The Wall of the Sky, the Wall of the Eye

by Jonathan Lethem

  “I’m not a policeman in some cellular sense,” I said, and then realized the pun. “I mean, not intrinsically. They’re novels, first editions.”

  “Let me guess; mysteries.”

  “I detest mysteries. I would never bring one into my home.”

  “Well, you have, in me.”

  I blushed, I think, from head to toe. “That’s different,” I stammered. “Human lives exist to be experienced, or possibly endured, but not solved. They resemble any other novel more than they do mysteries. Westerns, even. It’s that lie the mystery tells that I detest.”

  “Your reading is an antidote to the simplifications of your profession, then.”

  “I suppose. Let me show you where the clean towels are kept.”

  I handed her fresh towels and linen, and took for myself a set of sheets to cover the living room sofa.

  She saw that I was preparing the sofa and said, “The bed’s big enough.”

  I didn’t turn, but I felt the blood rush to the back of my neck as though specifically to meet her gaze. “It’s four in the afternoon,” I said. “I won’t be going to bed for hours. Besides, I snore.”

  “Whatever,” she said. “Looks uncomfortable, though. What’s Barbara Pym? She sounds like a mystery writer, one of those stuffy English ones.”

  The moment passed, the blush faded from my scalp. I wondered later, though, whether this had been some crucial missed opportunity. A chance at the deeper intervention that was called for.

  “Read it,” I said, relieved at the change of subject. “Just be careful of the dust jacket.”

  “I may learn something, huh?” She took the book and climbed in between the covers.

  “I hope you’ll be entertained.”

  “And she doesn’t snore, I guess. That was a joke, Mr. Pupkiss.”

  “So recorded. Sleep well. I have to return to the station. I’ll lock the door.”

  “Back to Little Offenses?”

  “Petty Violations.”

  “Oh, right.” I could hear her voice fading. As I stood and watched, she fell soundly asleep. I took the Pym from her hands and replaced it on the shelf.

  I wasn’t going to the station. Using the information she’d given me, I went to find the tavern E. supposedly frequented.

  I found him there, asleep in a booth, head resting on his folded arms. He looked terrible, his hair a thatch, drool leaking into his sweater arm, his eyes swollen like a fevered child’s, just the picture of raffish haplessness a woman would find magnetic. Unmistakably the seedy vermin I’d projected and the idol of Miss Rush’s nightmare.

  I went to the bar and ordered an Irish coffee, and considered. Briefly indulging a fantasy of personal power, I rebuked myself for coming here and making him real, when he had only before been an absurd story, a neurotic symptom. Then I took out the card she’d given me and laid it on the bar top. Cornell Pupkiss, Missing Persons. No, I myself was the symptom. It is seldom as easy in practice as in principle to acknowledge one’s own bystander status in incomprehensible matters.

  I took my coffee to his booth and sat across from him. He roused and looked up at me.

  “Rise and shine, buddy boy,” I said, a little stiffly. I’ve never thrilled to the role of Bad Cop.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “Your unshaven chin is scratching the table surface.”

  “Sorry.” He rubbed his eyes.

  “Got nowhere to go?”

  “What are you, the house dick?”

  “I’m in the employ of any taxpayer,” I said. “The bartender happens to be one.”

  “He’s never complained to me.”

  “Things change.”

  “You can say that again.”

  We stared at each other. I supposed he was nearly my age, though he was more boyishly pretty than I’d been even as an actual boy. I hated him for that, but I pitied him for the part I saw that was precociously old and bitter.

  I thought of Miss Rush asleep in my bed. She’d been worn and disarrayed by their two encounters, but she didn’t yet look this way. I wanted to keep her from it.

  “Let me give you some advice,” I said, as gruffly as I could manage. “Solve your problems.”

  “I hadn’t thought of that.”

  “Don’t get stuck in a rut.” I was aware of the lameness of my words only as they emerged, too late to stop. “Don’t worry, I never do.”

