Open City

by Teju Cole

  FOUR

  The following day, returning to Sheep Meadow, on a circuitous route to a poetry reading at the Ninety-second Street Y, I noticed the masses of leaves dying off in bright colors, and heard the white-throated sparrows within them calling out and listening. It had rained earlier, and the fragmented, light-filled clouds worked off each other; maples and elms stood with their boughs still. Above a boxwood hedge, the swarm of hovering bees reminded me of certain Yoruba epithets for Olodumare, the supreme deity: he who turns blood into children, who sits in the sky like a cloud of bees.

  The rain had kept many people from their usual after-work sports, and the park was almost empty. In a cove formed by two large rocks, I went and sat, as though led by an invisible hand, on a pile of gravel. I stretched out and laid my head against one of the rocks, placing my cheek on its damp, rough surface. I must have cut an absurd figure to someone looking on from a distance. The bees over the boxwood lifted as a single cloud and vanished into a tree. After a few minutes, my breath returned to normal and the bellowing in my ribs ceased. I got up slowly, and attempted to clean my clothes, brushing bits of grass and dirt away from my trousers and sweater, rubbing earth stains out of my palms. The sky was now at its last light, and a trickle of blue, seen through the buildings to the west, was all that leaked through.

  I sensed a shift in the city’s distant commotion; day’s end: people heading home or beginning the night shift, preparations for dinner in thousands of restaurant kitchens, and the soft yellow lights that were now glimmering from apartment windows. I hurried out of the park, across Fifth Avenue, Madison, Park, then north on Lexington, to the lecture hall where, when once we were settled in our seats, the poet was introduced. He was Polish, dressed in brown and gray clothes, and though he was relatively young, his hair was a brilliant white halo. He approached the lectern to applause, and said: I don’t want to talk about poetry tonight. I want to talk about persecution, if you will permit a poet this license. What can we understand about the roots of persecution, particularly when the target of this persecution is a tribe or race or cultural group? I will begin with a story. His English was fluent, but the thick accent, and the elongated vowels and thickly rolled r’s, gave it a halting quality, as though he were translating each line in his mind before speaking. He looked up at the full room, looking out at everyone and at no one in particular, and the lights bounced off his glasses, making it appear as though he had a large white patch over each eye.

  LATER THAT WEEK, AT THE END OF A DIFFICULT DAY AT THE INPATIENT unit, a day on which I was oversensitive to the hospital’s white lights and felt more irritated than usual with the paperwork and small talk, a reprise of the heavy mood, now more sustained, settled on me. Psychiatry training programs are reputed to be less brutal than some other residency programs—and I had found it so—but the work has its own peculiar challenges. At times, psychiatrists feel the absence of the neat solutions surgeons or pathologists enjoy, and it can be wearying to always have to find the mental preparation, the emotional focus, that is necessary for sitting with patients. The only thing, when I thought it all through, that enlivened the long hours I spent on call or in the office was the trust those patients had in me, their helplessness, their hope that I could help them get better.

  In any case, unlike when I had first begun work in the hospital, I no longer spent much time thinking about patients, usually not until the next appointment, and often, when I was on rounds, I needed the chart to recall even the basics of a particular case. That I thought of M. away from the medical campus was, in that sense, an exception; he was, like V., the rare patient whose problems were not relegated to the back of my mind when I stepped out onto the street. M. was thirty-two, recently divorced, and delusional. On bad weeks, the medication seemed to hardly help at all.

