connective angles and occasionally throttling power of their three-way love thread, it was Andy.\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003E“ ‘It is no gift I tender,’ ” Marlon read, very loudly. “ ‘A loan is all I can; But do not scorn the lender; Man gets no more from Man.’ ”\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003E“This is not the time for poetry!” Elizabeth shouted.\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003E“This is exactly the time for poetry!” Marlon shouted.\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003EJust then, Michael remembered that there were a few CDs in the glove box. If he believed in anything, he believed in the healing power of music. He reached over to open it and passed the cases to Elizabeth.\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003E“I honestly don’t think we should stop in Ohio,” she said, examining them and then pushing a disk into the slit. “We could take turns driving. We’ll drive through the night.”\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003E“I can’t drive when I’m tired,” Marlon said, hitching himself up into a semi-upright position. “Or hungry. Maybe I should do my shift now.”\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003E“And I’ll do the night shift,” Michael said, brightening, and he began looking for a place to stop. He could not get over how well he was handling the apocalypse so far. Sure, he was terrified, but, at the same time, oddly elated and—vitally—not especially medicated, for his assistant had all his stuff, and he hadn’t told her he was escaping from New York until they were already on the road, fearing his assistant would try to stop him, as she usually tried to stop him doing the things he most wanted to do. Now he was beyond everyone’s reach. He struggled to think of another moment in his life when he’d felt so free. Was that terrible to say? He had to confess to himself that he felt high, and now tried to identify the source. The adrenaline of self-survival? Mixed with the pity, mixed with the horror? He wondered: is this the feeling people have in war zones and the like? Or—another strange thought—was this in fact what civilian people generally feel every day of their lives, in their sad old rank-smelling Toyota Camrys, sitting in traffic on their way to their workplaces, or camping outside your hotel window, or fainting in front of your dancing image on the Jumbotron? This feeling of no escape from your situation—of forced acceptance? Of no escape even from your escape?\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003E“Marlon, did you know that when Liz and I, when we have sleepovers . . . ?” Michael said, a little too quickly, and aware that he was babbling, but unable to stop. “Well, I really don’t sleep at all! Not one wink. Unless you literally knock me out? I’m literally awake all night long. So I’m good to drive all the way to Brentwood. I mean, if we have to.”\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003E“Don’t stop till you get enough,” Marlon murmured, and lay back down.\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003E“I dreamed a dream in time gone byyyyyy,” Liz sang, along with the CD, “when hope was high and life worth liviiiiiiing. I dreamed that love would never diiiiie! I prayed that God would be for-giviiiiing.”\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003EIt was the sixth or seventh go-round. They were almost in Harrisburg, having been considerably slowed by two stops at Burger King, one at McDonald’s, and three separate visits to KFC.\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003E“If you play that song one more time,” Marlon said, eating a bucket of wings, “I’m going to kill you myself.”\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003EThe sun was setting on the deep-orange polyvinyl-chloride blinds in their booth, and Michael felt strongly that his new role as the Decider must also include some aspect of spiritual guidance. To that end, he passed Marlon the maple syrup and said, in his high-pitched but newly determined tones, “You know, guys, we’ve driven six hours already and, well, we haven’t talked at all about what happened back there.”\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003EThey were sitting in an ihop, just the other side of the Appalachian Mountains, with their mirrored shades on, eating pancakes. Michael had decided—two fast-food joints and eighty miles ago—to leave his usual disguise in the trunk of the car. It had become obvious that it wasn’t necessary, no, not today. And now, with an overwhelming feeling of liberation, he removed his shades, too. For as it was in KFC, in Burger King, and beneath the Golden Arches, so it was in this ihop: every soul in the place was watching television. Even the waitress who served them watched the television while she served, and spilled a little hot coffee on Michael’s glove, and didn’t say sorry and didn’t clean it up, nor did she notice that Marlon wasn’t wearing shoes—or that he was Marlon—or that resting beside the salt shaker was a diamond as big as the Ritz.