  “Very well then,” I said, somehow unnerved. “This interview is concluded.” If he’d shown any sign of budging I might have leaned back in the booth, crossed my arms authoritatively, and stared him out the door. Since he remained planted in his seat, I stood up, feeling that my last spoken words needed reinforcement.

  He laid his head back into the cradle of his arms, first sliding the laminated place mat underneath. “This will protect the table surface,” he said.

  “That’s good, practical thinking,” I heard myself say as I left the booth.

  It wasn’t the confrontation I’d been seeking.

  On the way home I shopped for breakfast, bought orange juice, milk, bagels, fresh coffee beans. I took it upstairs and unpacked it as quietly as I could in the kitchen, then removed my shoes and crept in to have a look at Miss Rush. She was peaceably asleep. I closed the door and prepared my bed on the sofa. I read a few pages of the Penguin softcover edition of Muriel Spark’s The Bachelors before dropping off.

  Before dawn, the sky like blued steel, the city silent, I was woken by a sound in the apartment, at the front door. I put on my robe and went into the kitchen. The front door was unlocked, my key in the deadbolt. I went back through the apartment; Miss Rush was gone.

  I write this at dawn. I am very frightened.

  4

  In an alley which ran behind a lively commercial street there sat a pair of the large trash receptacles commonly known as Dumpsters. In them accumulated the waste produced by the shops whose rear entrances shared the alley; a framer’s, a soup kitchen, an antique clothing store, a donut bakery, and a photocopyist’s establishment, and by the offices above those storefronts. On this street and in this alley, each day had its seasons: Spring, when complaining morning shifts opened the shops, students and workers rushed to destinations, coffee sloshing in paper cups, and in the alley, the sanitation contractors emptied containers, sorted recyclables and waste like bees pollinating garbage truck flowers; Summer, the ripened afternoons, when the workday slackened, shoppers stole long lunches from their employers, the cafes filled with students with highlighter pens, and the indigent beckoned for the change that jingled in incautious pockets, while in the alley new riches piled up; Autumn, the cooling evening, when half the shops closed, and the street was given over to prowlers and pacers, those who lingered in bookstores and dined alone in Chinese restaurants, and the indigent plundered the fatted Dumpsters for half-eaten paper bag lunches, batches of botched donuts, wearable cardboard matting and unmatched socks, and burnable wood scraps; Winter, the selfish night, when even the cafes battened down iron gates through which night-watchmen fluorescents palely flickered, the indigent built their overnight camps in doorways and under sidestreet hedges, or in wrecked cars, and the street itself was an abandoned stage.

  On the morning in question the sun shone brightly, yet the air was bitingly cold. Birds twittered resentfully. When the sanitation crew arrived to wheel the two Dumpsters out to be hydraulically lifted into their screeching, whining truck, they were met with cries of protest from within.

  The men lifted the metal tops of the Dumpsters and discovered that an indigent person had lodged in each of them, a lady in one, a gentleman in the other.

  “Geddoudadare,” snarled the eldest sanitation engineer, a man with features like a spilled plate of stew.

  The indigent lady rose from within the heap of refuse and stood blinking in the bright morning sun. She was an astonishing sight, a ruin. The colors of her skin and hair and clothes had all surrendered to gray; an archaeologist might have ventured an opinion as t
o their previous hue. She could have been anywhere between thirty and fifty years old, but speculation was absurd; her age had been taken from her and replaced with a timeless condition, a state. Her eyes were pitiable; horrified and horrifying; witnesses, victims, accusers.

  “Where am I?” she said softly.

  “Isedgeddoudadare,” barked the garbage operative.

  The indigent gentleman then raised himself from the other Dumpster. He was in every sense her match; to describe him would be to tax the reader’s patience for things worn, drab, desolate, crestfallen, unfortunate, etc. He turned his head at the trashman’s exhortation and saw his mate.

  “What’s the—” he began, then stopped.

