The World of Tomorrow

by Brendan Mathews

  He had outrun the grocer but he had also outrun Yeats. He took another deep breath and tried to compose himself. All around him people and cars and buses jostled and he could hear none of it. He could smell hot asphalt and human sweat, the exhaust of automobiles, the dank rot of rubbish bins, and the moldy stink of the storm drains. The subway rumbled beneath the massed drumbeat of the millions walking this lattice of streets. All he heard in his head was a faint whooshing, like the whisper of a seashell, and his ears registered only the muffled pressure of the deep-sea diver. That it was better than the Noise was his only consolation.

  He had left the hotel looking like an uptown swell, but now, with his clothes in disarray and blood trickling down his shin, he was beginning to look like a downtown tramp. One pant leg was ripped at the knee. His collar was torn and his shirt was plastered to his sides like papier-mâché. His face was slicked with sweat and his hair roostered off his head.

  He figured the best course was to return to the hotel. Let Yeats find his own way back. But when he checked his pockets for the card that had been his ticket home on Monday morning, he found only a few green-inked American dollars. His jacket—that’s where the business card was stowed. The only way he would see the jacket again would be to retrace his steps, make a silent apology to the grocer, and offer whatever was in his pockets as payment for the squashed oranges and bruised apples.

  “Are you ready to continue our search?”

  Michael flinched in surprise, then looked up from dusting off his clothes. “Why didn’t you warn me that I was about to run into that ape?”

  “You didn’t want to be disturbed.”

  “And you picked that moment to listen to me? We need to work on your omniscience.”

  The two resumed walking, and although Michael’s vision of the seminary had brought him to the brink of so many lost memories, he could not find his way back to that spot. He trailed behind Yeats, growing more certain with each step that this mad errand had been a grave mistake. He wondered, too, where Francis had gone, and when he would see him again. This was without a doubt the longest day of his life—or the longest that he could remember, and it troubled him that the two were not necessarily the same.

  The steady, silent march with Yeats wasn’t making the time pass any faster. Michael jogged to pull even with the poet. “I have another theory, you know. One that explains your presence, too: Virgil and Dante. A dead poet, a man who has lost his way.”

  “Don’t you find that a bit presumptuous?”

  “Casting you as Virgil? I think you’ve earned it.”

  “No. Casting yourself as Dante.” Yeats walked a few paces in silence, then cleared his throat. “Tell me, Mr. Demp—”

  “Michael. It’s just Michael.”

  “When you could speak, Michael, did you talk quite this much? And in this manner? What I mean to ask is: Did you drive your friends absolutely mad? Or were you simply without friends?”

  Michael stopped. Yeats did not seem to notice and continued walking.

  “You can be very cruel, Mr. Yeats,” Michael called after him. “Especially to those who you think are lesser than you.”

  Yeats turned, a sour expression puckering his face. He, too, seemed wearied by all of this walking, and now this unpleasant turn in the conversation. He sucked at the inside of his cheek and gave Michael a slow, top-to-bottom inspection, then resumed walking.

  Michael stifled a curse. Whatever he was feeling—anger, sadness, despair—had come on quickly and boiled behind his eyes. Was this another effect of Whatever Happened? He didn’t remember himself being so moody, so mutable.

  Varium et mutabile semper femina flashed through his head. His father sitting in the chair beside Michael’s bed in Ballyrath, reading from a leather-bound Aeneid before Michael drifted off to sleep. Varium et mutabile semper femina. Hermes says this of Dido—Woman is fickle, always changing—when he urges Aeneas to desert her to fulfill his destiny, before she, in anguish, throws herself on the pyre. There was an oil lamp burning beside the bed and his father was hunched low, close to the flame and close to Michael. He read in a steady cadence, first in Latin and then in English. Michael must have been young—not yet ten—because there came a time when his father would read to him only in Latin. But in this moment the house was quiet except for his father’s voice chanting dactyls and spondees and the buffeting of the wind against the panes. Outside, the darkness had claimed the house, but inside, Michael was warm beneath his eiderdown and safe in the boats of the Trojan exiles. Da rarely directed conversation his way, and this was why Michael loved to hear his father read: for the uninterrupted presence of his calm voice, untainted by anger.

