by Mark Helprin
Had it been a few days earlier, he would have tried to make an iron cross on the rings, or fly gravityless on the high bar, to see what he could see about such things. But now it was difficult for him even to raise his head to look at the sun in the windows at the top of the Byzantine dome.
The clear morning light had been bent by the circle of windows until it made a perfectly round golden platform that dazzlingly plugged the dome. Hardesty rose to his feet. The climbing rope which fell from the center of the cupola now seemed to lead to the first platform of heaven. Even the rope itself sparkled like a thick golden braid.
A hundred feet above, the golden disc had thickened. It seemed solid, and he wanted to get to it. But he could hardly stand, much less climb, and there were cuts on his hands, as if he had been hauling steel cables. From the way the sun was moving, pumping gold into the platform until it seemed that the dome would no longer be able to hold the weight, he could see that, as it had been given, it would be taken away. He began to climb.
In climbing, he found the compound mortal agonies that he had sought, and as he moved higher on the golden rope he really did rise. The rope itself ran scarlet as his blood poured from him like hot water escaping from a breached pipe. Though the braid below him was now as red as it was gold, he pulled himself upward without cease, thinking only that if he could reach the platform he would need neither blood nor strength. His palms were rubbed away, and the grip on the rope became so slick that he had to clamp it with his bones. In agony and delirium, he saw whitened hands and dry bones leading him up and pulling him on. Halfway up, his hands became mechanical things with a life of their own. As he rose, he seemed to be hauling more and more weight. What fish, he wondered, are in this net that it seems so massive and unyielding?
Almost at the top, the rope burst into gentle flames that wound around it in a soft helix. He moved his left hand into its base. It was hot, but it didn’t burn, and as he climbed into the flames, the blood on his clothes vanished and his hands began to heal.
The platform just above was almost too bright to be seen. Beyond, the windows were ablaze in white and silver frost. He saw engraved upon them an infinity of precisely etched forms. Winglike chevrons seemed to be moving into the sun like flights of black angels. Deep inside the thicket of feathery etchings were gleaming landscapes, and in every pane of glass the engraved rime led to worlds within worlds. The deeper they went, in long tunnels to the vanishing point, the wider they opened up and the more they seemed to hold eternal battles, fields that burned as aerial forces fought above them, and round suns that bled in pinpoint gilding dashed about in waves of blue. The sun tractored across the forest of lines in the glass, cutting them into bundles that flowed like handfuls of broken wheat.
Hardesty Marratta tried to poke his head through the golden disc. He was immediately pushed back. He grabbed the rope and viciously hiked himself up, but was slapped down with equal ferocity. Finally, he tried for all he was worth, rising like a high-powered shell, to attempt to get through the impenetrable mat above his head. He was swatted like a fly.
He fell backward, arms spread, fingers outstretched, through a hundred feet of empty air below him. It would have done no good even had he been able to turn, like a cat, and land the way he wanted. A hundred feet were a hundred feet, best taken however they would be delivered. But as he fell, he realized that he was coursing from left to right, swaying in pendulum arcs, and dropping only slowly. The air around him beat with a thousand unseen wings which damped his fall and set him down so gently that, for a moment or two, he hovered above the mat.
Hardesty opened his eyes. Several men in gymnasium clothes had him by the arms.
“Are you one of us?” they asked.
“What are you?” Hardesty returned. Then he looked at their expressions. “You must be bankers and brokers.”
“Are you a member here?”
“It’s all in your numbers,” Hardesty said, “if only you would read them in the right way.”
“He must come in from the street,” one of the men said. “I thought for a moment he was a member who had had an accident.”
“I floated like a butterfly,” Hardesty declared as they picked him up and carried him out in a sort of invisible sedan chair. “When I rose into the flame and fell back, I thought I was going to hit the floor. But I floated like a butterfly.”
As he was carried past the clock in the lobby, he saw that it said eleven. With the mixed reverence and disdain that people have for lunatics, they set him down on the street.
“One more thing,” he said.
“What’s that,” one of them answered as they were going up the steps.
“Your gymnasium was packed with angels.”
They didn’t hear.
IN THE December cold, without a cent in his pockets, and not having eaten for days, Hardesty began to walk the length of Manhattan. He had failed Abby, and, in failing her, he had also failed his father. The pride that had allowed him to think that he would have the strength for a raid on heaven now filled him with nausea and fear.
As he passed people rushing by the scores of thousands on the streets, he saw the glory of their faces. He saw in the way their eyes were set—in their reddened cheeks, and in their expressions of hope, determination, or anger—whatever it was that made them more than skeletons and flesh, for the life in their faces far transcended the material into which it had strayed. And yet if he were to grasp for it, all he would have would be the lapels of a coat and a startled and fearful pedestrian inside. Though the light he sought was shining all around, he could not capture it.
