The Steps of the Sun
Page 28
I pulled back and looked up at him. “If I am,” I said, “I’ve left home for good.”
He smiled benignly. “What could be more in tune with the order of things?”
“I’ll get you a drink,” I said. The Mayor arrived and the holo filming began. During a lull in that he handed me a pair of Xerograms and I pressed them on. One was a formal thank you from President Weinberg with a White House logo glowing in gold on its projection; the other was in strong calligraphy: “I am pleased with my son,” it said. “Your journey has relighted the world.” The Mayor tapped my arm, ready to begin his speech. I followed him to the dais and stood at the bunting-draped table. Someone had unlocked the power switch. Isabel sat in the front row in her blue dress; she looked smart and strong.
The Mayor went on longer than I had expected and I began to get impatient. He talked about the simultaneous ceremonies in Boston, Dallas and Chicago, about the new electric heating that would soon be flowing into Montreal and Vancouver, about Juno uranium plants scheduled for Zimbabwe and Rio and Paris, about the new reciprocity in U.S. relations with China, while I stood with impatience, wanting to get on with it and occasionally slipping a look at my watch. For a moment I became appalled at myself. Did the road of excesses lead only back to this? Had I lost my impotence and quieted my rages only to become another impatient rich man with a distended ego? I looked down at myself. There was my Ralph Lauren cotton jacket of midnight blue, my Bert Pulitzer shirt, my blue silk Marley tie, my gray trousers gently resting their cuffs on English shoes. Under all this a body still firm and a set of genitals no longer in spiritual orbit. I looked up and there was Isabel with a light smile on her lips, looking not at me but at the dull man at my side. Had it all only come to this, then: the speech of a politician, expensive clothes, and boredom?
In a seat behind Isabel a relaxed-looking man whom I didn’t recognize shifted his weight in his chair. He glanced down toward his watch. I looked around the room, from well-dressed person to well-dressed person: others were restless too. L’Ouverture, the biggest man there, sat in the back row looking bored out of his skull.
My discomfort subsided and I became easy again with my clothes and my life. I thought of how well Isabel’s career was going, how she worked at her acting and at getting our home in order. I thought of the Isabel, now in the limbo of analogy travel from Belson with a load of endolin aboard and a crew ready to fill the empty holds on Juno. Ruth was captain this time, sleeping in my old suite with the porthole in the bathroom, but the Nautilus machines were at our home on Madison Avenue in the room with the pool table. Mourning Dove was presiding over installing new cores in the reactors of the Middle Kingdom. The world was not ready to wind down yet, and New York was not ready to become a memory like Samarkand or Constantinople.
While this verbal fugue was playing in my head, a part of my attention was picking up Mayor Wharton’s speech. He was praising the work of the Isabel and the abundance it had brought. Then he paused, turned to me and said, “With us now to close the circuit is the captain of the Isabel.” I took a step forward and spoke. “I am an impatient man and I want to throw this switch, but I want my wife with me when I do it.” I looked at Isabel. She stood up, walked around the table and took my arm. We gripped the heavy handle, hesitated a moment and pulled it together, looking toward the window behind the rows of chairs. The switch clicked into place and the microwave blipped its signal off to the power plants across the river. No more than a dozen windows lighted up outside. Isabel looked up at me. “Is that all?” she said. “Is something wrong?” People were standing and looking out and a few were murmuring; the ceremoniousness had evaporated.
