Human Meme

There are forty-one Broadway theatres. That number has been effectively frozen for nearly a century. The oldest of them opened in 1903. The newest was assembled in 1998 from the demolished remains of two older houses. Between those dates, the city tore down theatres, condemned theatres, converted theatres into parking garages and television studios and conference venues. What remains is forty-one buildings, most of them constructed before 1930, clustered in a rectangle of midtown Manhattan roughly thirteen blocks long and three avenues wide. On a Wednesday evening, all of them are running. Forty thousand people sit in the dark simultaneously, watching live performances delivered under more than a dozen separate union contracts, in rooms designed for gas lighting and audiences who arrived by streetcar. That district generated $1.89 billion in gross receipts in the 2024-25 season. Fourteen point seven million admissions. Ninety-one percent of all seats filled. The highest-grossing season in recorded history.

I want to talk about a face. Specifically, I want to talk about the face you see when you look in the mirror and the face other people see when they look at you, and whether those two faces have ever been the same face, and what happens to a person who discovers, at the age of five, that the answer is no, and that the distance between the two can be closed by reaching out and copying someone else's bone structure onto your own skull. That is the premise of my new novel, The Borrowed Saint: A Horror in Five Skins. A boy named Asa Greer stands in a bathroom in Decker, Ohio, and watches his reflection change. His cheekbones soften. His jaw loses its angles. The space between his eyes widens. For three seconds, maybe four, he is looking at the face of the boy next door on his own head. Then it collapses. His own features rush back. And the bathroom is loud again.

I want you to think about the last time you encountered an achievement that seemed too large for the person who produced it. Something that made you pause, narrow your eyes, and reach for the comfortable explanation. Maybe it was a historical figure whose story sounded exaggerated. Maybe it was a living person whose accomplishment struck you as implausible given what you thought you knew about their background, their body, their circumstances. You felt a flicker. A small, quiet impulse that said: that cannot be right.

There is a street in Jersey City called Baldwin Avenue. If you drove down it today you would see nothing unusual. Asphalt. Cars. A fire hydrant. The usual negotiation between infrastructure and weather. But if you had been standing on that street in late September 2013, you would have seen something that has stayed with me for thirteen years. A road crew was rolling fresh asphalt over granite cobblestones. The cobblestones were a hundred and fifty years old. The asphalt would last about twenty. I asked the man operating the road roller why they were burying them. He gave me a one-word answer. Tires. Not cost. Not engineering. Not city planning. Tires. Cobblestones are rough on tires. Asphalt is smooth. The logic was complete.

I want to tell you about something I overheard in a cafe in Newark, New Jersey, about twenty-five years ago, and about the book that grew out of it, and about why it took me a quarter of a century to understand what I heard. I was teaching at the time. A colleague from my department was sitting near the window with her daughter, a young woman just starting her freshman year of college. I came in, we exchanged the usual pleasantries, and then I sat down at the next table and we performed that ritual of urban public life where you pretend you cannot hear the person three feet away from you. But I could hear her. Her voice had changed. It had acquired weight. She was no longer making conversation. She was delivering an instruction. She pointed at her daughter and tapped the table with her finger, and she said: "Go to every funeral. Even if you don't want to. Even if you don't know them. If you know the people around them, you go."