by Rick Moody
Polanski says to Edwin (Sanchez) from Delancey Street, “Twenty bucks on Spicer.”
Edwin replies, “The brother lives in the clouds. But he’s fast. Spicer has corns. He will stop at the Rite Aid in the McGraw-Hill building and complain. He will make conversation with a Haitian cashier.”
“Are you saying?”
“The bets are placed.”
Polanski also asks Daryl Standler, dope smoker, if he wishes to wager. Standler appears to mull it over for a long while. He, too, backs Tyrone. All this gambling takes place without considering the effect of the accident: the windows and the displays of Diamond Universe, 1200 Sixth Avenue, at the corner of Forty-seventh, still shattered, inside the ribbons of police tape. The sawhorses there, snarling the pedestrian traffic at the subway entrance. All the merchandise removed from the felt-lined display cases. The street in front is swarming with rented enforcement and with Hasidic guys protecting their family business. The car is still there, in fact. And Ramon Martinez, who drove up Sixth and then made the turn at high speed, against westerly traffic, going forty-nine miles an hour, Ramon Martinez, who uttered anti-Semitic oaths, where is he, exactly? After arraignment, he will certainly be moved from his cushy spot in the Tombs to maximum security at Rikers Island, where guys will shout encouragement and vilification at him from adjoining cells. His comely appearance will be the subject of intense scrutiny. Has he had his first shower yet? Three people are deceased, two of them Hasidic. Their families are weeping, and tabloid photographers are camped out in front of the relevant homes in Williamsburg, hoping for the perfect photograph. Again, on the televised news, Ramon Martinez makes the turn. Again, in diagrams. Again, he swings his LeSabre, with a hundred and sixty-three thousand miles on it, just wide of the subway stairwell and the lamppost that has the giant facsimile diamond on it; again, he wipes out a garbage can; again, three pedestrians to the immediate south of the driver’s side leap clear. One, a former high school basketball star, sustains a back injury, and two dive to the curb and are nearly run over by a taxi crossing west on Forty-seventh. Nearby: a guy holding a falafel sandwich, bantering with another guy checking his watch, and, by coincidence, an Arabic teenager. All are driven upward into the windows. Again, we watch the Schappell footage, which confirms this interpretation. It was taken by an astute passerby from St. Louis, Norm Schappell, he of the digital camera and unsteady hand. Now the car jumps the curb, and it seems in the little windows of low-resolution imagery as though Martinez is shaking a fist, as though at this moment, when he is furthest from God, he imagines he is God’s agent of vengeance. Into the reinforced storefront he goes, which should forbid such things. Again, the alarm goes off, and the taxi behind swings wide, hits a parked car on Sixth Avenue. Now the screams. On the news, the footage scrolls, the Schappell footage, and the mayor says at the press conference that this is a hate crime until proven otherwise. “There is no room in our city for hatred and ignorance, for division and prejudice. The world lives in New York City.” Martinez does his duckwalk that evening in leg irons, his arm in a sling. As the reporter on the UBC affiliate notes, giving away a closely held trade secret, the police sometimes put the leg irons in the freezer, back at the precinct. Because frozen leg irons hurt like hell.
This is what the rental enforcement guys tell Mr. Spicer. He stands at the corner, taking in the expanse of the tragic incident. It’s just too much of an enticement. At the three-minute mark in the competition, Spicer is just getting going. Saying to whoever might listen, “What did this city ever do to this young man? We did nothing to him! Did someone deny him a job? I didn’t deny him a job! I just want to deliver messages in peace. Did I ever do anything to hurt him?”
Meanwhile, Tyrone is on the glide. Tyrone has a theory. This is his theory, which has to do with inertial bodies, bodies moving at constant speed in a horizontal direction, unless additional forces are impressed upon them. His theory of the glide is first a theory of orbit. Tyrone feels the orbit on his bike, which is to say that his bike is the Mysterium Cosmographicum, and his responsibility is not the delivery of messages, which is an interruption of his true calling. His responsibility is the glide, and his responsibility is the relation between large bodies, a refutation of the origins of astronomy. He flings a lanky leg over the saddle. He’s off. On a Surly Steamroller, fixed gear, in baked-bean brown, no brakes, as befits a bike with this illustrious name, Mysterium Cosmographicum. Since the glory period of the messenger, there are no longer any brakes, and indeed, this, in the physical meditations of Tyrone Duffy, philosopher of elementary systems, painter of Newtonian phenomena, is a feature of necessity, because brakes impede the glide. Tyrone needs to glide, and the glide needs no brakes.
