Refiner's Fire

by Mark Helprin

  “Those are here to trap Specials. They’re highly poisonous.”

  “Specials?”

  “Yeah. That’s what they call a live rat. Rats reproduce when they’re two months old, have about six or eight litters a year of ten to twenty babies a shot. If two of them started in perfect conditions and none of their offspring died of hunger or poison, in a year they could produce five million. My father says that there are at least two rats underground for every person in the city. That’s at least sixteen million. If something happened down here and they all came out at the same time, let’s say in front of Bloomingdale’s, it would be hell on earth.”

  “How come we haven’t seen any?” asked Marshall.

  “Are you crazy?” asked Al, shining his light on two dozen little ones tucked into a hole in the wall. Marshall knew that they were vile, but somehow he sympathized with them. Everyone in the world tried to kill them, when they wanted only to survive. They carried disease, but not intentionally. All they did was eat garbage, and squeak. Then, one ran up and tried to bite his foot, and he kicked it into the air with hatred and disgust. “That was a Dewey,” said Al, “a live one which attacks. A live one which runs is a knocker. Knocker or Dewey, they’re all Specials.”

  “What’s a dead rat called?”

  “A Beebuckle.”

  “A Beebuckle!”

  “Yup. I don’t know the origin of the term.”

  “I suspect,” said Marshall, “that it’s Irish.”

  At the end of the passage was a wall-mounted iron ladder which led up into darkness. They climbed for about ten minutes, until they were so high that they did not hear a penny hit bottom. They thought that they were close to ground level, when suddenly they saw a light from above. Switching off their lamps, they climbed quietly to the grate through which the light was passing. They could not believe what they saw, and they froze to the ladder.

  In an enormous room the size of Grand Central Station, hung with draperies and spotlights and potted palms suspended in the air, were hundreds of nude women. Some lay on divans and ate fruit, or read. Some did gymnastics. Some were engaged at archery, while others bathed, worked looms, dived into a great pool of blue water with geysers and fountains spraying about, or played the lute. Others worked at desks, typing and making phone calls, while still others sat in poker games, visors of green their only apparel, the tables surrounded in clouds of smoke. Midgets of all races and colors waited on these women. The midgets were men, dressed in pea-green Department of Sanitation uniforms. A lone black piano player, bathed in spotlights and smoke, played a hypnotizing rondo from high above, and through clouded windows sunlight seemed to be streaming, even though Marshall and Al knew that it was night. The women were mainly beautiful, though some were very ugly, and they seemed extremely busy. Marshall and Al remained there, stunned and panting, until a midget with a tray of time drinks walked toward them and slammed a door on the grate. They could hear crushed ice dropping into glasses, and then a few footsteps. They poked their fingers through the grate, but the door was solid steel. They banged on it. Nothing happened. After a while they descended silently and made their way through the tunnel, in which there were then hundreds and hundreds of Specials, including a Dewey or two which tried to bite their boots.

  After climbing through a shiny green ceramic tube they found themselves in Union Square at dawn. Millions of pigeons were strutting about, washing or eating. Marshall and Al peeled off their boots and removed their helmets. “They say,” said Al, “that sewer gas sometimes causes hallucinations.”

  “Who’s they?” asked Marshall.

  “I don’t know,” said Al, and they began to walk home.

  That day they gave up on the sewers and resolved upon bridge climbing. Summer was coming. Alexa was readying for the Gotham Ball and then Rome, and the furiousness and anxiety of her preparations drew the entire family after her. Marshall and Al told of what they had seen. The only one who believed them was Paolo, who, for the first three weeks of June, begged to be taken into the sewer, and then was distracted by the beginning of another dinosaur fad. June was hot, and Marshall took Alexa up to Eagle Bay, where they rode and swam and looked for early raspberries and dived into the fresh rapids of the Croton River. There, overcome by mutual affection, they lay together in protracted kissing as thundering water made them lose track of time.