“As we know,” Mayor Wharton was saying, “there will be a delay while the elevators are going up and people are entering the high floors.” I could picture those old offices and apartments. People with flashlights, people who were part of this big Manhattan party just now beginning, would be wandering about on dusty floors, putting bulbs into sockets and finding long-disused switches and trying to get them to work. The elevators had been checked out over the past months, but there had not been enough professionals to climb all the stairs and get all the rooms open. Now it would be mostly volunteers: clerks, actors, bankers and sanitation workers and their lovers. Children too. People with martinis or beer bumping around in musty old rooms and hallways, in executive washrooms with rusted plumbing and office suites with peeling walls and dust-covered light fixtures and musty carpets. Elevator shafts would be groaning and rumbling again with their cables, so long slack, now going suddenly taut. I thought of the remnants of final office parties, the empty champagne bottles and the uneaten cheese and canapes sitting on empty desks, there since the last office workers had left in 2031, when the legislators in Albany had stopped the use of elevators. In some rooms there would be napkins strewn about, unemptied wastebaskets, an occasional umbrella or a forgotten purse.
Isabel brought me out of this reverie. “Ben,” she whispered, “follow me.”
People had broken up into groups and were chattering, glancing from time to time toward the windows. A few more lights had come on in the lower stories, but the city was still dark. Isabel had me by the hand. She led me away from the crowd and out into the anteroom with the elevator. Behind us the band had started playing. To the right of the elevator was a door with a small table in front to keep it from being opened. Isabel pulled the table aside. “I checked this out a while back,” she said. She turned the knob and opened the door. Fresh air hit my face. “Come on!” she said.
We walked down a short hall into a cool breeze. It was dark and I nearly stumbled, but we had left the doorway open and enough light came from the room behind us that I could find my way with Isabel leading. The noise of the band behind us faded. I felt I was in a windy tunnel, now hearing only the purposeful clicking of Isabel’s heels. I was just starting to protest when I saw her stop in front of me by a black staircase. I blinked. It was an old escalator, not working. I looked up and saw a rectangle of black, with stars. “Come on up,” Isabel said, leading the way. I followed her and the starry rectangle above grew larger and the air windier.
We stepped out onto a dark metallic surface. I looked up; the mooring mast of the building, that useless tower intended as a home for dirigibles, loomed up over us. I looked outward. The panorama of a dark Manhattan was in front of us. We walked a few steps toward the edge of the platform, our steps clanging, and just as we arrived at the steel railings, with wind now blowing strongly in our faces, just as Isabel took my hand, a horizontal row of lights came on in a building in front of us. I caught my breath. More lights came on, to our left. Then to our right. We stood silently in the night air, staring.
Landing on Belson the first time, Ruth had slid the Isabel into a single orbit under the rings and I, standing on the bridge in gym shorts in my newly strong body, had felt my heart stop at the sight that wheeled before us: those magnificent rings in airless rainbow above a circle of void. Below them hung the gray curve of Belson itself. The Isabel moved from the sunless side of the rings to their illuminated side, and light suddenly filled the windows of the bridge and bathed our faces in a refulgence beyond all knowing. A small pale moon hung poised between the rings and the planets, shimmering as the Isabel must be shimmering in that splendor, poised in Newtonian certainty of hurl and granitic heft, floodlit by magic as we ourselves were. There is beauty in our galaxy that the human mind can only reach out for and brush against before recoiling. There is a sweep and color that our history upward from warm amoebic seas has hardly prepared eyes and nerves for. I had to look away.
Here in New York, as the lights of its own metropolitan scale came winking on randomly at left, at center, at right and up and down and middle in scrambled array, with the pale, limited incandescence of tungsten and of phosphors, filling in the pieces of the great architectural jigsaw, I did not this time turn away. I am not able to forget the Belson rings, nor do I ever want to. I am not one to forget either th
at this human world of ours has beauty that can stun the mind—the rain forests, the canyons, coasts, the gray skin of deep ocean, the grim antarctic mists. New York was built by pressure and noise, yet its beauty—far beyond the human noise that made it—penetrates to the marrow. I felt Isabel’s warm body beside me and heard her breath catch in her throat as we watched Manhattan create itself before us. I would have given my whole lovely fortune for Aunt Myra to be there with us and to have heard her own breath catch as she saw New York reawaken. I hugged Isabel to my side. It was good to be home.