by Mark Helprin
On August nights, Christiana, Marcel, and his guests would occasionally sit on a balcony that extended over the river at the garden’s edge. Laden barges and intracoastal craft rode the current close to shore, passing silently and swiftly like monsters trying to sneak down the channel after having wandered by accident into the city. These poor frightened things became targets for the Apand pistols. As the barges glided by, Marcel, Christiana, and their friends pumped shots into the darkness, trying to hit the running-lights, and when they shot low they heard their bullets chime off the steel hulls and into the water.
Sometimes when Christiana found herself at a party in a very high place she would go to a darkened window and look out over the city. It smoldered in summer heat, and through the blur she could see tenements burning, perhaps ten at any one time, in the city of the poor. The many lights that shone through the misty summer air also seemed to be fires, and everything below her appeared to be alight. And yet the city was not strangled in its own smoke. It was alive, and she wanted to know it, even if it meant the risk of losing herself within it. Because there were all kinds of hell—some were black and dirty, and some were silvery and high.
IN LATE summer the city was attacked and besieged by waves of heat which bleached and dried the marshes in New Jersey until they were as white as salt pans, scorched the pine barrens, and tried to turn the dunes of Montauk into the deserts of Mars. The city itself became a kiln—ninety-eight degrees in the shade and all through the night. The main arteries, islands, and boulevards were feathery green with thirsty trees that moved like wild dancers, begging for water in the dry wind.
One airless night at the end of August, Hardesty and Virginia became crazed with desire. Possessed and hallucinating, and sweating like athletes, they struggled with everything they had to get to the other side of one another. Immersed in violent, gymnastic, wet intercourse, they felt like powerful engines, forges, furnaces, and they wondered if perhaps some great god on a journey to the outer reach had flown by the sun and passed his hot cloak over the earth. Just when it was over, they heard the steam whistle of an outbound freighter gliding downriver. They sensed the form of the ship; and its passing gravity shook their bodies and trembled through them as if the ship were not making its way down the East River, alive in the stream, but sitting across from them in their bedroom.
Not too far away, Asbury Gunwillow lay on his bed, trying as best he could to breathe. He had found work as the pilot of The Sun’s launch. He carried reporters and illustrators to pier fires and shipboard dedications; took them far out to sea to meet dignitaries on incoming transoceanic liners; ferried employees to and from Manhattan, Brooklyn Heights, and Sheepshead Bay; shadowed the Coast Guard, Customs Service, and Harbor Police; made it possible for the readers of The Sun to have fresh riverward perspectives of new buildings; accompanied Hardesty and Marko Chestnut to places like Sea Gate and Indian’s Mallow; and trolled for bluefish a hundred miles off the bight. He had been pursued for a full month by a monstrous unkempt woman from Tribeca, an intellectual who did not know if it were day or night, had never seen the ocean, and thought that a goat was a male sheep. Jaundiced and liver-colored, living only through books, tobacco, and alcohol, she had the face of a bullfrog, the brain of a gnat, and the body of a raccoon. And yet she had easily lured Asbury to her loft on Vesey Street, because she had a siren’s voice, and her name was Juliet Paradise. Being relatively courtly, he did not bolt at their first meeting, and she followed him thereafter like a hound. “How can I get rid of her?” he had asked Hardesty and Marko. “I look at her face, I see pizza pie. I’ve tried everything. What should I do? Tell me!” They just laughed, enjoying his distress.
Uptown, on Central Park West, Praeger and Jessica were back together again for the ninth or tenth time, knowing that they would spend the rest of their lives in convergence and reconvergence. Harry Penn, a widower, went to see his daughter when she appeared in a play, ran the finest newspaper in the Western world, and was served his at-home dinners by Boonya, an insane but cheerful Norwegian maid. Marko Chestnut, also a widower, would never fall out of love with the woman who had died, and was sustained by the grace of the children who came to his studio to be painted, the practice of his art, and the ever-changing city. Craig Binky was a bachelor who had never given a thought to love. But, then again, he hadn’t ever given a thought to anything else, either. He was happy enough. He had The Ghost, his blimp, and various schemes to crush The Sun. Marcel Apand had real estate, concubines, and Christiana for show.
