by Mark Helprin
About a hundred people stayed awake that night on the neat little steamship off Governors Island, staring at the shining palisade of buildings and bridges across the water. It was late spring; the air was warm; the fog kept low and made the city beyond look even more dreamlike than it might have looked on a clearer night. Unable to see the land, they thought that America was a glowing island reaching infinitely high from the middle of a gentle sea.
They were quiet because they had been stunned. Their hearts had almost run out of their bodies when the line of people on deck finally started to move forward, and, with a great cheer, a thousand souls began to descend from the gangway into the new land. That morning, Brooklyn had spoken off to the right with its church bells, klaxons, and boat horns. The streets that ran up its sloping hills glittered and waved in the sun; they were the scene of constant traffic, as were the harbor, the piers, and the river lanes. Even the air was crowded with clouds and birds, fleeing together in the wind with unbent white energy. After so long in places so difficult, the immigrants could almost hear music as the buildings rose up ahead and sparkled. Here was a place that was infinitely variable and rich. Its gates were like the gates of heaven; and if there were some on the other side who said that this was not true, all one had to say was, “After what I have been through, the power of my dream makes it true. Even if this place is not the great beauty that I think it is, I’ll make it so, one way or another.” As they moved in the packed line, they looked over the rails and saw people beyond the barriers smiling at them as if to say, “Just wait! You have hard and good times ahead, as I did.” The signals were from everywhere and very strong. The world they faced was terrifying and beautiful.
After they had stepped onto solid ground the line divided at the base of the gangway, and they walked quickly into an enormous room full of people. The windows were open, and sometimes spring air entered gently in warm breezes that smelled of flowers and trees. A family of three moved step by step to the head of the line. The man was sturdy and blond, with a carefully tended mustache, and eyes as blue as the wet blue cups in a palette of watercolors. His wife had a weak and lovely mouth that suggested vulnerability, sensitivity, and compassion, but, unlike the dark waddling pumpkins that stood around her, she was tall and strong. She carried their son, an infant. The father took the baby when she left him for the examining room. The people next to him thought that he was crazy, for he stroked the child almost mechanically, muttering something to it in a tight and desperate fashion, though he could not take his eyes off the door where she would come out. When finally she emerged, she shrugged her shoulders as if to say that she didn’t know what the doctors had determined. Without a word, she took the baby, glad to get him back, and her husband left for another room. As he walked away, he saw that she had a symbol chalked on her back. Then, they examined him. They made him spit into a vial; they took some blood; and they scanned him rapidly while a clerk wrote down what they said. After he put on his clothes, they put a chalk mark on his back, too.
By early evening the meaning of the chalk marks was apparent. Most of the hall was empty, but about a hundred people remained. She was already crying by the time an official came and told them in their own language that they would be going back. “Why?” they asked, in fear and anger. To answer them, he made them turn around so he could tell them the one word that had kept them out. For this young peasant and his wife, that word had been “consumption.”
“What about the child?” she asked. “Is there a place for him? If we have to go back, we’ll leave him.”
“No,” answered the official. “The child stays with you.” His expression implied that there was something wrong with a mother who wanted to leave her child.
“You don’t understand,” she said, shaking. “You don’t understand what we left.” But the official continued down the line of those he had to condemn, and disappeared in silence. They were left with their child in the rays of a very clear and harsh electric light.
The ship pulled into the harbor to lie at anchor, mainly, they thought, so that they would not try to jump off it. Even for those who knew how to swim, the water was far too cold, the distance to land too great, the currents too swift. Chunks of ice flowed past, hissing as they melted, sometimes knocking against the ship’s steel plates like wooden mallets.
He tried to bribe the captain to take the baby ashore, but he didn’t have enough, and, thus, the captain was not amenable. Perhaps if they had been turned back for other reasons it would not have been unthinkable to return to the place that they had been so glad to leave. But they knew that they would die, and they were determined to leave the child in America no matter how difficult it would be for them to part with him. It would be as difficult as dying.