  A hint of winter was in the air as I began to cross Broadway and was held for a moment in the yellow eyes of the cars hunched in serried ranks at the red light. It was just past five o’clock and night was falling fast. The buildings of the medical complex stood shoulder to shoulder against the charcoal-colored sky and, all around me, people wore padded jackets and knitted hats. I entered the subway at 168th Street and caught a packed southbound 1 train. So absorbed was I in rehearsing that afternoon’s consultation with M. that, when the train reached 116th Street, I simply watched the doors open, stay open, and close. The car moved on past my stop, and momentarily I tried to figure out what had happened. I hadn’t been asleep. My staying on, I finally decided, was intentional, if not conscious. This was confirmed at the next stop, when again I failed to exit and instead sat there, with the feeling that I was watching myself, waiting to see what would happen next. Everyone in the car seemed to be wearing black or dark gray. One woman, unusually tall, more than six feet, wore a black jacket over a long, black, pleated skirt and knee-length black boots, and the play of depth in these layers of her clothing brought to my memory the virtuoso black-on-black passages in certain paintings by Velázquez. Her pale, pinched face was overwhelmed, nearly, by the black of the clothes. No one on the train spoke and no one, it seemed, knew anyone else. It was as though we were all listening closely to the rattle of the train on the tracks. The lights were dim. I knew then that I was no longer heading directly home.

  At Ninety-sixth Street, I switched to the 2 express, which happened to arrive on the platform just at that moment. This carriage was brightly lit. The man sitting across from me wore a pumpkin-colored jacket, and next to him was a woman in a sky blue ski jacket and striped gloves. A few people in this train talked to each other, neither demonstrative nor loud in their manner, but enough to highlight in my mind how somber the other train had been. The brightness, perhaps, gave people permission to open up. To my right sat a man whose full attention was on Octavia Butler’s Kindred, and to his right, a russet-haired man leaned forward in his seat and read The Wall Street Journal. His natural expression was delirious, which gave him the aspect of a gargoyle, but when he straightened up, he had a handsome profile. At Forty-second Street, a man in a pin-striped suit entered holding a volume with the title You’ve GOT to Read This Book! The book was open in his hand, but as he came in and stood by the seats, he kept his eyes fixed on a spot on the floor. He did so for a long time. He kept the book open in front of him, but read nothing out of it. He eventually closed it on a finger when he got off, at Fulton. At Wall Street, more people, all of them probably workers in the financial world, got on the train, but no one got off. Just as the doors were closing at this station, I stood up and slipped out of the car. The doors closed behind me and, this assortment of inwardly focused city types still swirling in my mind, I found myself all alone on the platform.

  I took the escalator up, and as I came out onto the mezzanine level, I saw the ceiling—high, white, and consisting of a series of interconnected vaults—slowly reveal itself as though it were a retractable dome in the act of closing. It was a station I had never been in before, and I was surprised that it was so elaborate because I had expected that all the stations in lower Manhattan would be mean and perfunctory, that they would consist only of tiled tunnels and narrow exits. I suspected for a moment that the grand hall now confronting me at Wall Street was a trick of the eye. The hall had two rows of columns running along its length, and there were sets of glass doors on either end. The glass, the dominance of white in the color scheme, as well as the assortment of large potted palms under the columns, made the room feel like an atrium or greenhouse, but the tripartite division of the space, with the center aisle broader than the two to either side of it, was more reminiscent of a cathedral. The vaults strengthened this impression, and what came to mind was the florid Gothic style of England, as exemplified in buildings like Bath Abbey or the cathedral in Winchester, in which the piers and their colonnades spray up into the vaults. Not that the station replicated the stone tracery of such churches. It evoked the effect, rather, by means of its finely checkered or woven surface, a gigantic assemblage of white plastic.r />
  My original impression of the grandeur of the space, though not of its size, quickly changed as I walked through the hall. The columns could have been wrought from recycled plastic chairs, and the ceiling seemed to have been carefully constructed out of white Lego blocks. This feeling of being in a large-scale model was only increased by the lonely palm trees in their pots, and by the few groups of people I now saw seated under the nave aisle to the right. Little round tables had been set up on this side of the hall, and men sat at them playing backgammon. The hall was sparse and, because it was enclosed, full of the echoes of the few voices present. The scene, I imagined, would be different in the middle of a workday. There were five pairs of players now, under the nave aisle to the right in this evening scene, all of them black. On the other side of the hall, under the other long nave aisle, there was another pair of men, both white, playing chess. I walked among the backgammon players, most of whom seemed to be middle-aged, and their languid, focused faces and the slowness of their movements did nothing to correct my impression of being among life-size mannequins. When I moved back into the center of the nave, which was almost free of human presence, a solitary man hurrying across to the subway escalators dropped his briefcase with a loud clatter. He got on his knees, and began gathering pieces. His oversize, mouse-colored trench coat fell like a Victorian dress around him.