On the August night when Asbury had been unable to sleep and Hardesty and Virginia could not tear themselves apart, Marcel Apand, some of his closest friends, and Christiana set out in three enormous automobiles to tour the city of the poor. Marcel was not a fool: the bulletproof salons on wheels in which they rode were equipped with radios and high-voltage skins, and each automobile carried both a guard and driver armed with small submachine guns and tear-gas grenades.
They did this because they were willing to do anything for amusement, because they, too, could not sleep, and because Marcel wanted to disabuse Christiana of the notion that beyond the brown-out and smoke there was a free empyrean. He wanted to show her that such things did not exist, that there was no mystery, no transfiguration, no God to save those who are thrown upon the waves.
As they rode slowly in convoy across the Williamsburg Bridge, before curtains were drawn so no one would be able to see in, they toasted each other with champagne and checked the door locks. Nervous and excited, but, most of all, curious, they spoke in barely audible whispers as they descended the Brooklyn ramp into the inferno.
“The entire city is going to burn someday,” said an older man, apart from Marcel the oldest there.
“So what if it does,” someone else challenged. “They probably have the right to burn it.” The three cars had descended, and were moving down a long empty avenue of blackened tenements.
“I don’t mean the way it burns now, the way it burns every day,” said the older man. “That’s controllable, acceptable. I mean a shudder of anger that will make itself heard in heaven, a fire that will leave only rubble and glass.”
“We’ll rebuild,” said Marcel. “Let it come. We’ll rebuild.”
“It would be so wrong,” a fashionable woman declared, “so very very wrong, to burn everything just to cleanse part of it. . . .” But then she was interrupted.
“Look!” Christiana shouted. They peered out the windows on the right side, where a group of ten or twelve skinny young men in denim jackets and tight pants were chasing a man who wore no shirt. He tripped now and then, as they did, too, because they were running across a field of jagged bricks piled three or four deep at all angles. But, still, he nearly flew, and would have kept ahead of them had not a brick thrown by someone in the front of the pack grazed his head and sent him sprawling. They closed in, beating him with steel pipes and chains. Finally, as if that were not enough, they shot him point-blank in the face eight or ten times. Then they ran.
It had all happened in less than a minute. Christiana had not been able to breathe as she watched. She begged Marcel to call the police, and wanted to get out to help the man lying on the bricks.
The glass partition between compartments went down halfway, and the guard reported that the police had been summoned. “But they won’t come,” he said. “Not until daylight. They’re afraid. It doesn’t matter: the man’s dead, and he probably was expecting it.” The partition closed, and they rolled on.
“Don’t you own a lot of this area, Marcel?”
“I used to, Del, thirty years ago, when there was still something to own. It’s all squatter’s law now. And there aren’t many buildings that still stand.”
“Enough to turn a profit.”
“Only for the devil.”
Through the tinted glass curtains came a fiery glow that made the women’s faces seem rose-colored. The long avenues of flattened rubble, in which nothing stood but chimneys, were only the
perimeter of a vast city of the poor that stretched to the sea. Guarded by ramparts of tenements, it appeared in the distance like an enormous pan that holds a smoky flame. The sky above it flickered and danced, and the unseen rampart walls looked like a mountain ridge shadowed against a sunset. The action of the light suggested, in red and black, the movements of a crazed barbaric army.
Though frightened into silence, they continued into the city of flame. This was no silent place, as well it might have been, punctuated only by explosions and shots. It was a hell of roaring mechanistic sounds that fought to overwhelm the senses: battalions of drums, sirens mating in the open air, engines shrieking with delight.
