by John Crowley
And what about the great ones of the world, the leaders and the Presidents for Life and the Field Marshals and the Members of Parliaments and Presidiums, have they really all come? If they have, we haven’t been informed of it—of course there are some coming with their nations, but the chance of being swallowed up amid their subjects or constituents, suffering who knows what indignities and maybe worse, has perhaps pushed a lot of them to slip into the city unobserved on special flights of unmarked helicopters and so on, to be put up at their embassies or at the Plaza or the Americana or in the vast apartments of bankers and arms dealers on Park Avenue. Surely they have left behind cohorts of devoted followers, henchmen, whatever, men who can keep their fingers on the red button or their eyes on the skies, just in case it has all been a trap, but we have to be realistic: not every goat-herd in Macedonia, every bushman in the Kalahari is going to be rounded up, and they don’t need to be for this to work—you can call your floor thoroughly swept even if a few twists of dust persist under the couch, a lost button beneath the radiator. The best is the enemy of the good. He’s an engineer, he must know that.
And it is working. They are filling, from top to bottom, all the great buildings, the Graybar Building, the Pan Am Building, Cyanamid, American Metal Climax, the Empire State—a crowd of Dutch men and women and children fill the souvenir shop at the top of the Empire State Building, milling, handling the small models, glass, metal, plastic, of the building they are in. The Metropolitan Museum is filling as though for a smash hit opening, Van Gogh, Rembrandt, the Modern as for a Pollack retrospective or Op Art show, there is even champagne! How is it that certain people have managed to gather with people like themselves, as on Fifth Avenue, at the Diocesan headquarters, Scribner’s bookshop, the University Club, whereas old St. Patrick’s is crowded with just everybodies, as though they had all come together to pray for rain in a drought, or to be safe from an invading army? They are the invading army!
We know so little really, plodding along footsore and amazed and yet strangely elated among the millions, the river of humanity as Ed Sullivan said in his last column in the Daily News before publishing was suspended for the duration. The broad streets (Broadway!) just filled all the way across with persons, a river breaking against the fronts of the dispatcher stations, streams diverted, uptown, which is north more or less, downtown, which is south. And now the flood is at last beginning to lessen, to loosen, a vortex draining away into the shops and the apartments, the theaters and the restaurants.
She and I have received our assignment. The building is in Manhattan, below Houston Street, which we have learned divides the newer parts of the city from the older parts. Though old Greenwich Village is mostly above it and all of Wall Street is below it. We would like to have been ushered down that far, to find a space for ourselves in one of those titans of steel and glass, where perhaps we could look out at the Statue of Liberty and the emptied world. We were surprised to find we both wished for that! I’d have thought she’d want a small “brownstone” townhouse on a shady street. Anyway it’s neither of those, it’s a little loft on the corner of Spring Street and Lafayette Street, an old triangular building just five stories tall. Looking down on us from the windows on the east side of the street as we walk that way are Italian men and women, not people just arrived from Italy but the families who live in those places, for that’s Little Italy there, and the plump women in house dresses, black hair severely pulled back, and the young men with razor-cut hair and big wristwatches are the tenants there. They’re waving and shouting comments down to the crowd endlessly passing, friendly comments or maybe not so friendly, hostile even maybe, their turf invaded, not the right attitude for now.
But here we are, number 370, we wait our turn to go in and up. Stairs to the third floor. It seems artists now live in the building, they are allowed to, painters, we smell linseed oil and canvas sizing. Our artist is lean, scrawny almost, his space nearly empty, canvases leaning against the wall, their faces turned away. We look down—maybe shy—and can see in the cracks of the old floorboards what she says are metal snaps, snaps for clothing, from the days when clothes were made here by immigrants. Our artist is either happy to see us or not happy, excited and irritated, that’s probably universal, we are all cautious about saying anything much to him or to one another, after all he didn’t invite us. Okay okay he keeps saying. Is that dark brooding resentful girl in the black leotard and Capezios his girlfriend?
