He let his words hang in the air and watched the motes float above him to a ceiling rose plugged and clotted with eras of paint.
Afterwards he waited for the girl outside. He caught her by the gate, by the arm – somewhat brutishly, he worried for an instant – and blurted: ‘Won’t you come for coffee with me?’
She gave no immediate and clear response. Her mouth hung open, the ‘Continental’ face was pale, and the eyes that had seemed so sleepy and reassuring were now alert and panicked. He wondered if he had misread the look she had given him in the hall. But he had such an unshakeable feeling within him, damn her, and she had put it there, and he could not accept that it did not exist within her also.
She went to her friends, two girls who had stalled between the gateposts, and the three of them gathered in a huddle. They were giddy and all the while cast glances back at him. The whole scene was very ‘American’, it struck him, and how must he have come across, he wondered – so brave and forward and American-seeming in standing his ground and waiting for an answer? Or did they see him, in fact, and in spite of his and Missus Dwyer’s best efforts, in the mould of the romantic Italian tenor?
He would be resolute now and show her he was a man of will and then, by and by, after she had got to know him, she would see the man he thought she had seen in the hall, the man he knew himself to be and had spoken about, the young man so uncertain of himself.
She turned and came to him – and those eyes now! He would possess them like she possessed them. He would not care if anyone else might think of them as ordinary, he would carry them in a box in his pocket if he were allowed and eat them with herbs and butter.
‘Don’t you know,’ he said, ‘that you have eyes that would bring peace to warring nations? You have the eyes of a lobster. Do you know what an anagram of lobster is? It is “bolster”. You have eyes that would bolster a man before a day’s work.’
‘Excuse me?’ she said. ‘I’d like to think I have a wider set of functions than that.’
‘Oh you do, no it’s true, I wouldn’t doubt that at all. Please, let me buy you coffee and tell you what you have done for me this afternoon.’
6
Rickard Velily stood on his bed in his attic room and looked out of the open porthole. For half an hour he watched the night sky, lulled by bleeping lines, readable left to right or right to left: aeroplanes and helicopters; the helicopters equipped with heat cameras, Rickard had learnt, to find illegal factories in attic spaces like his own. He was not on drugs – he was not in favour of drugs – though the porthole plate, flipped flat in front of him through a diametric fulcrum, would have been ideal for spreading out this or some other drug. Time could be spent like this, standing on the bed, or lying on the bed.
He was feeling dreamy, nostalgic, romantic. A minty moon, a paper moon, unmoved by aircraft distress signals, shone brightly for, and only for, this bailiwick of Tin Pan Alley. It was at one time the home of song – and would be again! (he thought with sudden determination). Into this silver pool of spinning life the minstrel cast lines from his heavenly perch. Lovers birthed from electrical charges danced to his jigs and swayed to airs carrying the sadness of older worlds and times. Well it was that Americans were passing through a time of change again and the fixative of nostalgia and meme of melancholy would be dominant once more in music. Rickard would send the message from the concert stage and he would sell songs from an office and build new words yet again on old airs. In winter and autumn he would do this, in society season, when people came back to the city. In summer he would harvest his airs in Ireland. He would receive blind harpists. Scenes from The Severe Dalliance played out in his mind. He thought of Toni again. He was unhappy again, quickly.
On most nights that were not practice nights Denny and Clive could be found downstairs in the drawing room. Mostly Rickard would leave them be, and usually he spent the time – if not in his room, or outside meandering – in the clubhouse library. But there was not even a good range of books in the library. Every book, as in his room, was on the subject of business. The only material he could find on music was in a volume called The Brill Building: An American Production Line and another called Why I Dropped Out, What I Reassessed, And How I Came Back More Eager Than Ever, which had a chapter on Gregorian chanting. How hungry he was to learn and improve. He felt ignorant beside Denny’s knowledge and past, and so, he suspected, did Clive; he and Clive were merely enthusiasts, when it boiled down to it. He had come to his art by whim, really; but then he might as well have, for it was all whimsy, what they were doing, these sentimental, art-less ballads. But they held history, at least; or at least they came from a time that was historical, even if the words that were in them were historical fantasy.
