THENEWYORKER,DECEMBER16, 2019 59
drifted through the grid. I’d forgotten
what Gibson had said about brutality,
Canadian style, until someone pushed
a shopping cart past me. We were there:
across from the restaurant, a tent city
huddled in the dusk.
N
ot long afterward, Gibson came
to New York. We had coffee at a
counter in Chelsea Market, near the
logoed elevators leading to YouTube’s
offices. Then we entered Artechouse, a
high-tech exhibition space, to check
out “Machine Hallucination,” a video
installation by Refik Anadol, a Turkish
artist. The installation was designed to
conjure a sleek, data-saturated metrop-
olis: computer-generated images pulsed
and swam over the walls and floor of a
large subterranean room, as though every
surface were a screen. Instead of talk-
ing—it was impossible to converse over
the synthesized soundtrack—people
posted videos from their phones. In a
sage-green MA-1 with black sleeves—
an ahistorical, experimental make—and
a wool baseball cap, Gibson leaned
against a pillar, illuminated by vivid,
geometric images evocative of the de-
cades-old cyberspace of “Neuromancer.”
Eventually, the images shifted: colorful
layers of hand-size pixels suggested a
Pointillist cyberspace for the neural-net-
work age. Gibson smiled sympatheti-
cally: it was hard to invent visual met-
aphors for the digital world.
Leaving “Machine Hallucination”
meant crossing a floor of radiant C.G.I.
We shuffled vertiginously to one door,
then another, then another, before find-
ing the real exit and escaping to a lobby.
“Jesus Christ,” Gibson said, blink-
ing. “Those cyberspace cowboys, they
deal with that shit every day!”
Chelsea Market’s retro brands sur-
rounded us—a cheesemonger, a hot-
sauce emporium—each with its own
distinctive design language. Neon,
chrome, veneer; historical typography,
the New York of the past. It was as if,
having emerged from one William Gib-
son novel, we had entered another.
“Which way do we go?” Gibson asked.
“I think this way,” I said, indicating
a purveyor of Australian meat pies.
“Make a wrong turn down here and
you’ll be in the headquarters of You-
Tube,” Gibson mused. “You’ll never get
out. Never! You think Facebook is bad?
Those YouTube motherfuckers—they
will really fuck you up.”
We took a cab to dinner at Lucky
Strike, a French bistro in SoHo that Gib-
son enjoys. In the back seat, sitting next
to him, I thought of the surprising ten-
derness in his recent novels: in “Agency,”
a man works from home while taking
care of his baby, as Gibson once did. (Un-
like Gibson, he uses a telepresence head-
set.) It used to be, Gibson had told me,
that a defensive membrane divided his
life from his work. He could consider
the future as a professional, without pic-
turing his own life, his kids’ lives. “I never
wanted to be the guy thinking about
‘Mad Max’ world,” he said. “I had some
sort of defense in place.... It’s denial,
some kind of denial. But denial can be
a lifesaving thing, in certain lives, in cer-
tain times. How on earth did you get
through that? Some reliable part of you
just says, It’s not happening.” The mem-
brane, he went on, “which I very, very
much miss, actually held until the morn-
ing after Trump’s election. And I woke
up and it was gone, whatever it was. It
was just gone, and it’s never come back.”
At dinner, Jack Womack joined us.
The restaurant was loud and dimly lit,
its tables and chairs artfully cheap, the
specials written on mirrors in white pen.
Attractive drinkers, dressed in black,
raised coupe glasses. At our corner table,
conversation turned to the jackpot.
“What I find most unsettling,” Gib-
son said, “is that the few times that I’ve
tried to imagine what the mood is going
to be, I can’t. Even if we have total, mag-
ical good luck, and Brexit and Trump
and the rest turn out as well as they pos-
sibly can, the climate will still be happen-
ing. And as its intensity and steadiness
are demonstrated, and further demon-
strated—I try to imagine the mood, and
my mind freezes up. It’s a really grim
feeling.” He paused. “I’ve been trying to
come to terms with it, personally. And
I’ve started to think that maybe I won’t
be able to.”
Womack nodded. “My daughter’s
sixteen and a half,” he said. “Sixty years
from now, she’ll be in her mid-seven-
ties. I have absolutely no idea what the
physical world will be like then. What
the changes will be.”
“It’s totally new,” Gibson said. “A
genuinely new thing.” He looked away
from us, into the room. Another song
came on the sound system. Incandes-
cent light gilded the mirrors. A young
woman in round glasses leaned back in
her chair. I felt, suddenly, that we were
all living in the past.
“Can I look at my phone now?”
• •