  “Michael,” he said. Then again. Then louder, but hoarse, not like his father’s voice. “Michael.”

  Michael shook himself: It was Yeats. Not his father at all.

  The details of the memory lingered—his father, the Aeneid, the cottage—but he was no longer inside the moment. Did Da know what had happened to Michael? Had Francis notified him? Did his father know that he was the only one in the family still on Irish soil?

  Yeats cleared his throat, a habit Michael had grown tired of enduring. “Perhaps I spoke too harshly,” Yeats said, “but you must admit—”

  “Admit?” Michael said, and here the edge in his voice grew sharper. “I admit that I have tried to introduce some levity, to make our time together more bearable, and perhaps even pleasant. But you, however, are determined to increase our measure of misery and isolation by acting at all times like a hoary old bollocks.”

  “Now listen here—”

  “Why should I listen when you’ve not heard a word I’ve said in all this time?” Michael wanted his voice to boom, but he was too frail. He was shrill, his eyes wild. He did not care. “I am lost, Mr. Yeats. I don’t know where I am or why I was brought here. I don’t know where my brothers are, or how to find them. Until very recently, I didn’t even know who I was. My past has been lost to me, and I do not know how I came to be the way I am. If you can help me get—get found, then by all means, help. But if you’re going to sneer down your nose and ahem at me, and interrupt every moment that brings my past into view, then please—please—pop off back to whatever celestial sphere you came from. And when you get there, ask them to send Virgil or Keats or Lord Byron in your place. Someone with a trace of human feeling left in them.”

  Yeats blinked behind the frames of his spectacles. With his beak of a nose, he had seemed birdish, an eagle. But there wasn’t anything aquiline about that blink. Owlish, that was the word for it. “Do you suppose,” Yeats said, and here his voice came out smoothly, slowly, “that you are the only one troubled by our situation? Some months ago I bade farewell to this world. I had come to the end of my earthly journey and believed that a new journey was about to begin, one which would allow for the decoding of mysteries I had contemplated all of my life. And now I find myself not in some celestial sphere, as you call it, but in a cesspit of a city where my only companion confuses cracking wise with wisdom. And so I too am struggling to maintain my sense of bonhomie, which I will admit was in short supply even when I lived among my dearest friends.”

  The two stood in front of a weather-beaten brownstone. A pitted terra-cotta balustrade led up to double doors coated in flaked green paint. Beneath the stoop, an iron gate barred entrance to the apartment below. In the front window, lace curtains parted and an old woman peered into the street. When Michael met her gaze, she closed the curtains and withdrew.

  “I will make an effort to be more courteous,” Yeats said, “but I am certain that our search for answers—answers that will benefit us both—lies this way.” He pointed down the street, deeper into the unknown city.

  Yeats might have wanted answers to the state of things, but Michael wanted only to get back to the way things were. Not back to the seminary or even to Ballyrath—just back to being himself. If he were to wake tomorrow, his senses intact but no memory of how any of it had happened, he would
call off the search, he would ask no questions, and he would merely live.

  THE WORLD’S FAIR

  AFTER THREE HOURS ON the balcony of the Savoy Pavilion, Hooper’s mind had started to wander. Here he was, one of the star attractions at the World’s Fair, but it had to be said: The gig was a snooze. What’s that you say, Professor? No sooner did he stretch the truth—thinking he was some kind of star—than he heard Lorena’s voice in his mind, calling him on it. Oh, so you’re the big attraction? Don’t let it go to your head, Professor. He knew she loved him, but that woman could cut him to the quick like no one else. She was the only one who still called him Professor, like it was his given Christian name. Others had knocked it down to Fess, a mark of honor in its own way (or so he told himself). You had to be somebody to get a nickname, the kind that stuck, the kind that other people recognized: Satchmo, Count, Duke. He had been tagged “Professor” during his first months in Harlem by one of the old-timers at Monroe’s. If anyone asked, Hooper said it was on account of the years he’d spent at Howard, before he left school to become the next Louis Armstrong. If you asked the regulars at any of the late-night jam sessions, they’d say it was because Fess Hooper was always trying to tell you what was what and how to do it properly.