Hundreds of thousands of people rushed from place to place, just as in the mother city glowing coolly in the west, but these were wasted creatures with euphoric eyes. A soot-blackened man in rotted clothing bent over and pounded the sidewalk with two sticks. It appeared as if, momentarily, he would straighten his back, but he never did. Barefoot lunatics, expressions awash, staggered from street to street with their pants half down. Rows of diseased prostitutes stood at the curbs and gestured to growling automobiles that had engines powerful enough for tanks and were filled with men whose hands warmed knives and guns. There were no quiet places, no misty parks, no lakes, no trees, no clean streets. The only towers in the city of the poor were pillars of wavering smoke, and it was ruled by arrogant young men who swept through the streets. Consumed by wars among themselves, they exploited others only as an afterthought, but always well. When the cars passed by, these people pushed out their chests, gestured defiantly, and smiled. Rocks and bottles bounced off the armored automobiles like rain.
They came to a square which, though it had once been a fairground and a farmer’s market, had become a place for the exchange of loot and drugs, for the marshaling of gangs, and for the continuous sharking and hustling that was nothing less than the city consuming itself. Off to the side, a clever entrepreneur had made the ruined foundations of a public building into an arena. A crowd was pouring in through its gates and fighting for seats on planks laid over uneven courses of dilapidated masonry. Thousands had packed themselves together to see some kind of entertainment. Marcel thought it would be all right for his party to go in as well, since everyone’s attention would be directed toward what they had come to see. He sent a security man to arrange for a special box behind the lights and close to the waiting cars.
As they got out of the limousines, the women pushed back their lace veils and squinted at the carbon arc lamps that shone into the arena. The few stragglers who had gathered were silenced by the shocking differences in bearing, health, and dress that made both parties feel as if they were contemplating representatives of another species. Christiana threw back her hair and looked around. She knew that, if need be, she was able to climb or run. So often, living with Marcel, she had felt motionless, and, ironically, bodiless. Here, at least, everything was physical—the noise, the oppressive summer heat, the tumbling pink clouds which reflected the flamelight. Better to be here, she thought, where the heart pounds out of control and the hand trembles, than chatting with Marcel’s friends in a drawing room or an expensive restaurant.
A man stepped into the lights. Wearing a lime-colored tuxedo and gold jewelry that seemed to be crawling all over him, he screamed in a language that Christiana could hardly understand, and, as he screamed, he danced. He gestured to one entrance or another of the pit, and a fighter would appear from the shadows. Armored in shiny black metal plates that made him look more like a sea creature than a gladiator, each man carried either a sword, a long steel pike, a trident, or a mace. When the man who was being devoured by his own jewelry disappeared, a dozen strong fighters remained standing on the sand. But they did not fight each other.
Instead, a gate opened and a brown mare was pushed into the light. At first blinded, she shied back. The roar of the crowd was a wave that struck and paralyzed her, and, as her eyes adjusted to the light, she saw the animal fighters closing in, and she knew what was going to happen. Those closest to her drove her from the wall to the center of their ring. She watched as they tightened it. There was little use in threatening with her hindquarters, since, wherever she turned, there would be a swordsman or a pikeman in front, where she was almost defenseless. Some animal fighters fought horses one to one. Not here. Even so, they moved very slowly, and the spectators were tense. The mare panicked, and reared onto her hind legs. As soon as she did, they attacked, driving their steel deep into her flesh. Pikes pierced her chest with a sound that was like a knife in a melon. She was down in an instant, swaying gently, on her knees, and they hacked at her until the sand was soaked and the pieces lay about like litter.
Christiana could barely stay upright. She had the strength neither to stand nor to cry out, and though she wanted Marcel to take her out of there, she couldn’t even turn to him. She had no will, but only eyes, as in a dream.
They produced a different horse, and though Christiana begged in silence to be released, she was pinioned to the air, and she watched as another perplexed animal fell to its knees and died.
Then they brought out what the crowd had been waiting for, an enormous white stallion for whom both gates from the holding pen had to be opened. He stood calmly, neither blinded by the light nor afraid. The animal now in the ring was for Christiana the embodiment of all that she loved, all that was beautiful, and all that was good. She felt that were they to kill him they would be killing everything in the world that would someday enable it to rise. And unlike the day that she had been alone on the beach, thrown off her dress without a thought, and waded into the surf, she was now unable to go to his aid. It was a different time. Things had changed. The world was not the same as it had been when she had ridden the white horse in from the sea.