He might think of the small coffin (like a salesman’s sample) in which his daughter would have to be buried. But then the life of the streets and the glory of people’s faces would rush into his blood, and he would believe once more that he would be able to keep her alive, if only he could understand the force behind the city’s many vital scenes: the harried expression of a hooded boy pushing a garment rack through snow-filled streets; a tailor in the fur district bent over his machine, stitching forward into the eternity of tailors; a squad of street breakers machine-gunning the concrete with the concentration of working infantry—something there was that knitted all these scenes together and pushed them on a forward course. The empty corridors and rising shapes held the secret, which rested invisibly upon the city, like a column of clear air. And yet when he clenched his fist around it and wanted to wrestle it down, it wasn’t there. Thoroughly beaten, he was swept up in the crowds. He was weak and dizzy, and the human tides on the streets just before Christmas proved impossible to resist.
Like a chip in a flume, he ebbed back and forth on the avenues. He was carried into huge department stores and drained out. He fell with the stream down the steps of the subway, and rode a stop or two before he was lifted once again onto the street. And he found himself stuck in an intersection as if it were a whirlpool. Crossing and recrossing a hundred times, limp, feverish, and defeated, he was taken completely at random by millions of people who were galloping about as if their lives depended upon it.
When the offices let out at five, a torrent of gabardine and wool flooded the streets in blue and gray. Everyone was running. In some places, the waves of clerks and typists were three or four layers deep. It sounded like water, or a grass fire pushed by the wind, and at five-fifteen the streets of midtown Manhattan were like the aisles of a burning theater.
Finally, in a convergence that looked like the Niagara River pouring into Horseshoe Falls, a stupendous mass of frenzied overcoats and taut faces fell into Grand Central Terminal, drawing Hardesty with it. He was lucky to be on the edge of the flow, and he managed to maneuver himself to safety on a balcony overlooking the main floor. Here, primarily because of an overwhelming dread of traveling to Hartsdale on the five-twenty, he held fast to a marble balustrade. Clamping himself to the rail, he rested for an hour, until the tide receded and he was warm.
Except for a stream of commuters still moving b
etween the doors and the staircase that led down to the main floor, the Vanderbilt Avenue balcony was nearly deserted, and the vast concourse began to show bald spots of caramel-colored marble where empty islets had formed in a carpet loomed with the thread of all the comings and goings since 1912. No one ever looked up. The ceiling had been dark and cloudy for so long that it had been forgotten. Though for most people the barrel vault was too high to bother with, Hardesty slowly tilted his head until, as he leaned back, he was able to see it in its entirety.
The stars were on. They shone in incandescent yellow from deep in the green. Since when? They were supposed to have been extinguished forever. It was believed that they had burnt out one by one and would never light again, and that they had been placed too high to be reached or changed. No one tried, and eventually the stars were forgotten and denied. But now they were lit. And not one was missing.
“Look,” Hardesty commanded a young woman in the uniform of a dental assistant, “the stars are lit.”
“What stars?” she asked, without looking up at them, and ran toward the tunnels to catch her habitual train.
“Those stars,” Hardesty said to himself, staring at the green sky.
As his eyes traversed the high vault, he saw something move in the center. It seemed as if, in an earthquake of the heavens, a piece of the sky had been jolted out of place. He thought it had to be an optical illusion. But a crack appeared. Then it vanished, but it appeared for a second time, and oscillated, as if someone were struggling with a heavy door. Suddenly a patch of green sky was pulled back, and a dark square appeared in the ceiling. Hardesty found it difficult to breathe. The door could not have opened by itself.
Though no one was visible, Hardesty waited patiently for someone to appear, and his patience was rewarded when, high above, a face emerged from the shadows to stare down at the rushing armies clothed in gabardine and wool.
For the Soldiers and Sailors of Chelsea
IN OLD age, moments of great energy and lucidity are like wet islands in a dry sea, and in powerful rages and sudden joys an old man with a cane may discover that his many years have added nothing to his innocence but proof and explanation, and that, as much as he may have learned in his long life, he cannot see as far as he could see when he was seven. Harry Penn was often subject to such moments, during which he was electrified to find that he was learning what he had at one time known before he paid the price of finding out.
He had grown up with the millennium in his eyes, and now he wanted Jackson Mead’s bridge to go as far and high as could be imagined, and beyond, speeding like a lance through the cloud wall. For this to happen, he knew, conditions on the ground had to be improbably perfect. No human agency could see to the many alignments, lock up the unraveled stitches, or bring about the complete and resounding justice that would be required: and yet everything had to be in place and everyone would have to move briskly on the lighted stage exactly according to his part. Harry Penn believed that he had not yet completed the task of his life, and this saddened him. It wasn’t enough just to grow old. He wanted miracles. He wanted life where there was no life, the negation of time, and the gilding of the universe—if only for one truly wonderful moment. He wanted to see the huge whitened plumes, like those ceremonial plumes on carriage horses, which his father had promised him would rise above the city in announcement of the golden age.
So he romanced his books and encyclopedias, to no avail, remembered as much as he could of what he had seen, and kept alert to the architecture of the spirit as it suffered its periodic and allegorical devastations and restorations. He often filled the huge slate tub with water and jumped in just to let his thoughts float free, but they never floated free enough to prepare him for the millennium that was fast approaching.
