The Monster (Charles Dickens)

On a dreary afternoon, Harriet Carker pauses from her needlework to gaze at the scene outside her window.

She often looked with compassion, at such a time, upon the stragglers who came wandering into London, by the great highway hard by, and who, footsore and weary, and gazing fearfully at the huge town before them, as if foreboding that their misery there would be but as a drop of water in the sea, or as a grain of sea-sand on the shore, went shrinking on, cowering before the angry weather, and looking as if the very elements rejected them. Day after day, such travellers crept past, but always, as she thought, in one direction—always towards the town. Swallowed up in one phase or other of its immensity, towards which they seemed impelled by a desperate fascination, they never returned. Food for the hospitals, the churchyards, the prisons, the river, fever, madness, vice, and death—they passed on to the monster, roaring in the distance, and were lost.

Dombey and Son

"Dark deeds of licentiousness and vice"

"Sometime in March last, a gentleman who lives in Portsmouth N. H., being on a visit to Boston, was induced by a friend of this city, to visit, out of curiosity, the third row, in the Tremont Theatre. In all cities, this part of the theatre is well understood to be the resort of the very dregs of society. Here the vile of both sexes meet together, and arrange their dark deeds of licentiousness and vice. Soon after entering the common hall, this Portsmouth gentleman was struck with the very youthful and innocent countenance of one of the girls in the crowd. He sought an opportunity to speak to her. After some light observations to engage her attention, and not excite any suspicions, but that he was one among the rest, he asked her to walk a little aside, when he inquired how she came to her present condition, &c. He learned that she was from L_______, Vt., that she was very unhappy in her situation, but did not know how to get out of it...

"We warn parents in the country, to be careful about permitting their daughters to go to factories, and especially about coming to Boston. There are men here who have the appearance of gentlemen, who, by the most seductive pretensions, and consummate artifice, seek every opportunity to ruin the innocent and unwary. They do this too, without the least remorse; they even make a boast of their ruined victims. Trust not, then, your daughters here, unless you can secure the watchful care of some well known friend. O how many who have come to this city, innocent and unsuspecting, have been soon snared in the trap of the deceiver, and here found an early, and a dishonorable grave!"

Zion’s Herald, May 9, 1838

Adrift

He arrived knowing nothing of the city and no one there. Cities in general were mysteries to him, this one, which he had no ties to, most of all. What did he expect to find there? What did he have to offer?

The trolleys and bus station were run down, the domain of mumbling alcoholic ghosts. The museum was closed for restoration. The sidewalks downtown were torn up, vacant lots boarded over, stores shut behind steel curtains, out of business, waiting for a renewal that showed no sign of coming. Only the streets, arteries jammed with cabs and utility vans, seemed to function.

The river made a hairpin turn through the center of town, crossed by aging iron spans. Barges lay moored along the shore but never seemed to move. Deserted warehouses, their siding shredded, their rooves broken, sagged amid eddies of dust and trash.

A park opened out along one shore on the outskirts leading north, and under the great oaks and balding sycamores leaves blew about, their colors fading to rust. Radios blared from picnickers far off, and a soccer game was in progress. The sun at least was warm and strong. He skirted the edge of the field, watching strangers.

The further out of town he went the more the city seemed to come alive, though not in order to beckon to him. Little shops with Coca-Cola signs stood open among rowhouses; groups of men clustered outside eyed him critically, their conversations breaking off as he approached. He decided he had come too far, cut back across the park, heading south again towards whatever was going to pass for now for home.

Berlin (Jason Lutes)

Two brilliant pages from Jason Lutes's mammoth graphic novel set in the waning years of the Weimar Republic.

Berlin is published by Drawn & Quarterly.

City

I'm walking the dog home across a city that bears little relation to the real one, as if Robert Moses had succeeded in his nefarious scheme to plow an expressway through lower Manhattan. On a quiet Greenwich Village street I notice a small garden with a few plants and decorations, and I say to myself, "A real hippy must live there." Up ahead, a pickup truck approaches; as it passes I see a young woman standing in the back. She's singing these words:

I'm proud to be a New York City hippy
I'm proud of dirty feet and dirty hair
I'm proud of living with the cock-a-roaches
I'm proud of living in a garbage can*

I recognize the song, and the woman is stunned when I join in halfway through. The truck keeps going. There's nothing left for me to do but pick my way east through the cloverleafs and dead ends, heading home.

* Actual song by David Peel, c. 1972.

Tower

In the office on the 73rd floor, high above the city, the president of the company passes me a handful of letters to mail and a note with the deli order for lunch. "Quickly!," he shouts, and I rush to the elevator, which swiftly descends the great steel and glass tower until its doors open at the ground floor. A rush of wind hits me as I exit through revolving doors, and the letters are blown from my hand and scattered. Pedestrians hurrying in and out of the building trample the letters and leave their footprints on them. I gather them up and enter the deli, but there's a crowd ahead of me struggling to be served and in the confusion I drop the letters again. Now they're torn, soiled with beef blood and grease. I run outside looking for a mailbox, for a place to wash my hands, but all in vain...

