notes from the garden

it is an old arena. the capacity is 19,500 and the arena is always full now. always full and there is a man sitting in his chair and a wall filled with screens. the man sees everyone and everything. the man knows who is on the street next to the arena and he can see the two women buying a michelob and the man is looking for a reason. the team is very good now and it was not for a long while and the fans are still angsty and so the man must listen closely. a father hands a bucket of popcorn to his daughter and the man behind the desk labels her a PRIORITY 9¹. a teenager yells out that the owner sucks and the man behind the desk scours the footage to find him because this is a PRIORITY 2 now and there must be a write-up and a warning. because the team is very good now.

the team’s star is 6’1” and about 190 pounds. he is a bully and a murderer and he wants to put you on his hip. he likes to move quickly and then very slowly and then faster than you can think. he drives his shoulder into your chest and before your body knows what to do, you are three feet away and he has gotten you.² he looks like he is falling but his shoulders are square and his hips are locked in and the ball flies 15 feet and when it kisses the backboard, the net cannot help but fall in love with him. he does not need to jump but when he shoots, his head rises two feet and his elbow sticks out about 10 degrees to the left and you could shine a laser in his eye and he would not flinch. we do not think artists are brutes and so he is not an artist. he keeps his feet right beneath him, and he is an avowed liar but his feet give him away. he is always on a very thin rope above a very deep canyon but the line does not get away from him and some stars bring a picnic basket and rest their head on a sweater when they walk this rope but his gaze cannot break. the man is almost 30 and soon enough he will not be able to rock you. and if the man decided to stop trying today the team would still have to pay him a hundred million dollars and his teammates a two-hundred-and-twenty million and if they wanted to blow it all up, they would very quickly be bad and for a very long time again they would not be able to get out of it.

it is an organic intelligence here. reports are written in microsoft word, with the imported header graphics and the 10pt thickness tables that describe in remarkable detail all that the man behind the desk can see. the cameras are always watching but the men will patrol the streets and sweep away the homeless and clear the parking lot. on occasion the men will embed themselves within the protests always camping outside the arena. one imagines they wear fake glasses with the big rubber nose and the bushy mustache, but it is more likely that they wear completely black hats with a non-descript hoodie and good walking shoes and inconspicuous cameras that feed the servers.³ every week there are more guards coming in and guards going out, and every week they are told to watch closely and engage with caution and if the word comes down, to follow it to the letter.

employees are not named and when they speak with the press later, they warn the reporters to keep an eye out for tails and to meet only outdoors far away from the arena and one employee passes by the journalist on a busy street in manhattan, hands him a file, and before the journalist knows what happened, the employee disappears. because the owner has invested a billion in cameras that can see through walls and specialized metal detectors and algorithms that recognize faces. the computer knows that you favor your right side by 1.87˚ with a leisurely arm-swing pattern and when the team is winning, your pace elevates 2.41% with slightly-increased swing control and when they are losing your pace decreases 5.23%. the computer will not forget it even if you are making your way up sands avenue to koval lane three-thousand miles away from the arena, and you damn sure better hope the guards there find no reason to escort you off the property. and so in this sense it is an artificial intelligence.

but there is still a moment in this piece. this trans woman who adores the knicks and goes to all the games and this trans woman with 44,000 followers on instagram, this trans woman who is here because she loves the knicks even though it is 2021 and the team has not been good in years. she is taller and larger, at the very least described this way and the journalists call her nina richards but this is not her real name. the man behind the screens has hundreds of people who rely on him and oligarchs who listen closely when he speaks. and he cannot stop watching richards. the cameras catch her when she is going to buy a snack and later when she sits down at her seats and then when she hugs the section’s security guard and it is watching when the team is down 40 and few remain in the stands. she stays because these are the knicks and this is her team. and the computer is very much watching her.

