After he had gone, the tragedians stood looking out of the window. Members of the Tactical Unit of the NYPD were standing in a loose ring upon the lawn below. They were fondling their Roman-candle tear gas launchers and their riot batons, which were much thicker than the average nightstick and upholstered in hard-pack padding so as to mete out internal injuries more readily than external ones, theoretically saving the municipality lawsuit expenditures while not failing to teach the offending parties the required lesson. The elite unit’s distinct padded leather costume, an anomaly in the long history of the department, was specially patterned after the ensemble Marlon Brando had worn in The Wild One, right down to the Buster Bad Ass cap, loosely modified to meet the requirements of the constable’s millinery. The uniform would be abruptly discontinued on the night, fourteen months into the future, when the Tactical Unit raided the Stonewall Inn at 57 Christopher Street and promptly found that some of the feisty habitués, the ones not in sequined drag, were wearing the same costume, or at least some fraction of it. Upon sight of the policemen in their honcho wear, the gay revelers, in their accessorized leather suits, Harley signets, sequins, and swastika tattoos, with the extra element of perspiration affording the room the aura of the Roman bath, assumed that their sister speakeasy, The Gaiety, had sent over reinforcements to replenish the Friday-night hothouse frolics. “C’mon in, girls, the sauna’s fine,” the Greenwich Village of the Damned collectively shouted.
Back at Columbia, the soldiers and the athletes stood behind the blue police barricades, gloating, smirking, snickering, and whittling their index fingers to signify shame upon the radicals. Hasty as a prop crew, the students in Low refortifed the premises with loose furnishings and those volcanically spored pasteboard bulwarks that segregated library cubicle from library cubicle, and they awaited their reward in heaven. The assembled police troops put on their respiratory masks, which granted them the aspect of fetished grasshoppers. Then all unholy hell broke loose.
The tacticals stormed the front stairs, hitting the door with such authority that the stained-glass archway window just below the granite dome caught a black widow’s shiver, configuring into a heraldic web. From the berths above, the students could be heard singing a rousing chorus of “If I Had a Hammer.” An obscurant fog of marrow-custard-matter tear gas exited in an orderly fashion through the ornate front door of Low Library, simultaneous with the racket of a wrecking crew, and it leaked its way dilatorily past the sentinel pillory, finally settling into a nebula upon the front lawn. The television networks had broken into the late movies on local affiliates across the country. The scene that they were transmitting was so desolate and brumous that callers all across the land asked switchboard operators if there had been a surprise landing upon the moon, fourteen months ahead of schedule.
The front-line journalists, themselves quasi-military by now, battle-hardened in ghettos and on campuses across the land, sent up a series of their own GI-issue flares, which had been available for many years through P.O. boxes advertised in the back of fitness magazines. Suddenly it was nine o’clock in the morning and the entire world had an adequate picture of the atrocities as they were occurring. Then the yellow-tinted darkness fell once more as the flares discovered the laws of gravity and crashed, like a calculated air strike, through the president’s bay window, scorching the carpet just as the police began to crack heads in earnest.
I was apprised of the rumpus by the jittery tone of Cool DJ Dacon Nolette, the after-hours jazz pilot on campus radio WKCR. His apprehensiveness got me sitting up straight in my dorm bed, since the only other time that I had ever heard Dacon sound nervous about anything was on the occasion a year earlier when the campus rads had stormed into his control booth with the effrontery to actually suggest that he break into “Crepuscule with Nellie” in order to announce the commencement of the Newark riots.
