by Mark Helprin
PETER LAKE wanted to go to the marsh to see what he could remember. Because the harbor was frozen, he didn’t need a boat. Instead he bought a pair of skates and laced them on tight. Then he tied his shoes together and threw them over his shoulder. He set off across the ice early in the morning, with his hands in his pockets, as a strong east wind pressured by the rising sun poured down the darkened streets of Brooklyn and sped over the harbor. Peter Lake found that he didn’t have to skate, but could lean back on the wind and let it push him toward the marsh. As he sailed effortlessly over many miles, he saw again the familiar outline of the Bayonne peninsula, and the way it once had been began to come back to him even though it was now covered with factories, wharves, and huge construction sites. In the cold dawn, men labored by the thousands under flood-lamps and rows of sparkling bulbs that made the caissons and steel girderwork look like naval ships in liberty lights. Shooters Island came into view. The Baymen had called it Fontarney Gat, and there had been fresh water and fruit trees on it.
As he sped into the Kill van Kull, which the Baymen had called Siltin Allandrimore, he turned to look at the city. It gave him a shock, for it was so familiar from that perspective, and his recollection of it so strong that he thought he had lost touch with both worlds. Still, he found pleasure in seeing the cliffs of the city lighted in the dawn, as he had seen them so many times before. Though its glass palisades blazed, and the light that passed through them covered the Jersey shore in refracted rainbows, enough older buildings were left to give Manhattan the air of an island of rock cliffs, and to make the Battery seem like a very tough chin.
He was about to head up the Kill van Kull to explore the bays, reed-covered bars, and salt-water channels, when he noticed a group of barely perceptible black dots above the ice, several miles behind him. He wouldn’t have known for sure that they were after him were it not for the graceful ebb and flow of their movements as they rushed forward at high speed, changing course at different times but keeping to the same general line. Knowing that in physical mechanics the appearance of such smoothness meant either unearthly precision or high speed at a distance, Peter Lake wondered not why the skaters would be out at dawn, but why they would be so determined and fast.
Instead of vanishing into the Kill, he skated east against the wind, and watched the intoxicatingly beautiful sway of the forms, much larger now, as they realigned themselves according to his position. They were headed beyond him, on an intercept. Then he turned and raced west. Sure enough, they wheeled gracefully to the right, keeping him, as it were, in their sights.
Peter Lake came to a sudden stop, shredding the ice into a cascade that fell upon its smooth surface and broke into crystals that were scattered by the wind. He stared at the approaching skaters. How steadily they moved, with none of the lurching of those not lucky enough to have the wind at their backs. They came on straight. And they were coming for him.
Despite the apparent peril, Peter Lake was glad to find himself in what seemed like a familiar situation, and he felt a rush of strength and elation which seemed inappropriate for a man of his age—as if the strange forces which had battered him and beaten him down while he was on the street, and the powers that had worked against him and punished him with lightning flashes and thundercracks, were now in him.
The sun caught his pursuers. There were at least a dozen, and the steady and determined way they moved was threatening. Peter Lake headed for the island. They had the wind, and there was no way he could escape to the left or right of them, since, if he tried that, all they needed to do was to change course slightly and intercept him. Nor would it have made sense to continue west. The marshes had changed, and he was not so sure of his knowledge of them anyway. The best strategy was to round the island and go to the middle of the far side. When he saw them coming around on one side or another, he would set out again to the northeast, with a slight lead, and the wind would be against everyone.
He got to the far side and stood there only long enough to realize that, if they were smart, they would break into two groups and put him in a pincer.
After a high-speed leap across the cattails, he flew onto the beach, and dug his skates into snow and sand as he raced awkwardly across the island. At its highest point, he saw that they had indeed divided into two groups, and were coming around in a set of slowly spreading phalanxes that would have trapped him had he followed his original strategy.