  But that was after hours, and this was his day job: five days a week, dressed like a rail-riding hobo, blowing into a dinged-up bugle while a pair of dancers gave a preview of what was waiting inside. Paying customers got a bigger, better-dressed band and even more dancers whirling through the Lindy Hop, the big apple, the mutiny, and other steps made famous at Lenox and 141st Street. In the front windows of the pavilion, life-size marionettes herky-jerked through the big dances of the day, while along the side, beneath big red letters that proclaimed THE WORLD’S GREATEST COLORED DANCERS, Hooper and his bandmates did their thing. It was jim-dandy with Hooper to make the dancers the center of attention, but he wished that more thought had gone into the music on the balcony—a set list that he had complained was little more than hoots and hollers. So while his horn pumped out one tune after another, his mind would wander away from the pavilion and around the Amusement Zone, where the Savoy jostled for attention with the Parachute Jump and the Drive-A-Drome, Skee Ball and the Silver Streak.

  The brochures and the big talkers could say that the mission of the fair was to usher in a new era of peace between nations or to showcase the abundance and industrial might of America’s great corporations, but they were wrong on each count. The Amusement Zone was the sticky-sweet, candy-apple heart of the whole operation. Maybe the fair proper, with its Trylon, Perisphere, and Futurama, had its eyes fixed on the world of tomorrow, but the Amusement Zone, with its carnival barkers and twenty-five-cent thrills, was all about the world of today, and offered the clearest picture of what poor, restless, down-at-the-heels America truly wanted. After years of scrimping and making do, America wanted a thrill. America wanted pizzazz. America wanted to have a good time.

  Is that all, Professor?

  End of lecture, Lorena. And now back to the tour.

  Just down the lane from the Savoy Pavilion was Little Miracle Town, with its tiny houses, tiny horses, and tiny people. Around the corner was the Sun Worshippers court, where near-naked white girls lounged on chaises and frolicked among the trees while fairgoers snapped pictures of these free-spirited natural wonders. If that didn’t beat all, bare-breasted women posed in the Living Magazines exhibit and twirled in the Crystal Lassies building, and if your tastes ran to the more exotic, there were topless mermaids on one side of the Amusement Zone and topless Amazons on the other. But he let his mind wander past all of that—just as his feet would follow in another few hours—because even in New York, the powers that be weren’t so keen on black folks gandering at naked white girls. Next on the tour were the Chinese acrobats and the Seminole Village, then the two-story chrome cash register that logged the fair’s attendance as if every visitor were another coin in the drawer. The tour of the zone always led back to Frank Buck’s Jungleland, which was the biggest nonsense of all. Maybe the apes on Baboon Island were the real thing but one peek at those elephants and Hooper knew they were Indian, not African—You just have to look at their ears, he had said to Lorena.

  Yes, Professor, she’d said. Gotta look them in the ears if you want to know what’s what.

  But that wasn’t even the worst of it. Those real live African tribesmen, dressed in leopard skins and beating their conga drums? One of them was a neighbor on 130th, Harlem-born and Harlem-bred.

  HE HAD SET it up with the other horn player to cover his Saturday shift so he could play the wedding gig, which was a whole different brand of nonsense. Lorena had already made him promise to be long gone from Woodlawn by nightfall—she knew where the city’s color lines were drawn—but the job paid better than a day at the fair and even Lorena couldn’t argue with that. He’d heard one of the old lions at Minton’s talking about making seventy-five a week when he played with Ellington at the Cotton Club during Prohibition, but no one had seen scratch like that in ages. Nowadays a man showed up from points south, horn in hand, ready to blow up a storm, only to learn a lesson as soon as his feet touched Harlem ground. The clubs where the colored folks had their fun didn’t pay much. It was hard to get the big dollars out when the big spenders weren’t the ones coming in. The downtown clubs paid better, but they wanted white folks in the seats and white faces in the band; looking out for their own by looking only at their own. Sure, there were exceptions: since Basie had held court at the Famous Door, most of Fifty-Second Street had gotten wise and made room for one or two of Harlem’s finest on their bandstands. And once you made a name for yourself, there was Europe. Duke was there now, as was Lester Young. Hooper had dreams of a European tour of his own someday, when he and Lorena would sip champagne at the top of the Eiffel Tower. They would raise their glasses in the direction of Baltimore and say, How do you like me now?

