Walking back, I stayed in the shadows for as long as I could. It wasn"t far. The boys had melted away into the park, and were probably far away, somewhere deep in Harlem, by now. The lobby was empty, the elevator free. I entered my apartment and stood before the bathroom mirror for a long time. I touched my jaw, traced a finger gently up onto the cheek. It hurt, swollen to a furious purple. I removed my clothes, first the filthy black coat, then the pristine powder-blue shirt rumpled underneath it. The shirt, which I rarely wore, was a gift from Nadege. Clarity returned: I must clean the wounds (a hospital visit did not seem necessary), and I must make a report. My credit cards, too: that was the first call to make, to limit the financial damage. Then the campus police, who would put up a sign by the elevator announcing (as so often before, in all the previous instances when I wasn"t the victim) that someone had recently been attacked in the neighborhood, and that the suspects were male, black, and young, of average height and weight.
I opened the window and looked out. It was total darkness now, and the sky was a charcoal gray, the darkness interrupted closer to ground level by distant halogen lights. The buildings across the street were apartments, mostly occupied by students and faculty of the various inst.i.tutions of the neighborhood, Teachers College, Union Theological Seminary, the Jewish Theological Seminary, and Columbia Law School. In one of the apartments, the one almost directly level with mine, a young woman faced a wall. She was wearing a shawl, and bowed her head repeatedly, davening in the yellow light of a standing lamp. A few floors above her, on the flat roof of the building, a large chimney belched out gray smoke in a wide plume. The smoke was like a slowed-down explosion, silent, billowing, being absorbed at its edges into the deeper darkness of the sky. My own apartment was dark. I had made some tea, and I drank it as I watched the woman pray. Others are not like us, I thought to myself, their forms are different from ours. Yet I prayed, too, I would gladly face a wall and daven, if that was what had been given to me. Prayer was, I had long settled in my mind, no kind of promise, no device for getting what one wanted out of life; it was the mere practice of presence, that was all, a therapy of being present, of giving a name to the heart"s desires, the fully formed ones, the as yet formless ones.
It had been only two hours. I trembled from the shock, still gasped inwardly at the suddenness of it; but already, it felt in some way like a school yard scuffle. Had I sailed through a brief moment when, like an old man welcoming death, I had accepted the next blow and the next? No, I hadn"t. I had felt only the fear of pain and the love of being free of pain. But how could I have missed this! I"d thought, lying in the dirt. How could I have been less than completely aware of how good it was to be injury-free?
Now every cliche by which the a.s.sault could be minimized hurried to claim s.p.a.ce in my head. These things happen, it was only a matter of time, count your blessings, and, yes, it could have been worse-and such bile rose into my throat at these thoughts. Three personal days from work would be enough to restore my equilibrium, I thought, and I would try to be frank about the reasons for my time away, for my staying out of sight. In the meantime, I would have to reach out to my friend for help with some practical things. He, at least, would not make more of the event than was necessary.
I had listened to others" stories of being mugged. A colleague on the service had had her purse s.n.a.t.c.hed. One of the nurses-a burly, soft-spoken Portuguese-American-had had his jaw broken by a gang, and they had left his wallet, his watch, his gold chain, and taken only his iPod. He"d needed seventeen st.i.tches across his face. Violence for sport was no strange thing in the city; but now: me. I had cleaned the wounds on my shoulders, arms, and legs, mostly numerous small bruises that would heal quickly. My disfigured mouth and my hand troubled me most. As I examined the bruises, a herd of thoughts clattered through me: Why had this same body hale so often hurried past its lovers?
The woman had stopped praying. She ran her fingers through her fair brown hair, and took the tallit from her shoulders, pausing for a moment as though she"d forgotten something. Then she folded it, and switched off the lamp.
THE YOUNG WOMAN WAS UNCERTAIN, THINKING HARD BEFORE she said each word. The man sitting next to her, to whom she had looked for confirmation, shook his head and corrected her. No, that"s World Health Organization. Try it again, do you see? That is World. Trade. Organization. Yes, that"s trade. Do you remember the word for trade? she said each word. The man sitting next to her, to whom she had looked for confirmation, shook his head and corrected her. No, that"s World Health Organization. Try it again, do you see? That is World. Trade. Organization. Yes, that"s trade. Do you remember the word for trade?
He pointed, and trilled a pair of fingers on the page. She mulled it over awhile, then gave another answer in Chinese, which sounded similar to the first. This one pleased him more, and he asked her if she would like to review the list from the beginning. I was at a small table, alone, drinking coffee, picking out their conversation from the fugue of voices in the diner. They were at the bar across from me, drinking c.o.kes. The student was Asian. Her inky black bangs cut straight across her face, and she moved a stack of flash cards from one hand to the other, restless. Her teacher, not much older than she was, was a blond man in a tracksuit.
I pretended to look out at the street. The shadows were long, the light yellow, and, on the sidewalk, two women with high heels and large shopping bags embraced. The negotiation between the blond teacher and his student was that of a new relationship, with the roles set already but a certain formality still prevailing. She laughed every now and again, and he corrected her p.r.o.nunciation. She seemed to be struggling to draw what little she knew of the language to the surface. Her eyes searched, oblivious of being seen. His manner seemed more self-conscious. He was aware of the incongruity between his features and his task, aware of carrying out that task in a public s.p.a.ce. He seemed to be presenting his credentials, addressing not her alone, but anyone within earshot who might pause for a moment at the sight of a white man teaching Chinese to an Asian woman. He sounded a little pleased with himself. He repeated the phrases again, and in a quick upward glance, caught my eye in the storefront gla.s.s of the diner.
The diner was on Broadway, between Duane Street and Reade Street, and close to the Brooklyn BridgeCity Hall subway station, opening into a park that, by the standards of lower Manhattan, was tranquil. That morning it was busy with office workers, park workers, and the odd tourist, but the volume hardly rose above a hum. People came up the stairs out of the station and made their way to work; those on the early shift were already out in the park, taking their first coffee break of the day. An unlit neon sign that said COMIDA LATINA COMIDA LATINA swung outside the cafe, and inside the restaurant workers cleaned out steam-heated chargers. These would shortly be filled up with yellow rice, fried plantains, chow mein, barbecued spare ribs, and the various Dominican, Puerto Rican, and Chinese dishes that places like these set out for the lunch-hour rush. It wasn"t a big place, but it was easy to tell that it did good business, no doubt because of its proximity to the ma.s.sive buildings all around, and the countless civil servants who daily streamed in and out of them. swung outside the cafe, and inside the restaurant workers cleaned out steam-heated chargers. These would shortly be filled up with yellow rice, fried plantains, chow mein, barbecued spare ribs, and the various Dominican, Puerto Rican, and Chinese dishes that places like these set out for the lunch-hour rush. It wasn"t a big place, but it was easy to tell that it did good business, no doubt because of its proximity to the ma.s.sive buildings all around, and the countless civil servants who daily streamed in and out of them.
