by Mark Helprin
The midsection kept on coming, rolling out from behind the wall in a surprise that was sustained by unprecedented mass and height, leaving the onlookers speechless. Just as they thought that the stern would appear to make a proper end of the fine and long proportions, the ship burst into yet another fanfare of sparkling towers and terraced white decks, as if whoever built it had wanted it to be so lean and sleek that its staggering height would seem entirely reasonable.
Then, at last, after several thousand feet of it had paraded before them, the superstructure and the hull ended abruptly, not in a flowing curve, but in a steel cliff that dropped straight to the water. Closely following, connected in a dozen places by struts so large that trucks could have been driven over them, was an enormous rectangular barge the same height as the main deck of the ship itself. This glided after the mother ship, and was followed by two identical siblings.
The ship reduced speed and slowly came to a halt. Now that the sky was dark and the city lights had come into their own, it was possible to see that its hull and the barges were light blue. And, like most great things, it had attracted swarms of lesser attendants. Helicopters and private planes circled like gnats and dragonflies, turning circles and figure-eights in astonishing tours between the great masts and pylons. A fireboat from the Fire Department’s maritime headquarters on the Battery had belatedly rushed upriver, and was shooting plumes of white water into the night as its crew pulled on their pants and wondered why no one had informed them that this . . . whatever it was . . . was going to arrive. The great ship itself lowered yacht-sized launches that prowled about it jealously, and those of its crew who could be seen at all were seen only momentarily—like soldiers who rise for an instant above a parapet but dare not linger.
Everyone at Petipas had come to his feet, electrified. It was as if they had won a great victory merely in seeing a wonderful thing. They were so excited that they hardly knew what to do, and they were content for a while just to share their amazement.
To a city dweller high on a hill, amid the trees, or on a busy street, ships always seemed to creep into a harbor with unnecessary hesitation. But to a sailor who had been racing for weeks or months between spacious horizons, his ship’s speed was dizzying in view of the insanely narrow confines into which it had to come, and he was happy only when it reached a full stop. When a great ship entered New York Harbor, it realigned the city’s notion of itself, its place, and its purpose: the ship proclaimed that there was a wide world beyond the Narrows. “I have been there,” it said. “I have seen it. Now do your best to imagine the wonderful things that lie beyond, for I will not tell you exactly.”
Harry Penn climbed onto a chair and began, as usual, to direct his staff, “Craig Binky probably missed it,” he said. “Who knows, he might have turned north and flown to Canada. I wouldn’t put it past him to scout for a ship on land.
“All right. Asbury, get the launch ready so we can have a good look when we want to, close up. We have time, if we can get some information, to have a special edition of The Whale. Praeger, there has never been a ship like this. I think it may be bringing us a great gift.”
“Which is? . . .”
“The future.”
They left the restaurant almost at a run. Even Harry Penn raced up the cobblestone streets that led to Printing House Square, tapping now and then with his cane to remind himself that he was not young anymore.
That night no one on The Sun got any sleep, and although it did not know it, the city began to come alive.
The Machine Age
SPRING IN New York is often rough and dirty, when enticing stretches of near-summer weather are followed by ten-day sleet storms. For derelicts it is by far the most difficult season, if only for its frequent showers and rebellious winds. After the desperate battles of winter, when one can die in less than an hour if one is in the wrong place, the prospect of slow death in April, while the plants are greening, is like the prospect of dying on the last day of a war. Much the same as those who are in school, the men of the street graduate in June, and then the summer takes good care of them.
Not until June was Peter Lake able to reflect upon his dilemma. After his release from the hospital, he had to struggle just to stay alive during the winter. For several months he lived in subway tunnels, sleeping near heat pipes, burrowing in next to people with whom he never exchanged a word. Most of them were mad, and all were scared—that a train would cut them in half, that dog-sized rats would attack, or that they would run afoul of some lunatic with an easily inflammable grudge. Eating was neither difficult nor pleasant, since restaurant garbage cans always held enough to feed more than just cats and dogs. Sometimes, on subzero days when he couldn’t get a meal either by washing dishes or by experiencing sudden rushes of piety in front of religious institutions with soup kitchens, Peter Lake turned to this source. He quickly discovered that kitchen workers, and truck loaders at commercial bakeries, were always willing to give him a carrot or a roll, if he would take his intense and disturbing presence somewhere else. Pigeons were not healthful to eat, but they could be roasted over a fire in a trash barrel, and there were charitable trusts here and there which sometimes offered a shower, a turkey dinner, and a bed for the night.
Holding a job would have been possible, but he hadn’t the time. He was extremely busy doing absolutely nothing, and had he been comfortable for just an instant, he would immediately have been captured by his obsession and defeated. He neither liked nor felt at ease with the idea of work, and decided that he would not take a job until he had some idea of who he was, or until some passion seized him and he did not even need to know.