Notes for a commonplace book (17)

Luc Sante:

The game may not be over, but its rules have irrevocably changed. The small has been consumed by the big, the poor have been evicted by the rich, the drifters are behind glass in museums. Everything that was once directly lived has moved away into representation. If the game is ever to resume, it will have to take on hitherto unimagined forms. It will have much larger walls to undermine, will be able to thrive only in the cracks that form in the ordered surfaces of the future. It is to be hoped, of course, that the surface is shattered by buffoonery and overreaching rather than war or disease, but there can be no guarantee. It may be that whatever escape routes the future offers will be shadowed by imminent extinction. Life, in any case, will flourish under threat. Utopias last five minutes, to the extent that they happen at all. There will never be a time when the wish for security does not lead to unconditional surrender. The history of Paris teaches us that beauty is a by-product of danger, that liberty is at best a consequence of neglect, that wisdom is entwined with decay. Any Paris of the future that is neither a frozen artifact nor an inhabited holding company will perforce involve fear, dirt, sloth, ruin, and accident. It will entail the continual experience of uncertainty, because the only certainty is death.

The Other Paris (2016)

Notes for a commonplace book (16)

Luc Sante:

The occult forces in the city are always at work, indifferent to rationality, scornful of politics, resentful of urban planning, only intermittently sympathetic to the wishes of the living. They operate with a glacial slowness that renders their processes imperceptible to the mortal eye, so that the results appear uncanny. But much like the way stalagmites and stalactites grow in caves, such forces are actually the result of long passages of time, of buildup and wear-down so gradual no time-lapse camera could ever record them, but also so incrementally powerful they could never be duplicated by technology or any other human intent. Over the course of time they have worn grooves like fingerprints in the fabric of the city, so that ghostly impressions can remain even of streets and corners and cul-de-sacs obliterated by bureaucrats, and they have created zones of affinity that are independent of administrative divisions and cannot always be explained by ordinary means.

The Other Paris (2016)

Leonard Lopate's radio interview with Luc Sante is available here, and below is a representative chanson by Damia (Marie-Louise Damien), mentioned in the book.

Mexico City

I approach the heart of the city down a narrow, winding road that weaves among thick settlements of low buildings and clusters of trees. (I have been to Mexico City, many years ago. The geography doesn't correspond, but it does correspond to the topography of the city as I may once have dreamed it, perhaps, before I went there.)

It's morning and I set out by foot to change a bit of money. I find myself in a small gift shop attached to a restaurant. There are some stacks of books about contemporary Mexican artists; I pick one up and leaf through it, admiring the work, then set it down and look around to see what else they have. But the shop is small, there's just the one corner of books. I get on line at the cash register to change some money. When I get to the front of the line the cashier and the cash register have disappeared somewhere behind me, and I wander off outside. I go into a bank. "Se puede cambiar dólares por pesos?," I ask the teller, but she says no and gives me directions, which I can't follow, to another bank. After a while I enter a small building that looks more like a car repair shop. While I'm waiting in line someone knocks me down and begins rifling through my pockets; I come to and give the man a beating. A third man, waiting in front of me, helps me up and thanks me profusely, but I think it best to beat it; I stuff my money awkwardly into my pockets and exit through a long arcade. Here I have a commanding view of much of the city. I look at my watch — it's ten A.M. — and at the sun to orient myself, then set off in the direction where I think the center of the city lies. Off to one side there's a little wrought-iron pedestrian gate that opens into an old neighborhood; there's a name and date on a sign next to the gate. But I don't go that way; instead, I climb a long series of steps past a vacant lot overgrown with tall trees. A man in a pale polo shirt, who doesn't appear to be Mexican, is descending the steps; he says "buenas" as we pass. I start to mumble "buenas tardes" but remember that it's still only morning. The man steps into a small office, where another man listens sympathetically as he pleads, "necesito un poquito más sustancia que me den, para poder vivir." The other man nods and agrees; he will take steps.

I've emerged at the edge of a small college campus. I pass through it; on the other side there is an abandoned fairground. A sign reads "NY World's Fair" and there's a date: 1961. I wonder, is this where fairs come to die? Is this a cemetery for fairs? Everything is white and there are life-size calaveras strewn over the ground.