It had been two weeks, and everything else had healed. As it turned out, I hadn"t needed to go to the hospital for my mouth. But my left hand troubled me. What had felt like a minor bruise now seemed to have been a bruise of the bone, and turning a doork.n.o.b, or lifting a full cup of coffee, hurt. Mostly, I kept the hand in the pocket of my coat. Across the street, in front of the largest of the federal buildings, there had formed a snaking queue. No one lined up in front of a federal building early on a weekday morning unless they had to. When I came out of the diner, I saw that the crowd seemed to be an immigration crowd, as opposed to a jury-duty crowd, which was the other possibility at such a building. The air was of nervous antic.i.p.ation, a palpable effort to project readiness for the interrogations ahead.
I walked across the street so that I would pa.s.s directly along the line. A group of Bangladeshis-the tiny silver-haired matriarch in salwar kameez salwar kameez, the young man dressed in wool coat and brown slacks, the young woman in a calf-length skirt, the young children bundled up-all seemed to be fumbling with their papers. There appeared to be an unusual number of interracial couples standing in line. One pair, I guessed, was African-American and Vietnamese. The security officers were, their uniforms revealed, also from Wackenhut, the same private firm contracted to control the immigrants in the detention facility in Queens. As each expectant family reached the front of the line, they were instructed to remove jewelry, shoes, belts, coins, and keys, so that the official fear of terrorism played along, like a ba.s.s figure, to the private fear of being found wanting by an immigration officer once they got upstairs.
From where I stood, I could see, behind the diner, the ma.s.sive AT&T Long Lines building on Church Street. It was a windowless tower, a giant concrete slab rising into the sky, with little more than a few ventilation openings, which resembled periscopes, to indicate that this was a building rather than a dense brick fabricated by a gargantuan machine. Each floor was at least double the height of that found in a normal office building, so that the whole tower, intimidating though it was, came to only twenty-nine stories. The military aspect of the Long Lines building was intensified by the thickened corners, elongated shafts with which the building mimicked the form of a castle"s keep flanked by gatehouse towers, and which concealed the elevators, ductwork, and plumbing. Those few workers who used the building, I imagined, must after a few years become moles, their circadian rhythms completely distorted, their skin de-pigmented to the point of transparency. Long Lines, which I continued to stare at, as though it had drawn me into a trance, seemed like nothing so much as a monument or a stele.
I was drawn out of my thoughts by the voice of a security officer: You can"t stand here, move along, sir. I moved, and came down to the side street. The line had extended that far, to the distant edge of the building. Nearby, another man, who seemed to be a janitor, was helping a Hispanic family group, a mother and two children, who seemed to be lost. Trying to understand what they were asking for, he repeated the mother"s p.r.o.nunciation of pa.s.sport pa.s.sport as as pa.s.siport pa.s.siport. The older of her boys was just beginning to sprout his first unruly facial hairs. He looked bored, or perhaps embarra.s.sed. Near the front of the line, a young woman raced out of the gla.s.s doors, and threw herself at a waiting group, hugging them and weeping. A young man, perhaps her husband, had come out with her, and the people they met outside beamed, embraced each other, and exchanged high fives. An older woman in the group began to weep, and the young woman said, loud enough for all to hear: Now you see who I get it from, from my mama. The other people in line, wishing the same good luck for themselves, possibly made even more tense by someone else"s demonstration of relief, perhaps discomfited by the emotionalism, watched and looked away, and watched again. The janitor near me smiled, shook his head, and explained to the Hispanic family how to get to the pa.s.sport office.
There was a small security island in the middle of the side street, and just across from it, surrounded by the huge office buildings, was a patch of gra.s.s. It wouldn"t have drawn my attention at all, if I hadn"t seen a curious shape-sculpture or architecture, I couldn"t tell right away-set into the middle of it. An inscription on the monument, for that is what it turned out to be, identified it as a memorial for the site of an African burial ground. The tiny plot was what had been set aside now to indicate the spot, but in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the site had been large, some six acres, as far north as present-day Duane Street, and as far south as City Hall Park. Along Chambers Street and in the park itself, human remains were still routinely uncovered. But most of the burial ground was now under office buildings, shops, streets, diners, pharmacies, all the endless hum of quotidian commerce and government.
Into this earth had been interred the bodies of some fifteen to twenty thousand blacks, most of them slaves, but then the land had been built over and the people of the city had forgotten that it was a burial ground. It had pa.s.sed into private and civic ownership. The monument I saw was designed by a Haitian artist, but I was unable to take a closer look, because it was closed to public access, for renovation, as a sign informed me, in preparation for the summer tourism season. In the green gra.s.s and bright sun, in the shadow of government and the marketplace, standing a few yards from the cordoned-off monument, I had no purchase on who these people were whose corpses, between the 1690s and 1795, had been laid to rest beneath my feet. It was here, on the outskirts of the city at the time, north of Wall Street and so outside civilization as it was then defined, that blacks were allowed to bury their dead. Then the dead returned when, in 1991, construction of a building on Broadway and Duane brought human remains to the surface. They had been buried in white shrouds. The coffins that were discovered, some four hundred of them, were almost all found to have been oriented toward the east.
The squabble about the construction of the monument did not interest me. There was certainly no chance that six acres of prime real estate in lower Manhattan would be razed and rededicated as holy ground. What I was steeped in, on that warm morning, was the echo across centuries, of slavery in New York. At the Negro Burial Ground, as it was then known, and others like it on the eastern seaboard, excavated bodies bore traces of suffering: blunt trauma, grievous bodily harm. Many of the skeletons had broken bones, evidence of the suffering they"d endured in life. Disease was common, too: syphilis, rickets, arthritis. In some of the palls were found sh.e.l.ls, beads, and polished stones, and in these scholars had seen hints of African religions, rites perhaps retained from the Congo, or from along the West African coast, from which so many people had been captured and sold into slavery. One body had been found buried in a British marine officer"s uniform. Some others had been found with coins over their eyes.