  I walked out by the doors leading to Wall Street proper. Outside, people moved around, talking on their phones, presumably headed home, but I heard no traffic noise. The reason became clear right away when I saw the blockades that had been set up on both ends of the street, either for security or because of ongoing construction. Wall Street, from where I stood on the corner of William Street all the way down to Broadway, a distance of several blocks, was shut off from vehicular traffic, and had been transformed into a pedestrian zone; what one heard was human voices and the click of heels on pavement. I walked toward the west. People bought food from a falafel vendor whose van was parked on the corner, or walked alone, in pairs, in threes. I saw black women in charcoal gray skirt suits, and young, clean-shaven Indian-American men. Just past Federal Hall, I walked by the glass frontage of the New York Sports Club. Right up against the glass in its brightly lit interior was a single row of exercise bicycles, all of them occupied by men and women in Lycra who pedaled in the silence and looked out at commuters in the dusk. Near the corner of Nassau, a man in a scarf and fedora hat stood with an easel before him and painted the Stock Exchange in grisaille on a large canvas. A stack of completed paintings, also grisaille, of the same building seen from different angles, lay at his feet. I watched him work for a moment, as he loaded his brush, and with careful gestures applied white highlights to the acanthus of the six massive Corinthian columns of the Stock Exchange. The building itself—which, following his gaze, I now scrutinized more closely—was illuminated from below with a row of yellow lamps, and with this footlighting appeared to levitate.

  I went on, past Broad Street and New Street, where I noticed another sports club, this one called Equinox, from which another row of exercisers faced the street, until I came to Broadway, where Wall Street ended and at which junction stood the east façade of Trinity Church. The reappearance of traffic on Broadway startled me for a moment. I crossed Broadway and went up to the church entrance, with the unpremeditated idea that I might go inside and pray for M. He’d been sick for a while but, since his divorce came through earlier in the year, he’d taken a steep turn for the worse. He was by now completely in the grip of the delirium, and when he spoke it was with such distress that his heavily accented sentences seemed to be pursuing each other out of the troubled caverns of his mind.

  I don’t blame her, he’d said to me earlier that day, any woman would do the same, I screwed up, I screwed up. I should have been more careful. I don’t find it amusing now, but I can imagine that it seems that way to other people, I can imagine that my suffering amuses people. I do so much for them, but they find my suffering amusing. I have to be responsible, though, more discipline, more and more discipline, and if I tried that I would still be married. Not that I blame her, or anyone else, they can do what they want, but I have to be responsible for the world, and none of them knows what that feels like. If I don’t organize things just right, you see, everything will be destroyed. You understand? I’m not saying I’m God, but I know what it feels like to carry the world. I feel like the little boy with his finger in the dike, like I am doing a small thing, but it takes a lot of concentration. Everything depends on this, I can’t even tell you, and I wish I didn’t have this burden, this burden that is so much like God’s own burden, but given to someone, Doctor, do you see the problem, who does not have the powers of God.

