Who just might be his Ahab. Or just might be a wish-apparition: the chimerical upshot of too many days spent in pursuit of elusive goal.
Fearnley worked his way through the sea of his fellow humans, fellow New Yorkers. After the loss of his job, the prospect of an uncertain future, might for once a beneficent god be smiling upon him? There was a smile upon his own face, even as he trained his eyes on the large and distant man, reached down for the one-shot pistol lodged in the waistband of his trousers. Behind him, fireworks turned the sky red, then blue. Then: turned the sky white as the arctic continent.
EIGHT
INTO THIS THEATER of light strode our Ahab. With each uneven step he found the crowd more thick, the smoke more dense, yet he plowed forward—escaping, by fugitive’s habit, evading whatever pursuers from Weehawken might be on his scent, yes, but moving to-ward, not merely from. He wanted to disappear in that crowd, as a hunted sea animal disappears beneath the waves.
The torches crazed his vision. Transparencies bobbed and weaved upon the side of thick buildings, like the shadow puppets he had seen in Bali. But that was another voyage, and a long time past. That was when he was young. He did not at this moment feel young. He felt old, and tired, and full of spent vengeance. But he was not ready to lie down.
He found himself in Reservoir Square, depending south from Forty-Second Street and extending from Sixth Avenue to Fifth, a plot of greensward rendered mud by the pressure of so many boots in so confined a space. At the far end of the greensward was Carstensen & Gildmeister’s Crystal Palace, their massive, delicate monument to fenestration: all wrought iron and rolled glass, illumined now by hundreds of tiny flames and a few large ones.
Tonight, in front of the palace, on a purpose-built wood-plank platform, Ahab beheld a bearded orator, Mr. Cyrus W. Field, speaking into a horn so large it was borne by two. When the horn was aimed toward him he could hear, quite clearly, the words of the night; and when Mr. Field democratically turned his mechanism to other parts of the Square, he heard nothing but the cheer and echo of eight thousand souls.
“—the applicability of “electricity to the communication of intelligence—”
Our Ahab looked repeatedly over his shoulder. The crowd had filled in behind him. He was for the moment lost; he was for the moment safe. He shifted his weight from bad leg to good.
“—the nations of the world conjoined, its peoples as one people—”
Ahab spat upon the ground. The men on either side shifted, giving him more room at the expense of their own.
“—so that our great country America may once again be reunited with her twin—”
Abruptly—and it was the work of an instant—a change grew over him. Ahab’s eyes, which had been fixed on the stage, or, alternatively, had been darting, furtively, over his left shoulder, now went all soft, lustrous, effulgent. Staring not at the crowd, the speaker, the Crystal Palace, but to some wide vista beyond. It was as if he were gazing less through space than through time. And as if he were seeking not the horizon where the water meets the sky, but rather the horizon inside. The one, as we all know, that is farther away.
He is seeing, now, his sister. Seeing: though he has no real image of her, no true memory of her voice. She has been with him since before his birth and has never really left.
There is, two states north and an equal ways east, in Nantucket, a small shallow hill on a larger flat of green, latticed with large stones and larger mausolea. It is the Quaker graveyard. And on that shallow hill are two markers, side by side. The first marker has, as is customary, a date of birth, a date of death. They are but six days apart. The marker bears a name:
ANNABEL.
The second marker shares with the first the date of birth. Yet below that first date is but stone, blank stone. Smooth, featureless, polished, like a crystal ball in which no image has yet formed. This stone, too, bears a name:
JOHN.
He sees it. His name. His stone. The stone of his beloved sister. The small shallow hill where, after all ports of call, he will come to rest. Next to Annabel’s small sad coffin. Her home, and in time a home for him.
She is half of him. More than half. And the farther he roams—through city, over sea, atop peak, within isolate isle—the nearer she stays. In anger, in alcohol, in densest crowd, she can always find him. She is here now in Reservoir Square. He can see her and feel her. He cannot touch her. He knew her before she was born and for the shortest time afterwards. Her loss was the first of every loss and the only loss. She is his rock: but not, he knows, his salvation. He was with her in the womb and soon, he knows, will be with her again, beneath the loam of that small sad shallow hill. And because of her: death held no dominion over him. Death, to Ahab, would be a return. A reunion.
