by Mark Helprin
“Gentlemen!” he blurted out as he was powerfully lifted into the air, but could think of no further appeal.
Amazed by the absolute steadiness with which he was raised, he imagined that the thugs who had him were Olympic weight lifters. He turned his head a few degrees in each direction, but was unable to see their feet. Nor could he hear their breathing. Nor could he feel their hands.
Though it was not entirely beyond the range of the local criminals to approach their craft with such refinement, it was not likely, either. Peter Lake tried to look over his shoulder, but he was held as firmly as if he were a kitten grasped by the scruff of its neck. He cleared his throat, and was about to address his tormentors once again, when he saw that he had begun to move very rapidly across the room. The acceleration was such that he felt the wind whistling in his ears, and he was pointed at the far wall. It came at him so fast that he hadn’t even time to blink (much less protest) before his head smashed right into it.
But, rather than being killed, he went right through, with a gust of air that blew his hair back against his skull. Then he was in another cellar, still accelerating, heading for another wall. Expecting the worst, he closed his eyes. But again he went right through, and was still picking up speed. Soon he learned to keep his eyes open and bless the pace. Wall after wall appeared, and was passed as if it were mere air. He was traveling so fast that he saw the basement rooms go by as if they were frames in a motion picture—until the walls were no longer evident.
He flew underground as fast as a jet, whistling through earth, stone, and innumerable cellars, cisterns, tunnels, wells, and, finally, graves. For, as effortlessly as if he had been flying through clear air, he was taken on a tour of all the graves of the world. Though they flickered by with such rapidity that they became no more than a beam of sullen light, he was able to examine each one separately, as if every flash of his journey were a full-scale inquest. He saw the faces and clothing of the newly buried, and he registered their expressions without emotion.
Peter Lake’s eyes were the only vital part of his face as they took in the quickening images that hurtled past, and they moved with machinelike, supernatural speed, fastening precisely upon every detail, catching a glimpse and more of each of the billions that he was assigned to see. The velocity and rhythm of these many lives combined into a pure and otherworldly whistle, like that of a loon in the deep forests on a still, clear night. They lay in all positions. Some were merely dust, others the ivory bones that children fear, spookishly luminescent. In unending scenes and drolleries, they clutched amulets, tools, and coins. They were buried with icons, photographs, newspaper clippings, books, and flowers. Some were in tattered shrouds and others wrapped in tape. Some had cradles of silk and wood, and many many more lay without any accoutrement in the soft or stony ground. Some he found in steel chambers, smothered under the sea, and some in great masses, thrown one atop the other like kindling. Chains, ropes, and iron collars were as much in evidence around the neck as were pearls and gold. They were all ages—infants, warriors with swords still stuck in their thighs, scholars who had died peaceable deaths, and Renaissance servants in red caps. As they shot past, they hesitated for an immeasurable instant to greet him. He flew over their great legions in the darkness of the ground, and his eyes kept working to take in the bearded ones, the toothless, the laughing and the insane, the worried women and the smiling, those who were profound and those who had never known more than a fish knows, the ones who had lived their lives on the ice and were still there, perfectly preserved in smooth white vaults, and the ones who had been washed down hot rivers and had lost everything but the tiny sparkle in the mud that betrayed their final positions.
His mouth fell open, but, still, his eyes worked. Something within him refused not to honor each one, and as if he had been born for the task, he saw and remembered each fleshless head, each whitened hand, each cavelike eye.
The graves of the world went by him with the hypnotic speed of the counterrhythms that dash from the spokes of a rushing wheel. He was unmoved, and he did not feel compassion, for he was far too busy and his eyes too darting and quick. There was much to be done. He had to know them all. And, in his mad and breathless flight, he did not miss a single one, but worked as if he had been created to be their registrar—the mechanical mole, the faithful observer, the gleaner of souls, the good workman.