Well, better here than in some vast factory floor in the borough of Queens or train shed in Long Island City, or out on Staten Island not much different from where we come from. The ferries are leaving from Manhattan’s tip for Staten Island every few minutes, packed with people to the gunwales or the scuppers or whatever those outside edges are called. World’s cheapest ocean voyage, they say, just a nickel to cross the whitecapped bay, Lady Liberty, Ellis Island deserted and derelict over that way, where once before the millions came into New York City to be processed and checked and sent out into the streets. The teeming streets. I lift my lamp beside the golden door. For a moment, thinking of that, looking down at those little metal snaps that slipped from women’s fingers fifty, sixty years ago, it all seems to make sense, a human experiment, a proof of something finally and deeply good about us and about this city, though we don’t know what, not exactly.
It’s the last day, the last evening: we’re lucky to have arrived so late, there won’t be problems with food supplies or sleeping arrangements that others are having. The plan has worked so smoothly! All the populations are being accommodated, there are fights and resistance reported in various locations, but these are being handled by the large corps of specially trained minimally armed persons—not police, not soldiers, for the police forces and the armies were the first to arrive and be distributed, for obvious reasons—because they could be ordered to, and because of what they might do if left behind till last. And now it’s done: everywhere, in every land, palm and pine, the planners and directors and their staffs have taken off their headsets, shut down their huge computers and telephone banks and telex machines—a world-wide web of information tools whose only goal has been this, this night. They have boarded the last 707s to leave Bombay, Leningrad, Johannesburg, and been taken just like all the others to the airports in New Jersey and Long Island, and when they have deplaned, the crews too leave the airplanes parked and take the last buses into the city, checking their assignments with one another, joking—pilots and stewies, they’re used to bunking in strange cities. When the buses have been emptied the drivers turn them off and leave them in the streets, head for the distribution centers for assignments. Last of all the dispatchers, all done: they can hardly believe it, not an hour’s sleep in twenty-four, their ad-hoc areas littered with coffee cups, telexes, phone slips, fan-fold paper, cartons from the last Chinese restaurants: they gather themselves and go out into the bright streets—the grid is holding!—and they take themselves to wherever they have assigned themselves, not far because they’re walking, all the trains and taxis have stopped, no one left to ride or drive them; they mount the stairs or take the elevators up to where they are to go.
It’s done. The streets now empty and silent. The city holds its breath they will say later.
In our loft space we have been given our drinks and our canapés. It’s not silent here: we allow ourselves to joke about it, about our being here, we demand fancy cocktails or a floor show, but in a just-kidding way—actually it’s strangely hard to mingle. She and I stick together, but we often do that at parties. We stand at the windows; we think they look toward the southeast, in the direction of most of the world’s population, though we can’t see anything, not even the night sky. Every window everywhere is lit.
But think of the darkness now over all the nightside of earth. The primeval darkness. For all the lights out there have been turned off, or not turned on, perhaps not all but so many. The quiet of all that world, around the earth and back again almost
to here where we stand, this little group of islands, these buildings alight and humming, you can almost hear the murmur and the milling of the people.
He was right. It could be done, he knew it could be and it has been, we’ve done it. There’s a kind of giddy pride. Overpopulation is a myth! There are so few of us compared to Spaceship Earth’s vastness, we can feel it now for certain in our hearts, we hear it with our senses.
But—many, many others must just now be thinking it too—there’s more. For now the whole process must be reversed, and they, we, have to go home again. To our home places, spacious or crowded. And won’t we all remember this, won’t we think of how for a moment we were all together, so close, a brief walk or a taxi ride all that separates any one of us from any other? And won’t that change us, in ways we can’t predict?
Did he expect that, did he think of it? Did he know it would happen? Moon-faced little man in his black horn-rims, had he known this from the start?