This time the leftists came begging and bootlicking, and they somehow persuaded Dacon to stick his head out the window. “Just look,” he said into the microphone, backgrounded by the sound of his turntable needle skipping off the deep end. “Would you just look at that?” I got out of bed and tied my Vedic bandanna over my nose and mouth, smelling the spice of the tear gas through the walls. I put on my junior high hockey helmet that I had brought along to college as a hedge against whatever fraternity-boy harassment I might encounter. I slung Sabbath’s Nikon across my neck. I walked downstairs and went outside to complete my education. Thousands of other dorm kids were spilling into the night. Low Library was bifurcated, top and bottom, fairly levitated by a larvacidal mustard fog, and kids were tobogganing down Mount Low Memorial, that sierra of stairs, on their backs with their ankles in the hands of the elite, crusading cop squad. The footballers and the junior GIs stood chomping the bit behind the police barricades, calling out to the police officials, “Coach, put us in the game!” The cops were now content to launch kids from the summit rather than to help them down the stairs. There was quite a pileup at the spine of our black-bronze Alma Mater on its isle in the middle of the stairway. Bystanders were coughing, weeping, and breathing into their own or each other’s armpits. A fleet of paddy wagons entered from the Broadway side. Policemen passed wriggling bodies, hand-to-hand, into the sheet-metal holds of the detention trucks. The hollow cannonades of protestation that sounded from within the wagons put one in mind of stage thunder. About this time, a second armored convoy arrived, with much more alacrity, I might add, than the first one. These were the white, siren-topped ambulances from Saint Luke’s–Roosevelt intent on bearing away casualties. We applauded at the sight of them, but the cops got into their cruisers and headed these chariots of rescue off at the pass. A policeman strolled over and casually told me that if I didn’t stop taking pictures he was going to shove my dead body up my ass.
I was flotsam in the human wave that crested in the interior of Cannon’s Bar on 108th Street. There was one alabaster-headed fellow at the counter to the far right who looked terribly familiar and equally out of place. He kept the corona of his head down as he nursed a straight bourbon. He jowls were glossy with tears. Whispers worked the room like pruning shears. It just couldn’t be; just couldn’t be. It was. It was Columbia University president Grayson Kirk in a dark suit that he had obviously taken off long enough to have run through a car wash in the back of a flatbed truck, and then had stuccoed successfully back onto his body.
“I have only known careless love,” he said.
Hell, no, he didn’t. What he did say was that the radical students were to blame. They had forced his hand, and they had forced it to his own throat. They had transgressed all allowable limits of civil disobedience, peed upon the Great Gandhi’s corpse, infringed upon the sanctity of academic freedom by taking said freedom to an extreme heretofore un-dreamed of, and lastly they had passed up a week’s worth of opportunities to atone and to be forgiven, and to be brought back into and, yes, even celebrated within the latently social democratic fold of academia. President Kirk had been left without a choice. He asked if anyone had heard anything about the fate of the Burne-Jones painting that had been hanging over his desk.
On Monday morning, the office of the board of trustees announced Kirk’s composite resignation/dismissal, the board attempting to save face even as they attempted to be seen to kick ass. They mailed Kirk his gold watch and contacted him later in the year about being fitted for his commemorative bronze bust. He asked that the sculptor not visit him at his estate. A couple of weeks later, he mailed the board a pinecone for the artist to use as a model. The great majority of the students taken into police custody that evening were assigned court dates and then released after a couple of hours in the cages downtown. Most eventually copped out with fines that their fathers paid.
In the immediate aftermath, the police sealed off the office of the president. The plan was to wreck the almost pristine workstation— although the kids admittedly had left dirty socks and spent scumbags and such on the floor, they emphatically had not broken anythi
ng—and then invite the news media in, in order to frighten the world by letting it view just how lightly the upcoming generation valued private property. They capsized the dory of Kirk’s desk, scuttled his outsized kidskin swivel chair, which resembled nothing so much as the torso of a Sasquatch, and then they took their axes to his filing cabinets. The wrecking squad, having located a bale of Diplomaticos Torpedos in a secret panel in the desk, then held council beneath a niche along the right side of the wall, where Sir Edward Burne-Jones’s Myrrha hung, framed by a shaft of wheat-colored lantern light coming up from the square below. The smoke of the newly fired Habanos added a second layer of auriferousness. The figure of Myrrha stood above them with her eyes tightly closed in acquiescence, her bodice torn by her own hand, and the drapery of her dress like a pale pink fire. She was making ready for her rape. The press was clamoring at the door. The ringleader in charge of delaminating the Burne-Jones like a bad sunburn had to defer to the Tactical Unit’s senior man, two-tour, thirty-year veteran Officer Oval Kasovitz. “Well, Kas?” the cop asked.