LATE IN the afternoon, one day in the middle of October, the light on West Fifty-seventh Street created those perfect conditions that medieval churchmen had used to elaborate upon the idea of heaven. Virginia was returning from a North River pier where she had been sent to interview a noted political exile—who never arrived, because he had been secretly taken off his ship at sea and flown to Washington. She had several hours before she had to be home to wake the children from their nap, and had decided to do some shopping on Fifth Avenue. Abby hadn’t been feeling well, probably because of the change of seasons. Mrs. Solemnis said that she was sleeping comfortably and had no fever.
Virginia needed a winter coat. Because she was tall, even for a Gamely, she took large sizes. This, combined with her deeply ingrained thriftiness, meant that she would probably have to look hard to find something decently styled, and warm enough for the Lake of the Coheeries. It had been years since she had seen her mother. Both Virginia and Hardesty knew that they would have great difficulty getting to the Coheeries, and that they might not be able to return. Hardesty was willing, in that case, to become a farmer by the lake, and pass his winters on skis, in iceboats, and skating many miles from village to village and inn to inn. They planned to go in December or January, if conditions were right. They would bundle the children in wool, down, and fur, and take the train early one morning when the smoke from the few chimneys that still existed stood skinny and straight in the cold air, like undertakers waiting outside a church. These, at least, were their plans. But since they had planned in this fashion for many winters and had never been able to leave, the plans seemed like dreams. Every winter, they were going to go back to the Coheeries, but something had always occurred to force them to put off their move for yet another year.
Passing Carnegie Hall, Virginia noticed a crowd filing in for a concert, and saw on several billboards that the famous orchestra of Canadians P. (his full name) was going to play the Amphibological Whimsey Dances of Mozart. Because it was rather hard to tell what was what on the mixed bill, it might have been the Divertimento in C Minor of Mozart, and the Amphibological Whimsey Dances of Minoscrams Sampson. That seemed more reasonable. She was about to continue walking, when, right in front of her, as fast and round as a ball of quicksilver, the fat slit-eyed thing that they called Mr. Cecil Wooley bounced up the steps of Carnegie Hall. Undoubtedly, she thought, Jackson Mead’s quintet did not include in its repertory such things as the Amphibological Whimsey Dances, and young Mr. Wooley, soft for lighter forms, had weaseled away to attend this concert. There was no mistaking his truant stride. He had the air of one of those schoolboys whose eyes bounce back and forth in rhapsodic perjury as he tries to pretend that he has walked into a women’s steambath because he neglected to read the sign.
She dashed into the lobby. He had just bought his ticket, and was heading for the balconies. She approached the ticket seller. “You see that fat thing?” she asked, pointing to Cecil Mature as he was just barely swallowed up into a doorway. “Give me a seat right behind him.”
“But miss,” the ticket man protested. “I’d have to give you seat forty-six in balcony Q. That’s the worst seat in the house. Unless your mother was an owl and your father was a hawk, you wouldn’t be able to hear or see a thing.”
“What was that?” Virginia asked. “Speak up!”
“Oh,” the man in the box office said, and issued her the ticket.
She raced up the carpeted stairs, with Cecil panting several flights in the lead. At the top, Virginia paused to let Cecil take his seat. Then she went up and around, and took her own seat behind him, unnoticed. Were i
t not for half a dozen sound-asleep policemen, Virginia and Cecil would have had the upper balcony entirely to themselves. She looked down, and put her hand over her chest in fright. From where she was sitting, the stage was nothing more than a little fan-shaped cookie crawling with black-and-white ants.
The lights dimmed, and Cecil Mature popped up and down in joyous anticipation. After he opened a little white carton that he had taken from his coat pocket, Virginia was overcome with the aroma of lobster Cantonese. As the concert began, and the bassoons, piccolos, and snare drums started to play (to the cheers of the Mozart and Minoscrams Sampson devotees—and the police, who clapped automatically in their sleep), Cecil Mature began to eat the lobster Cantonese, using his fingers to shovel it into his mouth, and his teeth to crack the shells.
