by Mark Helprin
Once, in the jazz age, when steam and steel might have fulfilled iron’s promises of power, the wall had rolled in like an angry lion, on a winter morning when they were dumping snow in the harbor and the mist was rising in anticipation of the signal plumes and clouds. But circumstances had been a trifle uncertain, many elements had been out of place, and the city had remained firmly rooted, as if it would never rise.
Only at the beginning of the third millennium, when arduous winters had returned just as in the little ice age that had caught the hunters in the snow, did the wall open and rise, and the bays and rivers turn bright gold. It was a masterwork of precision. The choir of machines had been tuned to shout back and forth across the ages. The means by which justice was proffered were strikingly humble, and yet cardinal to the principles that bind this world. And at the beginning of the third millennium, in those years of unrelenting winters, the just man finally emerged.
Battery Bridge
FROM EITHER madness, truth, or charm, Peter Lake, listening hard, thought that he could hear the coming of the future in his machines. Cockeyed and still, directing all his attention to their sermons, he stood before them like a climber who has made some glorious peak. Their hoots, screams, and singing, like the static of the nebulae, enticed him deep into a confusing jungle of dimensionless sound and light. From the darkness, jaguars’ eyes without jaguars glowed and circled in symmetrical orbits as red as rubies. On infinite meadows in the black, creatures made of misty light tossed their manes in motionless eternal swings that passed through the stars like wind sweeping through wildflowers.
He was abducted from the everyday world by contemplating for a second or two a whirling flywheel, or by listening to the symmetrical clicking of an escapement. When he had to fix a machine that only he could fix, someone had to be with him all the time, or, faster than he could stop himself, he would be drawn into a motionless trance at the foot of a crackling gearbox. These trances rendered him as stiff as a statue. It was almost as if he himself were a piece of reluctant machinery that now and then needed to be kicked. At first, in the company of another mechanic, he talked volubly and appeared to be in thorough control of himself. “Get me a number six metric spanner with a ratchet head,” he might say to his escort. The escort would disappear into the hive of machinery on his way to the airfieldlike rows of red toolboxes that were kept in the long open ways between the machines, and return to find his mentor frozen solid, staring ahead into an open mechanical gut.
Master mechanics were as eccentric and idiosyncratic as Episcopal priests, and over the centuries they had learned to operate freely in each other’s presence, respecting differences and allowing for peculiarities. But Peter Lake remained an outcast even among them, though, in his more lucid moments, he tried to make friends and to be like everyone else. These attempts were odd in themselves, since he could no more hide the fact that he was chosen than a rhinoceros could pass himself off as a calloused dairy cow. For example, at the end of the day, Peter Lake’s co-workers often congregated around a makeshift table upon which was a huge glass pitcher of beer. In a show of good fellowship, he would join them, feigning relaxation and joviality. “You know,” he might start off, in amazingly thick Irish, “this place is strange. I’ve been working on the master belt governor for the past day or two, and . . . and . . . and . . .” And he would be frozen block-solid in remembrance of the master belt governor’s tapping code that ordered all things into a central symmetry. The other machinists would look at each other and snort, for they had been expecting this kind of thing, and they would never kick him awake until they were ready to go home.
In the beginning they called him “You,” even when he wasn’t there, because he refused to be called by any name, in the hope that he would discover his true identity. His paychecks were made out to “Bearer,” which was how he appeared on The Sun’s payroll register—“Master Mechanic, Mr. Bearer.” He was surrounded by many a mystery that the other mechanics wished to penetrate, especially because they never quite got over their awe at his extraordinary knowledge of the machines to which they were pledged. They wanted to know, for example, what he did on his days off. He was so odd at work that they assumed his free time would put the Arabian Nights to shame. So they sent one of the long-haired, adolescent apprentices to follow him into the depths of the city.
“He did all kinds of strange things,” the apprentice reported upon his return two days later.
“Like what?” they inquired.
“I dunno . . . all kinds of weird stuff. It’s hard to explain.”
“Be specific,” they urged, readying themselves for a feast of gossip.
“What does that mean?” the apprentice asked.
“Just tell us some things that he did!” they screamed.
“He peered at a lot of things.”
“Peered? No one peers at anything except in books.”
“Well, You peered at a lot of things, I can tell you that.”
“Who, me?” asked a senior mechanic.
“No, You.”
“Oh.”
“He peered at walls, stones, and gates. He ran his hands over the sides of buildings and stared at rooftops. He had conversations with fenceposts and fire escapes.”
“What did he say?”
“I don’t know. I couldn’t get close enough. He went into the Five Points. I almost lost him then because I had to buy grape gum to black out my teeth. He can go there because he’s gotten to look pretty funny again. I had to black out my teeth, take off one of my socks and put it over my head like a hat, rip my shirt, open my fly, and limp—then they thought I was one of them. He went straight for a tenement that stood alone on a brick lot. In the hallway there was a gang that would have killed me for the tallow man. But they thought I was with him, so they kept off.
“You went up to the roof. He put his arms around an old chimney, like it was someone he knew, and started crying. He was talking to it, sort of begging or something.”
“What did he say?” they interrupted.
