by Mark Helprin
Peter Lake could hardly decide what to watch—the living painting, or the girl who sat in front of it. He noted, however, that this indecision was pleasing in itself.
IF THE child in the hallway had lived, which he most probably had not, he would have grown to manhood, and would need no one’s help. If he had died, Peter Lake would never find him, for he would have been buried in one of the potter’s fields, in an unmarked mass grave. Many of these last resting places had been built over, and were now smothered forever under boiler rooms and basements. The child, male or female (he did not even know), might have been thirty feet under a packed coal bin in the cellar of a boardinghouse full of clerks and shop girls.
Nonetheless, several days before the new year, Peter Lake left early in the morning and rode Athansor to Korlaer’s Hook, where he had landed in his canoe long before, and from which he intended to retrace his path. This was not only a nearly impossible feat of memory (the city had changed), but the Short Tails were now so thick around Korlaer’s Hook, driven there by new laws and a new economy, that he was certain to be spotted. The morning was sunny and clear as he trotted Athansor along the fenced mall of Chrystie Street. Its row trees were varnished with ice in thin wafers of painstaking exactitude, and when the wind blew, they jangled like crystal chandeliers.
Down by the bridges, he passed the hotel Kleinwaage—not a big hotel, but, on balance, a good one, famous for its charcoal-grilled steaks, fluffy white beds, and green public rooms choked with fresh flowers. As he rode past, he scanned the façade.
Walking with incredible pomposity down the bleached marble staircase was a fat figure in an ermine coat. He carried a cane, strutted like a millionaire, and was studded here and there with big diamonds. He had all the makings of a rich spice merchant—which is what Peter Lake would have taken him to be, were it not for the dark slit eyes in a massive fat face, the single eyebrow, the heavy breathing, and the Chinese hat.
“Cecil,” said Peter Lake.
Cecil Mature turned in alarm, unslit his eyes to see who was calling, and then, in an attempt to run down the street, made his little sausagelike legs into an invisible windmill. Needless to say, he could not outrun Athansor.
“Cecil, why are you running?”
Cecil stopped. His face began to bend and quiver the way it always did when he spoke. “You’re not supposed to see me.”
“What are you talking about? I thought you were dead. What happened?”
“I’m not supposed to tell.”
“Who said you’re not supposed to tell?”
“They did,” answered Cecil, pointing at the hotel.
“Who’s they?”
“Jackson Mead.”
“He’s back? You’re with him? I don’t understand. What happened?”
“I can’t say.”
“C’mon, Cecil Mature, you’re talking to me.”
“First of all, my name isn’t Cecil Mature.”
“What, then?”
“Mr. Cecil Wooley.”
Peter Lake stared at his old friend, hardly knowing what to say.
“My name is Mr. Cecil Wooley, and I work for Jackson Mead.”
“Are you the squash cook?”
“Nope.”
“Potato chef?”
“Nope.”
“What?”
“Chief . . . structural . . . engineer,” said Cecil, a lighthouse of pride. “And I bet you can’t guess who’s the overall engineer-in-chief and first assistant to Jackson Mead.”
“Who?”
“The Reverend Doctor Mootfowl, that’s who!”
“It can’t be.”
“It is.”
Just at that moment, Jackson Mead came out of the hotel, with a hundred retainers. It was a pleasure and a shock to see him. “I gotta go,” said Cecil. “It’s against the rules. I’m not supposed to talk to anyone.”
“I want to see Mootfowl.”
“You can’t. He’s already on the ship. We’re leaving today at noon for the Gulf Coast and South America, where we’re going to build bridges—fourteen of them.”
“When will you be back?”
“I don’t know,” said Cecil, swept away by Jackson Mead and the mass of tall men who followed.
“The ferris piece!” screamed out Peter Lake.
“He forgave me,” cried Cecil, and then was lost to view as the entourage turned onto Park Place and headed for the great white ship that would take them to the Gulf.
It did not take Peter Lake long to gallop after them. But a line of trolleys cut him off from the route to the wharves. “Jump!” he commanded. Athansor had not jumped in a while, because he had been concentrating on pure speed and sustained flight. Thus, he was unable to clear the trolleys, and landed on top. Mortified, he stayed there despite everything that Peter Lake said to get him off, and they rode backward into Chinatown, where the inhabitants looked in wonder at the man mounted upon a pure white horse on top of a streetcar. They thought it was some sort of American joke, or perhaps an advertisement that (like most others) they did not understand. One of them started screaming that it was the President, and they all started screaming that it was the President, because they thought it was Theodore Roosevelt (who was not President then, but who had been not long before). Then Athansor galloped down the length of the cars and jumped, soaring over a group of tenements and leaving Chinatown and its astonished population Republicans forever.
When he reached the wharf, he saw the white ship under a steep slope of billowing sail heading out into a harbor full of whitecaps and windy blue. He had expected as much, and he was beginning to sense a pattern in such things. According to Cecil, Mootfowl was once again alive. Peter Lake wondered what would be the fate of the many others who lived amid the city’s complicated machinery and hearthlike engines.
