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Fantasy | Sep 28 2001

There is no single word in the English language that means “nightmarish fantasy.” One must either use “fantasy,” a word with misleadingly positive connotations, or suffer one or another adjective-noun combination. The verb form is worse still. Take a look at the following sentence and tell me which word or combination of words could possibly replace “fantasized”:

He fantasized that when he turned the corner to his street, he would see his house ablaze.

“Imagined” is perhaps the best of the bunch, yet it fails to convey even a speck of dread. One is forced to use a much longer construction such as “had the horrible thought” – itself a horrible thought to those of us who like our language concise.

This morning I had the horrible thought that a nuclear bomb had destroyed New York. I am in Cambridge now, which explains how I was able to imagine such a thing and still imagine myself alive. In my imagining (I dare not call it a fantasy), everyone I know in New York had been killed. This included Rachel, of course, and many beloved friends, and also Mayor Gulianni and the woman who owns the Chinese take-out on Marcy, among millions of others. All dead. Moreover (and I’m embarrassed to have thought of this), my computer would be destroyed, along with all my programs and files, which meant that I would need to begin everything again from scratch, assuming that the internet would continue to exist post-bombing and that I would one day return to making websites.

I haven’t a clue how television programs are transmitted, or from where, but I imagined that since the networks are in New York, the entire system would go down. The internet, too, would be severely damaged; although if I understand correctly, the destroyed hubs could be circumvented. Not that it would matter: recent events showed that the web can’t handle the crush of traffic generated by a national crisis. Telephone service, too, would be knocked out or jammed up, further sentencing us to a terrifying silence (though less terrifying, certainly, than the truth).

How then would the world learn that truth? I decided that the first and best witnesses would be the pilots of commercial jets flying in the vicinity of New York. They would initiate a chain of communication that would lead very quickly to the military and the president, who would … well, I had no idea what he would do; something more horrific still.

I’m staying with a friend, Anne, who’s Canadian. “We’d go to Canada,” I thought, “to Nova Scotia, where her aunt lives.” The comfort of this lasted but a moment as I realized that all hell would have since broken loose, making a drive up to Canada impossible. (Could we buy gas? Could we use ATMs? Would our money still be worth anything? Could we cross the border? Would people try to kill us? Would Anne be raped? …)

You see my point, don’t you? The word “fantasy” just doesn’t cut it.