Virginia was soon swept up in the sad amphibological harmonies. This music was like riding gentle waves, or motoring through the Cotswolds. It lifted and raised its hearers as gently as if they had been the wounded coming from war. It was very strange stuff, and Cecil Mature loved it. He must have been devoted to it, Virginia thought, the way her mother was to the works of A. P. Clarissa. Except that Cecil was young and somewhat rowdy, and every once in a while he would toss his arm into the air and say, “Play that music! Play it! Yeah!”
As the concert was ending, Virginia went into the hallway so that she might run across Cecil accidentally. When the lights came on, Cecil flashed around the corner. “Mr. Cecil Wooley!” she exclaimed, just as if she were surprised, and had known him all her life.
He went dead in his tracks, shut his squinty eyes, and clenched his teeth. “How do you do,” he said in evident pain.
Virginia went on. “What a surprise that you like Minoscrams Sampson. He’s certainly my favorite composer. You know, he lived not far from where I grew up, in a big windmill on the shore of the lake, and every day. . . .”
Before Cecil knew what was happening, she had captured him and was towing him along East Fifty-seventh Street. He could not protest that he had to get home (or wherever he had to go), because she was chattering away about this and that, and wouldn’t let go of his arm. In truth, he was very proud to be seen with such a tall beauty, and she could have taken him anywhere she wanted. He blushed and blinked in pride and embarrassment. It was as if he and she were on a date. All the executives walking home in the dusk would see them, and since Fifty-seventh Street was the street on which to be seen, what could be better? Thinking that they might take him and Virginia for husband and wife, he felt a thrill of pleasure.
Virginia snapped her fingers. “I know!” she said, in response to a question that had not been posed. “Let’s have an ice cream soda in the bar of the Hotel Lenore. They make a special ginger chocolate cream that my children love. You might want to try it.”
Cecil stopped where he was, and shook his head from side to side.
“What’s the matter, Mr. Wooley?”
“I can’t,” he said, gravely.
“You can’t what?”
“I can’t. We’re not allowed to go to a bar, to have ice cream sodas, to eat chocolate, to talk with strangers, or to be alone at night away from the ship.”
“Who said?”
“Jackson Mead said.”
“Does he have to know?” Virginia asked.
“I couldn’t.”
The Hotel Lenore had an overelegant bar where those who didn’t know any better went to feel important, but they made the best ice cream sodas anywhere.
“Look at that beautiful dame with that fat slit-eyed thing,” one of the bartenders said to another. “What does a knockout like her want with a ball of India rubber like him?”
“I dunno,” answered the other bartender. “Some dames like a crazy salad with their meat, if you know what I mean.”
Since, perched on a bar stool, Cecil looked like a memorial sphere atop a victory column, which was architecturally correct, he had a measure of confidence that he would not otherwise have enjoyed. Nonetheless, he was dreadfully ill-at-ease.
“Two chocolate ginger cream sodas,” Virginia said, “and go very, very, very heavy on the special ingredient.” The special ingredient was rum.
A $65 ice cream soda should be served without delay, and they were, the two of them, all $130 worth, as big as buckets, in Baccarat vats with platinum spoons and gold straws. Cecil was beside himself. He thanked Virginia, and grabbed the straw, but after half a draw he turned to her and said, “It tastes good, real good, but there’s something in it that reminds me of tetrahydrozaline.”
“That’s the ginger,” Virginia said, and touched her lovely lips to the gold straw.
At first Cecil hesitated, but then he set to work. Whereas Virginia took little dainty bee-wisps of the iced chocolate, Cecil would have been useful when Mussolini drained the Pontine marshes. Like a first-class rotary pump, he hummed with the pleasure of the work, and, even though the Baccarat vats in which the Lenore served sodas had special sumps to prevent the final “Aarchh . . . Roooch!” when the bottom was reached, Cecil’s velocity rendered their design moot, and the “Aarchh . . . Roooch!” sounded like a volcanic pumice shower. He leaned back a little and swung his glazed eyes at Virginia. He had drained a gallon in five minutes, but it was the quart of rum that had glazed his eyes. Now Virginia had him.