Rereading Martin du Gard (IX): Night raid

It is springtime in Paris, 1918. The youngest of the Thibaults, Jacques, has been dead since the beginning of the war; his older brother, Antoine, a medical officer in the French army, has inhaled mustard gas while conducting an inspection tour aimed, ironically, at determining why so many members of the medical corps have been gassed. He survives, but with aftereffects that sap his energy, leave him short of breath, and make it difficult for him to speak. He has been recuperating — if that is the accurate word — in a hospital in southern France, but has obtained leave for a few days to return to Paris in order to attend the funeral of an old family retainer. While in the city, he consults with a senior colleague, Dr. Philip. As the two doctors go over the details of Antoine's case, he reads in his old mentor's eyes what at bottom he has already known but refused to admit to himself: that the course of his "recovery" is in fact a downward spiral of remission and relapse that must, inexorably, lead to his death within a matter of months.

For Antoine, who has taken great pride — that stubborn Thibault pride, the family crest — in his own skill and drive, in his scientific knowledge, in the bright future that lay ahead of him, this death sentence produces a paroxysm of horror. Naturally he has known all along — and he is not a religious man — that his life would one day end, but he has always been confident that his death would come only after a long life filled with accomplishments and laurels; there would be a sense of satisfaction, a legacy to leave behind. Abruptly, confronted with his own annihilation, he realizes that it will all come to nought.

The chapter that narrates Antoine's return home that evening is one of the briefest and most extraordinary in the book. Reeling, he first takes the boulevard Malesherbes to the rue Boissy-d'Anglas, "passing so close to the façades that his elbows at times struck the walls."

He found himself under the trees of the Champs-Élysées. Before him, through the trunks, barely illuminated but visible under the nocturnal light of that beautiful spring night, stretched the Place de la Concorde, crisscrossed by silent automobiles which appeared like beasts with phosphorescent eyes and then vanished into the darkness. He saw a bench and approached it. Before sitting down, out of habit, he told himself "Don't catch cold." (And at once he thought, "What does it matter, now?") The blinding verdict that he had read in Philip's face had taken posssession of his spirit, and not only his spirit but his body, like an enormous parasite, a devouring tumor that would crowd out everything else in order to bloom monstrously and occupy his entire being.

The lyricism at just this point in the narrative, this nocturnal urban sublime in the face of the abyss, is remarkable, but it is about to become more so. He hears a distant howling noise in the night. At first he is barely aware of it; then:

Two shadows, two female forms, emerged at a run from beneath the trees, and, almost at the same time, all the warning sirens began to scream at once. The sparse points of lights that blinked feebly around the Place de la Concorde were instantly extinguished.

It is a night raid by German bombers, and the city is quickly blacked out. He hears distant detonations, the sounds of anti-aircraft guns, and rises from his bench.

Above Paris, an astonishing sky came to life. Emanating from every part of the horizon, luminous beams swept the vault of the night, their milky trails moving off and intersecting, scrutinizing the jumble of stars like a face, brutal, swift, or at times hesitating, stopping suddenly to examine a suspect spot, then recommencing their gliding investigation.

He looks for a taxi,

But the square was now deserted, dark, immense and could only be discerned at moments. Its outline would suddenly appear, rising out of the gloom in the intermittent reflection of the searchlights, with its balustrades, its pale statues, its Obelisk, its fountains, and the funereal columns of its tall lampposts, like a vision in a dream, a city petrified by some enchantment, the vestige of a vanished civilization, a dead city, long buried in the sands.

As the detonations and the sounds of machine gun fire rage on, he skirts the Tuileries and approaches the Pont Royal, watching halos of red flame rise all over the city.

He had forgotten his misery. Beneath that invisible, imprecise menace that hovered like the blind wrath of a god, an artificial excitation spurred his blood; a kind of furious inebriation gave him strength. He quickened his steps, reached the bridge, crossed the river, and plunged into the rue du Bac.

A few moments later he is standing outside the building where he lives, resigned to his fate but dreading the solitude of rooms where he knows that no one awaits him.

These few pages are the last chapter of third-person narration in The Thibaults; the more than one hundred pages that follow are composed of letters and of entries in Antoine's journal, which he continues to the day of his death. It's almost as if Martin du Gard, who generally took a more scientific, matter-of-fact approach to narration, decided to pull out all the stops for a set-piece that would combine existential horror, the nightmare of modern warfare, and the beauty — and unexpected, evocative solitude — of the monuments of Paris into one final dazzling flourish.

[Image above: Yvon, Pont Royal and Quai des Tuileries. The translations are mine rather than Stuart Gilbert's, but in any case they pale beside the original.]

Evening

He found some leftover pizza in the fridge, tossed it into the microwave, and watched it revolve on the glass plate like some slow-motion juggler’s trick. It tasted like cardboard when he pulled it out but he didn’t much care. The hunger was there, but appetite was another story; still, the beer he had opened to go with it didn’t taste half bad. Bill had lived on his own long enough that he could manage for himself in the kitchen if he had to, but mostly it wasn’t worth the dishes or the bother. Living mostly on take-out took a chunk out of his budget, but since it was pretty much his only indulgence he could swing it without any problem. He had never entertained in his apartment, except when his family flew in for a visit, and even then mostly they wanted to go out on the town while they were there.