He was already on his way down to the free ice. But these skaters in black coats were not to be written off lightly. They had left two of their number as pickets several hundred yards offshore. The only thing he could do was to head straight for them, and he did.
They saw him shortly after he moved onto the ice. They put about a hundred yards between them, and fired two shots in the air to call back the others. He went right up the middle. As he gathered speed against the wind they braced themselves and fired at him. He heard the bullets in the air and was grateful, for bullets in the air seemed to be his calling.
As they shot at him methodically and accurately, but missed because he was bobbing wildly and going too fast, he caught a glimpse of them. They wore black coats of an old-fashioned cut, much like the coats he had seen on the two short men in the restaurant. He still didn’t know who they were. Their tactics had been masterful, and it was only by luck that he had been able to remain unscathed.
But they were not as smart as they could have been. This he discovered as he flew between them. They had been training their pistols at him, waiting for the moment at which he would be closest—which was, obviously, when he intersected the line that went from one to the other. They pivoted mechanically, taking good aim. When he crossed the line, they fired with an exactitude that identified them as creatures of geometry. Anticipating this, Peter Lake sank down in the kind of compressed crouch from which barrel leapers spring, bent his head, and listened to the doubled Doppler effects of the converging bullets as they passed just above him. It was an unusually long sound, spindle-shaped. Rising to skate, Peter Lake was delighted to see that his two attackers had slaughtered one another with enviable precision, and lay sprawled on the ice, motionless.
“My sincerest apologies,” he said out loud as he pushed forward without a pause, not wanting to waste even a second to look back at the others, who he knew would be building up speed. He went straight for the populated ice under the East River bridges. There, he could vanish among the newly rising tents and in the snow walls and burrows along the banks.
He skated effortlessly, taking hard forward strides that made his skates quiver and threatened to crack the steel blades. Then, crossing toward Manhattan, he remembered that the last time he had returned to the city across the ice he had been on a white horse. Such fragments of memory falling into place were common now, and though they were at present more enticing than edifying, he was certain that if things continued apace he would know everything.
THE ICE city that lay under the Brooklyn and Manhattan bridges, and its sister cities to the north, were the intermediary ground between Manhattan and the city of the poor. Although, unlike their rich cousins, the poor did not fear for their physical safety in neighborhoods other than their own, they were intensely uncomfortable in the sparkling enclaves that they saw day and night from their own drab city. Walking down a well-kept street as doormen watched and matrons looked on disapprovingly was an experience to be avoided. The two cities had long been polarized, and though the lines were not physical they did exist, as the invisible boundary of the Five Points could easily attest. When the rivers froze, however, new territory was opened and neutral ground was established. Though the contact between the rich and the poor might have brought about a positive exchange, it was the grosser appetites of each that sent them to the city on the ice. While most people and their children were on the bay looking at the galaxies, a cynical transaction was occurring under the bridges. The wealthy came to abandon just those virtues that they might have contributed, and to indulge in a licentious pa
rody of what they imagined were the morals of the poor, and the poor came in turn like sharks to prey upon them. One group wanted to buy slaves and sycophants, and the other wanted cash, watches, and jewelry.
It made for a place of raw nerves and much ugliness, completely unlike the other ice cities on the other banks, for, as is almost always the case, the architecture followed the plan of the inhabitants’ souls. Peter Lake sailed in on his skates at breakfast time, making zigzags through the warrens of ice and snow until he was lost in them. After one last turn, he found himself in the courtyard of an inn. Snow walls had been raised against the wind, and a fire burned in a brick oven that had been stolen on the open ice to the south. At a large wooden table, a group of revelers sat awaiting their food, which was a crisp corn gruel and a milky cereal mixed together into a yellow paste. What faces they had, rich and poor, men and women, even the dogs who were curled up next to the oven: the greedy eyes, the chins and noses that flowed together into an undisciplined snout, the loose intoxicated smiles that came far too easily, the oyster-sack bellies that hung by threads, and the horseshoe-shaped rows of teeth that stuck out in aggressive unpearly necklaces from mouths that were continually barking.