One evening, Jessica’s performance was canceled because of unusually bitter cold. From all over Manhattan, as materials contracted in the low temperatures, came the sound of snapping cables and cracking masonry—local whippings that were winter’s answers to the lightning. As the small thundercracks reverberated, Jessica rode in a sleigh from the theater to her father’s house, where she cooked some lamb and peas, and they had dinner in front of the fire. Though Praeger was expected later on, they were alone. Christiana was with Asbury, and Boonya had gone to see her sister who lived in Malto Downs.
After Jessica had cleared the table and washed the dishes, she came back with two mugs of black tea and a tin of shortbread cookies upon which was a picture of a Highland Fusilier in a Black Watch kilt. Strong tea was good for Harry Penn’s imagination. As the fire burned, its resinous pine and bone-dry hickory became a Waterloo of advancing red lines and tiny gunshots. Harry Penn was still bedeviled. The tea and the fire stoked him up.
“What happens,” he asked Jessica, “when you forget your lines?”
“I don’t.”
“Never?”
“Very rarely. Almost never. Because, you see, in portraying the character I play, I learn the lines to become the character, not the other way around. Once I become her, I can’t forget the lines. It’s unthinkable.”
“Do you mean that learning lines for the stage has very little to do with memory?”
“Exactly. Only bad actors memorize lines. Good actors are perpetually writing them as they act.”
“Even though the playwright has already written them.”
She nodded her head.
“Isn’t that presumption?”
“The playwright understands.”
“You go into sort of a trance, then.”
“Yes.”
“The play has been put down, but it is still new to you. When you say the lines, you are saying them for the first time. They are as much yours as they are his. How can you explain that?”
“I can’t, but I can tell you that this is the quality that distinguishes the good actors from the bad.”
“Now, let’s say,” Harry Penn said, staring at the top of the tin box, “that you were out of sorts, and at the end of a long and complicated play you did forget your lines. What would you do?”
“I probably wouldn’t have time to think it out, and I would say whatever occurred to me. The other lines would have been a gift, and I’d take the lines I’d improvise as a gift, too, though perhaps a gift from a different source.”
There was a loud rapping on the door. “That’s Praeger,” announced Harry Penn.
“The mayor,” Jessica said proudly.
“It doesn’t make the slightest bit of difference,” Harry Penn declared. “He’s a fine fellow. Open the door for him before he freezes to death. Some years before I was born, you know, the Cranberry Mayor froze to death in Newtown Creek.”
When Jessica brought Praeger into her father’s study, they saw Harry Penn standing in front of the fireplace, the lid of the cookie tin in his hand. He was crying.
“What is it?” Jessica asked.
“The Highland Fusilier,” he said. “These boxes have been around for years, and I’ve never looked closely at his face. Now I see.”
“See what?” Praeger asked.
“Do you remember the derelict at Petipas?”
“Yes.”
“This was his face, more or less, if he had been shaven and clean.”
Praeger looked at the box. “It’s not clear to me,” he said. “I don’t remember well enough.”
“That’s because you hadn’t ever seen him before.”
“You had?”
“Yes.”
“When?”
“When I was a boy.” He put the Fusilier on the mantel, and stepped back. Turning to Praeger, the mayor of the city, Harry Penn commanded him to go to the stable and hitch the three best horses to the fastest sleigh. “I want you to drive me north.”
“To the Coheeries?” Jessica asked.
“Yes,” her father said, smiling. “I have, at long last, found my place in this world.”
Praeger went outside. As the stable light flicked on across the courtyard, Harry P
enn turned to his daughter and told her that a miracle had happened, and just in time.
“What miracle?” she asked.
“Peter Lake,” was the answer.
HARRY PENN was the only man in New York who could command the mayor to hitch up his sleigh, but he didn’t think twice about it, since Praeger had worked for him and been his virtual son-in-law for more than ten years. Apart from that, a sound man of a hundred is entitled to the highest conventions of protocol, and need not defer to presidents or kings, because presidents and kings have come so high that, if they have any stuff, they think only of history, and a hundred-year-old man is history.
The three horses that Praeger harnessed to the racing sleigh were aching to run, and almost before they knew it they were on Riverside Drive, flying to the north.
“Go down and get onto the river at One Hundred and Twenty-fifth Street,” Harry Penn directed the mayor.
“Will it be entirely frozen at Spuyten Duyvil?” Praeger asked apprehensively. “The whirlpools themselves never freeze, and then there’s the navigation channel.”
“Sure it’ll be frozen. In a winter like this,” Harry Penn stated, looking ahead, “there’s always a strong ice bridge in between Spuyten Duyvil and the channel. It curves slightly to the west and then bends east again, and it rises a little, almost like a section of prairie. After that, there’ll be empty ice all the way to the turn-off. We can go like hell.”
Praeger gave the reins an enormous snap, and the troika turned left and descended toward the river. “How do you know that?”
“I’ve been making this trip for nearly a hundred years. If you know only a dozen winters, it looks completely chaotic. But after a hundred you begin to see where certain patterns surface and intersect. I always know the weather. That’s easy. And I know the ice. That’s easy, too.”