The view from his balcony wasn’t so much of the river as over it, although naturally that wasn’t the way they put it in the real estate listings. The city had grown up along both shores, leveling hills and filling in marshes and brackish pools, abolishing the topography as it went. There had to be hundreds of thousands of living human beings, right at that moment, just in the buildings that were visible from where he stood. They were out there in the projects, in the office towers where people were still working late at their desks, at the stadium in the distance that was lit up for a home game, in the cars whose headlights were moving soundlessly along the encircling expressways, and yet he knew barely a soul among them. He had felt the same way once before, years ago, peering through the window of a Shanghai high-rise, when he realized that no one in that unimaginably vast metropolis knew his name or what had brought him there, that he was a stranger from another country who barely spoke the language and had no real reason for being there that he could clearly articulate, even to himself, that whatever his life was going to be about was of infinitesimal concern to the people whom he passed in the street or who waited on him in the crowded markets, that he was only of flickering interest even to his teachers and fellow students in the university where he attended classes five days a week. He had reconciled himself to the fact of his irrelevance and made it safely through, just as he would make it through tonight, but he couldn’t shake the feeling that something, somewhere deep down in his gut, was slowly, relentlessly hollowing him out from inside. No one around him would notice, of course, because it wasn’t necessary for you to have anything inside you in order to get by, in fact it made it easier, you fit in better with everyone else who was in the same predicament, showing up on time, keeping your head down and your desk in order, breathing in, breathing out, going through the motions. He had abandoned some indispensable part of himself somewhere along the way, but one of the symptoms of the disorder — maybe the hardest of all to bear — was that he could no longer remember clearly just what it was that was now lost to him forever. All he knew was that it wasn’t somewhere lying ahead, in his future, waiting to welcome him with fanfares and open arms when he finally landed on the shore. It wasn’t even in his past, for if he had ever truly been the person that he now knew that he would never become, then there would always be a piece of that being tucked away somewhere deep within, no matter how scarred over or neglected it became, something he could call on in his darkest moments, if only to have it reproach and mock him him for forsaking it. But even that was to be denied him. He knew that now.

He flipped the TV on with the remote and lay down on the bed, still wearing the same pants and shirt he had worn to work, setting the half-empty bottle on the nightstand. He flipped from channel to channel, watching the news. In the other room his BlackBerry chimed every few minutes but he didn’t bother to get up and answer it.

Héctor

The police had cordoned off the sidewalk and were beginning to make arrests. Something in the air was making Héctor’s eyes water, and the cops were wearing masks that made them look like giant grasshoppers and which might have made him laugh if he hadn’t been so frightened. A dozen or so protestors had planted themselves on the sidewalk and were refusing to move, waiting for the cops to come and put plastic handcuffs on them and drag them off to the waiting vans. Héctor didn’t know which way to turn but whenever he saw two or three cops coming he moved off in the opposite direction as quickly as he could. He remembered some minnows he had seen once in a store, how they darted from one end of the tank to the other, desperately trying to avoid being scooped up in the net, as if they knew that their fate lay in being impaled on a fisherman’s hook. The strobe lights on the police vans kept flickering, making him woozy and even more terrified than he already was. He wished that he had never decided to go for a walk, that he had never let his curiosity get the better of him. Whatever this protest was about it surely wasn’t his business to get mixed up in, and now if he got arrested he was certain they’d find out he had no papers and send him packing. How could he pay back what he owed the polleros for bringing him across the border if he couldn’t stay in the city and work? How could he ever come north again, with no money? His cousin was going to be furious when Héctor called him from jail. Maybe they’d stick him in some prison and let him rot, surrounded by strangers. Héctor had never been in prison but he’d heard the stories. If you were lucky, they said, you only got beaten by the guards; if the other inmates went after you, you were finished.

A voice was issuing from a bullhorn, shouting insistent commands, but Héctor couldn’t understand what it was saying. There were screams from across the street, a concussion, and then the mist of whatever it was that was stinging his eyes suddenly hit him head-on, blinding him, burning his nostrils and throat. He bent over, choking and retching, and as he stumbled someone running by struck Héctor’s head hard with his elbow in his haste to escape. He dropped to his knees but immediately forced himself up again. Unable to see, he staggered away from what seemed to be the center of the fumes and the noise. People were rushing past, shoving, grasping, crying, and through his closed eyelids he sensed the pulse of the strobe lights, the shadows of figures moving all around him. He trod on something soft that he thought must have been a human hand, but whoever it belonged to was evidently either unconscious or simply oblivious to the pain.