They stood at the rail or they sat within the dark spaces, silently, just as the others did. Had they been on the open sea it would have been a time of fear. But they were at the base of a palatial city which glowed at them and filled their eyes with gold light. They were amazed by the bridges, which arched in strings of glowing pearls. Never having seen anything like them before, they did not understand their scale, and imagined them to be many miles high. They ached with envy and regret as they took in the spring night, unable to sleep.
He began to wander the halls. Why am I not man enough to accept this? Why am I so greedy? The picture of his wife leapt before his eyes. At first he started to cry, but then he became enraged. He slammed his fist against the bulkhead. A framed print jumped off the wall, its glass shattering about the corridor. “Greedy!” he shouted, fighting nothing and everything that ever was, at one and the same instant. Right in front of him was a wooden door of slatted panels, that begged to be kicked. He gave it one tremendous boot and knocked it off its hinges. It smashed down so hard and loud on the floor inside that several things happened. He jumped back in shock. The lights in the room went on. And a companion-way door swung closed.
For a moment, he froze, fearful that one of the crew had heard. But then he remembered that nearly everyone had taken a boat to shore. A few officers remained behind, sitting on chairs with their feet up on the rails of the bridge, smoking and talking as they, too, watched the lights of the city. They were too far away to hear.
He stepped inside to turn off the light. He was in a meeting room of some sort. Green leather chairs surrounded a dark wooden table. He looked about, shut off the light, and started back to the open deck.
Halfway down the hall, he stopped. A chill came over him, and he shuddered. Then he ran back to the room, found the light, and saw what he had come to see. In the corner, under a porthole, was a big glass case. In the glass case was a wooden model of the ship, the City of Justice, a replica about four feet long. It had a weighted keel, masts, smokestacks. It was detailed so finely that he pictured within it a little room in which a man stood staring at a model ship, inside of which was another room and another model, until the last one was not small, but larger than the universe, having reversed the cycles and rhythm of size in an inevitable buckling cusp.
He was an orderly man who never would have smashed down a door or hit walls with his fist. But that afternoon he and his young wife had received what they thought to be a death sentence. He took one of the heavy green chairs, lifted it, and brought it down upon the case. Another crash, and more shattered glass fell to the floor. It was, in its way, exhilarating.
On the dark and deserted fantail, he and his wife tied lines to the little ship and lowered it into the water. Not only did it float, it trimmed itself to the wind, and it refused to capsize even when an enormous swell from a passing tug hit the real ship and exploded over the replica like a tidal wave. Despite its remarkable stability, it rode high in the water, maintaining about half a foot of freeboard. After they retrieved it, he went off to find a box of tools. That was easy enough, on a half-deserted ship, for a man who had learned how to kick in doors. When he returned, he used a chisel to open a space aft of the rear funnel. Putting his hand inside, he dis
covered that the hollow hull was spacious and dry. It took until morning to construct a little bed in the interior, and a hinged vent that, if a wave swept over it, would close tightly and then reopen.
When a rapidly strengthening sun promised the first hot day of spring, they put their infant in the ship and lowered the ship over the side. They watched it ride swiftly out into the green and sunny open water until they could see it no longer. She cried, because everything that she loved was soon to be lost.
“You leave your children,” he said, “and they make their way. It would have been almost the same. . . .” Unable to continue, he looked at her face, at the weak mouth that was like a thin crooked line. No longer was he her protector. They had become terribly equal, and when they took one another in their arms it was unlike anything they had ever done before, for it was the end. The ship sailed that afternoon. The whistle thundered. Steam issued from its stacks and raced up in doubling whitened plumes.
THE MINIATURE City of Justice darted on the waves like a pony as it drifted in and out of whirling eddies in the tidal race between Brooklyn and Manhattan. No one saw it as it sailed amid the full-sized harbor traffic, on several occasions escaping being crushed like an egg beneath the bows of huge barges and steamships, or rammed by the ferryboats in their monotonous sleepwalks from one shore to another. With the fall of evening, it was pointed toward the Jersey shore and the Bayonne Marsh.
