City to City, Part 2

On those first couple rides to the Capitol, visions of my old life came up now and again, when I got bored by the rhythm of tires on the highway. Sometimes, when I was able to sleep, they were more like dreams; I flew around the city with the sun shining, I was gifted, nobody was going to make me travel far away to earn a living. But more often than not I was only exactly what I used to be: a grown-up paperboy. Thinking about it bummed me out, but I couldn’t stop. It had been a happy life in a small kind of way.

I would wake up at two o’clock in the morning, make myself some coffee, and climb into my dull red ‘98 Civic as the light was just beginning to bleed into the sky. As I’ve said before, Elliston is a cruddy-looking city most of the time, but when mornings were clear and still I loved cruising through the northwestern city to the newspaper offices, by the Wiskasset Park and the old Botanical Gardens, thick with mourning doves and similar birds. The air was full of warbling, cautious calls. I went to the offices of the Examiner, traded the Civic for a company truck, and got on my way. Sometimes the papers were late printing, and I had to stand around waiting. All the delivery men would stand around and make clipped conversation, like kids locked out of school.

For the first year it took me nine hours to finish my run, although they only paid me for seven and a half. I made wrong turns and ended up doubling back on my own route, seeing the same mailboxes and lawn ornaments, the Christmas lights left up through January and the men with their knit caps and bathrobes waiting for the paper. All the obvious signs of Northwest Elliston. I didn’t get home until noon and barely caught my wife leaving for the second shift.

But I got better at it. I built a mental framework for the poorly planned residential streets of our Northwest, until I became the foremost authority on directions, addresses, and one-way intersections. Even now, when all those places I knew have changed or disappeared, I can still tell you the precise locations of a lot of dead monuments: the Ukranian beer hall that stood on the corner of Ferry and Tulip streets, the musty typewriter shop that managed to stay alive on Grand Street, halfway between two Irish bars with clover-leaf signs. I could slip through those old neighborhoods like a boy genius tracing his way through a Highlights maze, until I felt I had mental and physical possession of the entire Northwest. I measured my progress by the sky lightening, I checked off the streets in quick succession, I caught my wife in bed before she had a chance to get dressed. I could do the whole run in six hours.

My wife is a psychiatric nurse, and we’ve had times where we’ve hobnobbed with doctors and gone to fancy homes for parties. People asked me what I did for a living, and I’d tell them, I work for the Examiner.

“Are you a staff writer?”I had a doctor ask me once.

It was in a pre-fab home in the suburbs, in a planned community full of winding, unshaded streets with trees that need another ten years to grow. A gatekeeper had to let us in.

“No,” I said. “I do the deliveries.”

And the guy nodded to himself, trying to reconcile his own idea of how newspapers get delivered with the man standing in front of him, fully grown, drinking bourbon at a party. He probably thought newspapers appeared magically at his doorstep, like stork-brought babies. Or else he believed in the paperboy.

I watched him sizing me up. He gave me the look people of obvious substance, like doctors, lawyers, and college professors, sometimes gave me in social settings, the look that said they hadn’t figured me for an expendable person, somebody whose hold on life depended on getting up in the early morning, on puttering around parts of the city they’d never visited and didn’t care to know about. It was a peculiar mix of respect and pity, and to keep myself from being ashamed I called up the parts of my life I thought were private and sacred, things I assumed a man of his advanced standing would never have had the privilege of knowing. Who cares about the money he makes? I’d tell myself. He hasn’t seen the city winding up on a spring morning, watching joggers circle the empty streets, and the solitary porch-sitters sending up smoke signals from their cigarettes as they wait for the day to finally show up.

“How are the hours?” he asked me, putting his arm around his wife, who was tall and almost entirely silent, dourly considering the room and all its contents, pursing her lips at everyone.

“I can’t complain,” I said.

His wife led him away, toward a knot of people at the center of the party. I put my bourbon on the glass coffee table and looked towards the kitchen, just in time to catch my wife sneaking a glance in my direction.

Let’s get out, she mouthed. I nodded and pointed to my drink. We considered each other. She looked magnificently bored in her floral dress, sipping a whiskey and ginger. What were two exceptional people such as us doing at a boring party like this one? There was a great deal of secret information we needed to share with each other back home.

