The Sky Below

by Stacey D'Erasmo

  5:13.

  I worked in ruins. I don’t mean only the literal ruins of the World Trade Center, though they were not so far away and you could still come across that suspiciously thick dust in odd, overlooked places. I mean that as soon as you got off the train down there and began making your way along the winding, close-set streets—as narrow and intimate as streets in old European cities—you found yourself in a kind of ruin, or in a confused, half-remembered dream, of not one but several ancient civilizations. The temperature dropped ten degrees. These blocks were always in shadow, whether it was noon or seven o’clock at night; the sun couldn’t find its way in. Once upon a time, the big money guys who made the city believed they were gods, and they built their enormous banks here, a stone’s throw from where their ships came in, in the style of Greek temples, or what they thought Greek temples were. Massive columns and domes modeled on the Pantheon ornamented even more massive stone buildings trying to outdo one another on the serpentine streets: Wall Street, New Street, Beaver Street, Pearl Street, William Street, Ann Street, John Street, Stone Street. The flora and fauna, kings and queens, of another time. Gryphons, myriad Neptune’s tridents, the heads of gods, and winged horses were carved on pediments and grand doorway arches. On top of one bank was a seven-story pyramid that could be seen only from the sky. Reigning high above the entrance of the stock exchange was a statue of Integrity, wings sprouting from her head, guarding the kneeling figures of Agriculture and Mining on her left, and Science, Industry, and Invention on her right. All the kneeling guys were cute.

  But who the hell ever heard of Integrity? Why were there wings on her head? The Roman Forum had nothing on Wall Street when it came to being history’s junk heap; antiquity was an odd-lot jumble in the penumbral gloom down here, mixed and matched with impunity, half of it now covered in scaffolding as the bankers’ temples were being converted into luxury hotels and condos, much of it barricaded against terrorists by wrought-iron fences. Armed guards and soldiers in blue uniforms with Special Ops embroidered on their collars stood, bored, in the spaces between the Ionic/Corinthian/Beaux Arts/Art Deco columns. And all along the face of one nineteenth-century structure, in gigantic, television-ready lettering, gold as a stripper’s tassels: THE TRUMP BUILDING.

  The perpetual chill, the stone, the cheap gold, the chipped winged horses and old tridents and temples scattered helter-skelter everywhere: it was a tumbled mausoleum before the towers went down, and it was a tumbled mausoleum where the dead burned for weeks afterward. The smell was terrible. A few years later, in the time that I’m writing about, the sound of jackhammers was constant and construction workers vied for sidewalk space with tourists speaking German or Chinese or Dutch and the floor traders in their blue smocks, numbered badges hanging askew, loosely pinned near their hearts.

  I didn’t know why I was here, and I hated it, but sometimes I wondered if there had been unforeseen luck to it. Because, after all, this shadowy, jumbled place where two rivers met was the home of the money. Short, crooked, and cobblestoned, Wall Street was filled with secret entrances to the money. It’s a small street, no more than a five-minute walk from end to end, and day and night it had a peculiarly hushed, suspended, inward-looking atmosphere. It was populated by men at work on two kinds of things: the buildings, which you could see, and the money, which you couldn’t. Money was the aquifer. Since the destruction of the World Trade Center, the New York Stock Exchange was closed to the public, but none of the temples down there had ever really been open to the uninitiated.

  For years, I saw the men (and they were, still, almost all men) from these temples smoking, hurrying, eating salad out of plastic bowls on the Federal Hall steps, wearing Bluetooth earpieces, getting into helicopters at the heliport or disappearing into the subway, but they didn’t really see me. When I went down to Wall Street at lunchtime, guys my age in shirtsleeves and ties stood in line at the hot dog carts or fruit carts or pizza carts, punching at their BlackBerrys, talking on their cell phones or to one another, saying things like, “It was a motherfucker to put something in place to make the transaction,” or, contemptuously, “Twenty-five million, forty-five, sixty—whatever.” I stood next to them, listening, trying to figure out what was going on. I almost could be one of them, but I wasn’t quite, and sometimes when they noticed me listening they dropped their voices and turned away. It was like they knew I was still a bartender underneath.