The students had not harmed the painting, but they hadn’t left it untouched, either. President Kirk, extreme libertarian within reason that he was, was disposed to paper cuts. He kept a prodigious supply of iodine in the medicine cabinet of his facility. The extremist interlopers had soaked swaths of toilet tissue in a sinkful of iodine until the paper had turned a diaphanous shade of violet. They had dried the paper on the window’s ledge and then had gauzed the blue tiffany over the surface of the painting so that the light, whether in sun or moon or in the neutralities of dusk or dawn or lamplight, lent the painting the transpicuousness of the obscura lens of the lysergic acid diethylamide tablet. Upon being retouched by the students, the painting looked like an illumination in a magic volume.
“Kas, make up your damn mind,” the one in favor of going at it with a paint scraper said, the tip of his cigar throbbing.
Officer Kasovitz, just weeks earlier and only a few blocks uptown, had been helping oversee the community of Harlem’s ritualized mourning for slain civil rights leader the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. He chased a bottle thrower up a labyrinthine stairwell, his lungs giving out on him. Flights above, he heard the suspect’s sneakers scratching against the tar rooftop. When he finally reached the roof, he was enraptured to find that the entire expanse had been painted over with a colossal pigeon mural. There were stunning colorfast variations on the plumage and the wattles of the birds, and such a purity of line in the rendering of the one vagrant mourning dove whose long, white-tipped tail suggested the revision of bereavement. He took in the mottled and colorful surface of the roof. He decided in an instant that he could die happy then and there, never mind the riot below that sought to eulogize a man of peace with outright mayhem. For the first time in his life, he was experiencing the sensation of flight.
He turned to the bottle-throwing suspect, who was rocking on the springs of his ankles at the building’s precipice, measuring his chances. Oval gestured with his gun. “D’jou do this?” he asked the kid.
Obviously the policeman was trying to pin more than just that one lone bottle upon the boy. The kid dug in for traction. He dive-bombed over the edge, barely making it to the adjacent rooftop. He scampered off to the reprieve of freedom. In the spirit of good sportsmanship, Officer Kasovitz saluted both him and the mural with a single, bathetic shot into the air.
“Naw, leave the damn thing alone,” Kasovitz said of the tricked-out version of Sir Edward Burne-Jones’s Myrrha. “I’m starting to like it.”
The NYPD Tactical Unit was reprimanded by the news media and given medals by its superiors. The Burne-Jones painting was returned to the British Museum in a foam-packed carton under the supervision of an armed security guard. Vietnam was given back to the Vietnamese, seriously defoliated and depopulated. The gymnasium that was being built in Morningside Park was quietly bulldozed and plowed under. Grayson Kirk worked on his memoirs and died, possibly waiting for the phone to ring. Sabbath reclines in a bathtub at the core of my memory. The rest is history.
16.
Assia
Assia returned the children and reclaimed her auto. Frieda and Nicholas woke only long enough to dimly recognize their father. They were destined to be poets, she thought, what with all that they’d had to internalize lately.
Abdiel was saying something about how they hadn’t meant to intrude. She was looking at the girl’s rib cage.
There was a pestling underneath the hood of her Aston Martin. It was such a long ride back to London alone. She was alone with plenty of people to talk to. Herself, her baby, her own twelve-year-old persona stepping off the refugee ship barefoot, the one who was never promised that anything would be easy, or promised that anything would ever be over. There were people to talk to, but no one to argue with. No one to tell her that she had not seen what she had seen. That girl’s white rib cage. Like the shell of a conch.
