Now, knowing perfectly the instant of arrival, having willed itself up to the necessary temperature, it began, methodical and unrelenting, to burn its way out of its enclosure. Those who had chosen to stay aboard ship for as long as possible, one by one, as in a kind of moral exhaustion, let go, tumbled into flight, up the ladders, out the hatches, away over the brow and down into the thoroughfares of the city. But with only dwindling moments of normal history remaining, where could any of them have found refuge in time? No escort of Tenderloin toughs, no chamber of privilege however deep within the anchors of any of the great bridges, no train- or water-tunnel could have preserved even one of these impure refugees from what was to come.
Fire and blood were about to roll like fate upon the complacent multitudes. Just at the peak of the evening rush-hour, electric power failed everywhere throughout the city, and as the gas mains began to ignite and the thousand local winds, distinct at every street-corner, to confound prediction, cobblestones erupted skyward, to descend blocks away in seldom observed yet beautiful patterns. All attempts to counter-attack or even to avoid the Figure would be defeated. Later, fire alarms would go unanswered and the firemen on the front lines find themselves too soon without reinforcement, or the hope of any. The noise would be horrific and unrelenting, as it grew clear even to the willfully careless that there was no refuge.
The mobilization was city-wide as reports flew of negotiations with visitors unnamed, military leaves canceled, opera performances cut in half—arias, even famous ones, omitted altogether—to allow for early audience dismissal, railway stations echoing with troop movement, card and dice games up Tenderloin alleyways rudely interrupted and usually at critical moments, fear among the populace of twilight hours too abruptly extended, of indistinct faces, of high windows and what might, for the first time in civic memory, plausibly enter there. . . .
There was debate in the aftermath about what had happened to the Mayor. Fled, dead, not right in the head, the theories proliferated in his absence. His face appeared on bills posted all over the wood fences around vacant lots, the rear ends of streetcars, its all-too-familiar bone structure shining with the unforgiving simplicity of a skull. “Remain indoors,” warned bulletins posted on the carbonized walls over his signature. “This night you will not be welcome in my streets, whether there be too many of you or too few.”
As the daylight left the city that night, the streetlamps were not up to anything like their usual candle-power. It was difficult to make out anything clearly. Ordinary social restraints were apt to be defective or not there at all. The screaming that went on all night, ignored as background murmur during the day, now, absent the clamor of street traffic, had taken on urgency and despair—a chorale of pain just about to pass from its realm of the invisible into something that might actually have to be dealt with. Figures which late at night appeared only in levels of gray were now seen to possess color, not the fashionable shades of daytime but blood reds, morgue yellows, poison greens.
In a metropolis where Location was often the beginning, end, and entire story in between, the presence of an underground spring beneath the Cathedral of the Prefiguration, feeding its three baptismal fonts, had until this unaccountable advent been thought a sufficient, if not to everyone miraculous, defense. But now, in arc-light, at the church’s highest point, authorities had begun to project a three-dimensional image in full color, not exactly of Christ but with the same beard, robes, ability to emit light—as if, should the worst happen, they could deny all-out Christian allegiance and so make that much easier whatever turnings of heart might become necessary in striking a deal with the invader. Each night at dusk, the luminous declaration was tested for electrical continuity, power level, accuracy of colors, and so on. Spare lamps were kept ready, for the possibility haunted everyone that the projection device might fail at a critical moment. “No one would venture at night into a neighborhood of known vampires without carrying along a cross,” as the Archbishop had declared, “would they now? no, and so with this Our Protector,” who remained, guardedly, unnamed.
Despite the recent incorporation, the outer boroughs would be allowed a few more honorable years of wilderness and pastoral calm, having escaped at least for a while the stultified scrawling of builders and developers that was passing in those days for dream. Though what future could there’ve been for the “territory across the bridge” but sooner or later a suburban history and culture to be undergone?