\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003E“I feel like one minute we were in the Garden, and it was a dream,” Elizabeth said, slowly. “And we were happy, we were celebrating this marvellous boy”—she squeezed Michael’s hand—“celebrating thirty years of your wonderful talent, my dear, and everything was just beautiful. And then—” She hugged her coffee mug with both hands and brought it to her lips. “And then, well, ‘the tigers came’—and now it really feels like the end of days. I know that sounds silly, but that’s how it feels to me. There’s a childlike part of me that just wants to rewind twenty-four hours.”\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003E“Make that twenty-four years,” Marlon snapped, but with his classic wry Marlon smile, and all you could do was forgive him. “Scratch that,” he said, hamming it up now. “Make it forty.”\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003EElizabeth pursed her lips and made an adorable comic face. She looked like Amy, in “Little Women,” doing some sly calculation in her head. “Come to think of it,” she said, “forty would work out just swell for me, too.”\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003E“Not me,” Michael said, letting a lot of air out of his mouth in a great rush so that he would be brave enough to say what he wanted to say, whether or not it was appropriate, whether or not it was the normal kind of thing you said in abnormal times like these. But perhaps this was his only real advantage, in this moment, over every other person in the ihop and most of America: nothing normal had ever happened to him, not ever, not in his whole conscious life. And so there was a little part of him that was always prepared for the monstrous, familiar with it, and familiar, too, with its necessary counterbalancing force: love. He reached across the table and took the hands of his two dear friends in his own.\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003E“I don’t want to be in any other moment than this one,” he told them. “Here. With you two. No matter how awful it gets. I want to be with you and with all these people. With everyone on earth. In this moment.”\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003EThey were all silent for a second, and then Marlon raised his still gorgeous eyebrows, sighed, and said, “Hate to break it to you, buddy, but you don’t have much choice about it either way. Looks like no one’s gonna beam us up. Whatever this shit is”—he gestured toward the air in front of them, to the molecules within the air, to time itself—“we’re stuck in it, just like everybody.”\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003E“Yes,” Michael said. He was smiling, and it was the presence of a smile—unprecedented in that ihop, on that day—that, more than anything else, finally attracted the waitress’s attention. “Yes,” he said. “I know.”\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003E\u003Cstrong\u003E作者：\u003C\u002Fstrong\u003E\u003Cstrong\u003EZadie Smith\u003C\u002Fstrong\u003E\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003E\u003Cstrong\u003E来源：\u003C\u002Fstrong\u003E\u003Cstrong\u003E纽约客（2015.06.01）\u003C\u002Fstrong\u003E\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003E\u003Cstrong\u003E【更多·纽约客短篇小说】\u003C\u002Fstrong\u003E\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003E\u003Cstrong\u003EPrimo Levi: Quaestio de Centauris\u003C\u002Fstrong\u003E\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003E\u003Cstrong\u003EBen Marcus: The Grow-Light Blues\u003C\u002Fstrong\u003E\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003E\u003Cstrong\u003ELouise Erdrich: The Flower\u003C\u002Fstrong\u003E\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cimg src=\"http:\u002F\u002Fp3.pstatp.com\u002Flarge\u002Fpgc-image\u002FR69MnxW3IsH9KU\" img_width=\"640\" img_height=\"12\" alt=\"短篇小说｜Zadie Smith: Escape from New York\" inline=\"0\"\u003E\u003Cp\u003E\u003Cstrong\u003E翻吧·与你一起学翻译\u003C\u002Fstrong\u003E\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cp\u003E微信号：translationtips\u003C\u002Fp\u003E\u003Cimg src=\"http:\u002F\u002Fp1.pstatp.com\u002Flarge\u002Fpgc-image\u002FR6GGNCl3FFJVdo\" img_width=\"200\" img_height=\"105\" alt=\"短篇小说｜Zadie Smith: Escape from New York\" inline=\"0\"\u003E"'.slice(6, -6), groupId: '6717947183263384075