the woman wanders to the seats closer to the flo⁴or as fans are wont to do when the team is losing and the woman speaks to security and they let her take a seat on celebrity row. her presence there is noted and logged and as she walks along the floor, she asks a friend to take her picture. she posts this image on instagram with a caption reading: “What a great night. I pray that this new year brings more peace, love and understanding to everyone.” the man finds this image and adds it to the file and soon thereafter the man bans nina richards from msg and she retreats from public life. an employee named ingrasselino says that the man behind the screens thought the presence of a visibly-trans woman on celebrity row in clear view of the broadcast cameras would be “unseemly,” and it is implied that the camera was waiting intently for a reason to punish her.⁵

there is a feeling or tenor or tendency or idea in the words of the journalists of things-coming. that it is all from the owner and he has devised this system as a means by which to rid his little domain of all the doubters and detractors and people he does not want. a man worth a billion dollars crouched over a little desk with mucus pouring out of his nose and dried sweat gluing his skin to his shirt, crouched over this little desk, ordering goons to scare his peasants. and computers that recognize you and algorithms that say you gotta go and this whole universe of things totally invisible that will soon enough decide where and how you are allowed to exist. it is alfred krupp’s villa hugel, its tunnels and secret doors and untouched passageways and only he knew how to get around and he was perched up and peering through the cracks and when he watched his guests undress in their rooms, he would leave them a note informing them he did not care for the trousers they were wearing.⁶

this is an old kind of future and jalen brunson is of course a very old type of star. he is a gravedigger. he likes to be in the post and to junk it up in the paint, to score more than to pass with more girth than guile but he is a ruthlessly good dancer. his is that conventional style, that bullheaded style, and you don’t have to squint all that much and you can see isaiah thomas leaping three feet off the ground to get to his middie and jameer nelson rumbling through the lane and kyle lowry barely grazing the rim. it is the sudden and familiar appearance of the pittie before the buffalo, the wonder-of-the-untrampled. but i want to say that the owner is new, at the very least that there is something in that room that is stranger at a more metaphysical level, an inkling of another kind of future that may or, indeed, may not come to pass unlike in some fundamental way villa hugel.

where he comes from or how he got this job or why dolan trusts him or the precise extent of his authority i do not know. but it is generally clear that he is of a certain ilk. he served in the military and probably the department of defense and probably other places. his eyes are entirely unchilling and his smile is probably warm, and he does not need fatigues. employees report that he keeps his hand on his gun when he walks through the office and he orders his men around like a drill sergeant. when he meets new clients he asks “Do you know what they’re doing with your garbage?”and when he meets a new client he tells them he was born a sheepdog and they do not how easy it would be to kill them.

there is the desire to place him in a room full of bright screens with immaculately cool walls and a hopelessly complex projection of the property with realtime models with variously-assigned threat assessments and a small platoon of uniformed technicians each tasked with monitoring the property’s myriad interconnected spaces. one can almost see the man wading through this sea of azure light with fingers placed precisely beneath his chin and a spine that has never once crouched. but the owner is cheap and it is probably truer to say that he sits beneath popcorn ceilings and moths who died in the yellowy fluorescents with a walkie-talkie on his hip and knives hidden somewhere on his person.

because it is all really about a million faces we don’t remember making and words we don’t remember saying, a shape quite like all others. these mundane feelings of fear or concern or insecurity. all pressing to us and unique, born from specific conditions and yet generally of a predictable kind of shape.⁷ we have been watched for long enough and with careful enough attention it is to some degree certain that someone, somewhere has been able to articulate the ability to understand us, this what is happening is fine and normal, your life is not over, but there are certain things you must remember and you will get out of this. and it is even more certain that they have done so in front of a microphone and that with little effort the basic pattern of response can be replicated. what is artificial is really what has happened and could happen, and what is likely to happen; the promise of security, that is, the expectation of what will and will not happen.

and yet brunson screams when okongwu touches his shoulder and the ref blows his whistle. the crowd brays when brunson smacks his chest and when he goes to sleep at night all this grifting does not really bother him. he is here because he took less money to stay here and because wherever he goes in the city the people shout his name and children wear his jersey. this is the human part, that unpredictable and irreducible human intelligence. because of course all jimmy dolan really wants is to put on his stupid fucking fedora with his dumbass little sunglasses and sing to a crowd, and of course, former secretary of labor lori chavez-deremer had to step down for spending taxpayer money on vacations and drinking on the job and fucking her security detail.⁸

there is a kind of wonder to the things that we do when we are not supposed to; the ways we are predicted fail and that we keep failing exactly how we should. something that cannot be taken later nor truly apprehended in advance, undeniably and inevitably true. because when brunson’s knees are ground to dust and his weight won’t toss around the same way and he has still not won, we will look to the stars and the stars will have spelled out his fate and truly when we hear his name in 30 years, we will still feel like he could’ve done the th⁹ing.