“I couldn’t hear. . . .”
“Because you weren’t close enough?”
“No. I was close enough. There was too much, like, static.”
“What static?”
“You know, like on a police radio. I was in an airplane once: they have powerful radios, like a ham. It was like that—a ham.”
“From where?”
“I dunno. It rained down. I couldn’t hear anything. It was like when you’re in the ocean and a big wave catches you and pulls you under and along with it. You hear the foam. It says something to you. I don’t know what, but it does. That’s what I heard.”
“Well what was it, foam or a ham? Make up your mind.”
“It was like both,” said the apprentice, getting all worked up, “like a foamy ham. You know! Wait!”
“What, what!” they asked.
“My brother’s girlfriend is a Greek.”
“So what.”
“She’s an Orthodox. Once I went to church with her, and they got this choir there—guys singing in tones, real low. It sounded like that.”
The mechanics asked no further questions, for they had stoked up their apprentice and he was going full-steam.
“And it was like an airplane in the distance, an antique one with propellers, and bowstrings quivering, and women going ‘Ah! Ah! Ah!’ and an orchestra playing all kinds of different things, and the way a dog growls when it’s really mad, and metal—hot metal—plunged into a tub of cool water, and a teletype machine, and a harp . . .”
“All right,” they said. “What did he do then?”
“He walked around.”
“Where?”
“Everywhere. Whenever he’d come to something that was a bright color, he’d stare at it for hours. He sniffed it. There was a house in Brooklyn Heights that had just been painted red. You caught it right in the sunset: he didn’t move for an hour and a half.”
“Where does he live?”
“He eats when he’s here.”
“He didn’t eat out there, not for two days. Oh yeah, I forgot to tell you. Sometimes he would get so happy he would dance. And sometimes he would go into a broken-down factory or an old pier shed, when he thought no one was there. That’s when the sound came back again. It was like people singing in one of those choirs, but not together.
“It got really loud on Pier Eleven. Nobody ever goes there, ’cause it’s too dangerous. You was on his knees. It sounded like the whole world was shaking the roof. Beams fell down, and parts of the ceiling blew away. The sunlight pushed through, and lit up the dust. It was the weirdest thing I ever saw. I thought the building was going to fall down. It got so light I could hardly see, and the dust was all over the place. Even the pilings were vibrating back and forth in the water. That’s when I decided to get out of there, and that’s when I lost him.”
The apprentice leaned forward and beckoned to his hearers. “I think,” he said, in a whisper, “that what we’re dealing with here is not your ordinary type of guy.”
AFTER The Ghost aerofleet had swept in manic arcs over the Finger Lakes, turning up absolutely nothing, Craig Binky was at a loss for something new. In the wake of the poetry craze, one of his lieutenants had suggested asparagus: “It has that style, that swing, that unaccountable fascination. . . .” Yet another was partial to a Hapsburg Empire revival: “Every fashionable woman in New York will be dressed in mouton lamb and bandoliers. Places to do the waltz will spring up. And our Sacher torte bakery might not have to shut down.” Someone else suggested photographs of leather fruit: “It’s sweeping San Francisco right now,” he insisted. “It’s tasteful, biogenic, relaxing, and capacious. Soon, and you can mark my words, every house in Peoria will have pictures of leather fruit above the fireplace.”
Nonetheless, Craig Binky was unsatisfied. He rejected their proposals, and went into seclusion. A full nine minutes later, he emerged. “The idea bulb has lit in Craig Binky’s head,” he announced. “Bring me Bindabu!”
Wormies Bindabu was the dean of The Ghost’s book reviewers, a group of half a dozen men who sat in a windowless basement next to the hottest boiler and underneath the noisiest web press. They looked and dressed exactly alike—five foot two inches tall, 108 pounds, brushy mustache, stomach-length beard, long bony hands, gray hair parted down the middle, black wire-rimmed glasses, undertakers’ suits, stringy ties, and crossed eyes. They sat next to each other in a ramrod-straight row and read twenty books a day (apiece), smoked Balkan Sobranies, ate hardboiled eggs and pickles, and listened repeatedly to one particular atonal concerto for bassoon and ocarina. Their names were Myron Holiday, Russell Serene, Ross Burmahog, Stanley Tartwig, Jessel Peacock, and Wormies Bindabu.
Craig Binky harbored special affection for Bindabu, because Bindabu was one of the very few people in the world who made Craig Binky look bright. Though he would quote (without having read) Spinoza and Marx faster than a waterbug could cross a cup of coffee, he did not know what an apple was, and he had never swum in a lake. Though he had never read Melville, he knew by heart the work of most anti-American Bolivian poets. Though he railed against puritanism in his dyspeptic reviews, he could neither sing, dance, nor wave his arms.
“Get the mayor,” Craig Binky said.
“Did he write a book?”
“Of course not. But he won’t tell me about that ship.”
“What does that have to do with me?”
“Attack!”
“I resent that, Mr. Binky. I’m not an assassin, a guard dog, a thug, a hatchet man. . . .”
“Of course you are. You’re the best. What I love about you, Bindabu, is that you conceal it so well in all the big words you use."