In his bed, an hour after he had closed his eyes, he was still not asleep. At the same time the awareness of this came to him after what felt like a wakening. His body lay luxuriously sedate and insensitive while his head was excited. He allowed the excitements – really just a bank of tightly packed and furiously pumping blocks, like the hidden parts of piano keys, but not wooden – to continue as if he were asleep. It was not a happy excitement, but the kind that came from being lost, drifting in darkness, expecting to bump into things and never doing so. There were great mysteries about his immediate situation. (These last were words that seemed to have come from without.) He stood now on the floor in his bare feet. The floorboards were warm, as if heated from underneath. The tip of his tongue moved around the back of his front teeth. He felt that his whole being was concentrated in the tip of his tongue, and he was disturbed by the sensation of roaring in every direction across a huge, huge … white wall of death. (The room was unusually dark, so that, if it weren’t for the warmth that he felt transfer from the floor to his feet, he could easily have imagined he was floating.) Aquaplaning. He remembered that Denny had mentioned that he too had stayed in this room for a time after he joined the club. If there was a record of Denny’s past anywhere it would be in this room, in the form of a diary, a logbook, a tablet of ogham. A section of the floorboards came away at Rickard’s command, lifting, in a block. He stared down into the hole beneath, puzzling how he would move to the light switch without falling into other sections of hole around him. There was some light in the chasm: faint granules that illuminated enough in their vicinity to reveal a network of pipes, wires, resistors – circuitry. He knelt down and leaned into the gap. He felt heat on his face, and heard ticking and whirring. A chaffinch’s metallic note of ‘tchirrit’. It would be work for another day to find this diary, in better light.
After his breakfast, off-premises, he went again to the library. He liked to sit here before it got too late in the morning because it was east facing and it gave him the banal sense that the light that streamed in was the distilled first light of an American day. One of the oldest club members was also taking in the warming light. This man was about Denny’s age although unlike Denny he looked every day of his years. He was like a crumpled sheath that had lost its skeleton – so folded and formless that even his eyes were buried. Rickard began to amuse himself by putting the thought that the man was merely the sloughing of a man together with a nightmare about the internet he’d had during the night. In his nightmare, he’d had to come up with an ‘avatar’ for a false version of himself. The idea that this thing would be a homunculus, a hobgoblin, a sprite or a celebrated piper seemed terrifying in his sleep. But seeing him sitting here now in the library, his legs crossed, thigh over thigh, the effeminate way, made him laugh. He laughed thinking of those legs running amok in that great unmanageable wilderness, dancing across all of history and rumour and oceanography.
‘We are in the company of a genius, you know,’ he said to the homunculus in a slightly bullying tone that was unintentional.
‘Oh?’
‘Oh yes, don’t you know?’
‘Know what or whom?’
‘Denny Kennedy-Logan, the great Irish tenor and club member.’
‘Now w
hy do you tell me this?’ said the homunculus, sitting forward as his eyes extruded from their hoods.
‘Led by whim again.’
‘Whim has little to do with it,’ said the homunculus. ‘We are never led only by whim.’
Soon after, Rickard joined the New York Public Library system. His ostensible reason for doing so was that the clubhouse library was too small, but he recognised also a need to move closer to home. (In the simple visual display by which this thought was represented to him, the move to home was a bubble encompassing his New York experiences, interests and contacts that expanded [even if the contents at its centre did not] so that it combined with and expanded that past bubble of his life.) This was confirmed to him on his first visit to the main library branch on Fifth Avenue when he ordered up from stacks the Dublin telephone directory. The effect of what happened next took him by surprise. He was amazed at the slimness of the volume he was given; it had been a long time since he beheld any edition of his home city and county’s phone book. Its smallness, and the smallness it seemed to contain, only emphasised the immensity and grandeur of the reading room he was in, and the great windows, gangways of sunbeam, high ceiling and burning silence of the place increased his pity for and embarrassment at the place he was from. He went out to the street, and the roar and soar of Manhattan had never felt so new.