This was a mysterious place of unchartable tangled channels and capacious bays that exploded into sight after issuing from narrow water tunnels—a topography that had a life of its own, and was constantly altered by the busy engraving of the cloud wall. The City of Justice worked its way gently up the channels and through the reeds. In a wide bay that was more fresh than salt, due to the six rivers that poured through it to the sea, the City of Justice bumped up against a long white sandbar and came to rest. It stayed there throughout a warm night of a hundred million stars, without a peep from the child—who was rocked to sleep by the small waves on the lake.
The Baymen had a cryptic saying: “Truth is no rounder than a horse’s eye.” Whatever it meant, they passed it on from generation to generation as they hunted and fished. They poled through the reeds so swiftly that even kingfishers could move no faster. They were united so with the air and water of the marsh, moving through them like privileged natural forces, that they could outrun the cloud wall. Though few from the land had ever seen it, the sight of a group of ragged Baymen howling and shrieking as they raced ahead of the galloping cloud wall was extraordinary. For the cloud wall was quick enough to envelop eagles. But the Baymen could beat it even in canoes, their paddles pounding the water like great engines, grimaces upon their hairy ragged faces, the canoe bows planing dangerously, crashing through white water and broken reeds. They surged ahead of the cloud wall, and, when the chase was over, threw themselves into the water to cool off, the way a blacksmith plunges his hot iron into a bulbous tub to hiss and puff.
Thus, the unkempt and cockeyed Baymen were not afraid of fishing or digging clams in the beautiful deserted lakes and channels near the great white wall. In fact, most of the time they wanted the cloud wall to act up, to sweep and scour the yellow bars and golden reeds, and light out over the water after them. They liked to race it in their thin canoes, and were the only people in the world who could outwit it: if it caught them, they knew some things to say that might make it change its mind about snatching them up. There was much about them that was remarkable and good. However, they were primitive, ignorant, violent, and dirty. Though this was perhaps a steep price to pay for access to the fecund shallow lakes at the foot of the cloud wall, it was the way they were.
In the last hours of the clear night when the City of Justice grounded itself in a bar on the lake, Humpstone John, Abysmillard, and Auriga Bootes, all Baymen, set out to fish for the fat red snappers that had run a maze of channels from the Hudson and found the lakes. The three Baymen took note that the cloud wall agitated about two miles in the distance. It thundered, churned, flowed, boiled, crackled, screamed, and sang—a rapids set perfectly on edge. They cast out their nets. The water was fresh, and the reeds had begun to sprout green shoots.
As the sun emerged, the wind fled before it, whistling in the reeds and over the sand and water. The light glistened and turned in front of their eyes; now gold, now red, now white or yellow; and tones arose from the water—tones like bells or oboes or the singing of choirs from unimagined worlds. When the wave of light broke into white foam at the base of the wall and fell back to fill the crucible of city and bay with its brightness and warmth, the Baymen felt the presence of something powerful and benevolent, as if the sound and light presaged a tidal wave of strong gold that someday would sweep over everything and collide with the wall. They had heard of it. They had heard of the omnipotent glow that would spread about the bays and the city, of the light that would make stone and steel translucent. They hoped someday to see it, but did not dream that they would. In the mornings, though, they watched its tailings and remnants sweep up against the shore.
The nets had been cast and pulled in several times when the fishermen stopped to rest and to partake of dried fish wafers, radishes, hard bread, and clam beer. The most stimulating of all alcoholic beverages, the Baymen’s clam beer changed color with age and temperature, and was perfect when it was purple. That meant that it was cold, thick, and dry—an indescribable ambrosia that made mead taste like horse piss. They sat in their long canoe, eating silently. Auriga Bootes, whose eyes always combed the horizon and shifted about from sea to sky, stood up straight, and pointed. “A ship in the lake,” he said, with great surprise, for the lake was far too shallow for ships. Humpstone John, an elder of the Baymen, looked up and saw nothing. Since he knew the dimensions of the estuary, he had adjusted his gaze for sighting a real ship and passed over the City of Justice by ten or twenty degrees.
