Open City

by Teju Cole

  The circuit from the old Customs House to Wall Street, and then down to South Street Seaport, was a distance of less than a mile. The Customs House faced Bowling Green, which had been used in the seventeenth century for the executions of paupers and slaves. In a tarred space in the park, along an avenue bordered by sturdy, heavy-headed elms, Chinese women danced in formation. There were eight of them, all in casual clothes. One was young, maybe in her thirties. All the others had gray hair, and there was one who was especially old and wise-looking. Their calisthenics was accompanied by vaguely martial pop music blasted from a radio. The young dancer led the group. Her movements were exaggerated. Each time she swept her arms, the too-long sleeves of her baggy pink jacket tousled calligraphically. The others followed easily, through points, swoops, quarter turns in one direction, half turns in the other. She was graceful and beautiful. But when the music stopped and the dancers paused, she did not look beautiful. The beauty had all been in her movement.

  Their pause let me hear the other sound present, that of an instrument being played at the opposite end of the park. I wanted to get closer to it, and so I walked under the arbor of elms, passing by rows of concrete chess tables, which were oases of order and invitations to a twinned solitude. But no one sat at them or played chess. Around the tables, where they sank into earth, moss grew, spreading up the concrete and into the ground so that it seemed as if the chessboards had grown roots. I walked under the trees, past the creak of children’s swings and, as I moved closer to the end of the arbor, I could make out the sound of an erhu. The line was breathy and nimble, the precise nimbleness of an old-fashioned thing. How clear its sound in the park, how unlike the whine the same instrument made when it was played by a subway busker competing with the screech of subway trains.

  When I reached the other side of the park, I saw that there were actually two erhu players, not one. They were playing in unison, seated together on a stone ledge, and standing, facing them, was a young woman singing. A small group near the musicians, three women and a man, all past middle age, talked and stretched. One of the women carried a child in her arms and played with it, and as she walked around slowly she pointed her feet to the grass ahead of her, first one, then the other. Her deliberate movements were like a delayed shadow of the dancers’. I sat in the grass for a long while listening to the erhu players and the singer. It was cold. The singer sang softly, matching the bowed strings note for note. The players nodded to each other at the accents. I thought of Li Po and Wang Wei, of Harry Partch’s pitch-bending songs, and of Judith Weir’s opera The Consolations of Scholarship, which were the things I could best connect to this Chinese music. The song, the clear day, and the elms: it could have been any day from the last fifteen hundred years.

  The Times had said, in the obituary I read that day, that V. wrote of atrocity without flinching. They might have said, without flinching visibly, for it had all affected her far more deeply than anyone’s ability to guess. I could hardly imagine the kind of raw pain her family—her husband, her parents—would be experiencing. I returned to the knoll in the park, where I had come in. The dancers had started again. Many of them, I now noticed, wore red or pink. I could not remember if red was lucky in Chinese culture. The thin sound of the erhu still slithered in among the drums of the dancers’ tape player, and it seemed to summon to my mind’s eye the long-ago spirits that V. had been so concerned to honor in her work. Turning away from the dancers, and taking in the expanse of the bay once more, I sat on a green wooden bench. A curious junco, black on its upper half and white on the lower, hopped up to my feet. It was tiny, and soon darted away. There was another man on the bench, dressed in a linen suit, with carefully polished shoes, and a straw hat: summer clothes on a winter’s day. His shirt was yellow and his tie dark brown—my train of thought was suddenly interrupted by the laughter of the Chinese women behind us. His mustache was white and neatly trimmed. The man read El Diario, seriously and slowly. We sat there, the two of us, and I looked over the green park. We did not acknowledge each other’s presence, though I had a sudden urge to tell him all about V.’s life, the depth of her work, her tragic death. We simply sat, and the day rolled down the knoll before us and drifted upward across the grass, and across the water, with its busy crisscrossing ferries, and southward, toward the Statue of Liberty.

  When I got home, still not remembering the number for my ATM card, I refused to check the bank documents. I assured myself the number would return in its own time. Then I forgot all about the incident. The next day, Citibank called to tell me they had noticed a dozen failed attempts to withdraw money from my account. I was jovial with the clerk, and assured her that it was my encroaching senility that was responsible, not a thief; my card was fine, they needn’t worry. But when I got off the phone I sat on my bed in the silence of my apartment. I had forgotten about the incident, but then it had become fresh again, and this time more heavily, and this time without witnesses or an official record. The strange feeling was harder to dispel, the memory of standing alone, standing in Wall Street, my memory gone, a pathetic old-young man padding about in the grip of some nervousness, while all around me the smart set made deals, talked on cellphones, and adjusted their cuff links. I recalled having seen a police officer from whose holster an automatic shone, and how I’d been taken with an odd sort of envy of that weapon, of its total lack of ambiguity, of its promise of danger. I imagined I had forgotten not just that number but all numbers, as well as all names, and why I was even there on Wall Street in the first place. I got up from the bed and checked the oven.