He struck something hard with his shoulder and knew at once that it was the wall of the building that soared above. Feeling his way along its surface, clambering over fallen bodies, he bashed his leg hard against a standpipe and let out a cry. He touched one of the building’s glass doors, tugged desperately at the handle, but found that it was locked tight. He could hear the sickening sound of a truncheon being struck against a body, no more than a few feet away, and winced in anticipation of the coming blow, but it didn’t arrive. As he reached the corner of the building something jutted against his chest and he realized that it was the cordon set up by the police. He grasped it with one hand and ducked underneath, then slipped away down the side street, still unseeing and in terror for his life.

The bus

There were no seats and several people already standing, so she grabbed hold of a strap and planted her feet as the bus lurched forward. She could have walked it in a half-hour and often did if the weather was okay and she wasn’t too tired, but today she was dead on her feet and eager to just get home and out of her work clothes. The traffic was bad, though, and she quickly regretted her decision. Gingerly easing its way around construction vehicles, crossing pedestrians, and cabs picking up or discharging passengers, the bus slowed to a crawl at every intersection and barely managed to make up time in the long stretches between avenues. All was quiet in the interior. One young woman was silently nodding to music, her headphones trailing down from her ear and disappearing into her clothes, but the other faces around Helen were patient, impassive, inured. If any of the riders were traveling together they had let their conversation lapse and were staring blankly ahead or out the window, rocking with the motion of the bus, when it moved at all. She recognized a couple of people from other times but no one she knew well enough to say hello to.

A voice came over the radio and the driver picked up the handset to respond. Over the noise of the motor she couldn’t make out all the back-and-forth but it sounded like the dispatcher was reporting a tie-up somewhere ahead. The bus had been stuck for several minutes, fifty yards from the end of a block, and streams of pedestrians — heavier than usual, Helen thought — were flowing past it on either side, as if the age of the automobile and the internal combustion engine had suddenly ground to a halt, undone by their own success, returning the streets of the city to older and more agile forms of transportation. No one complained or stood up or even let out a sigh, though the bus’s air conditioning wasn’t great and they were getting hit head-on with the declining sun in the west. The bus crept forward a few yards, halted, crept a few yards more, and finally pulled up to a designated stop where a dozen or so figures were waiting, skeptically, hoping to board. As the doors opened Helen made a snap decision, strode forward, and stepped to the sidewalk. She was only halfway home but anything was better than wasting the rest of the afternoon standing on a bus that wasn’t going anywhere.

The block stood in the middle of a busy wholesale and manufacturing district made up of older buildings, with narrow storefronts, fire escapes, and lofts in the upper storeys — not the trendy kind the bohemians liked, but the kind that still actually produced something, though Helen had no idea what. At night the area was pretty much deserted and she avoided it, but she felt no fear at this hour, other than the terror of getting bowled over on the narrow sidewalks by people darting past to run errands, deliver packages, or just be somewhere else. Keeping as best she could to a steady pace, she soon left the stalled bus far behind, but when she reached the end of the second block she saw that a crowd had backed up from the next avenue, that some people were trying to work their way through but others were just lingering there watching something. The traffic heading downtown was barely inching along, and when she turned to look she quickly saw why: a block away there were hundreds of people standing in the middle of the street, swarming around the unlucky vehicles that had advanced that far and now could neither proceed nor turn off. Some of the people held signs aloft but most just seemed to be staring further down the avenue, at something that Helen wasn’t able to make out. Two squad cars with flashing lights were parked at the edge of the crowd and the cops were trying to get traffic off the avenue, but the crowd was too big and the knot couldn’t be untied.

Walking (from a work in progress)

There was something going on in the park but whatever it was she wasn't in the mood. She walked slowly around the square, barely glancing at shop windows, smoking and blocking out everything but the taste of the smoke. Everyone in her family smoked and nobody had ever quit; she had picked it up from her cousins when she was thirteen and it was now as much a part of her as her skin.

She turned her back on the square and entered a block of quiet townhouses, all well-maintained but not too freshly scrubbed and polished, and so probably mostly occupied by longtime residents. There were sparrows hopping around on the sidewalk, looking for crumbs and seeds among the debris in the cracks, and someone was walking a huge, slow-moving basset hound that turned its head towards her inquisitively as she passed. She wasn't fond of dogs; they smelled and ate disgusting things and spread diseases, and back home they threw stones at them. It was different here but the attitude was engrained. Cats were better, if other people owned them, though she wouldn't want the bother herself.

She thought this was a block she wouldn't mind living on, someday. Money was the issue; whatever inheritance her parents would split up among her and her siblings would never pay for this. In fact she wasn't sure who could afford to live here: plastic surgeons? bankers? She didn't think the university faculty would be able to swing it, unless they had family money. Blue bloods, old money, she guessed, the ones who hadn't dissipated it all or made so much of it that they had moved on to crass palaces on the shore or ranches in Montana. There were house numbers but no signs, no Tot-Finder stickers on the upper storeys, just tidy planters with geraniums and pansies on the lower windows and fanlights over the doors.