Looking up at a row of high bridges, he recognized the one on which he had crossed with the spielers, and he realized that the house must have been on one of the islands of Diamond Reef. He spurred Athansor with a word, they ascended the white ramps that led to the bridge, and were soon so high over the river that they felt as if they were sailing within the cloud archipelagoes and winter stars above the Lake of the Coheeries.
AFTER SEVERAL transits of the islands via the tremendous steel bridges that connected them, Peter Lake came to the proper place, and he sensed his way through miles of streets and squares until he found the old Dutch façades behind which had been the spielers’ little house. But the tenements were empty, and in the space that had been their courtyard was an industrial building with soot-black walls and chimneys. The factory, or whatever it was, took up the whole block and pressed from inside against the old fronts, showing through glassless windows like a whale bulging from within a house.
Peter Lake tried the doors. Had they opened, they would have given onto solid walls. He bent his head back to see the height of the chimneys. Seven in a row reached hundreds of feet in the air, and each one was busy inventing plumes to drift and unravel.
He went around the other side and found an industrial door that was half as big as the building. At its base was an opening which, though twice the height of a man on horseback, seemed like a tiny missing tooth at the foot of a tower of baleen. From it came a river of light and air, and a sound of whirling contentment—whether dynamos, or motors, he did not know. Athansor carried him in at a slow gentle walk.
A vast room stretched before him, disappearing in its own dimness both ahead and above. The roof was not visible, but high overhead were acres of catwalks, grids, and traveling cranes. Some of the cranes proceeded slowly into the distance, with an extremely smooth and dampened movement that struck Peter Lake as unusual. It appeared that the beam hoists were directed from lighted house-sized boxes attached to their ends. Though they seemed to flow to and fro with a good deal of deliberation, no one could be seen inside. They were too far away, and the buttery yellow light that came out in straight rays from their big windows was white and blinding at its source. T
hough Athansor perked up his ears when he raised his head to follow them (as if they were mysteriously slow insects), neither he nor Peter Lake could hear anything except the white sound from the machinery on the floor.
The machines themselves were as big as office buildings, olive green, gray, and blue, and lacquered to a shine. Stairs traveled up their sides to steel ledges and landings which led to avenues and ways within. Lights of all colors sparkled in banks of blinking wildflowers; arched piping as thick as mine shafts bent from one massive block to another; and though everything about these engines was still, a steady sound like that of a dozen muted Niagaras gave the unfailing impression of speed, motion, and enveloping progression.
They walked along the line of machinery until they were discovered by a workman who was emerging from one of the long passages inside. He said nothing as he approached. But in his expressionless face and jewellike eyes he was expression itself held down and stilled. Peter Lake had heard Beverly say that the greater the stillness, the farther you could travel, until, in absolute immobility, you achieved absolute speed. If you could hold your breath, batten yourself down, and stop every atom from its agitation within you, she had said, you could vault past infinity. All this was beyond his comprehension. He took note, however, that, within this building, Athansor, his quiet and affectionate horse, had the air of a horse who enters the yard of a familiar smith. He wondered with what Athansor had once been shod, and would perhaps someday be shod again.
“Can’t you see the sign?” asked the workman.
“What sign?”
“That sign,” he said, pointing to an enormous luminous panel which read “Entry Forbidden.”
“In fact, I didn’t see it,” responded Peter Lake. “What is this place?”
“A power station,” the worker answered. “I thought that was obvious.”
“What kind of power station?” was the next question from Peter Lake—skilled mechanic, builder and repairer of electric motors, dynamos, steam turbines, and internal combustion engines.
“A relay station.”
“For what?”
“For the power that comes in here.”
“From where?”
“I don’t know. It’s just a relay station. I’m not an engineer.”
“I’ve seen every kind of power station there is.”
“Then you should know, shouldn’t you.”
“Yes. But I don’t. I’ve never seen or heard of anything like this.”
The workman made a gesture of contempt. “It’s been here for so many years,” he said, “that I couldn’t even count ’em.”
“It hasn’t been here for that long. Twenty years ago, people lived in the tenements. In the courtyard there was a little house with a dirt floor. The spielers lived in there: they were pickpockets . . .”
“I know,” the workman cut in. “Little Liza Jane, Dolly, and Bosca, the dark girl.”
“How did you know that?”
“I was here then, too. I lived over there, right about where that block of machinery is, see?”
“In a tenement?”
“That’s right. Everyone’s dead now, or moved away.”
“Do you remember a little child who lived in that building there,” asked Peter Lake, pointing at the empty space above a bank of lights, “and who was very sick—about so high, could hardly see, and had a horribly large head, a swollen skull?”
“I told you, they’re all gone. But if he was like that, they might have taken him to the hospital.”
“Which hospital?”
“The hospital that serves the islands, and served them then—the hospital in Printing House Square.”
“But that’s in Manhattan.”
“The ambulances just go over the bridge.”
