Open City

by Teju Cole

  From the windows that ran the length of that side of the room, the shadowed street was visible. Beyond it was the park, which was demarcated by an old stone wall. I heard a roar from the street just as I was sitting down; I quickly got up again and saw a man running alone through the alley that had been created by the crowd. He wore a golden shirt, with black gloves that somehow reached up to his elbows, like a lady’s at a formal dinner, and he had begun to sprint with renewed energy, buoyed by the cheers. He raced, his energies revived, toward the bandstand, the fervent crowd, the finish line, and the sun.

  Come, sit, sit. Professor Saito coughed as he motioned toward the chair. Tell me how you are doing; you see, I’ve been sick; it was bad last week, but it’s much better now. At my age, one falls sick a lot. Tell me, how are you, how are you? The noise outside rose again, and ebbed. I saw the runners-up dash through, two black men. Kenyans, I guessed. It’s like this every year, for almost fifteen years now, Professor Saito said. If I have to go out on the day of the marathon, I use the building’s rear entrance. But I don’t go out much anymore, not with that attached to me, pinned to me like a tail on a dog. As I settled into the chair, he pointed to the transparent bag hanging on a little metal pole. The bag was half full of urine, and a plastic tube led to it from somewhere under the nest of blankets. Someone brought me persimmons yesterday, lovely, firm persimmons. Would you like some? Really, you should try them. Mary! The nurse-aide, a tall, strongly built, middle-aged woman from St. Lucia whom I had met on previous visits, appeared from the corridor. Mary, would you please bring our guest some persimmons? After she disappeared into the kitchen, he said, I find chewing a bit difficult these days, Julius, so something as rich and available as a persimmon is perfect for me. But enough about this, how are you? How is work?

  My presence energized him. I told him a little about my walks, and wanted to tell him more but didn’t have quite the right purchase on what it was I was trying to say about the solitary territory my mind had been crisscrossing. So I told him about one of my recent cases. I had had to consult with a family, conservative Christians, Pentecostals, who had been referred by one of the pediatricians at the hospital. Their thirteen-year-old son, their only child, was about to undergo a leukemia treatment that posed a serious later risk of infertility. The pediatrician’s advice to them was that they have some of the boy’s semen frozen and stored, so that when he became a man and got married, he could artificially inseminate his wife and have children of his own. The parents were open to the idea of sperm storage, and had nothing against artificial insemination, but were resolutely opposed, for religious reasons, to the idea of letting their son masturbate. There was no straightforward surgical solution to the conundrum. The family was in crisis over it. They consulted with me, and after a few sessions, and after much prayer on their part, they decided to risk not having grandchildren. They simply could not let their boy commit what they called the sin of onanism.

  Professor Saito shook his head, and I could see that he had enjoyed the story, that its strange and unhappy contours had amused him (and troubled him) in the same way they had me. People choose, he said, people choose, and they choose on behalf of others. And what about outside your work, what are you reading? Mostly medical journals, I said, and then many other interesting things that I begin and am somehow unable to finish. No sooner do I buy a new book than it reproaches me for leaving it unread. I don’t read much either, he said, with the state my eyes are in; but I have enough tucked away up here. He motioned to his head. In fact, I’m full. We laughed, and just then Mary brought in the persimmons, in a porcelain saucer. I ate half of one; it was a little oversweet. I ate the other half, and thanked him.