Peter Lake took a place at table and was given a wooden bowl of gruel. The food was carried to the diners on a stretcher made of thick boards and logs. To transport eleven little plates of porridge, two men had to carry a 250-pound sledge. It wasn’t bad stuff, and all except Peter Lake ate like a pig, surrendering to their appetites and to the food. Peter Lake’s eyes darted about to take in the scene. Prostitutes in upper-floor windows were stuck in public kisses that were not so much kisses as the draining of swamps. And the bogs from which they sucked were slovenly boil-covered creatures with hairy backs and meat-red lips. Before he was halfway through his gruel, Peter Lake saw two pockets being picked, and then he saw someone picking a pickpocket’s pocket.
For a moment, Peter Lake forgot where he was and lost himself in trying to remember a rhyme of his boyhood in the Five Points that had to do with pucks and woodchucks, and what one might do to the other. But, glancing through pillars of the snow courtyard, he saw a huge delegation of black-coated skaters passing by like the centurions of a Roman city.
Peter Lake quickly found himself under the table, staring at fatty calves and trench foot. He noticed that, as they were eating, half of these people had their hands either on their own genitals or on someone else’s. In fact, he shared his place of refuge with a poor anonymous woman who knelt on the ice, rendering service between the legs to both sexes in return for a coin held out in the hand of someone who never even saw her. The black coats came in and questioned the diners, who hadn’t noticed Peter Lake, and could not provide any information. They were so drunk that they couldn’t answer anything straight anyway. Peter Lake peeped out from a thicket of varicose veins and saw the bottom halves of his pursuers. They wore coats that looked like abruptly shorn tails.
“That . . . those are. Oh Jesus, Short Tails!” he said, bumping his head against the table.
The Short Tails heard it, and toppled the diners onto the ice. Peter Lake bounded, knocking the table into the next enclosure. With the Short Tails in pursuit, he ran for the inn and raced up the stairs. Although the walls were white, it was almost pitch-dark inside. At the third story, Peter Lake stopped short and nearly reeled backward. A child who probably belonged to one of the prostitutes and was more than likely involved in the activities at hand, staggered from one of the rooms onto the landing. She was only four or five years old, but she wore a loose dirty gown, and she moved like an aged drunk. Peter Lake was so stunned by this sight that he nearly let the Short Tails catch him. But then he took hold of himself, and continued.
The top of the stairs was a dead end. Everywhere he looked there was a snow wall, and in back of him the Short Tails were crunching and burbling up the steps. Peter Lake took a leaf from his time as a derelict, and rammed the wall head first.
After bursting into an adjoining bordello where thirty people were moaning in a bath of thickened coconut milk, he excused himself, ran down the stairs, and skated back to the city.
In the real, solid city, the Short Tails now were everywhere, like cinch bugs in flour. Though not all of them recognized him, those who did gave chase. He obliged them with leaps through windows, theatrical bounces on snow awnings, and plough runs through unsuspecting crowds, in which people were bumped about like billiard balls and parcels flew into the air in ballistic arcs.
As difficult as this was, he loved it, and could not imagine a better sport than to be chased from place to place and have to climb up the sides of buildings, hide in drains, and leap from roof to roof. It kept him so busy and was so pleasurable that he forgot everything except the city itself, and this was of tremendous value when he had to decide where to go or how to hide, since the whole of the city seemed to be in his blood, and he was able to rush forward at great speed and never miss a step. It seemed to him a fine destiny, and he would have been disappointed had they not tracked him everywhere he went. Sometimes he would pull himself up onto a fire escape and drop down on a couple of Short Tails as they ran underneath, knocking their heads together savagely. Once, he cornered one of them in a deserted building. The terrified Short Tail had long, greasy black hair, which he nervously twisted into tiny little pigtails with his left hand, while, gun in the other hand, he paced about the rubble looking for Peter Lake, who was hiding in a closet. When the Short Tail opened the closet door, Peter Lake screamed “Boo Hoo Hoo!” so ferociously that the Short Tail began to dance and jiggle, firing his pistol into the floor at uncontrollable rhythmic intervals. When all the chambers were empty, Peter Lake said, “That’s a nice dance you’ve got there. You ought to get up an act and take it to the Rainbow Room.” The man’s teeth were knocking together like an automatic stapler. Some were dislodged, and fell on the ground. “When you get through with yourself,” Peter Lake told him calmly, “you’re going to need a good dentist. I was going to knock you out, but this is better. Still, I have to be going. When you finish, would you be so kind as to turn out the lights and tear down the building?”