So the city became the material expression of a particular loss of innocence—not sexual or political innocence but somehow a shared dream of what a city might at its best prove to be—its inhabitants became, and have remained, an embittered and amnesiac race, wounded but unable to connect through memory to the moment of the injury, unable to summon the face of their violator.
Out of that night and day of unconditional wrath, folks would’ve expected to see any city, if it survived, all newly reborn, purified by flame, taken clear beyond greed, real-estate speculating, local politics—instead of which, here was this weeping widow, some one-woman grievance committee in black, who would go on to save up and lovingly record and mercilessly begrudge every goddamn single tear she ever had to cry, and over the years to come would make up for them all by developing into the meanest, cruelest bitch of a city, even among cities not notable for their kindness.
To all appearance resolute, adventurous, manly, the city could not shake that terrible all-night rape, when “he” was forced to submit, surrendering, inadmissably, blindly feminine, into the Hellfire embrace of “her” beloved. He spent the years afterward forgetting and fabulating and trying to get back some self-respect. But inwardly, deep inside, “he” remained the catamite of Hell, the punk at the disposal of all the denizens thereof, the bitch in men’s clothing.
So, in hopes of being spared further suffering, as demonstrations of loyalty to the Destroyer, in the spirit of the votive shrine, the city had put up a number of propitiatory structures. Many of these were deliberately burned, attempts being made to blacken the stylized wreckage in aesthetic and interesting ways. Attention was directed Downtown, kept wrapped in a plasma of protective ignorance, extending at last to the enormous rampart of silence along its edge, one limit of the known world, beyond which lay a realm the rest of the city could not speak of, as if having surrendered, as part of some Plutonian bargain, even the language to do so. It being the grand era of arch-building in the City, usually of the triumphal sort, it was decided to put up, at some transition point into the forbidden realm, another great Portal, inscribed I AM THE WAY INTO THE DOLEFUL CITY — DANTE, above which, on each anniversary of that awful event, spanning the sky over the harbor, would appear a night panorama—not quite a commemorative reenactment—more an abstract array of moving multicolored lights against a blue, somehow maritime, darkness, into which the viewer might read what he chose.
On the night in question, Hunter Penhallow had been on his way out of town but, feeling something at his back, had turned to witness the tragedy unfolding along the horizon, stricken into remembering a nightmare too ancient to be his alone, eyeballs ashine with mercilessly sharp images in flame tones, so over-bright that his orbits and cheekbones gathered some of the fiery excess.
He was abruptly lost in an unfamiliar part of town—the grid of numbered streets Hunter thought he’d understood made no sense anymore. The grid in fact had been distorted into an expression of some other history of civic need, streets no longer sequentially numbered, intersecting now at unexpected angles, narrowing into long, featureless alleyways to nowhere, running steeply up and down hills which had not been noticed before. He pushed on, assuming that far enough along he would come out at an intersection he could recognize, but everything only got less familiar. At some point he must have come indoors, entering a sort of open courtyard, a ruined shell of rust-red and yellowish debris towering ten or twelve stories overhead. A sort of monumental gateway, unaccountably more ancient and foreign than anything in the known city. The s
treets had by now grown intimate, more like corridors. Without intending to, he soon was walking through inhabited rooms. At one end of a mostly empty hallway, he found a meeting in progress. People were sitting clustered about a fireplace, with cups and glasses, ashtrays and spittoons, but the occasion was more than social. Both the men and women had kept their coats and hats on. Hunter approached tentatively.
“I think we’re agreed we all have to get out of the city.”
“Everyone’s packed up? The children are ready?”
People were getting to their feet, preparing to leave. Someone noticed Hunter. “There’s room, if you’d like to come.”