There had been, in the 1780s, a pet.i.tion by free blacks in defense of their dead. Black corpses were frequently singled out by cadaver thieves, who pa.s.sed them on to surgeons and anatomists. The pet.i.tion, in palpably pained language, laments those who under cover of night "dig up the bodies of the deceased, friends and relatives of the pet.i.tioners, carry them away without respect to age or s.e.x, mangle their flesh out of wanton curiosity and then expose it to beasts and birds." The civil powers recognized the justness of the cause and, in 1789, the New York Anatomy Act was pa.s.sed. From that time forward, as was done in Europe, the needs of surgical anatomy were to be met by the cadavers of executed murderers, arsonists, and burglars. The Act added, to the sentence of death for criminals, the further retribution of the medical profession; and it left the buried bodies of innocent blacks in peace and neglect. How difficult it was, from the point of view of the twenty-first century, to fully believe that these people, with the difficult lives they were forced to live, were truly people, complex in all their dimensions as we are, fond of pleasures, shy of suffering, attached to their families. How many times, in the course of each of these lives, would death have invaded, carrying off a spouse, a parent, a sibling, a child, a cousin, a lover? And yet, the Negro Burial Ground was no ma.s.s grave: each body had been buried singly, according to whichever rite it was that, outside the city walls, the blacks had been at liberty to practice.
The security island near the monument was unmanned. I stepped across the cordon, and into the gra.s.sy plot. Bending down, I lifted a stone from the gra.s.s and, as I did so, a pain shot through the back of my left hand.
NINETEEN.
I needed clothes for the ceremonies of my father"s burial in May 1989. As these things, and many other simple tasks, confused my mother in those days, most of the rites and the practical matters were taken care of by my father"s sister, my aunt Tinu. A few weeks before the burial, she took me to a tailor"s shop in Ajegunle, a sprawling slum of rusted roofs and open sewers, where the children were all poor and some of them were visibly malnourished. These children stared when my aunt and I emerged from her car because, from their point of view, we would have represented unimaginable wealth and privilege, an impression strengthened by my "whiteness." The shop itself had an efficient air; its interior, lit only by natural light, was clean, and redolent of blue chalk. There were swatches of Dutch wax prints on the floor, semimatte squares of loud color that interrupted the gray shine of the concrete, and the tailor flattered me as he took measurements with his swiftly unfurled tape measure, as though it were the most natural thing in the world to congratulate someone on the length of his inseam or the breadth of his shoulders. He was perhaps trying to comfort me, having had a quiet word beforehand with my aunt, who had told him the purpose of our visit. He called out mysterious numbers to his a.s.sistant, numbers that would later be trans.m.u.ted into clothing, a white shirt and dark suit for the burial, a needed clothes for the ceremonies of my father"s burial in May 1989. As these things, and many other simple tasks, confused my mother in those days, most of the rites and the practical matters were taken care of by my father"s sister, my aunt Tinu. A few weeks before the burial, she took me to a tailor"s shop in Ajegunle, a sprawling slum of rusted roofs and open sewers, where the children were all poor and some of them were visibly malnourished. These children stared when my aunt and I emerged from her car because, from their point of view, we would have represented unimaginable wealth and privilege, an impression strengthened by my "whiteness." The shop itself had an efficient air; its interior, lit only by natural light, was clean, and redolent of blue chalk. There were swatches of Dutch wax prints on the floor, semimatte squares of loud color that interrupted the gray shine of the concrete, and the tailor flattered me as he took measurements with his swiftly unfurled tape measure, as though it were the most natural thing in the world to congratulate someone on the length of his inseam or the breadth of his shoulders. He was perhaps trying to comfort me, having had a quiet word beforehand with my aunt, who had told him the purpose of our visit. He called out mysterious numbers to his a.s.sistant, numbers that would later be trans.m.u.ted into clothing, a white shirt and dark suit for the burial, a buba buba and and sokoto sokoto in indigo-dyed, hand-spun cloth for the funeral after-party. in indigo-dyed, hand-spun cloth for the funeral after-party.
The sensation of being in the tailor"s shop was, even in those circ.u.mstances, pleasant. I liked the smell of new cloth and, for me, the intimate wonder of getting measured for clothes was like that of getting your hair cut, or feeling the warm back of the doctor"s hand nestled against your throat as he checked your temperature. These were the rare cases in which you gave permission to a stranger to enter your personal s.p.a.ce. You trusted the expertise proffered, and enjoyed the promise that the opaque maneuvers of this stranger"s hands would yield a result. The tailor, simply by doing his job that day, comforted me.
The funeral took place on a sunny day, in the afternoon, not on a rainy morning, not in wretched weather, as I suppose I expected funerals to be, as I still expect them to be. I recall now that Mahler, buried in Grinzing in 1911, was given the kind of quiet, private funeral he wanted, no speeches by the graveside, no religious readings, no florid poetry on the gravestone, just the name, Gustav Mahler. And, fittingly, it rained all through it until, as Bruno Walter tells it, the body was interred and the sun came out.
My father was buried on a particularly hot day, an unfunereal day. My new clothes, which were dark blue, not black, chafed, at the neck especially, and standing outside in the heat made me especially aware of the discomfort. The crowd jostling at Atan Cemetery was large, a somber crowd but, on account of its size, not without a touch of festivity. Many of the people present seemed to be friends and business a.s.sociates of my grandfather, who was active in politics. Many of them had traveled from Ijebu-Ile and other towns in Ogun State to show their respects for my grandfather, who, though he held no formal political office at that time, had been a state commissioner in the seventies, and was still widely viewed as a kingmaker and power broker.
My experience of death was limited, less than limited. No one I knew well had died. But, as my father was interred that afternoon, I thought of someone else who had died, or had probably died. She was a young girl, around my age, I guessed. I was in the front seat, being driven to school, when the driver knocked her down. It happened in a poor neighborhood, probably her neighborhood, or near it, if she was walking to school. The girl was about eight or nine, and was dressed in a school uniform, which I distinctly remember was a pale lime green dress. I remember well that we"d seen her cross in front of the car once, in stalled traffic, a skinny girl, though not unhealthily so, merely gangly. Then she crossed again, and we hit her. The situation, our situation, was dangerous for a minute, as some men from the neighborhood appeared. The driver was dragged out of the car, after he hesitated awhile behind his wheel, and at first it seemed he would be beaten up. But then, perhaps suddenly realizing how grave his situation was, he was all business, clearing the area, carrying the child and putting her in the backseat. She was conscious but mute. We drove her to a hospital nearby, going so recklessly fast that we"d have hit another child if there"d been one in the way. The driver sweated, though it was a cool harmattan morning. The hospital was, or had until recently been, a residential house, now converted, with a neon cross placed outside it on the street. The girl was unconscious by this time, and I had a feeling, a feeling of certainty that even now I cannot explain, that she hadn"t merely fallen asleep or become comatose, but that she"d died. The driver, in a state of great agitation, carried her into the hospital. Please save me, I remember him repeating, to the nurses who had rushed outside to meet us. I remained in the car. I don"t remember it being a long wait, twenty minutes, maybe, after which he came out, solemn, and we continued our drive to school in silence.