Then Peter Lake vanished into the darkness, the snow, the vast sea of lights, and the plumes of steam that on a winter night are feathers in the city’s cap.
He dared not go back to his room, for, whoever they were, they had found him out. He knew that they were called Short Tails, and that their job was to chase him, but he didn’t know why, and he still knew precious little about himself. “As far as I’m concerned,” he proclaimed out loud, to no one in particular, striding down Fifth Avenue on a night bustling with shoppers, “this is a dream, and they can chase me until kingdom come.”
But he had to sleep. What a delight, then, to be able to remember yet another piece of what he now realized must have been an extraordinarily rich past. He went straight to Grand Central.
Commuters and passers-through crossed the prairielike floor much as they had always done, in a silence that invited the eye to rise and view the vaulted sky above. It was as if the building itself had been skillfully constructed to mirror life on earth and its ultimate consequences, and to reflect the way in which men went about their business mostly without looking up, unaware that they were gliding about on the bottom of a vast sea. From the shadows of the gallery above Vanderbilt Avenue, Peter Lake looked above him and saw the sky and constellations majestically portrayed against the huge barreled vault that floated overhead. It was one of the few places in the world where the darkness and the light floated like clouds and clashed under a ceiling.
They hadn’t tended the lights of the stars for decades, and the unlit sky was stormy and somber. Perhaps no one remembered how it was done, or even that the stars were there to be lighted. He went straight to the little hidden door, where he found a familiar lock. “I know how to pick this lock,” he said, taking out his wallet of fine tools, and not realizing that he himself had set the lock in place almost a hundred years before.
“It’s an old brass McCauley six.” He opened the padlock with such finesse that it finally occurred to him that he might once have been a burglar. But, since he had no memory of it, he dismissed the thought.
Once inside, in back of the sky, he threw a familiar switch, and all the stars lit up. Not a single bulb was burnt out or missing. It was just that no one had ever been there to throw the switch. In the forest of steel pillars above the warm vault, Peter Lake heard the distractive sound of low faraway engines, something that he had once taken to be the rhythmic blizzard of the approaching future. He went to his bed, which, after nearly a hundred years, was dusty but intact. Cans of food now probably deadlier than nerve gas were neatly stacked between the pillars. Stacks of Police Gazettes and old yellowed newspapers lay by the bed. He looked at all this in wonder.
Peter Lake lay back contentedly on the bed. It was winter, the stars were on, and he was safely in back of the sky. Down below, on the cream-colored marble floor, people still glided silently by without ever looking up. But had they done so they now would have seen stars shining brightly in a sea-green sky.
HARDESTY HIT the streets in a hypnotic fury that barely distinguished him from the thousands already there. Of all the places in the world, New York was the one where it was easiest to get your blood up. All you had to do was step out on the street, and immediately you were ready to pit two short human legs against the Belmont ponies. Hardesty knew that on the avenues and thoroughfares the surf was always in a gale. His plan was to agitate himself until he discovered some random secret by which he could then save the life of his daughter. Though there was neither much time nor much chance, he sought voraciously that which Peter Lake had never been able to avoid. He was willing to risk everything, and he didn’t even know exactly what he was looking for.