  Sydnee IMed again: what the hell are you doing move it.

  5:20. The river brightened. My heart beat faster.

  I had tried to blend in. When I got Skip’s job, I went to Brooks Brothers the very same day and bought a tie: brown, with a discreet black stripe. The next morning, I put the tie on for the first time. I wasn’t sure that I’d tied it right, it had been so long, but immediately I liked the feel of it. In the tie, I was a different man. It made me want to smoke and drink at lunch and call women “skirts.” The tie snapped things into focus: it translated reality into the most linear, boring terms. I began wearing the tie to work every day as sort of an homage to Skip, sort of a joke, sort of my cover. It became my signature, because none of the other guys at the paper wore one. To the outside world, the striped tie was a sign of respect, even deference, but to me it was so excessively normal that it meant (secretly) I’m just kidding. Psych.

  None of the shiny pods on the new corporate management team got the joke. The suspiciously, egregiously normal tie; my slightly too long hair with the retro-ironic Teen Beat–esque red waves that I firmed up every morning with the help of a peculiarly effective product called Bedhead Manipulator; the slouchy way I wore my belt, my low-slung jeans reminded me whenever I looked in the mirror in the men’s washroom that this wasn’t really me, this wasn’t my real life. My life, as such, hadn’t started yet. I thought it had, but I’d been wrong. I still looked like an artist; like a bartender (and there were days when I missed that job, the thick roll of cash in my pocket at 3 A.M.); like a guy in a band, though I’d never been in a band; like a guy you’d meet in a graduate seminar in philosophy, or on the plane to Goa, though I’d never been to either of those places.

  I let the tie take care of things. The tie could float to work in my place and probably no one would notice. Probably the tie would do a better job. The tie would care. The slouchy belt, the retro-ironic hair full of Bedhead Manipulator: they laughed at the tie. I always wore my heavy black Doc Martens—the same ones I’d worn ten years before to clubs where I head-banged all night—with my work clothes. Still, I admit that after I got Skip’s job, when I walked down Wall Street, passing the men on cell phones, the men in construction helmets, the men with Special Ops embroidered on their collars, the men with guns, the men getting into limos, and the men with numbers pinned sideways, as if carelessly, on their smocks, I led with the tie. I conspicuously loosened it as I walked along, as if to say, Hard day. It was a motherfucker to put something in place to make the transaction. Twenty-five million, forty-five, sixty—whatever. But the guys in shirtsleeves and ties standing in line at the carts still kept their voices down, murmuring numbers to one another.

  Wall Street ended at the East River. At the top of the block, the street was capped by the busy, democratic push of Broadway. There, Trinity Church, straight-backed, offered its blessing, raising its delicate spires to the sky, but the spires were dwarfed by the enormous office buildings shoving in, around, and over the top of them to get close to the money. The real soul and presiding deity of this entire zone was the huge bronze bull that tossed its horns and pawed the ground on Bowling Green. Last summer, a prankster had covered the bull’s head with a papier-mâché bear’s head; the cops tore it off. I felt like that bull: frozen in motion. Here and not here. Perpetually ready to charge, and unable to move.

  5:27. Finally. From the small, dirty window where Skip used to hold his cigarette aloft eight stories up, I watched the river turn to gold. It was that sliver of time between day and evening when the river lit up and looked like something scall
oped but solid, like you could walk right across to Brooklyn on it. I couldn’t see anything on the Promenade, but it seemed that there could be a big white dog there, and a man leaning against the railing holding the dog’s leash. My dog would be a small spotted dog named Chester; he would have an expressive face and be quick and light on his feet. When we walked along the Promenade, he would jump up to put his paws on the rail and bark madly at the air.