I didn"t think about the little girl later that day, or the day afterward, or at any time at all afterward, I didn"t talk about her to my parents or to anyone else. The driver did not mention the episode either. She came back to mind only four or five years later, at my father"s funeral, at the graveside as the priest said prayers over his coffin, and I began to think in a general way about death. By then it was as though the little girl in the pale green school uniform, dead on a cool morning, a funereal morning, was something I had dreamed about, or heard in a telling by someone else.
After the burial, there had been a party at home. It wasn"t the large, buoyant party there might have been had father died at seventy-five, nor was it the entirely joyless ritual of frying akara that would have been the case had he died at forty. My father had died at forty-nine, and he"d been successful by the important standards: a good career as an engineer, a wife and son, a fine house. And so, there was a party, to celebrate his life, and lunch was cooked for the few dozen members of the family, and close friends, professional a.s.sociates, members of the church, and neighbors, but colors were somber, there was no live music, and there was no alcohol. People sat in the living room, and outside under the rented canopy.
Some of the guests had brought young children, and the children ran around the tables, laughing, while the adults spoke in low tones and commiserated with each other. Memory fails me, but I believe that, for most of that afternoon, my mother was alone in her room, and my grandparents, and my aunt and uncle, received most of the guests. I had a role to play, my aunt had told me, and so I was to remain in the airless living room, too, uncomfortable in my scratchy buba buba and and sokoto sokoto, and be as polite as possible to the many old men and women who insisted that I surely recognized them, who, in trying to comfort me, the orphan, invented in their heads a relationship with me that had little basis in reality, and that did not extend beyond that occasion in any meaningful way. From many of them, I heard reiterated the idea that I was to take care of my mother, that I was to become the man of the house now, which struck me even then as an unhelpful commonplace.
The children, for some reason hard to control that day, got increasingly boisterous, and when, in the middle of a chase, one of them reached out a hand and accidentally overturned a serving charger full of jollof rice onto the concrete floor, three of the others fell into a laughing fit. No amount of shushing or threats was sufficient to make them stop, and their laughter rose and bubbled across the somber gathering, causing deep embarra.s.sment to their livid parents. Once or twice, the sound subsided, but then one of them would begin again, and the other three would not be able to resist joining in, and their raucous, heaving laughter went on for minutes. One of the houseboys was instructed to take them to the back of the house, from which, for at least another five minutes, we could hear them chuckling as though possessed. This incident caused the a.s.sembled adults obvious discomfort, but it amused me, and it is impossible for me, even now, to think of the events of that day, wreathed as they were in sorrow, without feeling a certain grat.i.tude to those children, all younger than eight, who fell under the momentary spell of mirth and let air into a room that the rites of death had been asphyxiating.
I WAS ALREADY FOURTEEN, NOT ALL THAT YOUNG, WHEN MY FATHER WAS ALREADY FOURTEEN, NOT ALL THAT YOUNG, WHEN MY FATHER was buried. The memory of the day wasn"t secure, because it was a public event and was as such taken over by other people"s concerns. His death had been private: there had literally been a deathbed (which struck me at the time, because I had only ever thought of the expression as a metaphor). But it was the burial I remembered more, and not the death. Only at the graveside had I felt that absurd sense of finality, the sense that he wouldn"t be getting better, or returning after a few months: the feeling hollowed me out. And while I had the elevated thoughts of someone who was about to become a man, while I nurtured stoicism in myself, and a determination to handle the grief in the right way, I also fell to more childish instincts, so that, at the graveside, part of what I remembered, part of the reel that played in my mind as my father"s body was prayed over, included the ghouls and zombies from Michael Jackson"s was buried. The memory of the day wasn"t secure, because it was a public event and was as such taken over by other people"s concerns. His death had been private: there had literally been a deathbed (which struck me at the time, because I had only ever thought of the expression as a metaphor). But it was the burial I remembered more, and not the death. Only at the graveside had I felt that absurd sense of finality, the sense that he wouldn"t be getting better, or returning after a few months: the feeling hollowed me out. And while I had the elevated thoughts of someone who was about to become a man, while I nurtured stoicism in myself, and a determination to handle the grief in the right way, I also fell to more childish instincts, so that, at the graveside, part of what I remembered, part of the reel that played in my mind as my father"s body was prayed over, included the ghouls and zombies from Michael Jackson"s Thriller Thriller.
In later years, it was the date of the burial, not that of the death, that I marked as an anniversary. I almost always remembered the former, and on May 9 of this year, I was on the 1 train on the way to work when it came to mind that he had been committed to earth for exactly eighteen years. In that time, I had complicated the memory of the day, not with other burials, of which I had attended only a few, but with depictions of burials-El Greco"s Burial of the Count of Orgaz Burial of the Count of Orgaz, Courbet"s Burial at Ornans Burial at Ornans-so that the actual event had taken on the characteristics of those images, and in doing so had become faint and unreliable. I couldn"t be sure of the color of the earth, whether it really was the intense red clay I thought I remembered, or whether I had taken the form of the priest"s surplice from El Greco"s painting or from Courbet"s. What I remembered as long, sorrowful faces might have been round, sorrowful faces. Sometimes, in waking dreams, I imagined my father with coins on his eyes, and a solemn boatman collecting them from him, and granting him pa.s.sage.
THERE WAS A MAN, I REMEMBER, ON THAT DAY OF THE EIGHTEENTH REMEMBER, ON THAT DAY OF THE EIGHTEENTH anniversary, who was moving around the subway cars. He was inspecting the vents above the automatic doors. He wore a dark blue MTA uniform, and carried some sort of counter with him, into which he pressed numbers and which emitted intermittent beeps. I watched him closely, imagining him a spiritual messenger, an angel of some sort, though whether for good or ill, I couldn"t tell, and so focused was he on his task that his methodical examination of each vent did nothing to dissuade me from the fanciful ideas working themselves into my head. I looked up at the vents as we hurtled past the uptown stations, 125th, 137th, 145th, I thought of the final terrible moments in the camps, moments that no one has survived to give firsthand testimony of, when the Zyklon B was switched on and all the human captives breathed in their deaths, and how, while all this was happening in the early forties, my oma was on her way north to Berlin as a refugee, bewildered and frightened as everyone around her was. These were the conversations I would have wished to have with her: about the young men in her town who"d marched off to war, and never come back, or those who had come back eventually-like my opa, about whom I had been told almost nothing-or those who"d been rounded up and sent to Mauthausen-Gusen. anniversary, who was moving around the subway cars. He was inspecting the vents above the automatic doors. He wore a dark blue MTA uniform, and carried some sort of counter with him, into which he pressed numbers and which emitted intermittent beeps. I watched him closely, imagining him a spiritual messenger, an angel of some sort, though whether for good or ill, I couldn"t tell, and so focused was he on his task that his methodical examination of each vent did nothing to dissuade me from the fanciful ideas working themselves into my head. I looked up at the vents as we hurtled past the uptown stations, 125th, 137th, 145th, I thought of the final terrible moments in the camps, moments that no one has survived to give firsthand testimony of, when the Zyklon B was switched on and all the human captives breathed in their deaths, and how, while all this was happening in the early forties, my oma was on her way north to Berlin as a refugee, bewildered and frightened as everyone around her was. These were the conversations I would have wished to have with her: about the young men in her town who"d marched off to war, and never come back, or those who had come back eventually-like my opa, about whom I had been told almost nothing-or those who"d been rounded up and sent to Mauthausen-Gusen.