  Later that day, it snowed, the first snowfall I had witnessed in the season. A furious sense of imbalance came over me as I watched the flakes tumble down and disappear on contact with the ground. Almost a full week afterward, when the cold front had retreated once again into the shadows of our unwintry winter, I still hadn’t remembered the four-digit code. I finally looked it up among my documents, and recaptured what had been hovering, for no good reason, just out of reach.

  FOURTEEN

  We’ve had a rough time of it, Dr. Saito said, welcoming me in. I’ve been sleeping here in the living room, on this pallet. We’ve had an infestation of bedbugs. Red coats they used to be called in this part of the country, do you know that name? We thought the exterminators had cleared it up, but it came back worse eight days later, and I’ve had to make an unpleasant choice between this room, with its noisy vents, and being eaten up by the little creatures. He gestured toward the slats above the window. They bite. Like this, one, two, three; breakfast, lunch, and dinner, along your arm; but I’m afraid I haven’t much blood to spare anymore. Then he folded his hands and said he expected the exterminators to return in a few days.

  But my spirits are up, so you’ve come at an excellent time. I was out earlier today to see the Chamber Music Society at Lincoln Center. They performed one of the Bach cantatas, the one about coffee. Do you know it? It was so well played that it seemed like a newly made work. It’s about a father fretting over his daughter’s choices. So at least we know nothing has changed through the centuries. Coffee was quite new then, and the elders were skeptical of this drug, and even more skeptical of the enthusiasm young people had for it. They would have been surprised to see how common it is now. And, I’ll tell you, while I was sitting in the concert hall, it struck me that this was exactly like the problem with marijuana today. Coffee, coffee, the young woman sang, I simply must have coffee. Three times a day, or I will shrivel up!

  I sat in an armless chair facing Professor Saito. It was good to see him vigorous, amused. It made me happy. His hands were coarsely veined, thin, and cold, and with both my hands I reached out and held both of his and massaged them. In the yellow-gray winter’s light of his apartment, in the deep winter of his own life, this reaching out seemed the most natural thing to do. I’m sorry I’ve been away so long, I said, I’ve had a lot of work to do. He asked if I had just returned from Europe. No, I said, I came back in the middle of January
, and I’ve had you on my mind since then. But the rotations have been unusually demanding. You’ll see more of me in the next few months, now that things are stable again.

  It’s so noisy, and I think we can lower the heat now, if that is fine by you. He called out for the nurse-aide. Do you think we could lower the heat, Mary? Actually, I think we should turn it off for now, he said, adjusting the blanket around his knees. It has gotten very dry again, the heat makes it so dry in here. Whatever you’d like, she said. She seemed to have gained a lot of weight in the months since I had last seen her. But then I realized she was expecting a child, and was starting to show. I wouldn’t have thought her young enough, as I had put her age somewhere north of forty. But the upper limits are perpetually shifting. A baby at forty is no great rarity anymore, and even fifty is not unheard of. I caught her eye, inclined my head in a gesture at her belly, and smiled. She smiled in return.

  Mary, did the Sunday paper come in? Oh yes, good, maybe Julius would like to read to an old man? I told him I would be delighted to do so, and walked over to the dining table, where the paper sat on a pile of others. The apartment was dense with its various collections: the endless variety of South Seas masks on the walls, some of them in darkly polished wood, others brightly painted, the several months’ worth of daily newspapers stacked on the table and near the door, the overstuffed bookshelves, from which hundreds of volumes called out for attention, the little figurines and puppets crammed on the desk facing the entryway. All that was missing, it occurred to me, were photographs: of family members, of friends, of Professor Saito himself.

  I read the headlines from the Times, and the first two paragraphs of each story on the front page. Most of them were about the war. I looked up from the paper and said, It’s almost too much to think about, all the intended and unintended consequences of this invasion. I think it’s a terrible mess, and I can’t stop thinking about it. Yes, Professor Saito said, but I felt that way about a different war. In 1950, we were deeply worried about the Korean situation. It was an endless tension, one that we never really believed would go away. So many people were called up into the military and, really, it wasn’t so long after World War II. There were doubts about how far it would go, how long the stalemate would continue, who else would get involved. There was an unspoken nuclear fear, and that worsened, you see, when China entered the war. That unspoken fear became spoken. We Americans started wondering whether to use nuclear weapons again. But the war ended, as all wars eventually end; it exhausted itself. By the time Vietnam came around, it was a different pressure, at least for those of us who had been psychologically invested in Korea. Vietnam was a mental battle for the young, for the generation after ours. You go through that experience only once, the experience of how futile a war can be. You latch on to all the names of the towns, all the news. It didn’t happen to me in World War II, that was a different experience, much more isolated, much more difficult. But as a free man in 1950, as a part of the campus scene, I experienced Korea more intensely. By the mid-sixties, the confusion of war was no longer a novelty for me. And now with this war, it’s a mental battle for a different generation, your generation. There are towns whose names evoke a real horror in you because you have learned to link those names with atrocities, but, for the generation that follows yours, those names will mean nothing; forgetting doesn’t take long. Fallujah will be as meaningless to them as Daejeon is to you. But look, I’ve veered off from the subject at hand, as I usually do. Bach really got my blood flowing, I think. Forgive my ramblings. Why don’t you read me the rest of the headlines?