  4

  ALEXA’S ESCORT arrived in patent-leather slippers—she had said that he was a fool. Marshall asked him how he could walk the streets of New York in a tuxedo and ballet shoes. “What happens if you get in a fight?” he added. “How will you protect Alexa? She has a lot of gold and might be a target for muggers. How much money are you carrying, and what’s your intended route?”

  “Are you a security consultant?”

  “No,” answered Marshall, “but you need one. You’re a robbery about to happen.”

  “I think we’ll be all right.”

  Marshall followed at a distance. He wished that they would be robbed so that he could save Alexa and be a hero, but they walked straight down Park Avenue and were very safe. It gave him great pleasure to see Alexa fend off the escort’s arm on Sixty-fourth Street and again near the Pulitzer Fountain. Hundreds of finely dressed people were there, some having arrived in Rolls-Royces and some in horse-drawn carriages. Entranced, Marshall followed them in. With great protestation, he had refused Alexa’s invitation, saying that such things were not for him, and that he would never go near a full-dress ball. She had to do it, for political reasons—all the commissioners’ daughters were to be there, and how would it look without public utilities?

  He got into the ballroom even though he wore sneakers, khaki pants, and a white shirt. Perhaps because of the spirited dancing and loud rock music, no one had noticed him. He knew that he couldn’t last long, so he walked over to a servant with a platter of champagne glasses and said, “I’ll take that.” The servants wore black pants, and white shirts not unlike Marshall’s. Young people his age took glasses from his tray without even noticing him, as if he were a vending machine or a walking table. A few gave him tender patronizing smiles, which he answered by screwing up his face into the ugliest grimace he could manage. He maneuvered toward Alexa, who, in black velvet and gold, was a dark star in the collusion of music and marble. He was close enough to hear a Greek-looking gentleman at her table deliver a lecture on oil tankers. “Forty oil tankers is better than twenty. But sixty is not better than forty. International tax structure, especially for the Liberian fleets, favors a centralization of tax advantages in a medium-sized company which can write off depreciation as a function of its total operating costs. It is really fascinating, really fascinating. I will now list for you the fifty standard amortization writeoffs common to Panamanian tax shelters. One...”

  Alexa drummed her fingers on the rim of her plate. Marshall stood at the edge of the dance floor, looking at her. Suddenly she raised her head and caught his glance. She turned red and flushed as if it were more than it was, as if Marshall had come back from the dead, instead of showing up dressed as a waiter at the Gotham Ball.

  Marshall was a spectacle in his khakis and sneakers. An old maître d’ bustled up to him and said in deeply indignant lisps, “ Where are your pants and shoes?” At first Marshall did not hear, so loud was the music and so gorgeous the expression on Alexa’s face. “Where are your pants and shoes?” repeated the maître d’, astounded.

  “On my legs and feet, dummy,” replied Marshall, who was then ushered out backward, still looking at Alexa. As he was hustled through the grand pillars he let his tray drop to the floor. Because he was light in coloring and mild in appearance, two waiters tried to beat him up. He made quick work of locking them into a golden sentry booth, through the open top of which he poured a tub of loose dirt. On his way out he grabbed a stuffed lobster from a serving cart, wheeled about, snatched a piece of chocolate cake, and nearly overturned a woman who was making a pompous entry on the Fifth Avenue side. Three doorm
en tried to capture him, but he sprinted easily up the parkside, with the lobster in his right hand like a baton. Halfway to Yorkville a mounted policeman galloped beside him and said, “What are you doing with that lobster?”

  “Treasure hunt,” said Marshall. “Methodist Charities treasure hunt.”

  “Good luck,” said the horseman as he veered off.

  Alexa returned very late, and he did not see her until the next evening, when, in preparation for dinner, she was sifting confectioner’s sugar over apple pastries. She worked at a counter in the kitchen, and when Marshall came in the first thing she said was, “Who knows, maybe I should go to Radcliffe.” Marshall thought as she operated the sifter.

  “Maybe I should go to Rome,” he said.

