Ben Lerner on Lanternflies and Invasive Voices

The author discusses “The Ferry,” his story from the latest issue of the magazine.
A purple portrait of Ben Lerner on top of a green background with cursive writing on it.
Illustration by The New Yorker; Source photograph by Catherine Barnett

In this week’s story, “The Ferry,” the narrator has received a voice-mail message from a man who is apologizing for having messed up. It’s the wrong number, though. When did you start thinking about this as the premise for a story?

I think I was drawn to the premise because it’s at once so ancient and so new, I mean the premise of receiving messages, hearing voices—as a mark of madness and/or artistic inspiration, for instance. And I’m fascinated by how hard it can be to sort the effects of certain new media from psychosis or séance, all these signals floating through the ether. Has it ever been easier to fall into a paranoid reading of the world and its “signs”? But there is something beautiful about a stray apology suddenly arriving on your phone, the pronouns elastic enough to accommodate you, a kind of poem, maybe an opportunity for you to practice forgiveness, letting go. So even though this story involves sadness and pain and unspecified illness I think the starting point for me was a sense of wonder about how the air is thick with voices.

The narrator works as an archivist, selecting old photographs for digitization. In his own life, he seems to have reached a point where he can’t necessarily judge what to keep and what to delete, like a voice-mail message from his partner, Camila, for example, that gives the story its title. How important is the idea of selection, preservation, and destruction to the story?

It’s central, yes. Like the narrator, I have these messages on my phone that are both too beautiful to delete and too painful to listen to—from my kids when they were younger, from a few of the dead I love. Some of these messages I want to save, but then some I want to let go of—but not merely trash. What if we need rituals around handling those sorts of materials, less a question of mere storage, of megabytes, than of something more like burial or cremation, some kind of ritual destruction that could involve acknowledgment, mourning, meaning? How do you let the voice (or the video or the photo) go?

More generally, a work of art or a library or museum collection or any significant form requires subtraction as much as addition, right? It requires omission, deaccession, etc., not just hoarding. Endless accumulation in an ever-expanding cloud flattens everything; when I take a thousand photographs of my daughters at the playground, I’m more generating data sets for A.I. than documenting anything at a human scale. Maybe some old media (like writing) have a role to play in countering the staggering surpluses of these newer technologies.

As the story opens, the narrator is taking his young daughter to her school-bus stop. They’re stomping on lanternflies as they go. The spotted lanternfly, an invasive pest, was first seen in New York in 2020, and New Yorkers have been urged to kill them on sight. Last August, we saw swarms of them flying past The New Yorker’s office windows, and the pavements were spattered with lanternfly corpses. They’re beautiful, if highly destructive, creatures. When you first saw a lanternfly, did you know that it would make its way into your work? How disconcerting is it to be told to kill a living thing?

They are spooky and beautiful, and also the radio told us to kill them at a moment (which is still this moment) of just total epistemological fragmentation—about masks, vaccines, elections, climate, whatever. And so, when I found myself just kind of gleefully stomping them to death with my daughters because a voice told me to do so, it was a reminder of my own suggestibility; it’s not like I really knew anything about them. I think another reason that they’re in this story is that I’ve often heard insects—dragonflies, for instance—described as messengers from the gods or the dead. So there was something here, too, about mysterious messages, about violent deletion.

The narrator becomes preoccupied by the man who has left the message. He imagines scenarios that the man might be apologizing for. When he sends a polite text message pointing out that he has the wrong number, the man replies with a barrage of abuse. How upsetting is that response? If the narrator were in a less febrile state, would he have been able to dismiss it?

It would certainly have been healthier to dismiss it, but I guess my hope for the story is that it’s not entirely obvious how pathological or reasonable the narrator’s response to that threatening message is. (I mean at first; it’s clear that his response to Camila is beyond unreasonable.) It’s another instance where it becomes difficult to sort paranoia from a technological present in which a staggering amount of personal information can be accessed instantly by anyone. That earlier, more benevolent idea of a generalized apology and possibility of forgiveness gives way to a sense of exposure and menace.

At the end of the day, the narrator picks his daughter up from school. They make their way home slowly, going to a bakery and then to the park. His phone’s battery is empty. When he gets home, Camila is frantic—she had no idea where he and their daughter had gone. He knows he should be reasonable, and he knows that he’s messed up, like the man who left the voice mail, yet he can’t stop trying to make Camila see things from his perspective. Did you always know how this scene would end? Is the story building up to that moment?

I think you’re right that this is the story of how the narrator becomes a version of the threat he fears, as signalled by those instances where he begins to speak the language of the messages he’s received. And he becomes the man in the sense that you can imagine him having left that first message by the story’s end. And clearly (or not so clearly) his own memories and maybe premonitions are caught up in the story he builds around the messages. He also, in that scene, knows he’s out of control—which might be worse than not knowing, if you’re powerless to stop it.

I find it strangely difficult to remember what I knew about a story before I wrote it—it’s like the story erases that knowledge—but I don’t think I had any idea of that scene or how it would end. I definitely had a vision of the idea of the stray, increasingly antagonistic voice mails and the notion of some ritual that would enable those messages to be heard differently or released—I know that was clear because I wrote a poem, “The Signal,” organized around those events, those notions. And a year or two later I started this story with no clear sense of what would happen.

Is the poem in “The Lights,” your forthcoming book?

No, the poem wasn’t good. It was a false start as a poem. Maybe a real start for the story.

Will you share it?

I deleted it. Without ritual. Although I guess you could argue this story is the urn.

Is it really deleted—you don’t have it anywhere?

O.K., I looked, I have it in my Gmail. Because I sent it to a couple of friends for help. I guess almost all the writing I say I’ve deleted is floating around in my Gmail.

Maybe we should conclude with the poem here, then.

Include it here as a way of letting it go?

Yes.

THE SIGNAL

A man was leaving messages on my phone
I texted him to say he had the wrong
intended for his wife or son, pleading
Call me back, I want to make this right, I know
I messed up, I apologize, understand
it will never be the same, but we’ve come
we have worked too hard, we have come
to let it end this way, too far, and I felt
hailed, the small stones of ice on my body
by the pronouns, and left a message saying
I am not the one you are trying to
And then he left another, this one for me
You stupid motherfucker, he said, I’ll kill you
if I find you, how dare you meddle in
I played these for her on the bench
It does not concern you, mind your own
and she was moved, she said they should all
the apologies, threats, be distributed at random
messages in a bottle, but I’m sorry
she said, taking both my hands, which is a thing
that you had to receive his rage
only she does to me, that you’re caught up in it
We were in the park, near the bandshell
that it has lodged somewhere in your
that you will have to locate it, get it out and I
was going to make fun of her, but realized
it was raining a little, that I was
I was moved, all the silver in it, which either
she’d dyed before or didn’t have, and she
tightening her grip, began to speak to him
through me, which is, I guess, the ancient
I have received your message, I cannot
forgiveness is not realistic, but the love
I was looking around, embarrassed, as she spoke
is real, that you are in great pain
is real, streetlights coming on, that what
you have done to me you have done to yourself
and let my hands drop. And I was like
What did we just do, what happened here