by Mark Helprin
Because Peter Lake had forgotten about the door that led outside to the roof, he thought there was no place to go. He froze at first, but then he threw the switch that controlled the stars. They stayed lit, because now they were on for good. Deprived of darkness, he still had the advantage of surprise. Perhaps, he thought, if I open the door as he charges, he’ll knock himself out on that iron pillar. No, that won’t work: whoever he is, he has a hard head. I’ll let him wear himself down a little, and then play it by ear.
Peter Lake climbed up into the beams and lay partially hidden in shadow for half an hour while Hardesty continued to hammer at the door. Both Hardesty and the door were suffering greatly in a war of attrition in which the door would have won, had not its opponent been convinced that if he found his way to the other side he might begin to get to the root of things. The intervals between his charges grew larger and larger, the charges grew slower and weaker, and the door became more and more like a loose tooth pleasurably near the brink.
Finally, he burst through, ran a few feet inside, twirled, staggered, and collapsed. Peter Lake waited for others to follow. When none did, he dropped down, closed the door, and dragged Hardesty to the bed. Hardesty was badly bruised, and breathing in gasps. Thinking to help him, Peter Lake took a tin that ninety years before had held a meal of New Zealand lamb stew, filled it with warm water, and splashed Hardesty’s face.
Hardesty made drowning motions and opened his eyes.
“Why did you break in here?” Peter Lake asked,
“I saw you looking through the trapdoor. I wanted to find out who you were and how you got here.”
“What caused you to look up? No one else ever does.”
“I don’t know. When I saw that the stars were on, I couldn’t take my eyes from them.”
“Didn’t you have to catch a train?”
“No.”
“How did you come up?” Peter Lake asked suspiciously. “Are you friends with the cops?”
“I climbed up the sides, along the wreathed eggs and the lousy little dentils.”
Peter Lake looked skeptical. “That’s hard to believe. What are you, a mountaineer?”
“In fact, yes,” Hardesty answered. “I used to be . . .”
He stopped himself in midsentence, drew back his throbbing face, and peered at Peter Lake. Peter Lake did the same (except that his face wasn’t throbbing). They had recognized one another from Petipas. Their throats tightened, and they shuddered the way one does when one discovers or reconfirms higher and purposeful forces brazenly and unconvincingly masquerading as coincidence.
“Who are you?” Peter Lake asked.
Hardesty shook his head. “That doesn’t matter,” he said. “Who are you?”
JACKSON MEAD unleashed all the forces that he had been preparing and conserving, in a mad bone-shaking spectacle that would last for a full ten days until the beginning of the millennium, and would not cease even though the city would be consumed by fire and civil disorder occasioned by the rainbow bridge itself.
After centuries and centuries of building, he had learned exactly how it all had to be done. He believed in a law of equalities which ordained a perfect balance. For everything that was raised, something had to fall, and there was no free form, since all form had shadow and counterpart. Hence his opposition. He respected them and had no desire to win them over, for that would have implied that he believed they were fighting without reason. Their actions, too, were just, and he might well have been on their side. But he wasn’t, for his task was to move things forward, and to do this he had to fight them. He was fond of saying that there had never been a builder who had not understood war.
He had prepared for nearly a century the actions that would take its last ten days by storm, with Cecil Mature and the Reverend Mootfowl his unlikely generals. Despite their personal oddities, they were perfectly suited for their responsibilities, and had been with him for countless years, ageless and unaging, possessed of extraordinary knowledge that they guilelessly concealed—not so as to deceive, but to satisfy their own temperaments.
The winter solstice brought to Sandy Hook an armada of huge ships whose mass alone calmed the seas. From their decks began an unprecedented transfer of machines and materials. Hundreds of heavy-lift helicopters, covered along their hundred-foot lengths with rows of flashing lights and penetrating blue beacons, roared through the sky, carrying beneath their crooked mantis-like bodies things of many times their weight and size.