It was only later, after the Examiner changed hands and the new owners slashed and burned, after I lost my job and found myself sitting at the dining room table of our newly bought house, watching the blades of our ceiling fan twirl, that I understood there was probably some genuine concern in that doctor’s look. I bet he thought it was a shame for someone to live their life on such a thin string. I could stew and gnash my teeth, I could sit and watch the fan all day, but there wasn’t anything I could do about it. My old life was over. For every day I sat on the stoop and watched our lazy neighborhood revolve around me, the less my wife was talking to me and the more she muttered about me under her breath. My powers were suddenly useless. He was right, it was a shame. My string got cut.

City to City, Part 1

The tide of progress was unstoppable. They built a high-speed rail line to the Capitol and everybody was encouraged to ride it; I saw so many lush advertisements with handsome men clutching briefcases and studying laptops, as train cars cruised past landscapes I had never seen in my lifetime: fields of green graced by tranquil cows, blessedly free of human habitation. I can’t tell you what the train was really like; I didn’t have enough money to ride it. When I went to the Capitol looking for work, I rode the bus.

The Koreans ran the bus lines. They bought old tour rigs, ripped out the lighting and cooling systems to save gas, and ran them in irregular cycles between all the metropolitan centers of the eastern seaboard. But the busiest routes were to and from the Capitol; the few times I went further out than my hometown I saw the bus empty of people, until I was the only being dropped off in Comstock, Delone, and several other dissipated points further south. I passed bus stations that sulked under the shadows of empty apartment buildings, main streets shuttered and hostile to life in general.

In those days every outlying city had a plan to attach itself to the Capitol, to position itself as a junior partner willing to share the burden of unending prosperity. That was the super-fast rail line theory of progress, where our cheap rents would lure people from the Capitol into the commuter life, and where those of us with moxy and gumption could ride the train bound for glory and success.

A lot of people staked their futures on this theory. There was a time when I couldn’t take my morning walk without noticing a new for-sale sign going up, or a house being rehabbed out of total decrepitude. Curious, I asked around.

“It’s a Capitol developer,” the men told me. “They’re converting it into a couple of apartments, they’re gonna charge a bunch of rent.”

Every time I asked it was the same story. Condominiums went up on the west side of the river. They tore up the weeds along the waterfront and put in an asphalt path for the joggers everyone was sure were coming. The landscape as I knew it was changing fast.

When I remember Elliston, my city, I remember a certain kind of summer day that seemed to happen at least once a week during the hot months. Elliston is in a swamp, and the summer is thick with insects and a dull humidity that makes you dumb and slow. During those afternoons the only people moving were the kids double-dutching on the sidewalks to the tune of tinny boomboxes. Everyone else just watched.

And over those still city scenes there was a gray cloud hanging low in the sky in all directions, full of light and dark gradations, never giving a break for rain. Everyone smoked cheap cigarettes on their stoops, and the plumes all rose up to the meet the low-hanging atmosphere, so that I sometimes imagined the sky itself was clustered with second-hand smoke, like the study of some decrepit old professor.

There was nothing pretty about Elliston in the summer, except for the occasional flowering tree breaking out of the sidewalk, but the laziness that gripped us had a friendly character. No one was embarrassed to sit in the afternoon and drink beer with a sleepy eye cocked at the street. No one expected you to shape up.

Of course things were terrible all over. People got shot every day to the north and west of where I lived. My wife wouldn’t walk to the nearest subway stop out of fear for having her life taken away from her. A fifteen-year-old kid robbed me on the el platform one spring evening. All our politicians were unapologetic crooks who sprung resurrected out of coffins every election cycle. I wasn’t so blinded by love that I didn’t notice those things.

And maybe, if no one had ever noticed us or made plans for our future, we would have ended up dying a slow death at the hands of all those creeping factors I have previously mentioned. Have you ever stood in the middle of Fordam, that gutted example of industrial dreams crowning the upper midwest? We could have looked like that, with wig shops and corner stores rising forlorn out of the otherwise dead landscape, with other people rooting for our sports teams out of pity. And then I wouldn’t be so starry-eyed concerning our past, and what it meant to me.