No longer desperate, at the end of May and in early June he began to walk the city, to see what he might remember, and to note the changes. It was almost all glass and steel. The buildings seemed to him more like coffins than buildings. The windows didn’t open. Some of the buildings had no windows. And their graceless and exaggerated height made the streets into wispy little threads strung together in a dark labyrinth. Only at night did they redeem themselves, and only at a distance—when their secretiveness, their inaccessibility, and their arrogance disappeared, and they bathed the city in light and shone like stained-glass cathedrals turned inside out. Oppressed by the size and power of the city’s architecture, he found for himself a string of holy places (only one of which was a church) to which he could and did return time after time. He sensed there what seemed to him to be the remnants of the truth, and he returned to certain rooftops and alleys the way that lightning repeatedly strikes high steel towers in an argument between tenacity and speed.
The first of these places was the Maritime Cathedral, which had endless fields of stained glass as blue as the sea. He could see into the light itself that made the illusion of waves and water, and into the light of the eyes and faces of the people depicted riding in the ships and boats. The power of the spectrum increased dangerously when it was woven into images of the broken and the redeemed, of those who were stubborn, of those who fought, of those who were unshakable, and of those who had seen a great thing. The rays of these delicate lights and pictures combined to splay upon the wide cathedral floor to make a representation of the sea under a line of miniature ships in glass cases. The ship models often drew Peter Lake into the cathedral, though he had no idea why. They seemed infinitely touching and full of meaning, as if the real life of ships had been concentrated and trapped to oscillate within the glass, waiting to be freed. Though the artful windows and little ships of the Maritime Cathedral were motionless, to Peter Lake they seemed always to move. The ships traveled across the glass, the whales rose into the air, the hearts of the sailors were beating and their brows were wet with spray.
The second was the alley outside Petipas, where the child had run into his arms. He appeared there often in the days that followed, hoping to encounter the same group of people. But the courtyard was either empty or filled with another party: usually they were raucous, they drank a lot, and they di
dn’t notice him. The wrought-iron fence became something sacred to kiss or touch. To hold it made him feel better, and the first time he returned when the courtyard was empty he closed his eyes and hoped that everything was a dream, and that, when he awoke, he would find himself not looking in from the outside, but in their midst, slightly inebriated, tired, at dinner on a summer evening trapped somewhere in the amber of time. How nice it would have been to have discovered that he was, say, the owner of a clothing store, a railroad dispatcher, a lawyer, or an insurance man, and that he was at Petipas—a century back—with his wife and family. If only he could have returned to that, to a house of dark wood, with friendly fires and a city garden, to the sad wails of the ferryboats, and the sense that the future was going to be quiet, infinite, and green, rather than a pent-up thing of suffocating glass and steel. He would keep the dream in mind, and reform whatever bad habits had plunged him into it. Remembering how it had been to be lost in time, he would do good works and be forever grateful for his return. When he gripped the iron and shut his eyes, he hoped that he was going to cross over. Of course, he didn’t.
There were small shrines and forgotten places that were for Peter Lake like the roadside altars of the Alps—an old doorway lost in shadow and peeling paint, a cemetery tucked between monstrous buildings (though a hundred thousand people might pass in a day, very likely not one turned his head to look in, or hesitated to read an inscription or a name), hidden gardens, house fronts, meaningful views down strangely crooked streets, places that seemed to harbor an invisible presence.
The last and best of these was an old-law tenement still standing in the Five Points. It was the kind of place the inside of which no decent, educated, perceptive member of the middle classes has ever seen and been able to describe. For no decent, educated, perceptive member of the middle classes has ever gone into such a place and come out alive. The people who lived there envied the rats in their tunnels. There was no light, heat, or water, and the hallway never lacked an angry man with a knife in his hand.
One day Peter Lake just walked into this place, climbed the stairs, and threw open the rickety door to the roof. He would come back a dozen times, and never know why. He went up the ramp that formed the roof of the stairwell, and inspected the chimneys. The round pipes that had once been oil flues had been out of use for a decade or more. Then what of the chimney, the real chimney? It had been sealed up for three-quarters of a century, and the mortar between the bricks was as loose as windblown sand. Looking into the abandoned shaft, he saw nothing. But he was almost overcome by the upwelling smell of sweet pine. As it rose from the hollow beam of darkness, the fragrant air carried the sense and stories of many winters long forgotten. This shaft with its cool unlikely air was a vault of memory. It comforted Peter Lake to know that the fires of the moment have blue and ghostly echoes that long outlast them to rise in another time. And it took him back so well that he had to embrace the disintegrating chimney so as not to lose himself and tumble off the roof. There were fewer buildings then, and much more forest and field. Morningside Heights was a farm, and Central Park really a part of upstate that had been inserted into Manhattan like a drawer in a bureau. The buildings often had high echoing halls reminiscent of great open distances nearby and on the frontiers. Because they were constructions of space, wood, and stone, they were portraits and parodies of the wilderness. It had been good to be alive then. You could leave your door unlocked. (Peter Lake had no way of knowing that he had been a thief, and no way of knowing that he had been, nevertheless, impeccably honest.) You could always smell a pine fire in winter, and the snow stayed white.