The pendulum’s arc is the same no matter how large or how small. Newton was a man of irremediable rage. Tycho Brahe had no nose. Lost it in a duel. The facsimile was cast in a durable metal. Tycho did successfully marry, however. Tyrone, of necessity, requires that a braking force be impressed on his inertial body in order to slow the progress of himself and the Mysterium Cosmographicum, and that force is the gravitational pull of pedestrians. This is the value of pedestrians in the course of the glide. They are a soft landing surface. Tyrone will refuse food because a modest bodily proportion increases the glide, and the food that he refuses goes into the pool of all available foods, such that the pedestrians can be made more obese and thus softer for soft landings.
He doesn’t ride on the sidewalk much. But now he must. Because of the police presence around the site of the Martinez incident, Forty-seventh is all but impassable. Riding on the sidewalk is air resistance in the glide. Obesity is air resistance, and the change in motion is proportional to the motive force impressed. Tyrone gets off the bike and he begins to walk the bike around the Martinez site. The car, which is about to be lifted free by a small crane, looks like a Christmas decoration. Promotional material. The diamonds glimmer as an afterimage, and part of this glimmering is the relation between forces, the force exerted on the carbon, which is graphite, which becomes the diamond, which becomes a legend, around which orbits the force of the African slave labor used to produce the diamond in the mines and the use of diamonds to finance and facilitate rebel activities designed to redistribute continental resources to disenfranchised nation-states and also to dictatorial regimes. Tyrone sees Spicer at the accident site, nods politely. Spicer says, “Can you imagine? Can you imagine?” Unclear if he recognizes Duffy or not. Which means at the three-and-a-half-minute mark the contestants are briefly in a dead heat, after which Tyrone glides silently across the intersection at Sixth Avenue as though the intersection were a vacuum and he’s a falling body in a landscape of falling bodies.
Spicer is so impassioned on the subject of the Martinez incident that the cops take a shine to him, as they always do, and an exchange ensues in which Spicer tells the cops that his wife died three years before, cancer, and that he liked the Mets in the series, never will quite recover from it, the series, and that that one pitcher on the Yankees is a criminal and should be locked away, and the cops applaud this, because all cops like the Mets, and they ask where he’s going, and he says he’s going west, but he’s an old man and has Parkinson’s, the early stages, and the cops violate all precepts of policing in the zero-tolerance time and they put him in the squad car and take him as far as the multinational purveyor of overpriced coffee beverages on Seventh and Forty-ninth, where Spicer repeats the whole thing to a cashier, about the wife, the Mets, never will recover from it, and what was wrong with Martinez that he felt he had to do this thing, this violent thing, while Spicer is mixing three sugars into his French roast.
For the Mysterium Cosmographicum, there is the problem of the door. One enters through a door, to be sure, there is such a splendid noun, but you also door, using the verb; that is, you are riding the Mysterium Cosmographicum when you strike a door or, usually, first, some soft landing surface, which is in this case someone trying to remove something from the backseat, ass first, so
that you are suddenly an object in motion, separated from your launch vehicle; you are an object that has been impeded in the glide and you are now flying through the air, launched from your launch vehicle. Or there is no soft landing surface to stop you, and you are doored, participially. Where is the soft, fluffy white butt? It is temporarily unavailable, and there is only the door, and it happens so precipitously, the Mysterium Cosmographicum’s striking the door, which serves thereby as a braking device, and you behave according to the rules, wherein it is supposed that projectiles follow a curved path, your parabolic trajectory being up and over the door, including some kind of half gainer and pike position, separated from the bike, inertial energy combined with gravitational energy, in this instance at the corner of Seventh Avenue, the open door of the van from Skyline Duplication. You rise up, you come down.