The humming of these helicopters could be heard from miles away. As they got closer, they shook the ground and froze all living creatures with the paralyzing frequencies that bloomed from their mysterious engines. Their flashing lights and the wavelengths of their beacons were perfectly synchronized with the rhythmic sounds, in exceedingly complicated harmonies and counterpoints. They could turn on any axis, and hold any position. They were as delicate as butterflies and as big as the largest jets. Crossing paths in constant motion above the harbor and yet never colliding, they shuttled between the ships and the construction sites.
Enormous doors opened in the sides of Jackson Mead’s ship in the Hudson. From the shore or on the ice, one could see that the vast interior was comprised of many levels that were lighted in different shades. Inside the ship were roads stacked ten or fifteen high, over which traveled speedy little vehicles rushing in several directions (at the head of multiple trailers or alone), coursing along the arteries, under urgently flashing lights. At intervals that were staggering in their precision and frequency, lifters emerged from this huge hangar and exited at great speed, turning in the air with a gust of wind that polished the ice and formed loose crystals and remnants of snow into expanding clouds half as high as skyscrapers.
Transparent towers twenty stories tall telescoped from the ship. Day and night, operations were directed from within them, in a subdued bronze-colored light that suggested yet another kind of perpetual daylight—not of March, but of August. The construction sites themselves threw off their shieldings, revealing half a hundred fortresslike redoubts of smooth concrete that rooted deep into the ground. Upon their upper surfaces were emplaced the many types of machinery lifted from the ships and from railroad trains that never reached the harbor, but were unloaded from the air, and then were themselves lifted off the track car by car and discarded so that other trains could follow and discharge their cargoes without cease.
Emplaced upon the foundations were blocklike substructures, big boxes, and the graceful girderworks that held their weight. The sky was filled with helicopters towing multicolored engines, huge constructs of glassy silicon, round aggregations of fire trucked about like little suns, ancient and arcane contraptions resembling Priestley’s giant burning glass or Herschel’s telescope more than any modern thing, pulsing spirals of crystal that were the icy twins of the little suns, and limp networks of wire and circuitry that made the lifters look like jellyfish drifting through the air above the harbor.
As soon as the stunned populace thought it had regained its breath, some unheard-of exquisite assemblage would suddenly be lifted from one of the ships, the traffic would double, or the net of sounds would thicken. Jackson Mead’s strategy was to make each hour more intense than the hour that had preceded it. The idea was to hold them off balance, shock them, disorient them, wade into their sensibilities, blind them with flashing lights, and hit harder and harder, so that the opposition might be incapacitated, and the bridge might take. For ultimately, despite the force and the planning, it was a delicate and fragile construction that depended upon circumstances for which Jackson Mead could only pray.
VIRGINIA SAT at the edge of Abby’s bed, watching the fading light in a thick and gentle snowfall. The hour when the turning on of lights gave the evening hope and energy passed in serenity and silence. Since Abby was fed intravenously, no one at her bedside was able to anticipate even the ambivalent cheer of the hospital meals that came on ungainly platters that looked like huge nickels.
Hardesty h
ad been away for more than a week. It was unlikely that in a thousand years of deliberate searching and suffering he could redeem his dying child, much less in a few days. Nothing he saw or imagined would save Abby. Children did die. At one time, not so long before, they had known death far more frequently than their elders. Though she could not explain it, Virginia was sure that she remembered a potter’s field in which half a hundred tiny coffins lay in the falling snow, waiting to be interred, while the gravediggers hurried to finish before nightfall. Since she had never seen such a sight, or anything vaguely like it, she wondered how it could have been so vividly emplaced in her memory, and she thought that perhaps in difficult times the past and the future were better able to emerge from the shadows. In the fixed gallery of infinite scenes, all events were always accessible. Nothing was lost, ever. The gravediggers in potter’s field, hurrying to beat the dark, would hurry to beat the dark for eternity.