  I expressed my delight in his ramblings. But as I read out stories about satellite radio and about civil unions in New Jersey, I became like one who was no longer there. My mind picked up an earlier thread in the conversation. When Professor Saito asked me not to stop at the second paragraph but to read the civil unions story all the way to the end, I did so, fully understanding the printed words but without engaging with them. Afterward, we discussed the story, and that, too, I did at a certain distance. It was a kind of party trick, to continue a conversation of this kind and remain the whole while perfectly distracted. It was like a film in which the soundtrack and the images were out of sync. Professor Saito expressed the view that the advances in equal rights for gays were welcome, and that, viewed from his lifetime of following such advances, the process looked inexorable. There was much to celebrate. But, he said, it has been slow. While I am happy for these couples now, I have a sense of how wasteful the struggle has been. It has been much too difficult to pass legislation of this kind. Future generations will perhaps wonder what took us so long. I asked him why New York State did not take the lead in passing such laws. Too many conservatives in Albany, he said, the political will isn’t there to make it happen. It’s all those people in the rural parts of the state, Julius, they think about these things differently.

  I knew that Professor Saito had cared for a long-term partner, a man who had later died. I came by this information not through a conversation with him, but from a biographical profile I had seen in the alumni magazine at Maxwell. I had had conversations with him for three years without any idea about this vital part of his life and, when I did find out, there had been no reason to bring it up in conversation. But at no time did I have the impression that Professor Saito was trying to avoid talking about his sexuality. Indeed, there were two occasions on which it had come up. Once he had mentioned, in the course of saying something else, that he had known about his sexual orientation since he was three years old. The second time was, now that I think of it, a kind of bookend to the first: his prostatectomy, he had told me, had effectively killed off any sexual urges that had survived the other ravages of old age. But the strange thing he found, he had said at the time, was that this freed him to have more tender and uncomplicated relationships with people.

  Professor Saito was like this, especially after his retirement: a curious combination of reticence and frankness. I wish I had asked what his late partner’s name was. He would have told me. Perhaps some of the artifacts on display in the apartment—the Meissen porcelain in the curio cabinet, the Javanese puppets, the row of books on modern poetry—were the legacy of this other man, with whom Professor Saito had spent so much of his life. Or perhaps there had been a series of partners, each important in his own way. But in spite of myself, unable to be fully present to our conversation, I could not lead it in this new direction. I simply nodded, smiled, and spoke about other things. He noticed, perhaps, that my attention was flagging, and he said, as if he were waking someone who had fallen asleep, You’re still young, Julius. You must be careful about closing too many doors. I had no idea what he was talking about, and I simply nodded when he said this, and watched his spidery hands slowly dancing around each other in that gloomy room.

  The bedbugs were on my mind. New Yorkers had begun to speak more often about these tiny creatures in the past two years. The conversations, as befitted a troublesome occurrence in the private arena, had remained private, and the bedbugs were having an unlikely success. They were the unseen enemy that carried on their work, even as false alarms were raised about the West Nile virus, avian flu, and SARS. In the age of the dramatic epidemic, it was the old-fashioned bedbug, a minuscule red-coated soldier, that was least deterred. Of course, other illnesses were much more serious, and more of a drain on public resources. AIDS remained a devastating problem, especially for the poor, and for people who lived in the poorer countries. Cancer, heart disease, and emphysema were not pandemic, but were nevertheless of great importance among the causes of mortality. Even as the terms of transnational conflicts had changed, a similar shift was happening in public health, where, too, the enemies were now vague, and the threat they posed constantly shifting.

  But bedbugs were not fatal, and were happy to stay out of the headlines. They were hard to fumigate into oblivion, and their eggs were almost impossible to kill. They did not discriminate on the basis of social class and, for that reas
on, were embarrassing. An infection in a wealthy home was just as likely, and just as difficult to get rid of, as one among the poor. Hotels at all levels of luxury suffered. If you had them, you had them, and ridding yourself of them permanently was difficult. And in that moment, as I contemplated these ideas, I suddenly felt sorrowful for Professor Saito. His recent encounter with the bedbugs troubled me more than what he had suffered in other ways: racism, homophobia, the incessant bereavement that was one of the hidden costs of a long life. The bedbugs trumped them all. The feeling was subconscious, contemptible. Had it been put to me so baldly at the time, I would have denied it. But it was there, an example of how an inconvenience can, because of one’s proximity to it, take on a grotesque aspect.