This is Tyrone picking himself up just as Spicer is emerging from the multinational purveyor of coffee beverages. At four minutes fifteen seconds, still a dead heat. They nod politely again. Spicer hobbles around the corner, the folly of neon everywhere above him now, canyons opening in the downtown direction, yes, it is Times Square, and Tyrone, who is checking the tire pressure on his bike, looks up for a moment at the behavior of all those neon gases, lighting up in so many preposterous ways, advertising so many things—women’s undergarments, home electronics—then mounts his steed again, Mysterium Cosmographicum, passes Spicer, old crank, takes a right on Broadway.
The orbits of the planets are in fact ellipses because the planets perturb one another. Ivan Polanski, Tyrone’s employer, has never put together the steps in this proof, which even some elementary geometry would accomplish, equal angles here and here, nor has Polanski put together the relationship between the heavenly body called Tyrone Duffy and the heavenly body employed at Means of Production, frequent Omni Delivery client, Annabel Duffy, in Rock Center; he never got that they are brother and sister, that they are confederates, and that the Omni Delivery service is hired by Means of Production precisely because Tyrone Duffy is sibling thereto; they are each, Tyrone and Annabel, heavenly bodies rotating around a certain Reverend Russell Hunt Duffy, of Newton, Massachusetts, minister of the First Congregational Church, and there are other heavenly bodies rotating around the same White Dwarf of high temperature and low brightness. There is a body known as the naturally produced brother of Tyrone and Annabel, the unadopted brother, Maximillian Rivers Duffy, white son of the White Dwarf, and there is the wife of the White Dwarf, otherwise known as Mom, whose idea it was, during a time of social upheaval, to adopt first one and then another disadvantaged child, meaning children of different shades, meaning African American children, and to raise them as though they were white dwarves not black holes in the Newton, Massachusetts, public school system. Tyrone and Annabel, who from their earliest ages were confederates. They were a team. Uniform deviations in velocity were always toward the White Dwarf, who was always perturbing.
Tyrone passes the Brill Building. There are many messages in the Brill Building these days; the Brill Building is a message epicenter. There are many CDRs to be taken to different addresses. And the Tin Pan Alley dudes, those remaining, are always sending the messengers around to the freight elevator. Tyrone could hum a dozen bubblegum songs written in the Brill Building, he could hum them backward with half-step key changes in them, but because he is in the uniform of the bike messenger, and because he has butterflies living in his dreads, wherever he goes he is stopped and he is invited around to the freight elevator. He knows about the Brill Building, he knows about the Armory Show, he knows about the Factory, he knows about the AbExes, he knows about the East Village gallery scene, he knows about postmodernism, he knows about the new historicism, he knows about Young British Artists, he knows, he hears, he discards the language of current events festering in him, he knows about the interruptions of the glide. Enormous potential, even his sister says it. The White Dwarf has always said it, as he has also said that Tyrone, whom he will not call by that name, must seek treatment. And Tyrone will not seek treatment because he thinks his problem is that he was too long stuck orbiting around the White Dwarf.
Six minutes, eighteen seconds now, and Spicer is back at the Forty-ninth Street entrance to the R train, asking directions. He inquires of a young woman the kind of bagel she’s eating. He prefers the salt bagel, himself. Will only eat the salt bagel; well, also the onion bagel, and sometimes the bagel with everything, but all varieties of bagel must have lox upon them. Fresh lox. Spicer does not have a prayer of victory, does not have a chance.
Tyrone Duffy is singing “Up on the Roof” as though it were an allegory about elliptical orbits when he is again knocked from his bike, by a large pedestrian, apparently on purpose. That is, a force is impressed against the inert body of Tyrone Duffy, at point P, along velocity tangent F prime. This is Tyrone, about to make a turn on Forty-eighth, along which axis Worldwide Plaza moves into view, whereupon he is brought to a standstill by a certain pedestrian of malevolent intent. A large man, apparently of Mediterranean origin, and it seems this man has a problem with the institution of bicycle messengers, if messengers, as a marginalized populace, can be said to be institutional. A message is announced at the moment that force is impressed upon Tyrone: Something something, motherfuckers, something something. That Tyrone is heading the wrong way up Broadway is apparently inadvisable and contrary to etiquette and worthy of violent confrontation in the view of this pedestrian of Mediterranean origin.