Mr. Field droned on, an orator before a crowd of thousands hailing a triumph that he alone knew to be a defeat. His voice was at once amplified and made hollow by the outsized horn. He was speaking of the unity of Man. Ahab spat once more upon the muddy soil of Reservoir Square, threaded his way through the crowd toward Broadway, transparent illuminated Broadway, a rampage of song and dance and flame.
From the far end of Reservoir Square, a city block and some eight thousand densely packed humans away, a former policeman with a pistol in his trousers struggled to keep sight of him.
Fearnley was on the trace. Wherever there was dirt, or mud, or sod, the dot-dash footprints confirmed not only identity but direction. The signature stutter of his gait was heard even by those with no direct line of sight. And even along stretches where there were neither prints nor witnesses, Fearnley had discovered the trajectory. Ahab he was following Broadway, the river Broadway, coursing thick and diagonal across the island of Manhatto, until, round Ninth Street, it snaps to grid, heading down, always down, relentlessly down.
Revelry was everywhere, not just on the Squares (Longacre, Madison, Union) but between them, continuous. With each southward step the celebration mounted. If on Forty-Second Street they had sung the glories of the Transatlantic cable, by Twenty-Sixth they were raising thick-bottomed glasses to the World United, by Fourteenth, all pretext abandoned, each toast saluted nothing save the toast previous. Houston Street was a crosswise river of torches; Canal, barely navigable. Following the spoor of his large dark man who, perhaps only moments before, had strode, with trademark syncopation, toward the bottom of the island, where Manhatto widened out, the grid of the city giving way to the angled grid of the waterfront.
Below Canal now. Lispenard. Walker, White. Franklin, Leonard, Worth. But it was not until Thomas that Fearnley finally caught clear sight of what appeared to be his quarry: a large, dark man, three blocks ahead, almost at Chambers Street.
Fearnley quickened his pace, taking three steps for his man’s every two. Soon he could see with clarity the man’s broad wool-clad shoulders gliding steadily south, even as the legs beneath those shoulders slid and stuck, slid and stuck. There was no doubt in Fearnley’s mind that he had found his bounty.
When he came within fifty yards Fearnley extracted, from his waistband, the percussion pistol. He rested his forefinger against the Lovell washer, pulled back the hammer with his other hand. The pistol’s load was a dense .57 ball that at this range could smash through a man’s gut, or depose a man’s head from its spiny pedestal. All of which Fearnley contemplated even as he focused his eyes on the vertical seam that bisected Ahab’s large dark coat.
Fearnley wished he’d had his revolver, an 1851 Colt with fine octagonal barrel. The Colt would afford a chance second, a chance third, etc., should the first shot fail to find its mark. But the revolver had been turned in—some might say confiscated—when he’d been decommissioned. If it weren’t for the freelance employment offered by Mr. Field and others, he’d soon have to leave his rooming-house in Turtle Bay and find less costly accommodations. But, he thought: tonight, should I meet with success, there might even be an opportunity for employment permanent on the staff of one of the wealthiest men of Manhatto.
>
He was very far south. All was tohubohu now. Fearnley stared through that crowd at his backlit quarry twenty yards ahead. But now the man turned! Turned left! Leaving Broadway for the first time in more than fifty blocks, heading east. Fearnley shoved his weapon into his waistband once more, the barrel dug into his groin even as he ran, ran, ran, following his prey to the three-sided park that fronts City Hall.
But what a City Hall it was tonight! It was a City Hall as neither Fearnley nor anyone else on Manhatto had e’er seen it. Each aperture was illumined eerie and majestic from within. The effect was that of some enormous jack-o’-lantern with windows for eyes, and the large outsized portal its mouth. The windows were of differing hues depending on the light behind them: the blue flicker of the gas lamps, the redder flames of whale-oil candles— The warm yellow glow of wood and paper, heaped into galvanized cans and buckets, now set aflame.
