Open City
Page 26
The music stopped. Perfect silence in the hall. Simon Rattle was stock-still on the podium, his baton still in the air, and the musicians, too, were still, their instruments up. I looked around the hall, at the illuminated faces, all flooded with that silence. The seconds stretched on. No one coughed, and no one moved. We could hear the faint sound of traffic in the far distance outside the hall. But inside it, not a sound; even the hundreds of racing thoughts had stopped. Then Rattle brought his hands down, and the auditorium exploded with applause.
ONLY WHEN THE DOOR CLICKED BEHIND ME DID I REALIZE what I had done. I had used the emergency exit, which led directly from the fourth tier to the fire escape outside the building. The heavy metallic door that had just slammed shut had no external handle: I was locked out. There was to be no respite from the rain and the wind because I had also left my umbrella in the concert hall. And, added to all this was the fact that I was standing not on an exit staircase, as I had hoped, but on a flimsy fire escape, locked out on the unlit side of Carnegie Hall on a stormy evening. It was a situation of unimprovable comedy.
The slick wirework was all that separated me from the street level of the city, some seventy feet down. The lights directly below were visible between my feet, and my head and coat were already wet. My fellow concertgoers went about their lives oblivious to my plight. It was farther than the distance of a shout, even in clement weather; at night, with rain lisping through the streets, it was futile. And a few minutes before this, I had been in God’s arms, and in the company of many hundreds of others, as the orchestra had sailed toward the coda, and brought us all to an impossible elation.
Now, I faced solitude of a rare purity. In the darkness, above the sheer drop, I could see the lights of Forty-second Street flashing in the visible distance. The railings of the fire escape, which were probably precarious at the best of times, were slicked with water and inimical to the grip. I moved carefully, taking step after premeditated step. The wind pushed around the building noisily, and I took some grim comfort in the idea that, if I were to fall from that height, there was no question of being maimed: death would be instant. The thought calmed me, and I stepped and slid down the metal steps, a few modest inches at a time. My high-wire act continued for long minutes in the darkness. And then I saw that the fire escape went only halfway down the building, ending abruptly at another closed door. The rest of the way down to the ground, some two flights, was air alone. But luck was with me: this second door had a handle. I tried it and it opened, into a hallway.
Before I entered the door, holding it open with relief and gratitude, it occurred to me to look straight up, and much to my surprise, there were stars. Stars! I hadn’t thought I would be able to see them, not with the light pollution perpetually wreathing the city, and not on a night on which it had been raining. But the rain had stopped while I was climbing down, and had washed the air clean. The miasma of Manhattan’s electric lights did not go very far up into the sky, and in the moonless night, the sky was like a roof shot through with light, and heaven itself shimmered. Wonderful stars, a distant cloud of fireflies: but I felt in my body what my eyes could not grasp, which was that their true nature was the persisting visual echo of something that was already in the past. In the unfathomable ages it took for light to cross such distances, the light source itself had in some cases been long extinguished, its dark remains stretched away from us at ever greater speeds.
But, in the dark spaces between the dead, shining stars, were stars I could not see, stars that still existed, and were giving out light that hadn’t reached me yet, stars now living and giving out light but present to me only as blank interstices. Their light would arrive on earth eventually, long after I and my whole generation and the generation after me had slipped out of time, perhaps long after the human race itself was extinguished. To look into those dark spaces was to have a direct glimpse of the future. I gripped the rusted railing of the fire escape with one hand and tightened my hold on the open door with the other. The night air clipped my ears. I looked down, a steep drop, and the blurred yellow rectangle of a taxicab sped by, and then an ambulance, its wailing reaching me from seven floors below, and stretching out as it headed toward Times Square’s neon inferno. I wished I could meet the unseen starlight halfway, starlight that was unreachable because my entire being was caught up in a blind spot, starlight that was coming as fast as it could, covering almost seven hundred million miles every hour. It would arrive in due time, and cast its illumination on other humans, or perhaps on other configurations of our world, after unimaginable catastrophes had altered it beyond recognition. My hands held metal, my eyes starlight, and it was as though I had come so close to something that it had fallen out of focus, or fallen so far away from it that it had faded away.