After all, I lost my job. The situation was not good. I had a new house, a pregnant wife, and the unemployment rate was on the rise. So one day, on advice from an old friend, I decided to try my luck with a job prospect in the Capitol. I was sick of unloading trucks and painting houses, I didn’t want to carry and gun and guard things, and I had a mortgage to pay. I got on the bus.

Like I said, Koreans managed the line. It ran from a fuzzy sort of stop, halfway between a nail salon and an Indonesian grocery in the south of town, and sometimes it would stop a block or so away, by a shaded public park that no one ever visited. The drivers were almost exclusively old men who wore khaki baseball caps and took frequent cigarette breaks. They stood next to the bus and clamped cigarettes between their lips, manically puffing and studying the highway with a pitiless gaze. They never spoke unless it was to shout out prohibitions. “No smoke!” they would say, when someone tried to light up, and “No noise!” when someone made the mistake of turning their headphones up too loud. It was always hot in the summer and cold in the winter, but a round-trip ticket was only twenty dollars and the buses were always full. People mumbled in all sorts of languages, and there were sometimes babies crying about the bad air.

The Koreans, as you may well know, have taken over much of the mafia turf the Italians used to handle, and some people will tell you that the bus lines are just a front for other illegal activity. I can’t say whether this is true or not, but I will tell you the buses I rode made strange and unexpected stops, at the sides of highways next to closed roadside restaurants without a soul in sight, other than a dark figure, boarding in silence.

Once, on a night bus back to Elliston from the Capitol, I laid my head on my jacket and tried to sleep. I heard a baby start to cry. No bus I ever rode had working lights, so all we had to see by were brief flashes of streetlamp. I couldn’t tell where the baby was sitting. Its crying got louder and I started to get frustrated, banging my forehead lightly against the glass. Why did I subject myself to four hours on the highway, every day? Why was my life such a trap?

And then, out of a sudden gap in the baby’s wailing, I heard a voice come rising up. I guess it was the baby’s mother, trying to quiet the kid. The mother was some kind of Korean soprano, and I didn’t understand a word she said. The notes were unfamiliar, twisting together into a weird, beautiful lullaby. I haven’t heard that kind of song, before or since. The bus ate up the road at an even sixty miles per hour, and the song went on and on until I felt like I was sleeping, although I was wide awake. There wasn’t any other sound, or so it seemed.

It Snowed Like It Never Snows Anymore

The winter Claire and I spent in New York City, it was so cold that when you spit your saliva left a trail of ice behind it, like a comet. Dead frozen pigeons littered Central Park. You don’t believe me, with our memories of snow fading fast, but when I went to New York the Manhattan atmosphere was one big brick of cold. The streets were clean and sharp; someone had burned an image of the city onto a pane of glass, but the original heat was long gone. There wasn’t one errant playbill, homeless man, or ferret in any of the five boroughs. The mayor had banned them all. Early Sunday morning was like the surface of the moon.

Claire and I rented a cramped efficiency and gave up our old habits. We labored daily, spackling and painting and dragging cumbersome bargain furniture across the threshold. The apartment fought back; strange holes appeared in walls, the floors whispered threats. Every kettle we bought refused to whistle.

All this left Claire demoralized, and by the third week I was the one hammering and bustling around the apartment, while she did her best to entertain me. She told stories. She did the old song and dance, complete with card tricks. But when she was tired, which was often, she lay on the couch and tried to sleep.

I got a job and kept out of trouble. I started smoking; smoke breaks cut my day into manageable chunks. There were men like me in offices across the county, men with store-smelling shirts in cornflower blue, newly cut hair and dodgy eyes. I kept my hands steady and my lies white. I drank four hundred and twenty-five cups of coffee an hour.

Claire tried smoking, too, but it gave her a terrible cough and stained her teeth. She would stand in front of the mirror and lean towards the glass, pulling her lips away from her gums. She was a waitress, a secretary, and then a nursery assistant, where the children loved her nervous smile. But even that didn’t last for long.