She dreamed an evening dream. A sudden thunderclap found her ankle-deep in freshly fallen snow as a dark carriage pulled by a dark horse flew by, its wheels four perfect studies in hypnosis. Not knowing where she was, she turned to see what was in back of her, and though ironwork, trees, and streetlamps were gray with snow, she slowly drifted into a summer scene in which she saw herself pushing a baby carriage by the side of a lake. It was in a park, and there were benches and a paved promenade next to the water. Trees across the lake were reflected on its surface, misty and indefinite: the city was full of dark forests. She bent over the rim of the carriage to see the baby, but the carriage was empty because the baby had been taken by the lake, and was somewhere under the water. Then the summer afternoon turned to darkness, and she found herself in a dim hallway. Badly scuffed wainscoting gleamed in the half-light. The floor was covered with rubble. As her eyes adjusted to the dimness, she saw a child in an old-fashioned gown standing near the banister. Her hair had fallen out, her hand was in her mouth, and she shook with a kind of palsy. She was dying, she was entirely alone, and she was standing up. Virginia stretched out her arms to embrace her, but couldn’t move because she was tied to the banister. She spoke in a choked voice, but the child didn’t hear, and continued to sway back and forth as if she didn’t know that one of the things allowed to the sick and dying is the right to lie down. Virginia strained against her bonds, weeping because she could not move.
“Wake up, wake up,” Mrs. Gamely said, shaking her daughter. “You’re in a dream. Wake up.” Virginia sat bolt upright as Mrs. Gamely turned on the light. “How is she?” the grandmother asked.
Looking at Abby, entangled in the tubes and electric leads, Virginia answered that she was just the same.
Mrs. Gamely said, “When the doctor comes tonight, I think we should go for a walk and get some air. You haven’t been out for a week.”
“Where have you been?” Virginia asked, because her mother’s cheeks were redder than the most scarlet Coheeries apple.
“I went to a lecture, dear. Now don’t be upset. It was given by that man who irritates you so, Mr. Binky. I rather liked him, though his vocabulary needs a great deal of work. He spoke movingly about his great-great-grandfather, Lucky Binky, the one who went down with the Titanic. I was quite touched when Mr. Binky kept on referring to the Titanic as the ‘Gigantic.’”
Mrs. Gamely did not know that Craig Binky had fixed his gaze on her throughout his discourse, and afterward had commanded Alertu and Scroutu to find her. They then began to tap their way through the city in search of a stolidly built, dumplingesque, white-haired woman whom Craig Binky had described only as “That Seraphina, that lovely one, that white rose!”
Virginia looked at her mother with disbelief. How could she have left Abby’s bedside to attend a lecture by, of all people, Craig Binky? But Mrs. Gamely thought it perfectly appropriate, because, unlike her daughter, the doctors, and other experts, she felt that though the child was gravely afflicted all that was needed to help her recover was to apply a certain poultice. Just to be safe, she always carried it in her bag. But every time she suggested the poultice they yelled at her as if she were an idiot. This had discouraged her a great deal, and in her view it was a shame for the child to suffer because the doctors put so much faith in strange machines and foolish drugs that did not work. She considered overruling them. This she might be able to do because, among the bric-a-brac and other things that she carried around in her carpetbag (such as, for example, a live though somnolent rooster) was a most persuasive instrument that she called a shotgun. But she was not as sure of herself as she had once been. This was not the Coheeries. She let them have their way, and though she kept the poultice, she dared not apply it. What if it made the child even sicker?
The doctor was late that night, but after she had made her examinations Mrs. Gamely and Virginia went outside into the snow while a nurse stood watch. “Where do you want to walk?” Virginia asked.
“Any which way,” her mother replied. “Look at you. You’re quivering. You need to walk, and get some strength.”
They walked for hours, in circles and long bending curves, treading silently amid stark and dreary loft buildings that the snow had dusted like sugarcakes. Virginia began to tell Mrs. Gamely her dream.