  “Better if it were the former,” said Alexa, turning toward him and putting down the sifter, “although Rome would be interesting for us, I think. But I don’t know if I want to. I’ve been in this apartment all my life, and I’m afraid. Perhaps I should go alone, like Ulisse.”

  Always uncomfortable with such questions unless, like a halfwit, he answered them immediately, Marshall was interrupted by Signor Pascaleo, who came in the swinging door. “Ah, torta di mele, ” he said, wishing that he could have a piece. They spoke for a while about Signor Pascaleo’s latest problem and triumph—he had appeared on television during the successful cloture of a burst watermain at Rockefeller Center—when they heard Paolo’s voice moving toward them in breathless panic.

  “Papa! Venga, venga!” he shouted. “Boofin il capro!”

  All six of them rushed from various rooms to the study, where they saw only white curtains blowing inward in a gentle June evening’s breeze. Paolo went to the window and leaned out dangerously. Signora whipped him back in. When they put their heads out they saw the goat, Arctic white and nearly aglow, poised on the thin ledge. His eyes were intently fixed on a roof terrace across the way, about fifteen feet out and ten feet down. Though some wrought-iron furniture and potted geraniums were dispersed on the tiles, the terrace was mainly open.

  The goat had all his feet together on the ledge, and was arched like a lute. It was amazing that he stayed on. The distance that he intended to bridge looked far too wide. Furthermore, he had no practice in jumping and was proceeding solely from imagination and will. They were afraid to coax him back, for fear that he would panic and fall the sixteen stories into the courtyard below. And even though they talked to him, they knew that he really did not know English. He began to lick his lips and quiver. Paolo started to whimper. Signor Pascaleo said, “He’s a goat, Paolo. He knows what he’s doing.”

  As they were wondering if he could leap, and if he would live, he leaped outward in a powerful perfectly upright movement and sailed through the air with his four legs straight. He looked like Pegasus, like a cloud, like something which flew, and not at all like a house goat. He landed right in the middle of the terrace. His legs went every which way, he lifted himself up after hitting his chin on the tile, and he began to bleat. Then he stopped bleating and walked over to a geranium, to which he helped himself.

  Alexa went to Rome. It seemed to Marshall that not seeing her would be the hardest thing in the world, but when she had to leave, she had to leave. He knew that months and years make little difference, because when finally all goes dark, everything has passed as quickly as sparks. The vision of Alexa remained with him.

  VI. A LAKE IN AUGUST

  1

  THE YEARS which passed were terrible, Coalbrookdale at night, a sulfurous artificial fire of intellect red within a tight frame, directed energy, overburdening allusion, heroic rebellion, and finally a hardening as if to steel or iron untempered. On the way to Cambridge one steaming September evening, Marshall’s train passed factories full of white clouds and fire, orange to the eye, with dirty furnaces in huge rooms with vast open doors, rooms disheveled and eviscerated like slaughtered animals. There was the printer’s frame into which letters and words were locked by steel, and the locked leaded glass rigid in the great windows of Memorial Hall lighting a planked floor with shots of spectra. Train wheels over rails for two hundred miles had been noisy like a harbor full of ships with tall masts. Harvard was deceptive, difficult, kaleidoscopic, ancient, hard, and alive.

  Almost like a battle, it exacted its toll in numbing, humbling, and killing some, while leaving many far behind. There, Marshall learned what it meant to walk down the edge of a sword. The unutterable resources of bound volumes would have been crushing; the thousand-faced Union; a flood of colors in galleries and chapels; a breathless white moon in perspective from Observatory Hill; the leathern authority of contemplative deans; red-booked revolutionaries running like gazelles from dawn-lighted police; a rapids course of young women more exciting than the White Water; a hundred formed philosophies as attractive as the gentle gleam from the old brass instruments in Dunster library; and the spread of the city as it pulsed throughout four voluptuous seasons would undoubtedly have felled him in demonstration of the frame and his predetermined positions, had it not been for the muffling snow, an insanity on bridges and high buildings, and the first-day piper.