  During the war, he said, I committed many poems to memory. I suppose that expectation is gone from the schools now. I saw the change during the time I was at Maxwell, how the later generations that came in had little of this preparation. For them, memorization was a pleasant diversion that came with a specific course; for their forebears of thirty or forty years before, there was a strong connection to the life of poems that came with having memorized several. College freshmen had a corpus of works with which they already had a relationship, even before they stepped into a college-level English literature class. For me, in the forties, memorization was a helpful skill, and I called on it because I couldn’t be sure I would see my books again, and anyway, there wasn’t much to do at the camp. We were all confused about what was happening; we were American, had always thought ourselves so, and not Japanese. There was all this time of confused waiting, harder for the parents, I think, than for the children, and in that waiting time, I stuffed bits of the Prelude, and Shakespeare’s sonnets, and large tracts of Yeats into my head. Now I don’t remember the exact words of any of them anymore, it’s been too long, but I need only the environment created by the poems. Just one or two lines, like a little hook—he demonstrated with his hand—just one or two, and that’s enough to snag everything, what the poem says, what it means. Everything follows the hook. In summer season when soft was the sun, I wore a shroud as I a shepherd were. Do you recognize it? I don’t suppose anyone memorizes anything anymore. It was part of our discipline, just as a good violinist has to have his Bach partitas or Beethoven sonatas by heart. My tutor at Peterhouse was Chadwick, an Aberdonian. He was a great scholar; he’d been taught by Skeat himself. Haven’t I ever told you about Chadwick? A grouch through and through, but it was he who first taught me the value of memory, and how to think of it as mental music, a setting to iambs and trochees.

  His reverie took him out of the everyday, away from the blankets and the bag of urine. It was the late thirties again, and he was back in Cambridge, breathing the damp air of the fens, enjoying the tranquillity of his youthful scholarship. At times, it seemed as though he was talking more to himself, but he suddenly asked a direct question and, interrupted from my own little train of thought, I scrambled for an answer. We reprised the old relationship, student and teacher, and he continued steadily, regardless of whether my responses were accurate or not, whether I took Chaucer for Langland or Langland for Chaucer. An hour went by quickly, and he asked if we could pause there for the day. I promised to return soon.

  When I came out to Central Park South, the wind had become colder, the air brighter, and the cheer from the crowd steady and loud. A great stream of finishers came coasting down the homestretch. As Fifty-ninth Street was cordoned off, I walked down to Fifty-seventh and came back up again to join Broadway. The subway was too congested at Columbus Circle, and so I walked toward Lincoln Center, to catch the train at its next uptown stop. At Sixty-second Street, I fell in with a lithe man with graying sideburns who carried a plastic bag with a tag on it and was visibly exhausted, limping on slightly bowed legs. He wore shorts and black tights, and a blue, long-sleeved fleece jacket. From his features, I guessed he was Mexican or Central American. We walked in silence for a while, not intentionally walking together but finding ourselves moving at the same pace and in the same direction. Eventually, I asked him whether he had just finished the race and, when he nodded and smiled, congratulated him. But, I began to think, after twenty-six miles and 385 yards, he had simply collected his bag, and was walking home. There were no friends or family present to celebrate his achievement. I pitied him, then. Speaking again, deflecting these private thoughts, I asked if it had been a good race. Yes, he said, a good race, the conditions were good for running, not too hot. He had a pleasant but worn face, and must have been about forty-five or fifty. We walked a little farther, for two or three blocks, punctuating our silences with small talk about the weather and the crowds.

  At the street crossing in front of the opera houses, I bid him goodbye and began myself to walk faster. I imagined his limping form receding as I pressed ahead, his wiry frame bearing a victory apparent to none but himself. I had bad lungs as a child and have never been a runner, but I instinctively understand that burst of energy a marathoner can usually find at the twenty-fifth mile, so c
lose to the finish. More mysterious is what keeps such people going through the nineteenth, the twentieth, the twenty-first mile. By that point the buildup of ketones would have made the legs rigid, and acidosis would be threatening to quell the will and shut the body down. The first man who ever ran a marathon had died instantly, and small wonder: it is an act of extreme human endurance, still remarkable no matter how many people now do it. And so, turning around to look at my erstwhile companion, and thinking of Phidippides’ collapse, I saw the situation more clearly. It was I, no less solitary than he but having made the lesser use of the morning, who was to be pitied.