She knew what her parents would think: they would disapprove because the houses were too narrow and the rooms too cramped for a family, and at the same time they would be intimidated by what they imagined was the exclusiveness of it all, those rich white people who will never accept you. They didn't understand that here it didn’t matter if they accepted you or made jokes about you behind your back because of what you looked like. If you had the money you were home free. You cut your ties, you kept your door locked, and someone would always sell you whatever it was you needed. The city was just a set of geographical coordinates. It didn't define who you were or determine where you belonged. Family, nation, social class — all of those loyalties were precisely what she wanted to leave behind. You slipped through the city like a ghost and no one saw you unless you wanted them to. The other people — they were all ghosts too. They turned back into flesh and blood when they returned to their houses, to their boyfriends or wives, but when you passed them in the street you could see right through them, and they could see through you as well. That's why nobody ever made eye contact, unless they wanted something from you, usually, in her case, because they wanted sex. You didn't stare at people, you didn't even look them in the eye, because to do so was an affront — or an invitation. You kept your sunglasses on, even in the rain.

The ghost in the rain

It's been raining since morning and the wind has been driving drops like shotgun pellets against the windows of my room for hours. Outside, the gutters are choked with crabapple petals, and here and there clusters of maple leaves have blown down as well, as if autumn had arrived before its time, but night still hasn't fallen, even at this hour, and the trees that line both sides of the street show the pallor of new growth. I'll stay inside now until the storm is over; I've had my dinner and I've nowhere to go. I may have another inch or two of wine before I retire.

I saw him again today. He was standing in an alley, a few yards back from the sidewalk, in among the empty crates and windblown trash. He tucked himself into the shadow of the adjacent building just as I approached, but it was too late. When our eyes met he averted his gaze at once, but as I stood there watching him he lifted his face again after a moment and under the brim of his soaked fedora I could make out his features, the same dismal eyes, the soft nose that could almost have been a woman's, the small, frightened, half-opened mouth. I chose not to intrude any longer. Already I could feel the pain he felt at my discovering him again, though I have never pursued him or presumed on his sorrows more than I could help. I went on my way. I didn't need to look back to know that already he would no longer be there, that he would have shuffled off to some other forsaken corner, away from the crowds and the lights and the din. By now we both know that he can't escape me, any more than either of us can ever leave this city. Weeks will pass and I won't see him; he will trace his silent and mysterious routes through the streets and back passages, unseen, as I trace mine, and day after day our paths won't intersect, but sooner or later, just at the hour when the city is at its most forlorn, in the shadows of the giant beech trees of the park or down in the deserted cobblestone lanes by the docks, just when I think I've forgotten him at last, I will sense him even before he appears, and then I'll see him, he'll be there once again, my curse as I am his.

Construction

Most cities grow by tearing down the old to make way for the new, erasing the past, eradicating their own histories. With us, this was never possible. Within a few centuries of the city's founding our numbers had increased to the point that we had filled every square meter of available space between the sea and the wasteland at our backs. To tear down would have required the displacement, if only temporarily, of some of the existing occupants, but so quickly do we set out roots that our homes, once established, become as inseparable from us as the shell of a tortoise. Instead, we ascended skyward. The city rose like a coral reef, each layer serving as the foundation for the ones above it, each building carefully buttressed against its neighbors. The weight, it is said, eventually pushed the oldest strata into the earth, and in those precincts a new race evolved, or so we are told, born without sight or incapable of tolerating even the faint sunlight that reached them. Did they then tunnel down even further into the earth to fill their own need for space, hollowing out the bedrock as far beneath as we have soared above? No one knows.

After a time our metropolis rose so high that descending to street level whenever we needed to leave our homes became burdensome and impractical. At that point we had no other recourse but to seal off the layers below. If nothing else the danger of falling made it imperative. To precipitate from a tall building to one's death is terrible enough; to fall forever, to tumble endlessly through dark and dusty columns of air, to be glimpsed, fleetingly, by creatures whose nature we can only guess at, is a horror beyond words. Did those who surrendered their last view of the sun's rays object, when our platforms and causeways sealed them in for eternity? They did not, for had they not done the same to those below them in their turn? Innocence is a luxury no one here can afford. By the time the darkness was complete they were resigned to their fate.

None of this would be possible, of course, were it not for our gardens, which are without peer on earth. There is no terrace, no stretch of wall, that is not surmounted with growing things, not just crops but flowers as well -- for there is nothing we love as much as the sight of flowers. Even in the winter we garden under glass, the windblown loess from the distant valleys is all the soil we need, we dump our scrapings and our night soil into the depths, and colonies of fungi nourish those below. Does the percolated energy of the sun dwindle to nothing in the lowest tiers, or do secret sources seep up from the center of the earth, bringing nutrients to sunless gardens perhaps even lusher than our own? No one can say.