  “You,” said the indigent lady, lifting an accusing finger at him from amidst her rags. “You did this to me.”

  “No,” he said. “No.”

  “Yes!” she screamed.

  “C’mon,” said the burly sanitateur. He and his second began pushing the nearer container, which bore the lady, towards his truck.

  She cursed at them and climbed out, with some difficulty. They only laughed at her and pushed the cart out to the street. The indigent man scrambled out of his Dumpster and brushed at his clothes, as though they could thereby be distinguished from the material in which he’d lain.

  The lady flew at him, furious. “Look at us! Look what you did to me!” She whirled her limbs at him, trailing banners of rag.

  He backed from her, and bumped into one of the garbagemen, who said, “Hey!”

  “It’s not my fault,” said the indigent man.

  “Yugoddagedoudahere!” said the stew-faced worker.

  “What do you mean it’s not your fault?” she shrieked.

  Windows were sliding open in the offices above them. “Quiet down there,” came a voice.

  “It wouldn’t happen without you,” he said.

  At that moment a policeman rounded the corner. He was a large man named Officer McPupkiss who even in the morning sun conveyed an aspect of night. His policeman’s uniform was impeccably fitted, his brass polished, but his shoetops were exceptionally scuffed and dull. His presence stilled the combatants.

  “What’s the trouble?” he said.

  They began talking all at once; the pair of indigents, the refuse handlers, and the disgruntled office worker leaning out of his window.

  “Please,” said McPupkiss, in a quiet voice which was nonetheless heard by all.

  “He ruined my life!” said the indigent lady raggedly.

  “Ah, yes. Shall we discuss it elsewhere?” He’d already grasped the situation. He held out his arms, almost as if he wanted to embrace the two tatterdemalions, and nodded at the disposal experts, who silently resumed their labors. The indigents followed McPupkiss out of the alley.

  “He ruined my life,” she said again when they were on the sidewalk.

  “She ruined mine,” answered the gentleman.

  “I wish I could believe it was all so neat,” said McPupkiss. “A life is simply ruined; credit for the destruction goes here or here. In my own experience things are more ambiguous.”

  “This is one of the exceptions,” said the lady. “It’s strange but not ambiguous. He fucked me over.”

  “She was warned,” he said. “She made it happen.”

  “The two of you form a pretty picture,” said McPupkiss. “You ought to be working together to improve your situation; instead you’re obsessed with blame.”

  “We can’t work together,” she said. “Anytime we come together we create a disaster.”

  “Fine, go your separate ways,” said the officer. “I’ve always thought ‘We got ourselves into this mess and we can get ourselves out of it’ was a laughable attitude. Many things are irreversible, and what matters is moving on. For example, a car can’t reverse its progress over a cliff; it has to be abandoned by those who survive the fall, if any do.”

  But by the end of this speech the gray figures had fallen to blows and were no longer listening. They clutched one another like exhausted boxers, hissing and slapping, each trying to topple the other. McPupkiss chided himself for wasting his breath, grabbed them both by the back of their scruffy collars, and began smiting their hindquarters with his dingy shoes until they ran down the block and out of sight together, united again, McPupkiss thought, as they were so clearly meant to be.

  5

  The village of Pupkinstein was nestled in a valley surrounded by steep woods. The villagers were a contented people except for the fear of the two monsters that lived in the woods and came into the village to fight their battles. Everyone knew that the village had been rebuilt many times after being half destroyed by the fighting of the monsters. No one living could remember the last of these battles, but that only intensified the suspicion that the next time would surely be soon.

  Finally the citizens of Pupkinstein gathered in the town square to discuss the threat of the two monsters, and debate proposals for the prevention of their battles.

  A group of builders said, “Let us build a wall around the perimeter of the village, with a single gate which could be fortified by volunteer soldiers.”

  A group of priests began laughing, and one of them said, “Don’t you know that the monsters have wings? They’ll flap twice and be over your wall in no time.”

  Since none of the builders had ever seen the monsters, they had no reply.