How stupefied he must have looked. He followed the group dumbly down a flight of winding metal steps to an electric-lit platform where others, quite a few others in fact, were boarding a curious mass conveyance, of smooth iron painted a dark shade of industrial gray, swept and sleek, with the pipework of its exhaust manifold led outside the body, running lights all up and down its length. He got on, found a seat. The vehicle began to move, passing among factory spaces, power generators, massive installations of machinery whose purpose was less certain—sometimes wheels spun, vapors burst from relief valves, while other plants stood inert, in unlighted mystery—entering at length a system of tunnels and, once deep inside, beginning to accelerate. The sound of passage, hum and wind-rush, grew louder, somehow more comforting, as if confident in its speed and direction. There seemed no plan to stop, only to continue at increasing velocity. Occasionally, through the windows, inexplicably, there were glimpses of the city above them, though how deep beneath it they were supposed to be traveling was impossible to tell. Either the track was rising here and there to break above the surface or the surface was making deep, even heroic, excursions downward to meet them. The longer they traveled, the more “futuristic” would the scenery grow. Hunter was on his way to refuge, whatever that might have come to mean anymore, in this world brought low.
Kit didn’t get to meet his benefactor until the weekend of the Yale-Harvard game, on a clouded and windless late-November day, in a side room of the Taft Hotel. They were introduced officially by Foley Walker, who was wearing a sporting suit in some horse-blanket plaid of vibrant orange and indigo, and a top hat that matched, while the magnate was dressed more like a feed-company clerk from parts considerably south of here, and likely west as well. He also had on smoked “specs” and a straw hat whose brim width unavoidably suggested disguise, with Irish pennants flying head to toe. “You’ll do,” he greeted Kit.
Load off my mind, Kit supposed to himself.
It was a less than intimate tête-à-tête. Alumni of both persuasions were milling everywhere in and out of the lobby, gesturing carelessly with foaming beer steins, sporting hats, spats, and ulsterettes vividly dyed in varying densities of the rival school hues. Every five minutes a page came briskly through, calling, “Mr. Rinehart! Call for Mr. Rinehart! Oh, Mr. Rinehart!”
“Popular fellow, this Rinehart,” Kit remarked.
“A Harvard pleasantry from a few years back,” explained Scarsdale Vibe, “which shows no sign of abating. Uttered in repetition, like this, it’s exhausting enough, but chorused by a hundred male voices on a summer’s evening, with Harvard Yard for an echo chamber? well . . . on the Tibetan prayer-wheel principle, repeat it enough and at some point something unspecified but miraculous will come to pass. Harvard in a nutshell, if you really want to know.”
“They teach Quaternions there instead of Vector Analysis,” Kit helpfully put in.
Pre-game passions were running high. Venerable professors of Linguistics who had never so much as picked up a football had been earnestly reminding their classes that, by way of the ancient Sanskrit krimi and the later Arabic qirmiz, both names for the insect from which the color was once derived, “crimson” is cognate with “worm.” Young men in striped mufflers knitted by sweethearts who had dutifully included rows of flask-size pockets ran clanking to and fro, getting a head start on the alcoholic merriment sure to prevail in the stands.
“I was hoping my son would deign to stop in for a moment, but I fear it is not to be. Detained by an orgy, no doubt. It is surely among the more compelling forms of human sadness to watch one’s alma mater decline into this Saturnalian swamp of iniquity.”
“I think he’s playing in some intramural freshman game this morning,” Kit said. “He really should be on the varsity.”
“Yes and a shame there’s no professional football, for his career would be assured. Colfax is the last of a litter that, love ‘em all as I must, promise despite me to redefine fecklessness for generations to come. It is the old capitalist’s curse—the aptitudes that matter most, such as a head for business, can’t be passed on.”
“Oh, but on the field, sir, he’s as go-ahead a fellow as any captain of industry could wish.”