 

I’m afraid I’ll forget who she was, or worse, consign her to a supporting role in the drama of my life. But what can you do when the parts you give to someone else get ripped away? You can’t walk around town in December asking bystanders to pay attention to your lack of arms. You cobble together an artificial limb from magazine pin-ups and cups of lukewarm coffee. You pay the heating bill, every month.

For a while we were good complements to each other. I was an animated drinker. I liked to make things and fix them, like tables and chairs, when drunk. Claire liked to sit in one place and talk, and let the action whirl around her. We spent the early days of our relationship in various kitchens, with me hammering and whistling and brewing cups of coffee while she told stories. She had wonderful stories. She had the one about a killer tanker truck and a ukulele, set in Buffalo. She told a few New Orleans stories that all revolved around graveyards.

But the best one by far was the one she told about the raining frogs, the one she always told when someone brought up railroad crossings. Someone would mention the clanging of the divider coming down in front of the rails and her ears and eyebrows would perk up.

“I was living in South Jersey,” she would always start, “with this guy named Jerry. He was a weird guy. I met him when I was out of school for a few years, after leaving Philly. He worked in a glass factory, he worked the swing shift. He was kind of a frustrated kid, didn’t really know what he was doing with himself. And neither did I.

“His number one favorite thing to do was to cruise around town, this tiny little town, in search of Indian burial grounds. It was all old Lenape territory, there were supposed to be six or seven of them, maybe. So on Friday nights, if he didn’t have to work, he would pick me up at this Mexican place I was working at, and he would carry me to these so-called graveyards. And you know, we’d do what we’d come to do, on top of what people thought was this sinister place.

“And I would have been okay with that. I mean, I like those spooky kinds of places, too. But then he would want to just fall asleep, “under the stars”, he’d say. And he would, you know? Right off. But not me. I kept imagining the ground, and what might have been under it. It gave me the creeps.

“So one night I just got up, left him there, and went walking along the road where the gravesite had been. The roads in that part of the state are always long and go in and out of the woods, and I followed it for a little while, just thinking. It was fall, getting cold, I remember. I thought: winter’s coming. I walked until I got to a railroad crossing.

“And there, right next to the railroad crossing, was this white sedan. All its lights were off, and it was parked, right there next to the tracks. I walked up to it, slowly, because it sort of freaked me out, y’know?

“But there was no one in the car. It was completely empty. There were a couple of cigarette butts in the ashtray. Where’d they go? I wondered. There wasn’t a house around for a mile in either direction.

And then, all of a sudden, the lights of a train lit up on me. I backed away a little, and the cars went by me, roaring really loud. And that’s when I felt this weird thing hit me in the stomach. The train passed by, and I looked down at it. It was a frog, almost dead. One of its legs had been half ripped off.

And that’s the way it was, all down the road. A crowd of frogs, on the road at night, all wriggling.”

And she would sit and smile and sip her drink. At times like this she would change from an awkwardly beautiful girl with an underbite and a drinking problem into a mysterious woman of the world. She would sit on her stool and be totally invincible.

“Where did the frogs come from?” someone would invariably ask.

“Maybe the train?” someone might suggest.

“Maybe frogs on the train,” she would say, shrugging. “But what kind of train carries frogs? I don’t know. Maybe they fell from the sky.”

She would let the silence settle on that one.

“Whatever it was, it seemed like a sign, and I got out of that town. So those frogs got me out of Jersey when a shitty job and a violent boyfriend couldn’t, and for that,” she would say, raising the glass, “I’m thankful.”

It was always like that. She would let those strange details, the cigarette butts and the motion of the frogs on the pavement, linger in the air, while the last desperate sentences never seemed to register in anyone’s mind.

I wanted those stories all the time that winter, but she was always too tired to tell them. I hammered away in silence.

She tried her best to stay in that apartment, but soon she started disappearing. I don’t blame her for losing track of our mission. That January was the most miserable winter imaginable. People went around in plastic parkas covered with snow and ice, like malformed polar animals. Dark advertisements leered down at us on all sides, and she went back to the bars.

The journey was always different, but it ended up the same. Our former friends would leave her stranded, or pack her into a cab she couldn’t escape from. It would pull up at our doorstep and the driver would call to me, three floors up.