More: the flames interior were but prelude to the fireworks above. The ringmaster of those fireworks, visible now in silhouette atop the Hall, brought torch to fuse. Even from down here you could see that his eyes had the gleam of the autodidact. Contracted neither by the city nor by anyone else, this low-rent Liliendahl lacked the cadence and subtlety of the master but sought to obscure that and any other deficit via quantity— And now, as the main fuse sputtered, transmitting spark to the secondaries, which then split, and split again, each line finer and more specific, this self-appointed pyrotechnician performed a small jig of triumph, of victory, of celebration, his steps as rapid, jittery, stuttering as the gunpowder sparks he’d just incited.
James Fearnley was a mean little man. And when he’d had a bit to drink, as in tonight, or was tired, as in tonight, why that meanness would come to the fore. He contemplated the labor involved in sidling up to his prey, surprising him, persuading him (with his .57 pistol), restraining him (with his pair of Tower Bottom-Key Handcuffs). Minding him the rest of the night, until an hour of morning decent enough to remand him to the custody of Mr. Field. Which now to Fearnley—in the full bloom of his smallness, his meanness—seemed a bridge too far.
In all his years with the Metropolitans, bring him in was but half a sentence, the other half of which: alive if possible. Inebriated, exhausted, Fearnley he was no longer interested in the possible. He was interested in a drink, and then home, or perhaps a stop or two before home, his celebrations fueled by the anticipation of the payday that would soon be his. A payday and then: a job, a proper job, a job in Gramercy Park. The waltz internal grew louder, drowning out now the cacophony of the park.
Avenging and bright fall the swift sword of Erin
On him who the brave sons of Usna betray’d!
For every fond eye he hath waken’d a tear in
A drop from his heart-wounds shall weep o’er her blade.
And so Fearnley he extended his right arm. Used his left to brace his right. Stared down his arm, along the barrel, continuing that line straight direct as if down a taut string, to the back of Ahab’s large dark head. In an instant the large dark man would meet his maker and he, Fearnley, would be the hero of his own dreams. Pull the trigger softly toward you, his instructor had said, as you would stroke a woman’s neck.
Atop City Hall the nameless pyrotechnician continued his victory jig as his fuse lines, consumed in spark, transmitted flame to destination. Then, in one struck and blinding instant—a moment too short for rational thought, but not, alas, too short for awful, gut-plummeting realization—the intent of the artist became terrifyingly apparent. This was not pyrotechnics as a time-based art but rather the all-in-one, the eggs-in-a-basket, the tout mange. It might, in some technical sense, still be called son et lumière, but the son was that of one large explosion, and the lumière, in the blink of an eye, that of City Hall entire convulsed in flames. Projectile flames, shooting out and down to the park below.
What happened next happened too quickly for Fearnley to comprehend. There was no sense of past or future, only a present, sliding slow and inexorable from now to now to now. He is taking aim. He is squeezing the trigger. He is thinking of the promotion that will be his, the hero’s welcome. City Hall is exploding. A projectile is launched from its roof. The projectile is larger, sputtering flame and spark behind. The projectile is larger still, but in the same place in his field of vision. Now he can see it no longer. There is a pain in his chest and everywhere. Then there is blackness.
Twenty yards forward, the large dark man Ahab shields his eyes. He has just been in a race with Death and he has won, yet of this victory he is unaware. To Fearnley, everything has changed; to the man, nothing is different, save the awful cataclysm which, one minute previous, had been the administrative seat of the municipal government of the most wondrous and important city of the Republic. Of, many would hold, the world.
Ahab watched as up on the roof the man who had set those flames in motion, his name now lost to history, disappeared into his own fires, flickered, and was gone, as if he himself were the grand finale. Ahab listened as behind him one screamed, then several. He did not turn around but rather kept his gaze on the pyrotechnician, burning now like a night-marcher’s torch, his bones the wood, his flesh the oil-soaked rags. Ahab owed the man the largest debt of gratitude. But it was a debt of which he would never become aware.