“Did the baby rise from the lake and clap its hands?” Mrs. Gamely interrupted with surprising urgency.
“No. The baby never rose from the lake. But I saw her later, when she was older, in the hallway of a tenement,” Virginia said, and then related the rest of the dream. “I think it’s obvious,” she stated at the end.
“You think that the child in the dream was Abby, and that you dreamed because of your anxiety.”
“What else would it signify?”
“It might signify nothing, and be valuable solely in itself. A dream is not a tool for this world, but a gateway to the next. Take it for what it is.”
“What am I supposed to do with it?”
“Nothing. It’s like something beautiful. You don’t have to do anything with it.”
“Oh, Mother,” Virginia said, nearly in tears. “Abby is going to die, and all you and Hardesty do is walk around the city, talking like mystics and bagmen. Half the time, I don’t know what you’re saying. I don’t know what the hell it means, and it’s not going to make a bit of difference to Abby.”
“Virginia,” Mrs. Gamely said, wanting to embrace her daughter.
“No!” Virginia said.
The old woman took her daughter’s arm, and they began to walk through the snow back to the hospital. They traveled in silence, except for the wind and the church bells that struck the hour and its quarters. Despite the misty cold, they felt dry and hot inside.
In a little square in Chelsea they saw a statue of a soldier of the first great war. He was covered with snow and nearly lost to the white clouds of mist and snow that howled through the streets and made whirlwinds in the squares. The two women stopped to read an inscription on the pedestal, which said, For the Soldiers and Sailors of Chelsea.
“Do you remember this statue?” Mrs. Gamely asked.
“No,” Virginia answered, somewhat apologetically.
“When you were a little girl, Virginia, we came to the city to meet your father when the war was over. Don’t you remember?”
“No, I don’t remember that at all.”
“It was very difficult to get here, but we did get here, and we waited for several months while the troopships were arriving. Many men had been killed, but their families had received telegrams. Though we hadn’t heard from him, we assumed that Theodore was all right, because we hadn’t heard any bad news either.
“During the time that we were waiting, we lived on the West Side, at the edge of Chelsea, near the river. Sometimes we would come to this park. You told the other children that this was your daddy. Your daddy never came back. He had been killed months before, and the notification had never reached us.”
“How did you find out?” Virginia asked.
“When his division returned, we went to Black Tom
, where they were debarking. You were very excited. I had dressed you up, and you had a little bunch of flowers that you carried all day, even after you found out. You wouldn’t let go of them. I took them from your hands only when you had fallen asleep that night. Harry Penn was the one who told us.”
“Harry Penn?”
“He was in command of your father’s regiment. All the men of the Coheeries were together. You made him cry. Don’t you remember?”
“Of course not,” Virginia said, shaking her head.
“He never brought it up? You’ve known him now for years.”
“There was nothing I could do to make him fire me. I guess that that’s the way he brought it up.”
“You moved him so, Virginia. You were excited and happy, and he had to tell you that your father was dead. It broke his heart.
“It was in early summer. You got sick that day and ran a fever until winter came. You were trying to join your father. I would have done that, too, but I had to take care of you.”
“If that’s why Harry Penn never lifted his hand against me, what good did it do?” Virginia asked.
“If during all this time you didn’t even know his motive, then why do you assume that you would know its effects? A benevolent act is like a locust: it sleeps until it is called.
“No one ever said that you would live to see the repercussions of everything you do, or that you have guarantees, or that you are not obliged to wander in the dark, or that everything will be proved to you and neatly verified like something in science. Nothing is: at least nothing that is worthwhile. I didn’t bring you up only to move across sure ground. I didn’t teach you to think that everything must be within our control or understanding. Did I? For, if I did, I was wrong. If you won’t take a chance, then the powers you refuse because you cannot explain them, will, as they say, make a monkey out of you.”