At 157th, an Asian girl who had been drowsing suddenly got up, skittish, doelike, and sprang out of the subway car before the doors closed. Someone else came in and, for a brief, startling moment, I thought I recognized one of the boys who had mugged me. But I was mistaken. They had, of course, been floating in and out of my dreams, and the idea, so distasteful to me at the time, that it could have been worse now seemed the most sensible one. But in those dreams, I fought back. I was more badly injured, but I also beat them to the point of bloodiness. One of them fell, and I set on him, punching his face until it became like red paper under my fists, until he lost one of his eyes. When I woke, the pain of hitting him would become congruent with the ache at the back of my left hand.
I left my seat and went to speak with the MTA official as he was about to push open the door connecting our car to the next. He looked like a Guyanese or Trinidadian Indian-there was a touch of African ancestry in him, I guessed-though he could also have been directly from the Indian subcontinent itself. I asked him about his work. He was an air-conditioning specialist, carrying out temperature checks on the cars. He was friendly, and seemed surprised anyone had noticed him at all.
It is amazing, he said, how a little variation, too hot or too cold, can lead to complaints. We have efficient HVAC systems-that stands for heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning-and in the summer, we try to keep things ten to fifteen degrees cooler than it is outside. We are constantly checking them, so it is a big operation. But of course no one notices the temperature unless it becomes uncomfortable, when the nozzles get blocked, or there"s a local breakdown in the system. And, he added with a laugh, you don"t ever notice your oxygen until it"s gone: something goes wrong with the HVAC, even for fifteen minutes, and people are ready to riot.
TWENTY.
I was invited to John Musson"s apartment for a party. It was in Washington Heights, just a little ways north of the hospital. The apartment overlooked the Hudson, Moji said, when she called me, and had a remarkable view, of water and trees and the George Washington Bridge, I simply had to come see it. She did not live with him, having her own apartment in Riverdale in the Bronx, but she spent many nights at his place, she said, and she was co-host of this party. I hadn"t seen her since our day out in the park, but she had called me three or four times, and we had had brief, friendly conversations, usually late at night. Once, she had abruptly asked me how my mother was doing. I was silent, then told her that I didn"t know, that we weren"t in touch. Oh, that"s too bad, she said, in a weirdly cheerful tone of voice. I remember meeting her. She was such a nice person. was invited to John Musson"s apartment for a party. It was in Washington Heights, just a little ways north of the hospital. The apartment overlooked the Hudson, Moji said, when she called me, and had a remarkable view, of water and trees and the George Washington Bridge, I simply had to come see it. She did not live with him, having her own apartment in Riverdale in the Bronx, but she spent many nights at his place, she said, and she was co-host of this party. I hadn"t seen her since our day out in the park, but she had called me three or four times, and we had had brief, friendly conversations, usually late at night. Once, she had abruptly asked me how my mother was doing. I was silent, then told her that I didn"t know, that we weren"t in touch. Oh, that"s too bad, she said, in a weirdly cheerful tone of voice. I remember meeting her. She was such a nice person.
In the days leading up to the gathering, I suppose I made some effort to edge out of it, but then the date arrived, in the middle of May, and I found that I was without a good excuse and would have to attend. That day, I left work early, around five-thirty. I had time to kill, so instead of taking the subway, I decided to walk. I came around from Harkness to the intersection of Broadway and St. Nicholas, and the streets, as expected at that hour, were invaded in every lane and in both directions by impatient drivers. Mitchel Square Park, where the two main streets crossed, a vantage point of less than an acre, was dominated by a gently rising rock outcrop, from which one could read the overlay of buildings that had brought the medical campus to its current form. The new constructions not only sat close to the older buildings but were in many cases grafted right into them, shiny and strange as prosthetic limbs. Milstein, the central hospital building, was an amalgam of Victorian stone and a recent triangular frontage of gla.s.s and steel that gave it the aspect of a glittering pyramid in a dour and stately setting.
Such juxtapositions were common to the many buildings around, and the same layering extended to their names, which recounted the history of inst.i.tutions that had begun as civic establishments and gradually become dependent on philanthropic and corporate benefactors. In the ornately carved stone lintel of one of the older buildings were the words BABIES AND CHILDREN"S HOSPITAL 1887; BABIES AND CHILDREN"S HOSPITAL 1887; next door to it, in modern sans-serif font and glossy blue paint, was next door to it, in modern sans-serif font and glossy blue paint, was MORGAN STANLEY CHILDREN"S HOSPITAL MORGAN STANLEY CHILDREN"S HOSPITAL. From Mitchel Square Park-dedicated to veterans of the First World War and named for a New York City mayor who had died in the war-I could see the Mary Woodard Lasker Biomedical Research Building, the Irving Cancer Research Center, the Sloane Hospital for Women, and the Russ Berrie Medical Science Pavilion. Parked in front of the Children"s Hospital was yet another donation, an ambulance of the FDNY Fire Family Transportation Foundation. Some of these were older, many were recent endowments, but all established the powerful link between modern medical care and memorials on the one hand, and memorials and money on the other. A hospital is not a neutral s.p.a.ce, it is not a purely scientific s.p.a.ce, nor is it the religious one it had been in medieval times; the reality now involves commerce, and the direct correlation between donating large sums of money and having a building named in memoriam. Names matter. Everything has a name.
On the great rock of the square, some boys were playing on skateboards, negotiating the gentle but craggy gradient up and down, and laughing. I read the plaque at the 166th Street entrance memorializing Mitchel. He had been the city"s youngest mayor when he was elected to office at the age of thirty-four, at the beginning of the war, and his death in Louisiana four years later, while he was flying with the Army Aviation Corps, had occasioned a great outpouring of public grief. As I read the plaque, musing on the strange middle name Purroy, a man in a large Yankees jacket came into the park. He stood next to me, and asked for two dollars for the bus, but I refused him wordlessly, and went back out to Broadway. Just north of the park, beyond the bronze and granite World War I memorial, its three heroes arrested forever in battle-one standing, one kneeling, the third slumped in mortal injury-the temper of the neighborhood changed, and the hospital campus, as though the past had suddenly transformed into the present, gave way to the barrio.