A short walk from the library Rickard found exactly what he was looking for – a telephone booth, open air, just like in the movies. He dialled Toni’s work number. It was 1.18 in New York City, 6.18 in Dublin. For too long he had waited for chance to happen and now he was going to do something about it. 6.18 was pushing things, although his father had told him that he believed Toni had reached such a status in work that she never, in fact, clocked out. Asked if it was possible that not clocking out meant simply that Toni carried her work home with her, his father hesitated, saying then that once or twice at around eight in the evening he had seen from the slip road all the lights on in Toni’s office. Picturing those lights now as violent slashes in the permanent grey that enshrouded the addressless place where Toni’s office was, Rickard considered how necessary it was that he got through to Toni at work rather than at home, and that what he would say to her was less important than what she would hear.
He closed his eyes and allowed the soundscape to disturb his emotions. There was nowhere in the world that sounded so like itself as New York City – all hollering horns and saxophonous sirens. He plugged his right ear with his finger and listened through the earpiece as mediated by the mouthpiece. Eyes open too: there was nowhere so like itself as New York City. Fifth Avenue stretched away to the north, to a little cluster of red and yellow, and sped the imagination along its lines to beyond this vanishing point and on to other places, times, and the products of other people’s imaginations. It put in Rickard’s mind one of the most famous scenes in The Severe Dalliance: Tyrone’s homage to the avenues, as delivered in monologue over black-and-white montage, while an epic Harold Campbelltown score suggested both the wonders of human achievement and (via the use of saxophone) giant vats of viscous human sleaze. Columbus and Amsterdam, according to Tyrone, were psychic transporters to early European America; the ancient holloway of Broadway, which cut across all the avenues, gave passage to, as it admitted, pre-Columbine time; the Avenue of the Americas continued as a highway through the southern cotton fields and Mexican cordillera, across the no man’s land of the Darien Gap, and as a golden road connecting the cities of the Incas; Fifth Avenue was America’s revolving carousel, its permanent World’s Fair pavilion: a showcase for the best of this modern nation of bright ideas and fierce competition.
He closed his eyes again and tried to imagine what Toni would imagine. His finger was still in his right ear. In that ear all he could hear was his blood, cruising like a jet engine. In his left ear was a horrible piercing tone, like bats. He clattered the receiver on its hanger and waited for his coins to drop into the refund trap, but there was nothing. He went back to the library, where he checked the phone book again. The number he had taken down was a fax number. He patted his trouser pockets, hoping for the hi-hats of loose change, but all he got was the phut of his pudgy thighs. In exasperation, his head flopped back on his neck and his feet pushed out in front of him.
When eventually he looked back up, the yellow rods of sunbeam had disappeared and the windows were panels of peacefully glowing ivory. Stirring himself further, he opened one of the other books he had ordered, The ‘Eir-Lite’ Book of Whimsy. A medical tendency to hyperfocus, which usually attended physical exhaustion, did not kick in, and instead he went to sleep. He entered a state of lucid dreaming: so lucid that he was not able to concentrate on his dream and only on the fact that he was loudly snoring, but he was too tired to do anything about it.