  At the very beginning, Marshall crossed the Charles on a September morning so hot that the water seemed to boil beneath the bridge, and the slim rosewood shells, oars extended, were like cooking prawns with sweating riders. This was not a river which flowed to the sea, but rather a lake in August. He went behind the deserted stadium, a prairie of soccer fields bordered by pale and fragrant grasses awaiting the lop of winter. Though protected by steel spikes and chained iron gates, the stadium was easily entered with a little vaulting, squeezing, bending, and jumping. A sign informed interlopers that it was the first precast concrete buildings in the world. From its top, Marshall surveyed Harvard’s ring of brick and Byzantine towers. The university seemed too massive for one alone, and he wondered if he could survive its temptations and bufferings without going public, engrouping, running in the packs he knew would be forming and which he almost could feel beyond the rim of protective buildings as the decade itself braced for pressure. He wondered if his place within the scheme would grind him down to synchrony, suspecting that time passing might, in making him old, take from him the spark and catapult by which it was thrown. And as he was thinking this, a furious figure appeared at the other end of the semi-enclosed field. A mass of Black Watch with bare legs and kilt, sparkling buckles, and pipes dark as ebony, he stood rigid, blew up the bag, and began to play. So perfect was the stadium’s geometry that the sound was like a massed tattoo, and the piper marched stiffly and with spirit up and down the lines. When he came close, Marshall could see that he was an old man with a wooden leg. After he turned around and marched back, Marshall descended to the lowest bank of seats. Returning, the piper did not see Marshall until he was within ten feet of him. With a single tone of the pipes—as when Lucius had been too moved to continue playing and had stared out over the clouds at a thin rim of sea—the piper looked up and said, “I thought I was alone.”

  “So did I,” said Marshall.

  “How do you do. I’m Berry.”

  “I’m Pearl.”

  “Same general shape, at least. Please excuse me.” He clicked his heels with a hollow sound and turned down the field at a march.

  There was nothing greater, thought Marshall, than men like this who had lasted, who were old, whose passions had been refined in fire and in ice and yet whose love was solid and gentle and true. He recrossed the river and vanished into a single turbulent frame of four years, expecting to find his way between the teeth of hardness and compassion, and to survive the blasts of light. Those years were a composite of deepening dreams.

  2

  ALTHOUGH AL was almost as strange as he was, Marshall had looked forward to rooming with him in a freshman dorm full of noise, conflict, water fights, and discussion. He hoped to make friends, to enter the mainstream, and (by ending his isolation) to have some years without a certain formless responsibility which he felt always we
ighing upon him. He would put up a Harvard flag in his room, join the canoe club, try to last through a dance, perhaps even buy a pewter mug with Veritas written on it. Marshall was happy that most of the freshmen on his floor had crewcuts like the brushes on waxing machines, and spoke with as so flat that they could slide them under the doors. He looked forward to constructive assimilation. However, though Al stayed in Weld Hall, Marshall ended up living alone in an organ loft.

  After he had been at Harvard for two hours, his proctor sent him to a dean who sat behind a rosewood desk on an ancient oriental carpet of ruby red. The dean was Australian. He moved in slow motion as if he were thinking hard, and said to Marshall over the exquisite silence of the marbled room decorated with Sargents and battered Persian muskets inlaid with pearl, “There is a prince, you see, from a small country in the Himalayas. His father, the King, casts in the General Assembly of the United Nations a vote equal to that of the people of the United States, and he has sent the boy to us. We are glad to have him. He’s smart, an Etonian. And (to be frank) chaps like this always donate a million-dollar chair for the study of some impossible little language. But he applied after the deadline, and we were crowded anyway. I’m afraid ... that ... we’re going to have to give him your room.”

  Marshall was displaced. He felt as if he were on a pastel road of royal palms, as if the room were full of halvah, marzipan, and jujubes, as if he were a slave who worked a fan and cracked nuts. “Why my room?” he asked.

  “The Prince speaks Italian and wants practice. Your friend Alexander Pascaleo is perfect for that.”