It wasn’t all easy, however, and this he understood when he realized that half of the reason he clung to the chimney was that just to look at the roof was inexplicably painful. Perhaps if he had read a history of the old-law tenements, he would have come across an off-hand reference to the legions of consumptives that took refuge on the roofs, making a separate, higher city, and then he might have begun to know who he was. But perhaps not, for he had a long way to go.
His existence was not without its compensations, and he had moments of elation and discovery that few of the settled ones he envied would ever know. Desperation is the lower half of something, which, in order to plunge, must climb. The streets of New York and some wards of its venerable institutions were packed with people who, despite being entirely forsaken, had episodes of glory that made the career of Alexander the Great seem like a day in the life of a file clerk. Peter Lake was always coming alight, firecracker style, with golden enthusiasms which made him dance in the street. No one noticed. No one cared. Bums were always dancing in the street, singing, proclaiming, shouting that they had found the truth. And never, ever, had one spoken anything other than the incoherent sonnets of the insane. “Chester Mackintosh! Chester Mackintosh! Chester Mackintosh bedid with flowers what Hilda did to the moon! Come ahead in the hive, and do with me what the crook who crawled summering into the cat neck did. Who?” one of these people might declaim—to a mailbox. The arguments and counterproclamations stimulated by posters were legendary, and the poster was always addressed as “you.” Often the men of the street were lordly or threatening in regard to parking meters, treating them like indentured servants or boys in the lowest form. Sometimes, though, at the height of these mad ignitions, they struck gold. It happened to Peter Lake.
Not long after he had served as the apparition of Petipas, he was walking in a splendid evening, as fast and bright as a Roman candle, master of the world in shreds and tatters, elated, benevolent, even operatic. He came to the greenhouselike panels above which schoolchildren often stood on an off-sidewalk parapet to see the ancient machinery of The Sun shimmer and tingle in its chores. He leaned royally on the empty rail and looked inside. The sight of the humming self-contained machinery was nothing less than a booster rocket for his already flaring mania. But it was more than that, because it had turned his gratuitous euphoria into something real. At once he knew that his optimism had been illusory, and that now—by chance—it had been substantiated. There, right in front of him, were the machines, spitting and coughing like babies, agitating like a hundred boiling kettles, turning and shuttling with devoted concentration. There, at last, was something he knew and was sure of.
Two harried and depressed mechanics walked through the gallery below, carrying a freshly oiled steel shaft between them and talking in frustrated grunts and curses that could be heard even above the noise of their engines. They approached a three-quarters disassembled contraption that stood between two other machines that wound up cables and then hissed and whistled as the cables unwound and spun several sets of Newtonian governors. Though their hands were covered with oil, they scratched their heads. That’s a bad sign, thought Peter Lake. They probably don’t know the workings of the double mutterer. They may not even know what it’s for.
He rapped on the glass. They looked at him, and then turned away. He rapped again. “What do you want?” they asked.
“I would like to explain the intricacies of the double mutterer,” he screamed. They couldn’t make out what he was saying.
“Go away,” they said. But he wouldn’t, and kept on pounding the glass, until one of them came over and opened a transom. “What do you want?” Peter Lake was asked again.
Composing his words as carefully as a man who stands before a judge, Peter Lake answered. “I saw that you two fellas are working on that double mutterer there. You seemed puzzled. I’d be glad to help.”
The mechanic looked at him with a skepticism tempered by the fact that Peter Lake, like the mechanic himself, was Irish. “Double mutterer?” he repeated. “Who said it was called a double mutterer? We don’t even know what it’s for. We were just trying to see if we could get it going and then find out.”
“It’s called a double mutterer,” Peter Lake said, “and it’s an important adjunct to the power train. If you haven’t been using it, chances are that you’ve been getting power-train breakdowns ab
out once every week.”
“That’s right,” the mechanic said. “But how the hell do you know?”
Peter Lake smiled. “I can take apart and put back together a double mutterer, or anything else you’ve got in there, with my eyes closed.”
“That I’d like to see!” exclaimed the mechanic, who for years had been laboring on these machines that had outlived all others of their kind, and who was obsessed with the dozens of puzzles that were implicit in their mechanisms. Though he had spent half his life there, and had been taught by his own father, he was unable to understand most of what he tended, and incapable of taking a great deal of it apart—much less of putting it back together again.
“I’d be happy to show you,” responded Peter Lake, knowing that his challenge would be irresistible.
The mechanic went to his friend and spoke to him, looking around every now and then to make sure that Peter Lake hadn’t vanished. Then both of them got a ladder, and put it up against the transom. “Come right in this way,” the other mechanic said.
Peter Lake climbed down into paradise.