  As if that bark had woken me up, unfrozen me, I grabbed my jacket and knapsack and ran out of the building. It was Tuesday, how had I forgotten? Visiting day. “Coffee!” I yelled into Sydnee’s office on the way out. I hurled myself into the elevator and up the darkening curve of Wall Street, past the benevolent figure of George Washington, past the exchange, past the earnest, lacy church. The carts were folding themselves up for the day, getting ready to drive off. Though everything was cleaned up these days, though the ash from the attack was gone, the windows replaced, the smell long since dissipated, I felt as if I was being watched by the dead, that they clung to the corners of the buildings, sought in vain for their own reflections in store windows. They liked sweat; their presence was thicker in the summer. It made me glad winter was coming. The wind ruffled my hair; I chased it down the subway, where wind from an oncoming train rushed up. The wind that came to meet me was surprisingly warm, intimate, like a baby giant’s breath. Almost a whirl, but not really.

  I pushed onto the train, one of the new silver ones with the narrow blue seats. A woman in a pink pashmina shawl jumped out of her seat as I was getting on, so I nabbed it. A few stops later, the train lurched and puffed to a stop under the river. In the silence, a fat man resolutely read his New York Post, legs spread, taking up two or three of the concave blue spaces. A baby slept in a stroller; a young Hispanic woman standing by a pole in the middle of the car held the stroller’s handles, glaring at the fat man, who pretended not to notice. Above their heads were oblong cardboard advertisements for bunion surgery and English lessons, a flyer offering the services of a psychic named Teresa, a poem by Ezra Pound, a photo of a glamorous Scotch bottle, and an ad trumpeting the most recent book in the wildly best-selling Stolen series by Fleur Girard; this one was Stolen Blossoms. Miranda, Leah, Natasha, Anna: each young woman’s face was embedded in a holographic flower. Together they formed a shimmering constellation, a sisterhood of abuse and victory, hovering near the ceiling of the N train. I smiled to myself, knowing my smile was inscrutable to anyone else on the train. They couldn’t see my money spring, although it was right there in plain sight.

  The only people talking were two pale, limpid guys in their twenties with pierced tongues and torn, low-slung, skinny jeans, slouching by the dark door at the end of the car. One of them was saying, “. . . from the gym . . . an ostrich.” I caught a glimpse of myself in one of the car’s darkened windows, superimposed over a bit of shaggy tunnel wall. In the window, I looked to myself like a watercolor, like you could put your hand right through me. Gabriel, thirty-seven, somewhere underneath the East River. A fairly good-looking guy with sparky, longish hair in a suit jacket and backpack, no briefcase, but wearing a brown tie with black stripes that his father might have worn, if he had had a father. Though I’d never seen my father in a tie. He must have been about the age I was now when he walked out on us. Where did he go? Was the river above me still gold, or had it turned to black?

  As the train sat suspended underground, I wondered, just for a heartbeat, what was going to become of me. It occurred to me that I couldn’t exactly say how all my time in New York had gone by so far. All I knew was that every day I was trying. Looking up at the plucky, unsinkable Stolen girls in their stars, though, I wondered if maybe I had drifted. Rallying, I thought that my girl May had probably caught glimpses of herself, too, in windows like this one. May had ridden these trains. She had been a young woman, then an old one, then quite an old one, getting smaller and smaller in these dark tunnels. She had lugged her life around these subway cars like all of us, like the woman with the pink pashmina shawl, like the baby with his florid baby dreams, like the guys with their ostrich. She had held her sequined soldier’s hat in a box on her lap on the way to Radio City. May would have drawn herself up to her full five feet. Shoulders back. Chin up. March. I squared my shoulders and reminded myself that there was still time, plenty of time, everything would turn out fine, I had a lot going for me. It wasn’t like I lived in the city of the dead. I just worked there, for now. The train shuddered and lurched on.

  I got off at Clark Street and came up through the St. George Hotel. It was actually condos, but the sign remained, as if the hotel were a shell, a portal. I went up through the St. George Hotel that wasn’t a hotel anymore, and there I was on the other side, in the land of the living. The sun, I saw with relief, hadn’t set yet. From Clark Street I could just about see the river, but more important, I could feel it. I could see the big sky over the East River at the end of the leafy block, and the way the street seemed to bend imperceptibly toward that expanse. The people on the street looked brighter because of the light from the big sky. The fall afternoon was warm. I took off my jacket and loosened my tie.