Almost immediately, there were fewer of the white medical professionals who had been milling about the entrance to Milstein, and the streets were full now of Dominican and other Latin-American shoppers, workers, and residents. Someone coming toward me waved, exuberant. It was a tall, middle-aged woman with an infant, but I didn"t recognize the face. Mary, it"s Mary, she said. I worked with the old fellow, you remember? She shook her head with the surprise of having seen me. I reminded her of my name. And it was indeed her; she lived up in Washington Heights now, and was going to begin a nursing program at Columbia once her little boy went to day care. I congratulated her, and felt in myself an amazement at how quickly life went through its paces. We spoke a little about Professor Saito. The old man was good, you know, she said. He always enjoyed your visits so much, I don"t know if he told you. It was difficult to see him go like that, to see him have it so difficult at the end. I thanked her for having taken care of him. Her baby started crying, and we bid each other goodbye.
From the intersection of 172nd Street, the George Washington Bridge came into view for the first time, its lights soft yellow points in the gray distance. I walked past small shops selling knickknacks, the sprawling window display of El Mundo Department Store, and the perpetually popular restaurant El Malecon, to which I occasionally came for dinner. Across the street from El Malecon was a ma.s.sive and architecturally bizarre building. It had been built in 1930, and was known back then as the Loews 175th Street Theatre. Designed by Thomas W. Lamb, it was filled with glamorous detail-chandeliers, red carpeting, a profusion of architectural ornament within and without-and the terra-cotta elements on the facade drew from Egyptian, Moorish, Persian, and Art Deco styles. Lamb"s stated aim was to cast a spell of the mysterious on the "occidental mind," with the use of "exotic ornaments, colors, and schemes."
Now the building had a marquee sign, with white letters on a black background, that read: COME ON IN OR SMILE AS YOU Pa.s.s COME ON IN OR SMILE AS YOU Pa.s.s. It had become a church, but the gilded-age excess remained. This religious function had begun in 1969, and the theater, renamed the United Palace, still hosted several congregations. The best-known and longest-running of them was the one shepherded by the Right Reverend Frederick Eikerenkoetter. Reverend Ike, as he was popularly known, preached prosperity and lived in the princely manner befitting, in his view, a faithful servant of G.o.d"s word. Parked in front of the church, and weirdly congruent with its false a.s.syrian battlements and decontextualized pomp, was his green Rolls-Royce, one of several luxury cars he owned. His church, the United Church Science of Living Inst.i.tute, once numbered in the tens of thousands. It was spa.r.s.er now. But, still, the people gave freely, as they had done since the sixties.
The theater, America"s third largest when it was built, seating over three thousand, had hosted films as well as vaudeville shows in its earlier incarnation. Al Jolson had played there, as had Lucille Ball, and back then it had been surrounded by expensive restaurants and luxury goods shops. Now, from the doorway of El Malecon, in the waning light of a Friday evening, it looked quiet. The jumble of architectural styles failed, more than seventy-five years on, to resolve themselves into anything meaningful. Even in its best days, it must have looked alien in the environment. It looked more so now, still reasonably well maintained, but utterly out of place, its architecture a world away from that of the small shops, its grand columns and arches irrelevant to the fatigued immigrants who rarely raised their heads to look above street level. The spell had faded.
The door of a parked minivan opened. A young boy stuck his head out, and vomited into the gutter, and from within the minivan, the rea.s.suring voice of a woman spoke to him. The boy vomited again, then he looked up, with a cherubic expression, and caught my eye. I walked on, farther up Broadway, drawn, it seemed, into the fast-changing face of the neighborhood. There was another ornate building at the 181st Street corner. And here was the old compet.i.tor to the Loews 175th Street Theatre, the Coliseum, which, in its own time, before the Loews was built, was the third largest theater in the country. A brief and sad claim to fame: to have once been the third largest. Now, greatly altered, it had become the New Coliseum Theatre, and it shared s.p.a.ce with a large pharmacy and a hodgepodge of other storefronts; only above its first floor were there hints of the 1920s architecture.
I turned left at 181st, and walked down to Fort Washington, past the A train station and the Fort Washington Collegiate Church, and then to Pinehurst, which was connected to 181st not directly but by a long and narrow flight of stairs rising into a small wooded tangle that opened out into the street proper. The stairs, vertiginous and reminiscent of the much longer stairs leading up to Sacre-Coeur in Montmartre, were in the shade of trees, fringed on both sides with dense, weed-choked plots, and bifurcated by a double rank of iron railings in a manner that evoked a funicular railway; I half-expected a tramcar to come chugging down the left side while I walked up the right. The stairs brought me out into the dead end of Pinehurst, a different world from the busy street life a few dozen yards below: residential buildings, a richer, whiter neighborhood. And so I proceeded among the whites, entering their quieter street life, feeling for minutes that I was the only person walking around a depopulated world, and rea.s.sured only by occasional signs of life: an old lady at the end of the block carrying a bag of groceries, a pair of neighbors in conversation in front of an apartment building, and the appearance, one after the other, of glimmering lights from within the windows of lovely brick houses set back from the street. To my right was Bennett Park, still and silent, animated only by the occasional fluttering of the American flag and the black POW flag hoisted below it. Pinehurst ended at 187th, and that brought me around to Cabrini, which ran alongside the river.
Following Cabrini a few hundred yards farther, to its farthest extent, would have brought me to Fort Tryon Park, in which was nestled, like a jewel in velvet, the Cloisters museum. I remembered my last visit to the museum, when I had come with my friend. We"d stood in the walled garden, which overlooks the Hudson. There was a large espaliered pear tree, shaped into a kind of green candelabrum against the stone wall, its branches, ramified like those on the Tree of Jesse, had been forced through the years by the attentions of gardeners into right angles and a single, two-dimensional plane. At my feet were the various herbs typical to a monastery plot-marjoram, parsley, marshmallow, garden sorrel, leek, red valerian, sage. They grew freely, thriving so well that we talked about how wonderful it would be to have a kitchen garden identical to this one.
I remember how, on that day, I knelt down close to the herb plot and inhaled its thin fragrance. The plot contained soapwort and liverwort, herbs that had been given their names by the old wisdom of simpling, or sympathetic herbal medicine, a quasi-mystical art by which the medicinal properties of plants were related to their physical appearance. Liverwort was thought to be good for liver ailments because its leaves evoked the shapes of the lobes of the liver; lungwort, likewise, was good for breathing complaints because its leaf was shaped like a lung; and soapwort was valued for its dermatological uses. This is where the search for meaning had led our medieval ancestors: to the certainty that G.o.d, who made all of creation, had scattered clues to the useful functions of created things in those things, and that only a little vigilance was necessary to decode those clues. Simpling was but the most basic of this kind of learning; the search for Signs, as undertaken by the sixteenth-century German humanist Paracelsus, was a further extension of the same idea.