I WALKED ALONG CENTRAL PARK, WHICH WAS CHOKED WITH the smell of horse dung, past Dr. Saito’s apartment building to Columbus Circle, and took the 1 train down to Twenty-third Street. When I came off the subway, instead of going directly home, I crossed the West Side Highway. I intended to see the water, and approached the Chelsea Piers building. Coming around it on the right, to where the yachts and tourist boats were docked, I saw a man in uniform. He raised his arm in greeting. We are just about to leave, he said. I presumed he was in charge of the boat, and I explained that I wasn’t part of the party. It’s okay, he said. The boat isn’t at capacity yet. And you don’t have to pay anything; they’ve covered the costs. He smiled, and added, I can tell you’d love to hop on. Come on! We’ll be back in under an hour. I followed him to Pier 66, and stepped onto the long white boat, which was already noisy with college-age revelers. It was almost eleven, and there was no rain. In the brightly lit interior cabin, someone in a waiter’s uniform was checking ID cards before letting the students take filled plastic champagne flutes from his tray. He offered me one, and I declined. Most people were watching the view from inside the cabin, as the wind was by now brisk. I made my way to the back deck. There were a handful of couples and some solitary individuals, and I found a place to sit near one of the railings.
The engine emitted a low grumble, and the boat pitched back a little and trembled, as though it were inhaling air in readiness for a dive. Then it pushed off the pier, and soon, the water between us and the docking piers widened, and the chatter of the revelers floated up from the glassed-in cabin. We traced a fast arc south, and the taller buildings in the Wall Street area soon loomed into view on our left. Closest to the water was the World Financial Center, with its two towers linked by the translucent atrium and lit blue by night lights. The boat rode the river swells. Sitting on deck, watching the frothy, white wake on the black water, I felt myself pulled aloft and down again, as if by the travel of an invisible bell rope.
Within a few minutes of our entering the Upper Bay, we saw the Statue of Liberty, a faint green in the mist, then very quickly massive and towering over us, a monument worthy of the name, with the thick folds of her dress as stately as columns. The boat came close to the island, and more of the students had by now moved up onto the deck, and they pointed, and their voices, which filled the air around us, fell echolessly into the water. The cruise organizer came up to me. Glad you came, aren’t you? I acknowledged his greeting with a faint smile, and he, sensing my solitude, went away again. The crown of the statue has remained closed since late 2001, and even those visitors who come close to it are confined to looking upward at the statue; no one is permitted to climb up the 354 narrow steps and look out into the bay from the windows in the crown. Bartholdi’s monumental statue has not, in any case, done particularly long service as a destination for tourists. Although it has had its symbolic value right from the beginning, until 1902, it was a working lighthouse, the biggest in the country. In those days, the flame that shone from the torch guided ships into Manhattan’s harbor; that same light, especially in bad weather, fatally disoriented birds. The birds, many of which were clever enough to dodge the cluster of skyscrapers in the city, somehow lost their bearings wh
en faced with a single monumental flame.
A large number of birds met their death in this manner. In 1888, for instance, on the morning after one particularly stormy night, more than fourteen hundred dead birds were recovered from the crown, the balcony of the torch, and the pedestal of the statue. The officials of the island saw an opportunity there and, as was their custom, sold the birds off, at low cost, to New York City milliners and fancy stores. But it was to be the last time they would do so, because one Colonel Tassin, who had military command of the island, intervened and was determined that any birds that happened to die in the future would not be disposed of commercially, but would be retained in the service of science. The carcasses, each time two hundred or more of them had been gathered, were to be sent to the Washington National Museum, the Smithsonian Institution, and other scientific institutions. With this strong instinct for public-spiritedness, Colonel Tassin undertook a government system of records, which he ensured were kept with military regularity and, shortly afterward, he was able to deliver detailed reports on each death, including the species of the bird, date, hour of striking, number striking, number killed, direction and force of the wind, character of the weather, and general remarks. On October 1 of that year, for example, the colonel’s report indicated that fifty rails had died, as had eleven wrens, two catbirds, and one whip-poor-will. The following day, the record showed two dead wrens; the day after that, eight wrens. The average, Colonel Tassin estimated, was about twenty birds per night, although the weather and the direction of the wind had a great deal to do with the resulting harvest. Nevertheless, the sense persisted that something more troubling was at work. On the morning of October 13, for example, 175 wrens had been gathered in, all dead of the impact, although the night just past hadn’t been particularly windy or dark.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thanks to Elizabeth, Andru, Jean, and Jeremy, who read the text and made useful comments on it. I thank Chimamanda, Siddhartha, Amitava, Femi, Patti, Nanda, Kwame, Hilary, Maria, Madhu, and Carey, friends who helped me write the book. I am especially grateful to Angelika, the source of several ideas and much kindness. My agent, Scott, was an enthusiastic and perceptive champion of the manuscript right from the beginning, and did a great deal to sharpen it. My editor, David, was unfailingly patient and kind, and he turned a wayward manuscript into a less wayward book. I am grateful to my parents and siblings for their love and stories. I am indebted to the many friends I haven’t named, and to the strangers who inspired me. Above all, I am grateful to Karen, love of my life and protector of my solitude.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
TEJU COLE was raised in Nigeria and came to the United States in 1992. He is a writer, photographer, and professional historian of early Netherlandish art. Open City is his first novel. He lives in New York City.