  On Clark Street, birds were singing, but otherwise the block had the muffled, languorous feeling you get in Manhattan only at four in the morning. It was all brownstones or Victorians on this stretch. The light was a strong amber that gave all the colors extra depth, as if they were made of thick oil paint. A heavyset woman with curly gray and blond hair, changing a light bulb in the black iron lamp in her yard, smiled at me as I walked by. I ambled along, down Henry Street. I passed a yellow house, a blue house, a gray house, all with stoops. The people on the stoops of the yellow house and the blue house next door to it were laughing together, their front doors open to catch the last of the season’s warmth. A man held a plump dachshund, standing on its hind legs, in his lap, one hand on the dachshund’s round belly. The toenails of one of the women were painted a strong, shiny red. A hot-pink tricycle with pink and purple streamers dangling from the handlebars sat by itself in the middle of the sidewalk.

  I passed a small, nondescript alley incongruously called Love Lane, then turned down Pineapple Street. It was so fanciful, like something out of a children’s book. And they all lived happily ever after on Pineapple Street. It was even quieter on Pineapple Street than on Clark Street; it was still as a mews. Halfway down Pineapple Street, I stopped to have a smoke. I noticed that there was a scaly red patch, about the size of a quarter, in the crook of my right arm. It itched. I scratched it. Tapping out a cigarette, I glanced, as if casually, at the house across the street. My house. For one irrational moment, I was gripped by anxiety, but then there it was, as always. My house.

  The house wasn’t markedly different from the others of its kind on Hicks Street or Joralemon Street or Cranberry Street, or any of the others in Brooklyn Heights, or Park Slope, or Cobble Hill. It wasn’t a brownstone. It was wood-frame, three stories tall, faintly—very faintly—Victorian. It was painted green. There were houses that were grander, more embellished, stranger. The house, in fact, was far from perfect. It was too skinny. It slanted a bit to one side; its porch looked tenuous, scruffy. On top of the roof was a lacy widow’s walk, painted gray. The peak of a skylight was just visible on the roof as well. There was a section missing on the widow’s walk (did a widow plunge over the edge?) that had been badly filled in with an unpainted two-by-four—it looked like a wooden leg. Under the widow’s walk, on the third story, there was a row of windows that were shorter than the windows on the first and second floors; just below the roofline, between two of the short windows, was a round, black metal plate with the raised shape of an anchor, and below the anchor, also raised, was the date 1853. In front of the house on Pineapple Street was a wrought-iron gate, and around the gate twined a vine of blue flowers, just like on Tinker’s Way in Bishop. That gate—if the blue flowers twined around it had actually spoken when I first spotted them a few years back, on my way to a yard sale for box treasure, th
ey couldn’t have called my name more loudly. Old friend, they said. Old friend.

  A nice African-American family lived in that house. A mother with long dreadlocks, a square-faced father, and a tawny girl of seven or eight with loosely kinky brownish-blackish hair and blue eyes. The little girl was generally dressed in many colors, many layers; her expression tended toward the grave. It had always been that way, even when she was a toddler. She was growing up so fast. The name of the family was Fisher, and, as if in homage to this name, on the heavy green door was a brass knocker in the shape of a fish, tail up. The garden in front of the house was modest: a few pansies, a bit of purplish ground cover. As I say, the house was far from perfect, and apart from its imperfections it was fairly ordinary. Its charm—which was almost certainly apparent only to me—lay in the indefinably insouciant way it sat on its little plot of ground, the subtly pleasing space between the windows, the particular broadness of the front steps. It had a soul. I loved that house. I just did. Seeing it was like seeing my own face in the mirror: familiar, inevitable, flawed, reassuring, sublime. The old glass in the parlor floor windows looked like still lakes. I couldn’t believe they hadn’t replaced that two-by-four. Maybe the square-faced father had been busy at the office.