The ghost

The man steps from the doorway, hands deep in the pockets of his worn gray coat, and passes into the crowd unnoticed, flowing through the throng as if he, or they, were immaterial. He hears voices, sounds of traffic, but muffled; they swirl and echo randomly around him, separated from their source. He recognizes the language -- it's not the one he was born with -- but he can't pick out the words. Above the rooftops the sky is opaque and sunless, yet each passing taxi reflects a blinding flash that makes him lower his eyes.

He stares into a shop window. There is a name displayed across it, a semi-circle of bronze decals that are peeling a bit at the edges, but the inscription makes no sense to him. The letters morph and transpose and won't stay still. Behind the glass gaudy objects in velvet-lined boxes have been laid out with great care on a background of dark gray fabric, but he doesn't recognize them, can't guess their purpose. In the shop's interior a man in a white smock is talking to a patron, or maybe it's the patron who wears the smock, he can't tell, they've already moved away or another person has taken their place, a woman he thinks. He walks away.

He passes a church, its heavy stone walls rising abruptly behind a hedge of red-berried yew. A man is slouched against the railing on the porch of the rectory next door. He recognizes him, somebody he knew years ago, and he stops and stares but the man doesn't return his gaze and suddenly he vanishes and when he looks again it's not the same man at all but someone he's never seen before. He hears a sudden shout behind him and turns but there's no one there, just the same incessant river of strangers.

The traffic has stopped at the corner, waiting for the light, and crowd drifts across, light as birds, their clothes rippling and slacking in the intersecting breezes. A signpost rattles on rusty bolts. He looks up at the street number on a building, remembering the address of a bar he used to frequent. It's still a bar but the name is different, everything is different inside, he thinks maybe I'm wrong, it was another place, so long ago... He lingers at the door. He's feeling thirsty but he won't go in, nothing will slake his thirst, not now.

In the center of the street the pavement divides around a narrow park. He crosses, walks past a shuttered newsstand, climbs a flight of stone steps, and takes a seat on a bench in the variegated shadow of a vast beech tree. It's quieter here, above the cars, just now and then the sound of a woman's heels on the cobbles, approaching or receding he can't be sure until all of a sudden he doesn't hear them anymore.

Night piece (North)

Possibly it's the end of the world, she's not the one to say, but if so as luck would have it the end of the world finds her in a city far from where she was born, where they speak a different language she never quite masters though no one seems to mind, where it's lovely along the lake in summer but winter comes hard and fast. She meets a man who has many friends but no ties and before long they find they are bound by love and she moves her things into his apartment three flights up and two blocks down a crooked alley from the center of town. In the evenings, when they come home from their jobs, he browns stew meat and onions on an old gas stove and she settles into a chair in a corner underneath a lamp where she can continue to draw after the sun goes down. He leaves the radio on while he cooks, too low for her to decipher the words but she likes the music, the strains of accordion and fiddle that bend around the singers' voices. After dinner they disconnect the phone, sometimes they put a record on and dance slowly and silently for a while but mostly they just sit by the window. In the beautiful chill night, above the muffled sounds of the city, the vault of heaven is filled with uncountable stars.

We can figure this out

Damn, he thinks, what a firetrap this place is. They must have paid somebody off for sure to let this club open at all, a flight of narrow iron stairs below street level with a crowded restaurant above. He's sitting in a corridor offstage, leaning his back against a stack of wooden crates full of empty, sour-smelling bottles of beer, waiting to go on, trying to keep his feet and his guitar case out of the way of the waitresses who have to step past him on their way back and forth from the kitchen. He's keeping half an eye on the emergency exit at the end of the hall, wondering if he could make it out in time if a pot on the stove suddenly went up in flames. The floor, which isn't level to begin with, is covered in some kind of sticky black rubberized mat, specked with cigarette ash and smears of food and beer and ripped to shreds in a couple of places, so the waitresses have to step carefully to avoid tripping as they pass by heaving trays. He comforts himself with the thought that if he got to his feet quickly at least he'd have one good shot at the door before the panicked crowd tried to rush through to safety.

The act he opened for is back for the last night of a three-night stand. He knows them by now, a little; they gave him a nice shout-out when he finished his set, an obligatory courtesy for musicians to be sure but appreciated all the same, better than he deserved, really, but what the heck. They're a real band, with tour support from an actual label and reviews in the Village Voice, not just some guy with a few songs and a crap guitar with pickups. They have cassettes laid out on the table by the door, they've been driving up and down the east coast for two months in a van parked around the corner. Right now they've paused for a minute, they're adjusting mics and retuning while the leader banters with the crowd a bit to gain time. He'll go back on later, to give them a break, then he'll hang around and just listen for a while, maybe make it home by one. They'll slide him a beer or two on the house at the bar, and if the guy who owns the club is in a good mood he'll slip him a couple of bills on the way out, a little grocery money for the week ahead, better than nothing.