  I soon arrived at the big Tower Records store on the corner of Sixty-sixth Street, and was surprised to see the signs outside which announced that the store as well as the company behind it were going out of business. I had been in the store many times before, had probably spent hundreds of dollars on music there, and it seemed right, if only for old times’ sake, to revisit it, before the doors closed for good. I went in, intrigued also by the promise that prices had been slashed on all items, although I didn’t particularly feel like buying anything. The escalator took me to the second floor, where the classical section, busier than usual, seemed to have been commandeered in its entirety by old and middle-aged men in drab coats. The men were going through the CD bins with something of the patience of grazing animals, and some of them had red shopping baskets into which they dropped their selections, while others clutched the shiny plastic packages to their chests. The store’s stereo was playing Purcell, a rousing anthem I recognized right away as one of the birthday odes for Queen Mary. I usually disliked whatever was being played on a music store’s speakers. It spoiled the pleasure of thinking about other music. Record shops, I felt, should be silent spaces; there, more than anywhere else, the mind needed to be clear. In this case, though, because I recognized the piece, and because it was something I loved, I didn’t mind.

  The next disc they played, though utterly unlike the first, was another I immediately recognized: the opening movement of Mahler’s late symphony Das Lied von der Erde. I returned to my browsing, moving from bin to bin, from reissues of Shostakovich symphonies played by long-forgotten Soviet regional orchestras to Chopin recitals by fresh-faced Van Cliburn Competition runners-up, feeling that the price reductions were insufficiently sharp, losing any real interest in shopping, and finally beginning to acclimatize to the music playing overhead and to enter the strange hues of its world. It happened subliminally, but before long, I was rapt and might have, for all the world, been swaddled in a private darkness. In this trance, I continued to move from one row of compact discs to another, thumbing through plastic cases, magazines, and printed scores, and listening as one movement of the Viennese chinoiserie succeeded another. On hearing Christa Ludwig’s voice, in the second movement, a song about the loneliness of autumn, I recognized the recording as the famous one conducted by Otto Klemperer in 1964. With that awareness came another: that all I had to do was bide my time, and wait for the emotional core of the work, which Mahler had put in the final movement of the symphony. I sat on one of the hard benches near the listening stations, and sank into reverie, and followed Mahler through drunkenness, longing, bombast, youth (with its fading), and beauty (with its fading). Then came the final movement, “Der Abschied,” the Farewell, and Mahler, where he would ordinarily indicate the tempo, had marked it schwer, difficult.

  The birdsong and beauty, the complaints and high-jinks of the preceding movements, had all been supplanted by a different mood, a stronger, surer mood. It was as though the lights had, without warning, come blazing into my eyes. It simply wasn’t possible to enter the music fully, not in that public place. I placed the small pile of discs in my hand onto the nearest table and left. I made it into the uptown train just as the doors were closing. By this time, the crowds from the marathon were beginning to thin out. I sat down and leaned back. The five-note figure from “Der Abschied” continued on from where I escaped, playing through with such presence that it was as though I were in the store listening to it. I sensed the woodsiness of the clarinets, the resin of the violins and violas, the vibrations of the timpani, and the intelligence that held them all together and drew them endlessly along the musical line. My memory was overwhelmed. The song followed me home.

  Mahler’s music fell over my activities for the entirety of the following day. There was some new intensity in even the most ordinary things all around the hospital: the gleam on the glass doors at the entrance of the Milstein Building, the examination tables and gurneys down on the ground floor, the stacks of patients’ files in the psychiatry department, the light from the windows in the cafeteria, the sunken heads of uptown buildings from that height, as if the precision of the orchestral texture had been transferred to the world of visible things, and every detail had somehow become significant. One of my patients had sat facing me, with his legs crossed, and his raised right foot, which twitched in its polished black shoe, also somehow seemed a part of that intricate musical world.

