by Henry Miller
Time and again, in midnight mood, he had stolen down to the water’s edge to throw open his nerves and arteries to the brutal splendid of this shadowy nocturne. Now, in his mind’s eye, for a transient, fractional interval (during which a world may be born and die again), it loomed before him, bulk and shadow, a serrated cardboard megalith floating in eerie phantasmal configuration. Towers of steel and masonry arose—sea-forms glistering in moonfire and spume, shaking off through crest and spire their sea-trove of chrysoprase, chalcedony, sardonyx. A torpid, myriad-shaped dream demon wriggling in sea-foam and star-shimmer, spouting twisted gouts of blood and mud up into the blue-black vault above.
And in the midst of this seizure his mind suddenly raced back and presented him with the image of Hari Das lying on the freight siding, his beautiful brown body cold and stiff, pumped full of embalming fluid. The cold immobile lips had once boasted: “My highest pride consists in not-standing-on-solid-earth; the principle of my philosophy is the ultimate principle of the universe, which is NO-Principle. … I boast of my system being fluid, gaseous, capable of evaporating.”
Golly, how Hari once could laugh! What ever made it possible for a man to laugh so heartily? He recalled a story he had told Hari once—it was about a corpse. It seems the undertaker had undressed the corpse, but forgot to remove the socks. Fancy shoveling a man under with a dirty pair of socks! Perhaps they had laid Hari out—he was only a nigger—without placing a clean silk hankerchief in his breast pocket....
Midnight. The last act of The Cherry Orchard for Fulton Ferry. Battered hulks snoozing in velvet slips. Done with the sea, inviting corruption. The ferryhouse, crumbling in the shadows, more grim, more ghastly than Caesar’s gutted corpse.
Farther on, up the quay, the Troubador lolls. She is just in from Curaçao, ten thousand bags of coffee in her hold. Her bottom is painted crimson, and about her tremulous white belly is an azure band. Hawsers and cables fix her gleaming prow to coppered stanchions that dot the pier and quay. Whirling constellations of stevedores transporting the odorous freight to the belching maws of warehouses a stone’s throw away. Perched eerily above the vomit-hold, checkers are busily engaged working out the arithmetic of commerce. Queues of abbreviated motor trucks straggle through the blue calcium light over slithery, splintered planks. The wharf is alive with cranes, hand winches, bales, stumbling figures in blue denim, fat-bellied tuns, derricks, masts, and yardarms. A swirling, gurgling, full-crested tide leaves the mossy flanks of the wharves with glistering plashes of cabbage-green water. Bracing odors of tar and seaweed iodize the lungs. The Troubador squeals and grunts as she rubs the dock-timber like a boar in rut. Impervious and aloof, defaming the screaming silence of midnight flaps the Union Jack, wharf rat’s symbol of power and greed.
Moloch’s turquoise gigue of thoughts is stabbed by the pompom puffs of a locomotive. From far-off places come mysterious bursts of song that match the delirium of stone on the opposite shore. His vagrant fancies oscillate between the phantom horizons of the British Empire and the condition of his existence, which more than ever now appears like a tremulous causeway linking dream to dream. His soliloquies are squeezed through primitive angles of mast and boom, only to be flattened against monstrous skeletons of steel and concrete, plastered with false faces. A pleasant sensation invades the pit of his stomach as he watches the fling and sag of the Troubador. The water gives out rich, juicy sounds—better than an all-day sucker. The flooded stream rushes by, fuming and spuming, pushing and surging toward the sea. .. . Here one comes to rest, even as by the waters of Babylon. Here golden argosies are moored—great, shambling vessels, cheap as Woolworth baubles—their entrails steaming with rancid stoker-flesh. Shoving off in the morning for Valparaiso, Singapore, Sumatra, Rangoon, and Mozambique … And yonder, rising still and bright in the night, the slim, myriad-chinked palaces of the money-grubbers. Tremendous towers of vertigo that pierce the womb of night.
More than all the glamorous, ineluctable truths of the world beyond is the ineffable charm of somnolescence. The low, age-old edifices squatting at the water’s edge were wrapped in thick, palpable gloom. Their stately desuetude, their sententious philosophic repose—all this mortuary splendor captivated and enthralled him. He felt that he was being carried away on a wistful catafalque to a purple-black, deeply poetic death. Frog-toots and sirens by the great black throat of the river.
“If one could only get away!”
He is tortured by imaginary fears of tomorrow. Midnight wears a surtout that conceals the bestial acromegaly of age....
Leaving the docks behind, Moloch sauntered through a high- walled street that drops like a canyon below the terraces of Columbia Heights. The silence here was more ominous, more intense. It was a splendid place to get dirked. He walked gingerly in the middle of the street, fascinated by the queer iron stars on the sepulchral walls of the warehouses. Opposite the warehouses were tumbledown shanties and a string of boarded saloons.
Time was when the doors swung lightly, and hobnailed boots ground the yellow sawdust like pollen. Schooners brimming with suds left sparkling saucer-rings on the smooth, mahogany-stained bars. Hairy-chested apes, burned in the Red Sea to an eggplant glaze, used to dip their bristling mustaches in the cool, soapy foam. Their sinews flexed with snakelike ease, and the air was burnt with their foul, fornicating oaths.
Alas, those days have been confined and deodorized. The sweetish stench of wassail has evaporated like sweat. There are no good old drunken bums to slobber over anymore. The waterfront is as clean as a hound’s tooth, and as morose as the grave. It is as safe here now as a patent medicine.
Drearily Dion Moloch turned away from this deserted street once stuccoed with saloons and crazy jerries. Above him were the dreary mansions of the rich. Within, sheltered from the fever and storm of life, were the brittle bones that were still too proud to betake themselves to the cemetery, where they belonged.
Looking down over a magical flight of steps at this fugitive backyard of Brooklyn, Dion Moloch cast his eyes once more over the rubble of shards heaped before him.
What was it, this grand view from the terrace? What did it reveal? A dump heap littered with rusty can openers, broken-down baby carriages, discarded tin bathtubs, greasy window shades, antiquated trunks, wheelbarrows, sewer pipes, copper boilers, nutmeg graters, and—animal crackers that had been partially nibbled.