“Broadway goes downtown, you ignorant piece of shit.”
Tyrone brushes himself off with Buster Keaton understatement. The man begins to assume the stance of a combatant. The preliminary stance of fisticuffs. The planets are complex. They are not of uniform cast.
“Whoa.” Tyrone mutters a reply, reaching for his glasses and his bandanna, which are scattered upon the curbside. A circle begins to form around the two men.
Another pedestrian says, “You were riding the wrong way!”
Soon a third and a fourth.
“Before the month is up, it will rain,” Tyrone says, well aware of his inexplicability. His bike is upended, the Mediterranean man is coming at him, and he can see the ring on the fifth finger of the hand of the Mediterranean man, a high school graduation bauble, and he can tell that this ring is about to make a deep impression on his cheek, and he can see that the circle of onlookers is like the plasma of the early universe, gathering energy. All he can think of is “inner force,” the notion that a body does what it is doing because of its inner force, and this force carries Tyrone on the glide, and the glide takes him from east to west and it takes him from north to south, and if the glide is good, then the day is good. This is his inner force. And if the glide is bad, then the day is bad, and all is darkness. The fist of the Mediterranean man is now, in roundhouse style, swung in his direction, and this blow falls across his face, and again his glasses go flying, and the bystanders, all of them white, hold Tyrone by the arms because they have all had infelicitous interactions with the centaurs of the empire. They have all had the centaurs drive them into other pedestrians, the centaurs riding the wrong way on one-way streets, the centaurs shouting at them, whistling on their centaur whistles, and now Tyrone is going to pay. One guy says, “Don’t you have anything to say?” and Tyrone thinks long and hard, and he says, “?198-157?v ~ (1/ R2) x R2 = 1,” and he says this with such clarity that it belies everything he has done or thought in weeks. He grins. The oppositional force of the Mediterranean man, with his outer-Brooklyn accent, makes Tyrone feel alive as he has not felt in weeks. It is true that if you had but fifteen minutes left to live, it would be most satisfying to have your hands around the neck of a white man, particularly a fat, detestable, middle-aged white man, and another blow comes now, and he attempts to kick the Mediterranean man centrally, but then a squad car pulls up close, and out come the cops, and Tyrone is let free as though never restrained. At once bystanders are consumed by the lobby ingresses of nearby buildings. “What seems
to be the problem?” et cetera.
The collection of passersby that remains, significantly reduced, offers the unanimous perception that Tyrone was riding in the wrong direction on Broadway. All of these persons are unaware that Tyrone was solving elementary propositions of astrophysics. The cops slap a moving violation on Tyrone. The Mediterranean man gets clean away.
“That guy punched me in the face,” he says in his throaty whisper. “For no reason. And he knocked me off the bike and may have damaged my rims from throwing my bike around. You’re going to do nothing about that?”
The officers look at him as though he has just said ?198-157?v ~ (1/ R2) x R2 = 1. They hand him the lightweight Mysterium Cosmographicum, and he limps the last block across, until he’s chaining the steed in front of Worldwide Plaza, from whence is now emerging Jack Spicer, retiree, parkinsonian patient, carrying a manila envelope. They nod.
Soon Tyrone Duffy calls into the message center at International Talent and Media and is told, of course, that he is redundant, as the package has already been picked up by an old guy. Salt is applied to the wound. On the sidewalk, he then telephones his sister. He tells her his new litany of sorrows. It’s almost impossible, he says, to get out of bed. Bed has some incredible electromagnetic convection, and he can’t get out of the bed, and he hasn’t eaten anything but Special K for three weeks because he’d rather read Spinoza or socialist-worker propaganda than boil an egg, and it’s always like that, the bad news piles up and rolls off his back, oh yeah, and he just bought a Harley-Davidson, and he’s going to disassemble it and mount it on the wall of his studio apartment.
“Hey, uh, I was supposed to bring some package by there, but I guess I didn’t get there in time. There was an incident.”
Annabel says the word honey like it is the first time the word has ever been used, like honey has just been discovered by a woodland animal. And then she whispers. To explain her own conundrum. To tell him about The Diviners, the treatment she typed last night, late into the night, and how a friend at a film agency agreed to send it over to Means of Production as though it were a genuine submission.