“Where, Auriga Bootes?” he asked. Abysmillard glanced about, still chewing loudly, seeing nothing that might have passed for a ship.
“There, John, there, John,” answered Auriga Bootes, still pointing in the same direction. Then Humpstone John saw it, too.
“It seems very far away,” he said, “but it seems close as well. It isn’t moving. Perhaps it has been spit out from the cloud wall and left aground. There may be a good cargo on board—guns, tools, implements, molasses—” at this, Abysmillard perked up, because, for him, molasses was a magnificent delicacy—“and there may be confused souls.” They put down their food and began to paddle in the direction of the City of Justice. Faster than they thought, they glided up to the ship, and were looming over it.
Like an ape, Abysmillard touched his own body, feeling ribs, nose, and knees. He could not understand what was happening, and thought that he had grown to be a giant. The other two knew what it was, but the illusion remained because the ship had been skillfully crafted. The wood of spars and decks was browner than an oiled nut. The hull’s simulated black steel was as dull and dark as the side of a bull. And the brass fittings were as tarnished as if they had been years at sea, not in a glass case.
“You see that,” said Humpstone John, indicating the ship’s name in white. “That’s writing.”
“What’s writing?” asked Auriga Bootes, staring at the funnel, which he thought might be what Humpstone John called writing.
“That,” said Humpstone John, pointing directly at the bow. Auriga Bootes leaned over and jiggled an anchor in his fingers.
“This?” he asked.
“No! The white stuff, there.”
“Oh, that. That’s writing, huh. What does it do?”
“It’s like talking, but it makes no sound.”
“Its like talking, but it makes no sound,” Auriga Bootes repeated. Then he and Abysmillard laughed deep, fat, snorting laughs. Sometimes, they thought, Humpstone John, despite his wisdom, was truly a fool.
The miniature ship was not much of a prize, but they decided to take it home anyway, and attached
a line to the bow so that they could tow it behind their canoe. Halfway across the lake the baby awoke and began to cry. The three Baymen halted in the middle of their strokes. Stock-still as their paddles dripped water, they tilted their heads to find the sound. Humpstone John rustled through a pile of burlap rags in front of him, thinking that one of the Baymen had left a baby in the rags by mistake, or put it there as a joke. He found no baby, but the baby’s cries continued. Still gliding, he pulled on the rope, and the City of Justice came near. The noise was from inside. Humpstone John pulled a broadsword from his belt and cracked open the ship the way one cracks an egg with a knife. A wizard with the sword, like all Baymen, he judged the thickness and strength of the wood in the stroke of the steel, and penetrated no farther than was necessary to split the shell. The sword was back in his belt before it had had a chance to gleam in the sun, and the baby hung in midair as the two halves of the now-dead replica parted and upended. Auriga Bootes snatched the child before it hit the water, and tossed it onto the burlap rags. Then, without the slightest acknowledgment of what had happened, they continued paddling. There was no point in talking about it. Abysmillard could not have talked about it even had he wished to do so. For him, thick tongue-tied stump that he was, it was as if nothing had happened. And as far as the other two were concerned, there was now another mouth to feed, another child who would laugh and giggle in the huts.
HE WAS one of them until he reached the age of twelve. They had called him Peter, and then, to tell him apart from the several other boys of the same name, had chosen for him a last name that fit the way they thought of him—as the child pulled from the lake. He quickly learned most of what they had to teach, and was good at the things they did. There was no formal training, and the children just picked up the skills of the Baymen as they grew. For example, the ability they had with swords was unequaled, demanding extraordinary strength and coordination. But, more than that, it required a free path to the deed of the blade itself, as if it had already been done and needed only to be confirmed. Peter Lake learned the sword at a stroke, when he was eleven.