One of the waitresses comes by and gives him a quick smile as he catches her eye. She's pretty -- he thinks she must be a student, about his age, maybe a year or two less -- short dark hair, dark eyes, she's got a trace of an accent, maybe, like she's from Eastern Europe but maybe not, he hasn't really heard her say that much but she seems friendly enough. She's been working there for a few weeks; he heard them call her name once -- Laura or Lori or maybe it was Lauren, he's not sure. He wonders if she's got a boyfriend, and decides she probably does. He thinks maybe he ought to hang around a bit later and start a conversation, nothing to lose, right?, but on the other hand lurking around a club in the small hours when nobody gives a damn that you're there can get old pretty fast and a good night's sleep would do him good, though it'll be lucky if he can fall asleep at all with the sound of the band still ringing in his brain.

They're starting up now, the music reverberating through the concrete wall between him and the stage. What they're doing is so simple, why can't I do it?, he wonders. It's just one guitar lick, repeated hypnotically for a few bars, then the singer jumps in with some lyrics that are rudimentary but at the same time dead-on perfect. A verse or two, no solos, no real chorus even, just a one-line refrain, then it circles back to the same lick, the percussion pounds and the singer chants

We can figure this out
We can figure this out

but he can't figure it out, no matter how he tries. It isn't craft, exactly, though clearly these guys are pros; he doesn't know where it comes from. You either have it or you don't and he knows he doesn't, won't ever have it, not that he doesn't maybe have something of his own, some little fleck of a gift maybe, but still, not this, this he doesn't have and he never will. He'll have to find something else -- but he has no idea what that something else will be or how to find it. Anyhow he's definitely not going to find it tonight. The band on the other side of the wall is playing a song in the real world, but somehow where he is, just a few feet away, is someplace else entirely, though he's not sure exactly where it is or even if it's a real place at all.

The song throbs to a close. The dark-eyed girl steps in from the crowd. She stands in the opening for a minute and looks back inside, wiping the sweat off her hands on her apron, peering through the cigarette haze and the dust and the glare of the spotlights. Bottles are clinking around the tables but everyone's set for the moment, nobody tries to catch her eye, they're clapping and laughing and talking loudly as the guitarist and the bass player fuss with the tuning yet again. A couple more songs and he'll unpack his own instrument and step outside, away from the noise, to tune it up the best he can. As he's thinking to himself that probably nobody will notice in any case even if he's not in tune he notices that the girl is standing next to him, and when he looks up she smiles and leans down in her white blouse and asks him if he wants a beer and he says sure, that'd be great, thanks.

(Apologies to the Vulgar Boatmen.)

The lost army

It's been raining since morning. The day broke gray and cold, and the overnight mist off the lake, instead of burning off quickly as the sun gained strength, slowly but steadily gathered into a forlorn, gusting, incessant storm. It must be raining high in the mountains too, for the little streams that irrigate the fields on the city's edges, normally placid and clear, are swollen and lead-colored and seem to be straining ahead in their long transit to the sea. You'd think the city itself would break up and melt away, but it won't, and the wooden bridges, built by experienced hands for storms worse than this, arch securely over the swell, bearing pedestrians who cross the solid timbers without delay but with no shiver of fear.

I've been watching the streets from this high window. The inn must be half deserted, tonight; now and then I hear bustling below but no one seems to have taken the other rooms on this floor, and it's late enough that in all likelihood no more travelers are to be expected, unless the odd straggler, perhaps delayed by washouts along the road from the hills, makes it in time to the city gates. There's a faint smell of barley and vinegar coming from the kitchen, but the rain has dampened all of my senses and most of the time I scarcely notice. The ghosts are coming out, and are beginning to flow, unnoticed, into the current of pedestrians, keeping to the edges of the crowd when they can, their heads bowed, though not against the rain like the others, no, it's the shame that keeps their heads cast down, their faces concealed. No one around them sees them but I see them, I know their names, each of their names. They'll wander the streets all night, searching for a destination they won't find, and with the first touch of morning they'll withdraw once more into the crawlspaces below buildings, into the runnels between paving-stones, into stagnant pools left behind by the flood, into the weathered beams of sad houses soaked by the steam of boiling laundry and the sweat of endless, unendurable toil. They'll never emerge to see the stars or the moon that casts its milky light on the lake, no, only when it rains like this and all hope is lost, only when despair walks abroad, will they feel their way, tentatively at first, out of their hiding-places and dare to walk the streets, seen only by their general, their commander in iniquity, in this high room, from this window through which light never shines.