  Then the priests spoke up and said, “We should set up temples which can be filled with offerings: food, wine, burning candles, knitted scarves, and the like. The monsters will be appeased.”

  Now the builders laughed, saying, “These are monsters, not jealous gods. They don’t care for our appeasements. They only want to crush each other, and we’re in the way.”

  The priests had no answer, since their holy scriptures contained no accounts of the monsters’ habits.

  Then the Mayor of Pupkinstein, a large, somber man, said, “We should build our own monster here in the middle of the square, a scarecrow so huge and threatening that the monsters will see it and at once be frightened back into hiding.”

  This plan satisfied the builders, with their love of construction, and the priests, with their fondness for symbols. So the very next morning the citizens of Pupkinstein set about constructing a gigantic figure in the square. They began by demolishing their fountain. In its place they marked out the soles of two gigantic shoes, and the builders sank foundations for the towering legs that would extend from them. Then the carpenters built frames, and the seamstresses sewed canvases, and in less than a week the two shoes were complete, and the beginnings of ankles besides. Without being aware of it, the citizens had begun to model their monster on the Mayor, who was always present as a model, whereas no one had ever seen the two monsters.

  The following night it rained. Tarpaulins were thrown over the half-constructed ankles that rose from the shoes. The Mayor and the villagers retired to an alehouse to toast their labors and be sheltered from the rain. But just as the proprietor was pouring their ale, someone said, “Listen!”

  Between the crash of thunder and the crackle of lightning there came a hideous bellowing from the woods at either end of the valley.

  “They’re coming!” the citizens said. “Too soon—our monster’s not finished!”

  “How bitter,” said one man. “We’ve had a generation of peace in which to build, and yet we only started a few days ago.”

  “We’ll always know that we tried,” said the Mayor philosophically.

  “Perhaps the shoes will be enough to frighten them,” said the proprietor, who had always been regarded as a fool.

  No one answered him. Fearing for their lives, the villagers ran to their homes and barricaded themselves behind shutters and doors, hid their children in attics and potato cellars, and snuffed out candles and lanterns that might lead an attacker to their doors. No one dared even look at the naked, miserable things that came out of the woods and into the square; no one, that is, except the Mayor. He stood in
the shadow of one of the enormous shoes, rain beating on his umbrella, only dimly sensing that he was watching another world being fucked away.

  6

  I live in a shadowless pale blue sea.

  I am a bright pink crablike thing, some child artist’s idea of an invertebrate, so badly drawn as to be laughable.

  Nevertheless, I have feelings.

  More than feelings. I have a mission, an obsession.

  I am building a wall.

  Every day I move a grain of sand. The watercolor sea washes over my back, but I protect my accumulation. I fasten each grain to the wall with my comic-book feces. (Stink lines hover above my shit, also flies which look like bow ties, though I am supposed to be underwater.)

  He is on the other side. My nemesis. Someday my wall will divide the ocean, someday it will reach the surface, or the top of the page, and be called a reef. He will be on the other side. He will not be able to get to me.

  My ridiculous body moves only sideways, but it is enough.

  I will divide the watercolor ocean, I will make it two. We must have a world for each of us.

  I move a grain. When I come to my wall, paradoxically, I am nearest him. His little pink body, practically glowing. He is watching me, watching me build.

  There was a time when he tried to help, when every day for a week he added a grain to my wall. I spent every day that week removing his grain, expelling it from the wall, and no progress was made until he stopped. He understands now. My wall must be my own. We can be together in nothing. Let him build his own wall. So he watches.

  My wall will take me ten thousand years to complete. I live only for the day that it is complete.

  The Pupfish floats by.

  The Pupfish is a fish with the features of a mournful hound dog and a policeman’s cap. The Pupfish is the only creature in the sea apart from me and my pink enemy.

  The Pupfish, I know, would like to scoop me up in its oversized jaws and take me away. The Pupfish thinks it can solve my problem.