She would have thought that she had been ready to witness adultery in the wake of the suicide. Of course Ted would pull this. The stakes could not have been raised any higher and standards could not be wrestled lower. Nearing the city now, she felt safer in the amaurosis of the fog. London had a history that would have annihilated most other towns. The fog helped partition the latitude of memory. Things are easier to understand when they are fragmented.
She parked her car outside the flat. She went inside and changed her clothes. She slipped into the teal chinchilla coat that Ted had always thought excessive. Exhibitionism, he said, has to have some limits.
Oh, really?
When she put her floppy, felt, incognito hat on, its weight rang the bell of her cranium. She saw a checkerboard miasma. She threw the hat onto the bed.
She boarded the once-on-the-hour city bus, an engine-red double-decker, vacant at this hour and ominous. Her heels tattooed the alveolate planks beneath her feet. She had looked forward to the fluorescence of the bus. Her headache did not take to it, however. She thought that the cure for the headache might be motion sickness. If she sat at the window and focused on nothing, the rush of the city going by might cause her to outdistance the pain in her head. Primrose Hill was full of gabled and two-toned Victorian houses. In season, the ivy clung to the front gates. The primula clusters bore up out of the dirt of the pocket gardens like inverted Asian parasols. There were black poplars, striking Shiva poses, lining the cobbled walkways, casting turbulent shade in the noontime, and hand-carved churches with toy porticos and crystalline unicorn horns, melting now, dripping down from the brick overhangs. In Saint John’s Woods, the snow was still clinging to the rooftops. London weather, everyone said, was capable of anything except being predicted. The coating of snow so well suited the opaline terraces peculiar to the neighborhood. She was making headway on outrunning her headache.
There wasn’t a soul on the streets. Her chauffeur sailed by the transport awnings without slowing. Smoke curled from the pocked discuses in the road. The Union Jacks flew over Picadilly. They bowed like maître d’s. Salaam, salaam.
There were waterfront clubs all along the docks. During the war, there had been only alehouses here, as there had been since the time of the Romans. Hungarians, Cypriots, and East Indians congregated with the working whites in these clubs now. Or so the grapevine attested. They were more inclusive by leagues and yet they remained patterned meticulously after the old stands of Pall Mall and Saint James. The fare was much cheaper than in central London. The ale outsold the wine, though both were retailed by the bucket. The chops were cut from the goat exclusively. She loved the masquerade of these gentlemen’s clubs. New in town, she had attended on dispensation evenings and afternoons when properly escorted ladies were not only welcome, but treated to a drink on the house. She loved the dyslexic claviers in these places, usually played by a bloke who appeared better suited to leveraging a piano up a pulley. These maestros had invariably played in a name jazz band before the war. They would all have been famous if the war hadn’t come along an
d broken off their impending big break. They would raise their glasses. “No regrets,” they would toast.
The Luftwaffe had paid assiduous attention to the docklands. The Brits, the story goes, had resorted to anti-aircraft cannons aboard merchant ships and flotilla piers just to keep commerce in play and the home front from starving to death. In reality, there never was any “home front” along these piers. Residents had enlisted and, like it or no, they were in the thick of battle. Rebuilding projects were ongoing even now. They were projected to last four or five times as long as the war had. It made her wonder what Berlin looked like.
Her pilot pulled the bus up to a wooden port no more formidable than a news kiosk. “Last-stop-Isle-of-Dogs,” he said. She looked out of the window. She saw a carpet of liquid, undulating brass and bronze alloy, like metallic lava. Beyond that was the Tower Bridge. It was a black, freestanding, webbed ossuary against the moon.
The Thames was a dead river, an industrial lavatory. Its aquatic life consisted of nonperishable strains of bacteria. Its sour smell was so repugnant that longshoremen arrived on the docks in the morning with their knit caps down over their noses. Yet there they were, the ships that brought in the city’s life’s blood. The freighters and the tankers, noiseless in this wind, but irradiative out in the bay.
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