The revelers jammed up against each other as they made their exit from the park. Boisterous, sullen, mid-song and mid-silence. If it were possible Ahab he would dispatch them all: not in grand fury but with deliberation. He wanted the larger justice. In all rooms, streets, avenues, boulevards. On broad ways, in alleyways, in all the streets, large and small, of this city, of every city, and all who there inhabit. And all in the dark forest, too, and all in ships upon the black and roiling sea.
He stood in the triangular park, the one side snapped to the grid of the city, the other to the grid of the waterfront, the third a hypotenuse between them. He regarded the fleeing crowd. There were hundreds, perhaps more. There was among them no single soul whose life our Ahab would, at this moment, spare. They were, to him, automata, no more deserving of life than a stave of wood, a mass of forged iron, a sedimentary brick. Were they to trample each other into the drunken mud he would not mourn, eulogize, linger. Our Ahab stood fast as others fled. He was a tall dark stanchion in a dark roiled sea. It appeared that he was staring at the fire, and, later, when the fire department made its arrival, at the comic and frenzied activity of the pumpers. But he was gazing further, past City Hall, across the East River, up through the woods of New York and Connecticut, up to New England, to a certain hill marked with two adjacent stones.
Behind him, outside the range of his gaze, the former policeman Fearnley leaked blood and life into the muddy ground. The ebbing of consciousness went slow as the present shut down while older memories remained intact. Fearnley recalled the candles on his birthday cake when he was young, arrayed at the points of a star, he must have been five years old. He recalled Matilda, of the same age, but the other sex, who visited the outhouse and neglected to close the door. Had she done this in haste? With obliviousness? Did she know he was in the yard? When he could image no more he recalled his father, or the scent of his father, who applied each morning to his fresh-shaven face a homemade tincture, one part witch hazel, one part bay rum. The scent was old and comforting, far more than the high reek of gunpowder that had stung his nose and sinus, just moments before, when he had been alive. He floated out on that scent, on a river of bay rum, downstream, past unseen fronds of green and fragrant Hamamelis along the shore.
Fearnley went unnoticed, regarded, if at all, as one of a common many: that legion of revelers, still drunk with glee at the cable’s completion, who’d ginned up beyond capacity and were now sleeping it off. It would not be until the dawn that anyone would see that he did not rouse.
Even as Fearnley he did bleed out our Ahab walked on. Further south, toward the lower tip of the island. The Customs House. The Battery. Breathing in the salted breeze that carried with it thin and c
ompelling scent of the places he had been, the places he had never been, the places heard about in taverns, glimpsed on old charts, sung about in chanteys. It was time, he knew, for him to single his lines. He was not walking but pacing back and forth, as if Manhatto were the yard of his prison.
He could see, behind him now, the full flames of City Hall, lighting up the sky, dense clouds of black smoke against the black sky, clouds—bulging, orange, ominous—growing bigger each time he looked. Let the first to go form a pyre for those above. Let it grow higher, consuming the fire-men in the flames they sought to quench. Let it spread. Zipping uptown, along the diagonal of Broadway. With each step Ahab he saw the largest wave, coming in from the sea, engulfing the island entire, from the Battery upwards; and with each step Ahab he saw the firestorm, spreading outward from the park.
NINE
ON A BRIGHT morning some months later Mr. Field was dictating his morning correspondence. His amanuensis, Ulysses Taylor, was able to keep pace even when Mr. Field spoke with great rapidity. Mr. Field was seeking to donate some of the Andes paintings of Frederic Church whose expedition he had financed. The paintings had been commissioned to make the Andes seem beautiful and to encourage investors in one of Mr. Field’s development schemes; and now, having served that purpose admirably, Mr. Field wanted them properly recognized as art.
After lunch at his club a few doors down Mr. Field walked to the offices of the American Telegraph Company, which he had founded, and which, at the moment, was perhaps the nation’s premiere corporation for telegraphy (though the Western Union would likely demur). Field made enquiries as to the volume of telegraphic traffic, and listened to a proposal for additional western trunk lines, perused diagrams for a revised, and improved, relay—a Barclay Box rather than the more standard Morse. But the cost of replacing the extant relays across the system was not negligible, and he was not certain that the improvement would generate improved revenues or lower the expense of operation.
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