The little bee-wisps of rum had given to Virginia a beneficent fuzzy glare. She was just enough out of phase with the rest of the world to be able to look Cecil in the eye and elicit from him all that he wanted to say, though she didn’t really look him in the eye, since it was harder to see his eyes than it would have been to see what the soldiers of an enemy machine-gun squad were reading inside their pillbox.
“There was some stuff in that soda, wasn’t there,” he asked, accusingly.
“A quart of rum,” she answered.
“A quart and a half,” said the bartender, in passing.
“God!” said Cecil, angry for a moment. “Why’d you have to do that?” He pounded his fist against the air. “It doesn’t matter. No bye, no goodbyes.”
“What does that mean?” Virginia asked.
“I dunno. Sometimes I used to have a glass of wine, or a glass of beer, with dinner. I found that it helped me appreciate the food, cleared the palate, aided digestion, and made me drunk. But this! I dunno what I’m going to do. How long does it take for a quart and a half of rum to go away?”
“Half an hour.”
“Oh, that’s not so bad. But the thing is, I feel so vulnerable. What if Pearly came in? Peter Lake’s not here to protect me.” His eyes went all misty and his mouth cranked up into an abysmal expression of primal sadness.
“Who was Peter Lake?” Virginia wanted to know. The name sounded vaguely familiar to her.
Tears now ran down Cecil’s cheeks, and he regained control only after a few minutes. “I remember those days,” he said. “We used to live in water tanks and on the rooftops. Sometimes, we would hire ourselves out under false names and work in a forge or a machine shop. They couldn’t begin to touch us for quality work. Mootfowl knows more about that stuff than anyone in the world, and he taught us. We worked whenever we wanted. Sometimes I’d do small tattoo jobs, and we carried everything we had in little stonemason’s bags. The weather was great. Always clear skies. And, if it did rain, we’d go see one of Peter Lake’s girlfriends. We went to Minnie’s a lot. I would always sleep in the other room and listen to the springs squeak when Peter Lake and Minnie were in the bed. It was all right. If I got too jealous, I’d go to the market. By the time I got back and started cooking, they’d be finished anyway, and we’d all sit around and eat squash. I used to cook squash good.
“As far as I was concerned, we coulda just had squash, all the time. But Peter Lake wanted roast beef, duck, and beer, so we used to go to places to eat. That’s where the trouble started, when Pearly threw the apple at him.”
Listening to this was very confusing for Virginia. It didn’t sound contemporary. And though Cecil was only an ado
lescent, it did sound true. She wanted to find out more. But as she was about to question him further, the doors of the Lenore were flung open by costumed lackeys, and in came Craig Binky with a huge party of hangers-on and sycophants.
They made their entrance as if they had been following operatic stage directions: “From stage left, enter Craig Binky and a group of young aristocratic rogues who have returned from the hunt, flushed with good cheer.” Surrounding Virginia and Cecil, they filled up all the nearby stools and banquettes, and began to order, in French, each and every $250 dish and $150 drink.
“I said to the Prime Minister,” Craig Binky declaimed to no one in particular, “what your country needs is the Binky touch. With more than half a billion people, no natural resources, and a per capita income of thirty-five dollars per annum, you might just wake up one morning to discover that you’re in deep trouble.
“There I was, me, Craig Binky, talking to the leader of all those millions! And do you know what he wanted to know? I’ll tell you. He was most interested in hearing from me how to open a numbered account in Zurich. Can you beat that! The man was a saint. With all his country’s domestic problems, he wanted to aid tiny little Switzerland!”
Virginia tugged at Cecil until she maneuvered him out of the Lenore. This was not easy, and he continued to speak even though she was unable to hear him. Only when she got him on the sidewalk did she again pick up the thread of his confession.