One final test, one final proof only remains. We’ve received our second drink. At the turntable our host places the 45 on the spindle and lets it drop. In every space in the city just at this moment, the same: on every record player, over every loudspeaker. The needle rasps in the groove—maybe there’s a universal silence for a moment, an expectant silence, maybe not—and then the startlement of music. That voice crying out, strangely urgent, almost pleading, to take his little hand, and go like this.
Alone together in the quiet world, the nations begin to twist.
Spring Break
So the last proj I did junior year at Spectrum Cumulus College was with my bud Seymour Chin, who was in Singapore—I was in Podunk, OH. It was a proj in Equality Engineering, required, tough but not so. We picked Toiletry and had scads fun and then did the CGIs, and we thought if the world had these johns and janes it would be equal more, definitely. Remembering now the probs we thought up.
“Transgen women can’t go in the women’s jane, hey,” Seymour said. “They’re men actually, they might abuse.”
“Nah,” I said. “They got no interest, yah? What you got to do is keep the lesbians out. They could abuse. They got an interest.”
“Obvi.”
“Ident,” I said. “Run a kit. Ten thousand self-ID’d lesbians amalgamed in half-length pix. Surveillance cams can scan and match in .9 seconds. Match, they get sent to the john.”
“Harsh.”
“Gentle it. Just a few words.” I flashed him words: Please use the adjoining facility.
“I see a problem.”
“Yah?”
“Yah. No one in the john knows you’re a les.”
I pondered. “So if they go in the john men could abuse.”
“Yah.”
So all that was actually utter dumb and from old, but I was on propanolol and Seymour was drooping, four AM Singapore, which is 5 PM mytime the day before. Next meet we switched the thinking to unigender, made progress. Can’t remember how we scaled it, but we got PASS on it and that’s what counts.
Then: Spring Break! My first spring break, because costs. Fam decided this time to go in on it for me, because PASS. Max lucks!
All over the world, Spring Break time.
Received welcome package in gmail, unzipped it. Nice oldtime fonts. Heyjoe! Great year, yah? Now’s for rest-n-rec, yah? As a fulltime student of “Spectrum Cumulus” you hereby receive a special invitation to Spring Break at our Grandparent College,“Yale”!
Went on a bit about Yale, this place, the oldness, the motto—“Luxe y Vanitas,” same as ours—and the many years that SCU.edu/sg and Yale had worked together, and-cetera. Pix and vids, leafy, stony, grassy. This was to be so fun.
Then Seymour Chin checked in. Seymour hates-hates to type like words, so what I got back was a string of emojoes to express. I got the meaning right away.
“Heyjoe, we not on?” I flash.
Seymour has affluenza—nose running, coughing, sick like a dog. (Do dogs get specially sick? Don’t know. Never had one.) Not going to make it, not on day one anyway.
I’m on my own at Yale.
So it used to be I guess that Spring Break was in the you know spring, like March. Everybody left Campus and went to crazy-hot places to party—not like now. But who wants to go to New Haven in March? If not snow, rain, ice, and-cetera. So they do it in June, which was when back then a student would get their diploma. And since there’s nothing else going on there then these days, good time. But they still call it “Spring” Break. Know what? You can actually get a train ride (take a train they say) from New York up to New Haven, get off. There’s a Shuffle that meets this train and takes you to Campus. Town is wastrel, but then you drive through this stone portal—like in a fantasy RPG—and there you like are.
Wow. The place is old. The buildings look like castles. Old corroding I guess granite. Pointy windows. Pointy tops. Pointy everything. And what happened just as we drove in and down this avenue? Bells started ringing. They were playing songs, but with bells, somewhere up in a tower. Ancient songs I remember from as a kid. I sort of teared up a little it was so amazing.
We were led through another portal into this big square of lawn, a quad it was called—four sides, get it?—where there were long tables and these young guys and women were waiting to hand us stuff, all of them waving and saying Welcome and Hi and Get in Any Line. The spring-breakers were some of them zonkered with sleeplessness, come from around the world like Seymour Chin did or actually didn’t, others up for it and giving high fives and whatnot. The woman I came up to checked my name/pic on their pad, and started piling things in front of me, calling out the names as they did it. Sheets and stuff! Orientation materials! One six-pack beer! One swechirt (with huge white “Y” on it)! Goody bag! Hat!