“Let me tell you. Colfax used to work for me down at the Pearl Street offices, summer vacations, fifty cents an hour, far more than he deserved. I would send him out on grease runs—‘Here—bring this to Councilman So-and-so. Don’t look inside.’ The young idiot, literal as well as obedient, never looked inside. Hopeful, though increasingly desperate, I kept sending him out, again and again, making it more obvious each time, even to leaving corners of greenbacks sticking out of the satchel and so forth, but the pup’s naïveté withstood that, too. At last, God help me, I brought in the police, hoping to shock my imbecile son back into some relation with the World of Reality. He would still be languishing in the Tombs today had I not given up the struggle and begun, in the matter of an heir, to search outside the immediate bloodlines. You following this?”
“All respect, sir, think I read it in a dime novel once, wait, what am I saying, more than once, and you know how that stuff pickles your brain for you. . . .”
“Less so, I pray, than the crockful of cucumbers I have sired. What I’m working up to here is a fairly grand offer.”
“What I was afraid of, sir.” Kit found himself steady on his feet and able to gaze back calmly into Scarsdale’s increasingly perplexed stare.
“Drawing against a hefty trust fund, inheriting uncounted millions when I’m dead, not up your alley, young man?”
“Apologies, but with no idea how you’ve gone about earning it, I couldn’t add much to it—more likely be spending the rest of my life in courtrooms fighting off the turkey buzzards, not how I was fixing to occupy my adult years, exactly.”
“Oh? You have an alternative plan. Admirable, Mr. Traverse. Tell me, I’m really interested.”
Kit ran silently through the list of topics better not gone into with Scarsdale, beginning with Tesla and his project of free universal power for everybody, proceeding through the enchantments of Vectorism, the kindness and genius of Willard Gibbs. . . . Didn’t leave much they could talk about. And there was something. . . . The man had been looking at him strangely. Not a fatherly or even foster-fatherly expression. No, it was—Kit almost blushed at the thought—it was desire. He was desired, for reasons that went beyond what little he could make of this decadent East Coast swamp of lust in idleness to begin with.
Despite having gone in with a determination to cut the place some slack, Kit had seen Yale almost immediately for what it was. The book-learning part of it, two or three good companions not yet quite crippled into the reflexive and humorless caution which leading the nation would require—that was all just swell, and almost made up for the rest of it. Kit was presently cranked up, bright-eyed and zealous, accosting as-yet-unintroduced Saturday-night shopgirls out on Chapel Street to lecture to on the subject of Vectorism—Gibbsian, Hamiltonian, and beyond—for this most miraculous of systems seemed to him bound to improve the lives of anybody he could acquaint with it—even if the girls were not always so sure.
“You chase them away, Kit.” ‘Fax, about to go meet a “date,” was inspecting his turnout in the mirror of the rooms they shared. “My cousin knows any number of girls who wouldn’t mind playing a little parcheesi wit
h you now and then, except you’re too intimidating with all this arithmetic business.”
“It isn’t ‘arithmetic.’”
“There. Just what I’m talking about. Girls don’t know the difference and, more important, don’t care.”
“As usual, ‘Fax, I defer to your wisdom in all matters of sport.”
No sarcasm intended here, or even possible. By the age of eighteen, Colfax Vibe had already developed into a classic “Corinthian” of the day, recognized as an expert—occasionally champion—skier, polo player, distance runner, pistol and rifle shot, huntsman, aeronaut—the list ran on to a length quite depressing indeed to any observer with merely everyday skills. When at last he did make his first appearance on an Ivy League gridiron, in the waning minutes of the Yale-Princeton game, ‘Fax took the ball from deep in his own end zone and ran it back for a winning touchdown against and through the best defensive efforts of the opposition, not to mention a certain amount of unwitting interference from his own team. Walter Camp was to call it “the most splendid display of broken-field running in Yale football history,” and Negro folks who lived in Princeton slept a little easier that Saturday night, knowing they’d been spared at least a week free of Princeton-boy posses come hollering down Witherspoon Street to rip porches off the houses for the victory bonfire. “Oh, hell, I’d been feeling cooped up,” ‘Fax would explain. “Just needed a good run.”
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