“Hey, buddy, get this girl out of my cab, she don’t have any money.”

So I carried her up and laid her out on the bed, while she whispered to herself, singing snatches of songs. I undressed her carefully, and she whispered the names of the clothes as they came off, like a goodbye. “Pants,” she would say, and “sweater”, her voice wistful and sad. She was tiny with her clothes off.

And then I would start to cry, because I could imagine her doing the same to the parts of her body I loved, the same solemn and resigned sadness as she unscrewed her graceful forearm and let it fall to the floor, as she bid farewell to the curve of her slight belly that led down to her stiff black hair. “Eyes,” she might whisper, “thighs”, and “lips”. Soft words to absolve them of all blame and let them go.

 

One night, years later, I went out walking and ended up at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, sitting unfinished on Amsterdam Avenue. I was alone and freezing. I went inside.

For a moment everything was vague and shining, and behind the shimmer the sound of young voices wavering around each other.

There were boys singing. They wore white, and sang in voices so clear they were almost piercing. They must have been trained for the comforting kind of songs that are sung for congregations of grandmothers.

But the choirmaster had other designs. He was a skinny man with narrow eyes and great bushy eyebrows. His hands were angry and led into eerie territory. The boys were uncertain, but they followed.

Outside the temperature dropped, freezing bums to the sidewalk. Snow came down all over Manhattan.

When I see snow fall, as it almost never does these days, I remember those weeks in Manhattan before I was gainfully employed, when Claire and I were staying in a friend’s vacant apartment in Greenwich Village. I would wander the streets and look up at people’s windows. All my life I had been staring up at other people’s apartments, but during those frigid days, when I went along walking through my newly discovered streets, I felt like a purposeful man. I wasn’t some sad transient, looming at the edge of other people’s lives. I had a place to go.

And then, when I came home, Claire and I would watch the snow that never seemed to stop falling, flurrying across the light of the streetlamps. Tell me a story, I’d say, and then she would. “We were in a car on the highway,” she’d intone, arms wrapped around me under the blankets, lain out on the rickety, fold-out bed. “We were heading west for Bakersfield.” I smelled her hair, the scent of days spent inside, of never having to leave for anywhere else.

In the church, where I had ended up, the boys went on singing with nervous faces. I imagined the lighted windows of the city, where an endless procession of mouths were opening and closing, fingers grasping and tightening, as the heated air enveloped their bodies and kept the cold from knitting their bones together with ice. The boys sang along with all of it.

The choirmaster dropped his hands and everyone fell silent. The boys looked at each other and smiled sheepishly. Some of them gaped up at the towering ceilings. Something had happened to them and they knew it was over. But the choirmaster looked down at the ground.

And that night I left the church and went out drinking, where I met a woman who had hopped trains for a while. She had a lip ring, and was years younger. I was drunk, the bar was warm. Everything was glazed over with happiness.

“Let me tell you a train story,” I said. “It happened to a friend of mine.”

And so I went on, playing around with bones.

I often think about those boys in the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. I think about singing other people’s songs. And I think of the choirmaster, and his sad eyes on the floor.

Something beyond you moves through your mouth, and then it leaves. These things make me terrified. To think that love is someone else‘s story you keep on trying to retell, over and over again.

July, at the Riverfront

The city bulldozed the riverbank and put up a walkway running all the way down its length, from the Financial District to Wallack Park, where the ducks all marched in circles and lovers went to tell each other their open secrets. In the first week of summer the whole city came to try it out. There were joggers in spandex leggings, college students trading movie quotes, and businessmen laying in the sun, talking to each other about mortgages and basketball. The weather blessed the Riverside Planning Commission and gave sunshine to everyone.

Andrew and Carol went down to the riverside. It was her lunch break; he worked the evening shift and slept until twelve; his eyes were still narrow in the sunlight, and he hadn’t showered. She was dressed for business, but her hair was still cut at odd angles and she looked younger than the other office women, out for the weather with their salads and sandwiches.

“What do you think?” she asked him.

“Oh, I don’t know,” he said. “It looks pretty enough.”