It was a blue flat cap—blue for Yale, Old Blue—and it had a number on the front, 2016. “What’s that?” I asked them.
“What’s what?” they said.
“The number.”
“Heyjoe, that’s your class!” They took it and put it on my head and tugged it down, laughing, really white teeth. “Class of twenty-sixteen!” they said, and shook my hand. “Welcome to Yale, Yalie!”
So the hat and the number were for the old-time scenics too. I laughed with them—they were sort of actually quite hot. “2016!” I told them. “That’s like my dad’s year!”
“Yeah!” they said.
Actually my dad didn’t go. Because army. But if he had.
I loaded all this stuff up plus my kit and started off. A whole bunch were headed for the dorm we were assigned, only it wasn’t called a dorm, it was called a college, which they said in this special way, a College. Why a college in a college? Who knew. My orientation pack explained, probs. And it was a castle too. It had a fucking coat of arms over the archway. All of us pouring in through the iron gate yelling, like overthrowing peasants, minus torches.
I have seen actually a lot of dorms, the boys and women in their little rooms, bunk beds, the stuff that happens. Squeeing and flaming on, the micro cutoffs and docked T’s, pizza-boxes, selfies. Actually, now I think of, a lot of that was in porn. Vintage porn, but it gave you the scenics. The room I actually got was not like a dorm room. It was more fantasy RPG. The monk’s lair or hmmever. A marble fireplace. Like wood walls made of oak. Dropped my stuff and sat down on a futon couch and felt a little—you know—I don’t know.
But you know what? The john/jane was also like from another age. Urinals? Yes. Had to try one. Everything we designed out in our Toiletry proj. Flashed Seymour Chin but no emojoes in response. Then seven guys and a woman poured in and it was sorting out the rooms and the beds (the wood room with the vampire-castle fireplace was just to hang in) and we cracked the comp six-packs and the night began. Hoo-hooting and woo-wooing from all around the quad.
I put on my droops and the gimme swechirt and 2016 cap and went out with my class into the quad. T
here was plenty of light there but most of the buildings, classrooms and such, were all dark inside. Way up far-off on a hill was a regular type building, part of the science center I think we got told, lit up normally but looking so far away. These old parts had been left behind years ago.
I’m not that great in crowds—always have this impulse to say things, right, like actual things and not just tags. The Meaning of Life. Sometimes I guess I put people off. Anyway thinking like this I got away from the quads where the spring-breakers were. Thinking of all these buildings being full long ago, now when it’s all collabs across the world, actually better for sure but still there was a kind of sadness to feel, just wondering what it would have been to go to classes in those buildings and throng around the quad all day hugging books, talking to professors like f2f. Maybe I was born too late.
Tomorrow was going to be utter. We go to class. We hear a lecture by some heyjoe about some subject. Like we walk all together into one of these lecture halls with seats that have these paddle arms where you put your notebook and take notes with a pencil. I got a pencil in my goodie bag. No paper. Maybe the note stuff was like for kidding.
By now I was somewhere that was pretty empty of spring-breakers. The buildings felt like they were sort of looking down on me, like looming. Up in the corners of buildings and on the edges and gutters were these faces—little heads, of monsters or like demons. Staring, grinning, showing teeth. Not for kidding: they were there.
Freaking out a bit. What happened to everybody? Was this still Yale? I went past a building that was like a giant white cube, with squares on each face, sort of like a ginormous Rubik’s cube without the colors. Not old. Not old but cold. And then when I hooked a left and a right there was the most, the tallest, the most looking-at-me building ever. It had to be a church. I’ve seen churches. This was the churchiest church I’d ever seen. The steps that led up to the churchy-pointy door were worn away, by a million feet going up and down a million times. I stood in sort of shock. Ancientness.