She was with him in the arc lights, and she saw through his eyes as he moved his head to survey his enemies. He stunned the crowd because he refused to be afraid. Striding forward easily, he went to the garbage that had been the mares, and put a hoof upon the bloody head of the first. It was an unmistakable gesture, and it made the horse butchers nervous. Christiana knew that he could have jumped out of the pit and left it all behind with no more difficulty than a steeplechase horse cavorting across a lawn. But he chose to stay.
He began to move about. Never before had the animal fighters faced such a large creature. During his agile dancing, muscles rose in his flesh. His legs moved fast, and the gray hooves suddenly seemed as sharp as razors. The people screamed when he reared and made the invincible fighters lower their lances and swords in fright.
A lance was thrown. The rampant stallion turned on it furiously, knocking it aside and driving it into the ground halfway the length of its shaft. The man who had thrown it tried in vain to pull it from the sand. The spectators loved this, and they would have raised the roof, had there been one, when, next, two pikes were thrown at once. The horse leapt high in the air and let one pass, and kicked the other with his rear legs, sending it up into the night air on a flight that promised to take it far beyond the smoke and clouds.
Now everyone could hear his breathing. Quick jumps took him from one side of the pit to the other, scattering the swordsmen and spear-throwers, isolating them for his attacks. They bounced off the walls, dropped their weapons, and staggered about as if they didn’t know where they were. The white horse felled them one after another. He would fake to his left, and, in a split second, bound to the right, his forelegs crushing one of the horse butchers against the wall. He picked them up and shook them until they went limp, and then threw them away. He batted them with his neck and crushed them with his hooves. And in the end, he stood alone, shuddering, sweating, incensed.
Because the spectators had been worked up to a dangerous frenzy, Marcel insisted that his party leave immediately to drive back to Manhattan. When the three heavy cars took to the Great Bridge, they were raised far beyond the fiery haze of the city of the poor, and Christiana saw a full moon that had sailed
over the harbor and silvered the cliffs. Away from the city of the poor there were such things as the color blue, a cool wind that had no smoke, mats of interwoven summer starlight, and the enormous pearl of the moon. The expedition, Marcel said, was a great success. Who would have known that they would see a white horse fight like an avenging angel? Marcel was credited for the discovery, and the word was spread. But other caravans would have no luck, for the white horse was soon lost deep within the city of the poor.
They returned to Manhattan quite late, or, rather, early in the morning, and they all slept soundly. That is, all except Christiana, who did not sleep at all.
SHE STARED out over the garden to the moon-washed river. While they had been in the city of the poor, a front of cold air had come down from Canada and lifted the mist from most of Manhattan. Upriver, she imagined, it would be dark green again, rather than the diffuse jungle green of summer, in which there was no blue. Heat and haze had swallowed up the blue for weeks, but now it covered the surface of the rivers and dominated the mountainsides. The cool air shocked her into her senses.
She gathered her things together, changed into a chambray shirt and khaki pants, and went downstairs to the kitchen. There, she made half a dozen sandwiches of smoked meat, took some apples and carrots, and decided that she would steal from the petty cash jar. Marcel wouldn’t miss it, and she would take only what was there. She opened it and pulled out a roll of bills that she stuffed into her pocket without looking. Outside, on Sutton Place, in the middle of the night, she felt free for the first time in months, and she almost danced down the street. She had no idea where she was headed or what she would do, but, before she turned into the depths of the city, she counted the money she had taken and was a little shocked to see that it came to $3,243. Since that was barely enough to make a small lunch for Marcel’s closest friends, or to provision the yacht for a day sail, she rightly assumed that he would never know or care that it was gone. After all, this was the man who had lost $7 million at Pachinko, and said it was worth having seen the little silver balls fall past the little silver pins.