3 am and I’m running on empty, so I decide to take a walk.

Cambridge is a safe city but different at night. During the daytime it’s something out of a Rick Steves PBS travel special, all Cathedral spires and cafés and bike-based British hustle bustle. At night the kids flood into the clubs in the heart of the city and are eventually expelled from them in punctuated arterial pulses, first wave at one, then two, then three. By four in the morning you can see the remainder of them queued up for taxis on each thoroughfare, a motley mess of drippy mascara and sequins.

I know this as I head out but I go anyway, dressed to signal I’m not a part of it.

My street is dark and placid, but I can see the baskets torn off bikes. They do things like that. As I walk toward the city center I can hear music faintly through walls, or the low grinding beat anyway. And then I start to see them; the first one is a guy who walks toward me with his hand outstretched repeating his name and saying skins? skins? I manage to avoid him by pretending he isn’t there.

It’s best just to observe. I round the corner onto the main thoroughfare and I’m suddenly swallowed into a crowd. There must be hundreds out here, stumbling and laughing and shouting. Some guys are having a fight in an alley that I can hear echoing over the roar of other noise. Taxis pass and their headlights flash in body glitter and what must be yards of latex and lamé. Across the street from me I notice a girl crouched against a building, her elbows draped over her knees. She’s in some miniscule club dress an high heels and there’s vomit on the ground in front of her, and because she isn’t wearing any underwear her genitals are exposed. People shout things at her as they pass.

I continue up toward what is usually a thriving outdoor market but at night is a ghost town of stalls and tent flanked by the city’s only McDonald’s, which is open all night on Fridays and Saturdays. It’s a little muggy out, probably for the first time this year, and I figure I’ll grab a shake or something before I head back in for another three or four hours of dissertation.

A guy is laying on the steps of a shop inset from the sidewalk throwing up. It looks a little like the dying gaul, the way he’s pushed up and leaning off to the side heaving. There’s another one, too, in the road a few yards ahead: taxi traffic is stalled and honking behind him, and I can only make out his silhouette for the brightness of the lights. He’s sitting on his knees and pitching forward from time to time to puke.

All of the trashcans here are overflowing with big mac boxes and fry cartons; I guess by nature of being the only late night venue in town McDonald’s does pretty good business on the weekends. In the alley leading to the door there are swarms of people, some of them singing, some girls carry their high heels as they stumble along. It smells sour and yeasty like you can sweat beer. Inside the McDonald’s is actually worse, extremely humid and boiling hot. A topless woman with a glittery butterfly wing painted on her face is seated at the first table in the door and toward the back it just gets worse and worse, louder and more cacophonous.

The line is about forty or fifty people deep and indistinct so I just stand at the back of the crowd. I watch a couple of girls sift up beside me and try to advance their place in line by grinding with the guys in front of them, which seems to work. A couple of people, at least one of whom is male, fall into line behind me. The crush is close enough for me to overhear everything they’re saying to each other, though their accents are very regional and slurred and I only make out about thirty percent of what’s being said.

But I realize before I get near the counter that they’re not talking anymore, just murmuring, and then breathing hard and vocal. I suspect by the periodic shift of someone’s knuckles against the small of my back something is going on, and when I surreptitiously glance over my shoulder I confirm the person standing behind the guy with an arm around him is jacking him off in his jeans.  But I’m distracted by a fight at the front of the line; one of the combatants is American and is saying something about the length of time he’s been here as he shoves some other guy into the wall.

Eventually McDonald’s security personnel, which I did not know existed until this moment, shove though the herd and intervene. As this happens I hear a guy who is now standing beside me ask the girl in front of me her age. She has cotton candy colored hair and says she’s sixteen.

I get my shake. Out on the street the night is undiminished. A group of people with jackets reading STREET PASTOR are now crowded around the dying gaul, one of them mentioning paramedics. I pause and pop my earbuds out to ask them who they are and they tell me about their ministry, which is pretty cool. As I head on my way I’m confronted before I can put my earbuds back in by some guy who again aggressively wants to shake hands, which I resist; he says I’m pretty cute but then, after a moment of intense peering, informs me I’m actually not. His friend laughs and they shove playfully as they head on down  the street opposite me.

I’m reminded of The Satyricon, the first century Roman novel by Gaius Petronius lampooning the culture of Nero’s Rome. It’s the kind of book that makes you realize how necessary all those Pauline vice catalogs really were. It’s incomplete, with chunks lost to time, but the general thrust of the plot is that two former gladiators, Encolpius and Ascyltus, are at war for the affections of Encolpius’ sixteen-year-old male slave Giton, who despite having the interest of both men seems to distribute his sexual attentions evenly across Roman society. It’s a work of satire that skewers the very worst of Roman excess and party culture, from social climbing to orgiastic sexuality to waste and casual violence. For something written in the first century it is genuinely funny, though darkly; when I read it as a teenager I remember the most revolutionary suggestion to me being that if you did it enough sex could get boring.