For Paracelsus, the light of nature functioned intuitively, but it was also sharpened by experience. Properly read, it informed us what the inner reality of a thing was by means of its form, so that the appearance of a man gave some valid reflection of the person he really was. The inner reality is, indeed, so profound that, for Paracelsus, it cannot help but be expressed in the external form. On the other hand, as in the case of artists, unless the work of art addressed the question of an inner life, its external Signs would be empty. And so, Paracelsus developed a fourfold theory around how the light of nature is manifest in individual men: through the limbs, through the head and face, through the form of the body as a whole, and through bearing, or the way a man carries himself.
We are familiar with this theory of Signs in the debased forms of phrenology, eugenics, and racism. However, this sensitivity to the play between inner spirit and outer substance also underpinned the success of many of the artists of Paracelsus"s time, not least the wood sculptors of southern Germany. By showing an extreme attentiveness to the properties of wood, and to how those properties might be translated into sculptural character, they created enduring works of art, precisely of the kind that lined the rooms and halls of the Cloisters. Riemenschneider, Stoss, Leinberger, and Erhat brought a complicated material knowledge of lindenwood to bear on their carving of it, and their attempts to marry the spirit of the material with its visible form, craftlike though it is, is after all not so different from the diagnostic struggle that doctors are engaged in. This is particularly true in the case of those of us who are psychiatrists, who attempt to use external Signs as clues to internal realities, even when the relationship between the two is not at all clear. So modest is our success at this task that it is easy to believe our branch of medicine is as primitive now as was surgery in Paracelsus"s time.
On that day, with these thoughts of Signs and simpling in mind, I had tried to give my friend an account of my evolving view of psychiatric practice. I told him that I viewed each patient as a dark room, and that, going into that room, in a session with the patient, I considered it essential to be slow and deliberate. Doing no harm, the most ancient of medical tenets, was on my mind all the time. There is more light to work with in externally visible illnesses; the Signs are more forcefully expressed, and therefore harder to miss. For the troubles of the mind, diagnosis is a trickier art, because even the strongest symptoms are sometimes not visible. It is especially elusive because the source of our information about the mind is itself the mind, and the mind is able to deceive itself. As physicians, I said to my friend, we depend, to a much greater degree than is the case with nonmental conditions, on what the patient tells us. But what are we to do when the lens through which the symptoms are viewed is often, itself, symptomatic: the mind is opaque to itself, and it"s hard to tell where, precisely, these areas of opacity are. Ophthalmic science describes an area at the back of the bulb of the eye, the optic disk, where the million or so ganglia of the optic nerve exit the eye. It is precisely there, where too many of the neurons a.s.sociated with vision are cl.u.s.tered, that the vision goes dead. For so long, I recall explaining to my friend that day, I have felt that most of the work of psychiatrists in particular, and mental health professionals in general, was a blind spot so broad that it had taken over most of the eye. What we knew, I said to him, was so much less than what remained in darkness, and in this great limitation lay the appeal and frustration of the profession.
I FOUND THE RIGHT BUILDING, AND FOUND THE RIGHT BUILDING, AND J JOHN SPOKE TO ME ON THE intercom, and let me in. I took the elevator up to the twenty-ninth floor. He was at the door, wearing an ap.r.o.n. Come on in, he said, it"s nice to meet you in person finally. There were quite a few people there already. John was a hedge fund trader, quite wealthy already, to judge from the house, which was s.p.a.cious and rather richly decorated with mid-century modern furniture, an a.s.sortment of kilim rugs, and a Fazioli grand piano. I estimated he was about fifteen years older than Moji was. There was something forced in his gregariousness, and the ruddy pink cheeks and salt and pepper goatee did not appeal to me. Moji came up to me, and we embraced. What"s with the bandage? she said. You"ve taken up boxing or what? I mumbled something about slipping on a threshold, but she had already gone into the kitchen. From there she called out, asking what I wanted to drink. I shouted an answer, unsure of what it was even before the echo of my voice faded, as my mind was still on how beautiful she looked, how desirable and, of course, unavailable. intercom, and let me in. I took the elevator up to the twenty-ninth floor. He was at the door, wearing an ap.r.o.n. Come on in, he said, it"s nice to meet you in person finally. There were quite a few people there already. John was a hedge fund trader, quite wealthy already, to judge from the house, which was s.p.a.cious and rather richly decorated with mid-century modern furniture, an a.s.sortment of kilim rugs, and a Fazioli grand piano. I estimated he was about fifteen years older than Moji was. There was something forced in his gregariousness, and the ruddy pink cheeks and salt and pepper goatee did not appeal to me. Moji came up to me, and we embraced. What"s with the bandage? she said. You"ve taken up boxing or what? I mumbled something about slipping on a threshold, but she had already gone into the kitchen. From there she called out, asking what I wanted to drink. I shouted an answer, unsure of what it was even before the echo of my voice faded, as my mind was still on how beautiful she looked, how desirable and, of course, unavailable.
BY ABOUT 2:00 A.M., MANY PEOPLE HAD LEFT, AND THE PARTY quieted down. Someone replaced the electronic dance music that had been playing on the stereo with a recording of Sarah Vaughan with strings. The dozen or so guests that remained were all sprawled on the sofas. A few were smoking cigars; the smell was pleasant, seductive, a baritone fragrance that evoked feelings of equanimity in me. One couple slept in each other"s arms, and a girl with heavy black eye shadow was curled up on the carpet near them. Moji and John were deep in conversation with an Italian physicist. He was from Turin. His wife, a woman from Cleveland, whom I had met earlier, was also a physicist. There had been something about both her delayed reaction in conversation and the slightly odd way she spoke that had made me wonder if she was deaf. Naturally, it wasn"t possible to ask, and I let the matter slide. I had spoken to her and her husband for a while. She"d been happy to get into a discussion about Italo Calvino and Primo Levi with me; he"d seemed bored and, on the pretext of going to refill his drink, had drifted away. quieted down. Someone replaced the electronic dance music that had been playing on the stereo with a recording of Sarah Vaughan with strings. The dozen or so guests that remained were all sprawled on the sofas. A few were smoking cigars; the smell was pleasant, seductive, a baritone fragrance that evoked feelings of equanimity in me. One couple slept in each other"s arms, and a girl with heavy black eye shadow was curled up on the carpet near them. Moji and John were deep in conversation with an Italian physicist. He was from Turin. His wife, a woman from Cleveland, whom I had met earlier, was also a physicist. There had been something about both her delayed reaction in conversation and the slightly odd way she spoke that had made me wonder if she was deaf. Naturally, it wasn"t possible to ask, and I let the matter slide. I had spoken to her and her husband for a while. She"d been happy to get into a discussion about Italo Calvino and Primo Levi with me; he"d seemed bored and, on the pretext of going to refill his drink, had drifted away.