They walked together down the path, until the asphalt drifted into the shadow of the Lincoln Bridge. Carol looked over at Andrew, the long path of his neck, the place where he had missed a spot shaving. There were some small wrinkles patterning the place where his jawline began. She lifted a hand and ran it through the hair above his ear.

“I remember what this place used to be like,” she said. “There wasn’t anything but weeds, when we used to come down.”

“The railroad still goes over there,” he said, motioning to the tracks that ran to the east of the path.

“Is that why we came down?” she asked.

“I don’t think so,” he said, smiling.

People gave them strange looks as they walked past. A few elderly women whispered to each other. They hopped off of the bank and onto the bridge pilings. It was cool and comfortable under the bridge.

“Look,” she said, pointing down at the water. “Look at the bubbles.”

He looked. There were strange bubbles, varying in size, trembling up to the surface of the water.

“What do you think’s down there?” he asked her. They could hear the vague rumble of cars overhead.

“Mafia,” she said. “They throw people in the river. They dress like normal people, like joggers, and then they sneak off to the side and throw people in.”

“Amazing,” he said, smiling. “What about those elderly women?”

“Mafia,” she said. “Mobsters in deep cover.”

He grinned. They sat down together on the pilings, and she took a stick from her pocket and poked at the flowing water.

“I remember when we used to come down here,” he said. “We used to do it on Thursday nights, after I had my late classes. We would jump over the fence and cross across the railroad tracks. I used to be scared.”

“You were scared?” she asked.

“Yeah. I never told you, but I was always afraid someone would jump up out of the grass and kill us.”

“Bums did hang out down here,” she said. “So why were we there? I can’t remember.”

“You wanted to watch the trains,” he said. “This was supposed to be the spot where you could hop them, the Citrus Line, going to Florida. Don’t you remember? That was all you ever talked about.”

“It was a long time ago,” she said, quietly. She put the stick back in her pocket.

“I remember what you used to say,” he told her. “You used to say, really seriously: one of these days I’m going to get on that train. It was funny, you were really matter-of-fact about it.”

“That is funny,” she said, not smiling.
“And I would always say that I would go with you,” he said, “if you decided to go.”

They sat together and watched the river for a minute. Someone went by on rollerblades, carrying an enormous boombox, blasting some old disco hit. Everybody has to dance, it went, in perfect endless rhythm.

“You never asked me to come,” he said. “It was always sort of a sad thing for me.”

“You wouldn’t have come along,” she said.

“I probably wouldn’t have,” he said. “I would have been terrified, of breaking my arm or getting arrested.”

“I figured that,” she said.

He clasped his hands together and nodded his head.

“Anyway,” she said, “I probably wouldn’t have gone either.”

“How do you know?” he asked.

“It doesn’t matter,” she said. “It was so long ago. I’m amazed you even remember.”

“Some things stick with you, I guess,” he said, standing up with her, getting ready to hop across to the bank. He took a quick look out to the bay. Somewhere hazy and far-off, a big cargo boat was listing in the water, waiting to drift out to sea.

They went back to the stairs, and she took both of his hands in hers and gave him a quick kiss.

“Back to work,” she said, rising up to the street. He watch her go, quick and confident in her stylish, yet sensible shoes.

He had nowhere to go for an hour or more, so he sat on a bench by the river and looked out over the factories that lined the far bank. The lunchtime crowd began to thin out, so that after twenty minutes there was no one else close by him. He thought back. It was almost possible to remember everything covered in weeds, the dirt and sand of the unused bank, and the moon overhead. He had been too terrified to notice the world as well as he should have, but there were a few thing he could recall: the sound of her Doc Martens crushing the sand, the toughness of her worker’s jeans coming off, how much his hands shook. And, of course, what she said about the trains, when they heard them start up on the other side of the tall grass, rumbling toward Florida. She’d be on them, someday.

Two men sat down close to him.

“No, no, Liberty is fine,” one of them said, “if you want your money managed by geriatrics.”

“Well,” the other one said, eating a tuna fish sandwich. “That’s your opinion.”

He lay down on the bench in the early afternoon light.  All over the city people were rendered unable to think by the blooming sun. It was too hot to remember or to worry. Everyone sat on benches, chattered on keyboards, waited and dreamed of the evening, opening up with possibility.