As I reread it throughout the years the most disturbing thing about it is to me now Giton’s total lack of psychology. Every chapter someone is trying (usually succeeding) to nail this kid and you never really have any notion of his thoughts on the matter, maybe because he is a slave. Whatever the reason he’s a blank spot in the narrative’s thinking, and only when I noticed that did I begin to see that no one around him seems to care. He’s easily the most desired object in his world, but that intensity is sustained in short bursts punctuated by periods of total indifference. Nobody really engages with him — or anyone else.

This is the real eeriness of Th Satyricon. In his 1969 film version Fellini brings this aspect of the novel to life exquisitely. Though the streets are bustling and the banquet halls are packed and the baths are teeming and everyone seems always locked in coitus there is nonetheless an overwhelming distance between each of them, and the overall impression is one of profound loneliness. Voices echo in crowded rooms as though they were empty. Wide kohl-rimmed eyes stare blankly in conversation as though lost in thought. Figures drift on and off screen motioning and talking to themselves evidently unseen. There is no sustained loyalty just like there is no sustained enmity: either one requires some bond between people, and that is the Satyricon’s ultimate poverty.

So it goes with Cambridge late at night, where shaking hands and introductions, the initiation of a relationship, becomes a parody of itself that emphasizes disinterest and distance. And it would be pretty easy to chalk the whole thing up to that sort of person, whatever that sort is, but here I’m reminded also of a story quite unlike The Satyricon: Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas. (I actually have a .pdf of this story, so if you want it, email me.)

Omelas concerns a fictional city that is nearly the perfect opposite of Nero’s Rome: the people are erudite, kind, conscientious and deeply engaged in civic and social life; they are mature and intelligent and complex and their city sparkles by the sea. Omelas is a seemingly peaceful and vibrant city, but as each adolescent in the city comes of age they’re shown to the lower portions of a tower where the city’s secret is concealed: a tortured child kept in absolute isolation and squalor who begs for help but can never receive it, because this child bears all the pain and privation of the whole city. Upon discovering this, the majority of people choose to remain in Omelas, but some refuse to be a part of a system that relies upon the destruction of even a single excluded person, and they walk away.

Once the reader realizes that everyone in the city knows all their happiness to be the result of the unconscionable abuse of an Other, it all seems empty, amoral, decadent. It was beautiful insofar as it was good, but as much as the goodness is destroyed so is the beauty. The people who walk away are dissenting but authentic; the ones who remain are only performing a charade of relationships, because the very basis of their ‘togetherness’ is the total abject exclusion of one person. Their community is built on a fundamental estrangement, which undermines the authenticity of all their relationships.

What goes on in the dark lower portion of that tower, that is, echoes in the light. The same is true of our world, as it was of Nero’s. It’s both facile and self-congratulatory to imagine the culture of night is wholly different than the culture of day; they’re informed by the same principles, in our case a commodification of people and subsequently a reduction of relationships to transactions. Nobody can really fathom an obligation to other people; a prominent theme of discourse among the young is, after all, the myriad things you don’t owe anyone. Or, as Bonhoeffer would have it:

Whereas the previous spiritual form had grown up upon the basis of love, the fall changed this to selfishness. This gave rise to the break in immediate communion with God, as it did to immediate communion with man…Whereas the primal relationship of man is a giving one, in the state of sin it is purely demanding. Every man exists in a state of complete voluntary isolation; each man lives his own life instead of all living the same life in God.

Fractures in genuine community that deep may be more visible at night, when people aren’t as sensible about participating in the social norms that perpetuate an image of community, but they’re there all the time. What echoes in the dark sounds in the light of day. There’s a reason, after all, that the antidote to an economy of exclusion is not merely an economy of inclusion — that would undershoot the problem and merely treat the symptom — but rather an authentic culture of encounter. This is because the very culture that leads us to shape economies of exclusion into what they are — essentially Omelas-esque structures that support some at the terrible expense of others — is a culture of fractured relationships and incredible distance. Authentic encounter is the only challenge to that culture, and the final cure.

Which is not to say, as some do, that the policies that can lessen the harm of cultures of exclusion should be foregone because they’re not the final cure; this is tantamount to saying physicians should refuse palliative care for terminal illnesses: why perpetuate suffering, if something can be done? But it is to say that even the observers who aren’t a part of the lonely landscapes that darkly echo cultures of exclusion still have an obligation to try and reshape their cultures into something more amenable to genuine encounter.