I stepped out onto the terrace, which I had been wanting to do all evening: the view was a marvel, as Moji had promised. It wrapped around the apartment on two sides and, from up there on the twenty-ninth floor, I could take in, in a single glance, the dwellings of millions. The way the tiny lights winked across the miles of air made me think of all the computers in all those homes, most of them sleeping now, with their single lights silently toggling between on and off. I was on my third gla.s.s of champagne. The day felt far away, and my spirit was soothed. There was, too, the pleasant sensation of flirting with Moji, not with any expectation, but for the pleasure of it. And I noticed, this time, less tension, less conflict, in my interaction with her. I was glad I had come.
The gla.s.s door clicked open behind me, and John came out onto the balcony. He also had a full champagne gla.s.s in his hand. His cheeks were flushed with drink. I complimented him on his generosity, and on his beautiful apartment. There was a row of bonsai trees, maybe a dozen plants in all, along the plate-gla.s.s window in the living room. They could not have been more different from ordinary houseplants. Each bonsai tree, stocky, ancient, and gnarled, had been growing since before we were born, and each had within its trunk and roots the genetic secrets that would ensure that it would outlive us all. I had been admiring them earlier, I told him. He asked me if I had noticed the one tagged Acer palmatum Acer palmatum. That little baby is a hundred and forty-five years old, he said. Some call it the j.a.panese maple, and it can grow, I don"t know, seventy feet, eighty feet. But this game is not about size now, is it? Did you notice how its leaves are like those of the marijuana plant? He chuckled. I was put off, but even he couldn"t spoil my mood.
AFTER I I LEFT LEFT J JOHN"S PLACE, I STOPPED BY A DINER AT 181ST AND STOPPED BY A DINER AT 181ST AND Cabrini for a coffee. I drank it quickly, then walked farther down Cabrini to 179th, and negotiated my way around to the George Washington Bridge. I wanted to see, closer at hand, the sun rising over the Hudson. The city was still asleep. In the diner, I had seen one man with a tattoo that covered most of his arm resting his head on his knuckles. When I came out, I saw another man, Dominican or Puerto Rican, in a parked car, who was either asleep or staring blankly at the GPS device in front of him. The reflection of the sun turned half of the windshield into a bright metallic field. When I got on the pedestrian walkway on the Fort Leebound side of the bridge, I saw, ahead of me and on the other side of the median, a stalled, maroon-colored car. It was one of the large American models from the late eighties, possibly a Lincoln Town Car, and it had plowed into a guardrail. The accident must have happened not more than fifteen or twenty minutes before I got there; the fire truck and police cars were just arriving. They pulled up in silence, cl.u.s.tering along the length of the bridge; there was almost no traffic, and they hadn"t needed their sirens. I could see that both of the car"s front doors were open, and that the windows had been smashed. The front end of the car was crumpled, and there was gla.s.s on the road, and blood as well, pooled on the pavement like an oil leak. I walked a few yards more, and could now see the car from the east. Cabrini for a coffee. I drank it quickly, then walked farther down Cabrini to 179th, and negotiated my way around to the George Washington Bridge. I wanted to see, closer at hand, the sun rising over the Hudson. The city was still asleep. In the diner, I had seen one man with a tattoo that covered most of his arm resting his head on his knuckles. When I came out, I saw another man, Dominican or Puerto Rican, in a parked car, who was either asleep or staring blankly at the GPS device in front of him. The reflection of the sun turned half of the windshield into a bright metallic field. When I got on the pedestrian walkway on the Fort Leebound side of the bridge, I saw, ahead of me and on the other side of the median, a stalled, maroon-colored car. It was one of the large American models from the late eighties, possibly a Lincoln Town Car, and it had plowed into a guardrail. The accident must have happened not more than fifteen or twenty minutes before I got there; the fire truck and police cars were just arriving. They pulled up in silence, cl.u.s.tering along the length of the bridge; there was almost no traffic, and they hadn"t needed their sirens. I could see that both of the car"s front doors were open, and that the windows had been smashed. The front end of the car was crumpled, and there was gla.s.s on the road, and blood as well, pooled on the pavement like an oil leak. I walked a few yards more, and could now see the car from the east.
On the concrete ledge near the car, with the rising sun gliding up the sky behind them, sat a couple. They were silent, bewildered, taking in the bad dream of a Sat.u.r.day morning. From the distance, they looked Filipino, or perhaps Central American. As I walked onto the overpa.s.s, the firemen had just reached them, all business. The bright red of the fire truck was like a gash across the empty road. Where could all the blood near the car have come from? The man and woman both had leg injuries but didn"t seem to be bleeding profusely. It was surreal, as surreal, in my memory of it now, as anything I had ever seen. This vision of needless suffering colored what else I saw of the sunrise, the river, and the quiet morning roads in the hour that followed, when, coming down from the bridge, I walked down Fort Washington until it met 168th Street, at the medical campus, and from there walked on Broadway, through the littered, sleeping barrio, all the way down, through Harlem, then on to Amsterdam and Columbia University"s quiet campus. I saw my neighbor Seth-it had been months, I don"t think I had seen him once since he"d told me of his wife"s death-and I stopped to greet him. He was, with the building superintendent"s a.s.sistance, dragging the second of two large mattresses out to the front of the building. Have to buy new ones, he said. He appeared to be reading something on the surface of the mattress, which had been propped up against the front of the building. Then he turned around and, by way of explanation, said, These ones have been invaded by bedbugs.
Seth asked if I had seen any sign of them in my own apartment, and I said I hadn"t. But then I remembered that, before he left about two weeks earlier, my friend had mentioned trying to rid his place of them. His tenure application at Columbia had been unsuccessful, and he had left New York, bedbugs and all, for a teaching position at the University of Chicago. Much to my surprise, the new girlfriend, Lise-Anne, had gone with him. And it was at that particular moment, speaking with Seth in the front of the infected mattresses, that I had an inkling of how acutely I would feel the absence of my friend.
EACH PERSON MUST, ON SOME LEVEL, TAKE HIMSELF AS THE CALIBRATION point for normalcy, must a.s.sume that the room of his own mind is not, cannot be, entirely opaque to him. Perhaps this is what we mean by sanity: that, whatever our self-admitted eccentricities might be, we are not the villains of our own stories. In fact, it is quite the contrary: we play, and only play, the hero, and in the swirl of other people"s stories, insofar as t