  So you could say that things were changing, but they weren’t changing fast, and if you wanted to get into what it was like outside New York—take, for example, Miami, where a black man couldn’t be on the streets after nine at night without a note from a white man explaining—

  And that was just the sort of lecturing that would put Lorena in stitches. Yes, Professor, she would say. I am taking notes.

  As for this Martin Dempsey, Hooper couldn’t tell if he was a joker or just plain simple. Like when Hooper asked him about quitting Chester Kingsley and Martin said, Then you take it. Here. It’s yours, like that was something that could happen in this world. Like the worst-paid seat in Kingsley’s outfit wouldn’t be the best payday Hooper had ever seen. If Dempsey knew what he was saying, then he was cold-blooded. And if he didn’t—if he hadn’t caught on that the brownest guy in the Kingsley band was maybe half Italian—then he was flat-out ignorant. Or maybe it was because he was Irish. America was a strange land, and it could take a man a while to figure out just how strange.

  A bullet-headed white man snapped Hooper out of his mental ramblings. He shouted, “Hey, go, daddy-o!”—trying out the hep-cat slang he had likely read about in Life magazine. In his Sears and Roebuck shirt and fresh-pressed trousers, he laughed at his own joke and looked from side to side for a smile or nod or a You got that right. Around him, a sea of white faces squinted into the sun and the sun kept right on burning.

  Hooper could only shake his head. These folks might bring a taste of the Savoy home with them to New Haven or Pleasantville or White Plains, but they would never see the Savoy for themselves. They didn’t know that they were getting but a keyhole view of what Willie and Dolores could really do—and that if you gave them a dance floor and a full band to fuel them, they could do more than dance: they could fly. Sure, Lindbergh had hopped across the Atlantic but these dancers did him one better. They did it without wings.

  When Hooper had landed the pavilion job, he thought of it as a foot in the door, but he had been playing in that ramshackle jug band since April and no one had mentioned
him sitting in at the Track, no matter how he blew his horn. It was a long way from Flushing Meadow to Harlem and even Hooper’s sound couldn’t carry that far. Just the other night, after they had run into Martin and his brother at the bar, he told Lorena that maybe he should think about quitting the fair. “Some days I feel like I’m a monkey in the zoo,” he said.

  Lorena rolled her eyes and gave him that laugh. “Monkeys gotta eat too,” she said.

  Still, there were times when his mind didn’t wander, when he kept body and soul together, shut his eyes, and wrapped himself in the music. Then he wasn’t playing outside in the hot sun for sweating tourists who stared and moved on. He was following the bass line like it was a bright path through the darkness and every drumbeat another step forward. The piano was another traveler on that path and sometimes they raced, sometimes they danced, sometimes they walked and told stories—joyous, sorrowful, and shades of blue in between. He wanted to stay in these moments, but these songs had a logic of their own. The Savoy Pavilion had to stick to its schedule: twenty minutes of music and dancing and then the fairgoers had to move on. To the Aquacade or the Music Hall, Penguin Island or Sun Valley, Old New York or Merrie England or, Lord help them, to Jungleland.

  THE BOWERY

  DON’T STARE, LILLY. IT’S not polite. Lilly could still hear her mother’s voice whenever she caught herself looking—no, staring—at another person. It wasn’t polite, but it was necessary. She walked through the city, patient as a coiled spring for the right gesture, glance, or convergence of bodies and objects. Moments before, on the street outside the Automat, she had found just such a convergence—the fruits of staring, she would happily admit.