After-hours, Rickard stumbled around the back of the library to Bryant Square. Feeling thoroughly stale, he paused to take in the enormous Puffball building that dominated one side of the square. In a newspaper a month or so before, he had read the building described as a ‘fastness’ or ‘alcazar’. This was intended as negative criticism of its visual effect on its surroundings. In the same piece someone else had described it as ‘the omphalos of all that is hip and innovative, which in New York today are often correlative qualities’. The article was divided into ‘against’ and ‘for’ arguments. The word ‘alcazar’, in particular, now resounded in Rickard’s head. It seemed to him an accurate description, not because it was intended as negative, but because it had an exotic or fantastical flavour, and the other person in the debate, a young person, Rickard seemed to remember, had thought of the Puffball Store as a sort of centre of dreams. Rickard was not quite sure what an alcazar was, but it made him think of dreams, fairy tales, and of the Challoner song ‘The Earls at Corunna’:
‘The dust not settled on their tracks
From Cordova to there.
Beware the power at their backs,
From Finisterre they glare.’
***
The Puffball Store was one of many innovations personally envisioned by Puffball’s messianic founder and chief executive officer Townsend Thoresen. It was a destination in itself, so it was said; Rickard had passed it before on his daytime walks in Midtown, barely noting its presence, which was obvious mainly for the backpack-wearing crowds that milled around on its piazza and the shrill collective noise that they made. In the evening, with the crowds thinner and with the benefit of artificial lighting, he could better appreciate the structure, or what was visible of the structure, for most of it was underground. Above the street, set well back on the piazza, was a great glass dome, composed, wondrously, of eight interlocking sections. It was lit from inside, and the light was so concentrated at the seams of the glass that the dome appeared to be held together with green laser beams.
The dome protected the entrance to a spiral stairwell, also made of glass. At the bottom of the stairwell Rickard found a quiet shop floor. Instantly he was placated by the atmosphere of calm. Lighting was low and easeful; cream marble floor tiles, smooth and concave like old worn flagstones, softened the clunk of his boot soles; wall tiles bore the imprint of prehistoric ocean life. Lines of machines on long white counters cast users’ faces in a lunar pallor. Shop staff seemed aloof; strangely so: they stood apart from one another at even widths with their backs against the wall, lit from underneath like deco idols.
Rickard took a machine in the centre of a bank of unused machines. With great self-awareness he held a casual pose. Before long, the calm he had felt disappeared, and trepidation overcame him.
He had had a bad relationship with computing technology to this point. In his job in Dublin, in Verbiage, the text-mining company, it had never been his business to use computers in a comprehensive way. Before then, long before then, at an early age, he had decided that he would not use computers in any way at all. Resolve had quickened to principle. He was seized now in inaction, bent forward at the waist, arms splayed, elbows locked, heels of hands
numb, as if guarding against something that might fly out of the monitor. This, he knew, was a ‘hardware’ problem: exposure to a mere screen and keyboard brought him out in a lather of sweat.
(Did technology, in the course of his passive absorption of its ethereal communications, detect his hostility? It did not seem so outlandish a thought. The world of information, he was told, was not just a paperless one but a wireless one now too. The medium was the air – even matter – itself; its bore limitless. Moving in three dimensions these days was to move through a fourth dimension, and for it to move through him. This was an increasingly self-governing and self-perpetuating ecosystem. Washing machines implanted with microchips sitting in utility rooms in the Cook Islands conversed with the factories that created them in the Netherlands while their unwitting owners dozed on verandas outside; cars were guided by bodiless eyes from behind the stratosphere. Encrypted military communiqués, scrambled recordings of Mozart symphonies, disassembled pornographic images – on every ordinary day all passed through his body on their way somewhere else, unprompted by human fingers. What messages were these pulses picking up from the electrical exchanges taking place in his nerves and cells, and what were they making of them?)
Four hours easily slipped by. His eyes became dry. He spent time on a website devoted to The Severe Dalliance. So strange for him to see this, The Severe Dalliance, made in 1976, cooed over on a computer by people who claimed to appreciate the warmth of the celluloid print. There were categories: FAN FICTION was one. The idea was appalling, the thought of these ‘fans’, hypocrites, rabid and proprietary in their enthusiasm, internet communicators, entering data by rows, by columns, intersecting with each other, forming cells, swapping TRIVIA – another category.
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