  The sun was setting as I left Columbia Presbyterian, giving the sky the look of tin. I took the subway down to 125th Street and, on my walk up to my neighborhood, feeling much less frayed than I usually did on Monday nights, I took a detour and walked for a while in Harlem. I saw the brisk trade of sidewalk salesmen: the Senegalese cloth merchants, the young men selling bootleg DVDs, the Nation of Islam stalls. There were self-published books, dashikis, posters on black liberation, bundles of incense, vials of perfume and essential oils, djembe drums, and little tourist tchotchkes from Africa. One table displayed enlarged photographs of early-twentieth-century lynchings of African-Americans. Around the corner of St. Nicholas Avenue, the drivers of the black livery cabs gathered, smoking cigarettes and talking, awaiting the fares they could pick up off the clock. Young men in hooded sweatshirts, the denizens of an informal economy, passed messages and small nylon-wrapped packages to each other, enacting a choreography opaque to all but themselves. An old man with an ashen face and bulbous yellow eyes, passing by, raised his head to greet me, and I (thinking for a moment that he was someone I surely knew, or once knew, or had seen before, and quickly abandoning each idea in turn; and then fearing that the speed of these mental disassociations might knock me off my stride) returned his silent greeting. I turned around to see his black cowl melt into an unlit doorway. In the Harlem night, there were no whites.

  At the grocery store, I bought bread, eggs, and beer, and next door, at the Jamaican place, I bought goat curry, yellow plantains, and rice and peas to take home. On the other side of the grocery store was a Blockbuster; though I had never rented anything from there, I was startled to see a sign announcing it, too, was going out of business. If Blockbuster couldn’t make it in an area full of students and families, it meant that the business model had been fatally damaged, that the desperate efforts they had made recently, and which I now recalled, of lowering rental prices, launching an advertising blitz, and abolishing late fines, had all come too late. I thought of Tower Records—a connection I couldn’t help making, given that both companies had for a long time dominated their respective industries. It wasn’t that I felt sorry for these faceless national corporations; far from it. They had made their profits and their names by destroying smaller, earlier local businesses. But I was touched not only at the passage of these fixtures in my mental landscape, but also at the swiftness and dispassion with which the market swallowed even the most resilient enterprises. Businesses that had seemed unshakable a few years previously had disappeared in the span, seemingly, of a few weeks. Whatever role they played passed on to other hands, hands that would feel briefly invincible and would, in their turn, be defeated by unforeseen changes. These survivors would also come to be forgotten.

  As I approached the apartment building with my bags, I saw someone I knew: the man who lived in the apartment right next to mine. He was coming into the building at the same time, and he held the door open for me. I did not know him well, in fact h
ardly knew him at all, and I had to think for a moment before I remembered his name. He was in his early fifties, and had moved in the previous year. The name came to me: Seth.

  I had spoken briefly with Seth and his wife, Carla, when they first moved in, but hardly at all since. He was a retired social worker, following a lifelong dream to return to school for a second degree, in Romance languages. I saw him only about once a month, just outside the building or near the mailboxes. Carla, whom I had met only twice after they moved in, was also retired; she had been a school principal in Brooklyn, and they still kept a home there. Once, when my girlfriend, Nadège, and I had a day off together, Seth had knocked on my door to ask if I was playing guitar. When I said that I didn’t play, he explained that he was often home in the afternoons, and that the noise from my speakers (it must be your speakers, he said, though it sounds like live music) sometimes disturbed him. But he added, with genuine warmth in his voice, that they were always away on weekends, and that we were free to be loud from Friday afternoons onward if we so wished. I felt bad about it, and apologized. After that, I had made a conscious effort not to trouble them, and the issue hadn’t come up again.

  Seth held the door open. He, too, had been shopping, and carried plastic bags. Getting cold, he said. His nose and earlobes were pink, and his eyes watered. Yes, yes, it is, in fact I thought about taking a cab from 125th. He nodded, and we stood silently for a while. When the elevator arrived, we got in. We got off on the seventh floor, and as we walked down the hallway, our nylon bags rustling, I asked him if they still got away on the weekends. Oh yes, every weekend, but it’s just me now, Julius. Carla died in June, he said. She had a heart attack.