  The gate at the front of the church was locked. I walked along the railing, first north then, when I couldn’t find an entrance there, south. There was a large graveyard that encompassed both sides of the church, white headstones, black ones, and a few monuments, among which Alexander Hamilton’s was prominent: THE PATRIOT OF INCORRUPTIBLE INTEGRITY, THE SOLDIER OF APPROVED VALOR, THE STATESMAN OF CONSUMMATE WISDOM, WHOSE TALENTS AND VIRTUES WILL BE ADMIRED. It gave the date—July 12, 1804—as well as his age, forty-seven. Hamilton, actually forty-nine when he died of the single gunshot wound he received in the duel with Burr, was not the only famous person interred in the Trinity churchyard. Among the stones were also those commemorating John Jacob Astor, Robert Fulton, and the abolitionist George Templeton Strong, whose memoirs of late-nineteenth-century life in the city I had once seen on my friend’s shelves. And then there were many women from those few centuries since the Europeans had come up the Hudson and settled on this island, women named Eliza, Elizabeth, Elisabeth. Some of them had died old, many others had died young, often during childbirth or, younger still, of childhood illnesses. There was a large number of children’s graves.

  Going around Rector Street, I came onto Trinity Place, where an ancient wall hemmed the church in and the air was cold and smelled of the sea. Trinity Church was chartered in the waning years of the seventeenth century; seafarers in general and whalers in particular had set out on their outbound journeys with the blessings of its congregation. It was to the same church that they returned, if they had been blessed with a safe and prosperous voyage, to give thanks for journeying mercies. One of the many privileges accorded Trinity in those years was full rights over any shipwrecks or beached whales on the isle of Manhattan. The church was near the water. Water loomed close by it in every direction but north. I walked around, looking for an entrance, thinking of these nearby waters. Later, I would find the story recounted by the Dutch settler Antony de Hooges in his memorandum book:

  On the 29th of March in the year 1647 a certain fish appeared before us here in the colony, which we estimated to be of a considerable size. He came from below and swam past us a certain distance up to the sand bars and came back towards evening, going down past us again. He was snow-white, without fins, round of body, and blew water up out of his head, just like whales or tunas. It seemed very strange to us because there are many sand bars between us and Manhattan, and also because it was snow-white, such as no one among us has ever seen; especially, I say, because it covered a distance of twenty miles of fresh water in contrast to salt water, which is its element. Only God knows what it means. But it is certain, that I and most all of the inhabitants watched it with great amazement. On the same evening that this fish appeared before us, we had the first thunder and lightening of the year.

  Fort Orange, from which de Hooges wrote his report, was the settlement that later became Albany, after the British took over the Dutch possessions in this part of the New World. De Hooges wrote of another sighting of a great sea creature in April of the same year. Another writer, the traveler Adriaen van der Donk, reported two sightings, as well as a beached whale, up the Hudson in the Troy area, also in 1647. The latter was plundered for its oil, van der Donk wrote, and its carcass was left to stink up the beach. For the Dutch, though, the si
ghting of a whale in inland waters, or of its beached hulk on land, was a powerful portent, and de Hooges’s link between the presence of the whales and dramatic weather patterns was typical. His sighting was even more ominous than usual, as the animal he described seemed to have been an albino.

  There could hardly have been any seventeenth-century Dutch resident of New Amsterdam and the upriver trading posts who would have been unaware of the numerous whale beachings back home in the Netherlands. In 1598, the fifty-four-foot sperm whale that beached itself in the sandy shallows of Berckhey, near The Hague, had taken four days to die and, in that time and in the weeks afterward, had entered into the legend of a nation at the very beginning of its modern history. The whale of Berckhey was memorialized in engravings, taken as an object of commercial value and, when that was exhausted, scientific curiosity. It was, above all, interpreted as a message from the deep. It was not at all difficult for the people of the day to see a link between this dying monster and the atrocities committed by the hated Spanish troops in the principality of Cleves in August of the same year. Between the mid-sixteenth century and the end of the seventeenth, at least forty whales were beached on the shores of Flanders and the northern Netherlands. For the Dutch, who were attempting, at the time, not only to define their new republic but also to consolidate their hold on New Amsterdam and other foreign possessions, the spiritual meaning of the whale was ever-present.