THE MORGUE of the hospital in Printing House Square was a windowless room in a subbasement with not even an airshaft. Fifty autopsy tables stood under glaring spotlights, and on every single one a body was in repose. On some, as many as ten infants were turned sideways and lined up from one end of the table to the other like a row of disabled pistons. The corpses were of all ages and colors—men, women, children, derelicts as big as horses and as loose as a bundle of rags, muscular workers in rigor mortis, slight girls with hardly any flesh on them, criminals whose last accomplishment had been to collect a bullet hole the size of a dime, a decapitated East Indian whose head stared at its body from across the room, young children with puzzled and painful expressions, men and women who never thought it would end this way, luckless people whose last expression was surprise.
A doctor in a bloodstained coat moved from table to table dictating notes into a speaking tube that he pulled after him on an overhead track, and sometimes bending over a corpse to examine or open it. Peter Lake was immobilized in the doorway. He could neither go in nor pull himself away. The eyes of the dead were focused at random everywhere, and one could not help but be in their field of view.
“Searching for someone, no doubt,” the doctor said to Peter Lake without looking up. “Chances are that you won’t find him here. If you don’t know why, I’ll tell you.” He spoke as if he were still dictating, and the appearance of Peter Lake were only another condition to be noted and examined. “These people don’t ever have anyone who comes after them. They’re the ones who fall through the cracks. Where are their parents, their children, brothers, sisters, friends? They’re here, or they were here, or they will be soon. Do you think that the ones who are still breathing want to get near this place before they have to? You couldn’t drag them down here with a windlass.”
When Peter Lake said nothing, it seemed only to spur the doctor on. “Maybe you’re from some reform group, and you’ve come to gather evidence.” He glanced at Peter Lake and concluded from his expression and appearance that he was not. “They come down here to snap pictures. They get a thrill here—that’s why they come. They take stupendous joy in the indignation and compassion they feel on account of these mangled stiffs; it’s their roller coaster. I know this,” he said, making a tragic incision across the abdomen of an adolescent girl, “and I’ll tell you why. Since I’m here all the time and take apart fifty of these things a day, I can’t feel for each and every one of them. I’m not God. I don’t have that much in me. The ladies’ aides and the social critics sense immediately that I couldn’t give a goddamn about all this inedible meat, and that’s just what they want. They know they’re better than the miserable bastards they try to help, but they really enjoy thinking that they’re better than the rest of us, who aren’t as ‘compassionate’ as they are.” He turned to Peter Lake again, and said, “You notice how often that very word escapes their lips? They use it like a cudgel. Beware.”
What he did next, as a matter of routine, made Peter Lake close his eyes in horror. But the doctor continued, his hands glistening, as if nothing had happened. “They come down here for their own benefit. It’s as clear as day that they love it. The great irony and perfect joke is that the wretches on the bottom of the barrel get these self-serving scum as champions. Some champions! They feed off the poor—first materially, and then in spirit. But they deserve each other in a way, because vice and stupidity were made to go together.
“I know that, you see, because I was poor. But I rose like a rocket, and I know how the whole thing works. The ones who are always on your side, or so they think, are the ones who keep you down. Everything they do keeps you down. They’ll forgive you for anything. Rob, rape, pillage, and kill, and they’ll defend you to yourself. They understand all outrages, and all your failings and faults, too. Perfect! You can go on that way forever. What do they care? Excuse me: they do care. They want it that way.”
He bent over to make a short cut, as thin as a hair, across the chest of the emaciated blond girl that he had just eviscerated. “How would they make a living, these servants of the poor, if there were no poor?
“What enabled me to rise above all the people who don’t know enough to come in out of the rain is that
one day I looked face to face at a man who hated half of everything I was and had the courage to tell me so. I remember his very words. He said, ‘What you’re doing is hideous—a perfect way to die young. Unless you want to live sweetly only in the hereafter, you ought to learn how to do the right thing.’” The doctor stopped what he was doing, dropped his hands to his sides, and looked directly at Peter Lake. “I hate the poor. Look what they do to themselves. How could you not hate them, unless you thought that they should be like this.”
Putting down his scalpel, he reflected for a moment. “Forgive me,” he asked. “Sometimes I talk to the living in the same way that I talk to the dead. And maybe they do get to me more than I think. You are looking for someone, though. Why else would you be here?”
Peter Lake nodded.
“Age?”
“A child.”
“Sex?”
“I don’t know. It seemed like a boy, perhaps.”
“Race?”
“Irish or Italian, I think.”
“Those are not races. Where from?”
“From the islands.”
“We don’t get so many of those anymore, not since they industrialized. The population was decimated.”
“This was before that.”
“Twenty years ago?”
“That’s right.”
“Maybe, maybe . . . I could help you find someone who passed through this place twenty hours ago—maybe. But not twenty days ago, and not twenty weeks, and never under any circumstances twenty months. Twenty years? That’s almost funny. You might as well go to a wheat field in Kansas and try to trace an individual grain that fell off the stalk two decades before you got there. Whole generations spring up and die without being remembered. Everyone is forgotten. If the parents are alive, which I doubt, I guarantee you that they, too, have forgotten.