“But Mr. Binky, the mayor is your ally. Are you sure you want me to go after him?”
“Run him down, beat his brains out, bite his ass!”
The next day, The Ghost published a shocking attack on the mayor, in which he was called, among other things, a lout, a pimp, a crocodile, a Nazi, a populist, a Fascist, a pederast, a porcupine, and a glowworm.
The Sun rushed to his defense, putting the two papers on opposite sides of a question in what appeared to be reverse order. Both The Sun and The Ghost began to lose readers. Since those who could read one could not read the other, because of difficulty in one case and revulsion in the next, many switched reluctantly to The Dime, a reckless new tabloid that cost a dollar. The Sun and The Ghost were, once again at war. But no one on The Sun understood or sympathized with Harry Penn’s support of the mayor. There were resignations and defections. Some thought it was the powerful effect of the approaching millennium. Two thousand years—of course, they said, things are bound to be confused as we head through the rapids toward that glittering fall only months away.
Even in September, cold winds arrived from Canada and shut people in by their fires, making them think of the city of old. Winter, it was said, was the season in which time was superconductive—the season when a brittle world might shatter in the face of astonishing events, later to reform in a new body as solid and smooth as young transparent ice.
HARDESTY MARRATTA and Praeger de Pinto rode their bicycles down the riverway, propelled by the pressure of traffic behind them, which, as the lights tracked the length of the avenue, surged forward like a cross between a tidal wave and the charge of the Light Brigade. The silver bicycle wheels sang through the indolent autumn blue. That fall the colors were the brightest in memory. Despite their immersion in a lake of cold clear air, they seemed hot, Caribbean, and metallic. Dark shadows passed over the landscape quietly enough to make a ringing in the ears, and after months of being lost in the summer mist the skyline had suddenly jumped back into sharp focus.
Praeger had secretly designated a dozen reporters and researchers to the matter of Jackson Mead. They were hard at work in archives, libraries, computer centers, and on the street. Five of them continued the surveillance. Hardesty, Praeger, Virginia, Asbury, and Christiana devoted a great deal of time to the question. Christiana spied on Harry Penn (without being directly intrusive, she was, nonetheless, all eyes and ears), and the others followed leads in any way they could. Everything they got was fed into a computer, which shuffled and reshuffled the data in search of hidden correlations. Because all this was accomplished without Harry Penn’s knowledge or approval, Praeger thought he was quite a fox. Little did he know that Asbury, who he thought was working for him sub rosa, was really using most of the time to search the city for engines, and that Christiana was concerned far less about Jackson Mead than she was about finding a certain white horse.
Praeger and Hardesty were on their way to the Erie Lackawanna freight yards, because of a rumor that train after train had pulled in from the west and disgorged heavy construction equipment. As they sped south, Praeger told Hardesty of a major disruption in the metals futures markets. Bedford had reported that two dozen new companies were buying up enormous amounts of strategic metals. They paid in advance, in cash, and had already parted with close to a billion dollars. The metals were stockpiled all over the country, but were slated to move toward New York.
“What about the government,” Hardesty asked. “Don’t they suspect the meddling of a foreign power? Aren’t they investigating?”
“According to Bedford,” Praeger answered, “the government claims that everything is all right. They say they’re familiar with the companies, that the dislocations are only temporary, and not to worry. But Bedford went to see the head of the Commodities Control Commission, and he said the man seemed as if he’d been drugged or hypnotized.”
“You think it’s Mead,” Hardesty said, pedaling against a wind that nearly lifted them into flight.
“I have a feeling that it is, yes.”
“A billion dollars is a large amount of money for one man to spend on raw titanium.”
“I
think he could manage that from his change pocket. We’re dealing here with something different than we’re used to. Things of the world seem to be no obstacle for him, and his problems no doubt lie elsewhere. If he’s struggling, as he appears to be, it may be in a way we can’t even imagine. The Reverend Doctor Mootfowl and Mr. Cecil Wooley are not the typical billionaire’s assistants.”
“What makes you say that?” Hardesty asked sarcastically.
“I can’t put it out of my mind that both the fat one and the thin one wore Chinese hats and pointy silk slippers. And according to the half-dozen art experts to whom I’ve spoken, the painting of St. Stephen ascending—supposedly by Buonciardi—was never painted.”
“Who painted it, then?”
“They don’t know. But that’s nothing. One of the researchers was looking for records of other instances in which unknown ships have come into the harbor. He was working through the files of the Quarantine Commission, since they, probably more than Customs, would be interested in the origins of a ship. For a while the Quarantine Commission had charge of the potter’s fields. Just out of curiosity, he started to look through their records (which are alphabetical), and was promptly thunderstruck. At the turn of the century, a Reverend Dr. Mootfowl was given over to the potter’s field gravediggers by a Reverend Overweary. In the ledger, under Mootfowl’s name, Reverend Overweary had written, ‘Murdered by an Irish boy named Peter Lake, and his fat slit-eyed friend, Cecil Mature.’
“Isn’t Mr. Cecil Wooley the fattest, slittiest-eyed thing you’ve ever seen? And don’t you suppose that being called Reverend Doctor Mootfowl is not a common phenomenon, and never has been?”