I turned a corner and someone came out of an old hotel and ran in sputtering little steps to my side. It was the girl Skippy, Happy Valley’s emissary, original bearer of the plain brown package. I kept walking and she remained alongside. We headed south and east into narrower streets, the city’s older precincts, less here of surfaces, of broad lines, the women pinned in little windows, forty years flowing through an isolated second, their true lives taking place in a European pastureland. A neon digit, sizzling a bit, hung lopsided from the front of a luncheonette. It grew colder as the wind gripped in and the island tapered toward the bay. Secure I felt beneath my sweaters. Skippy coughing.
The oldest immigrants lived in tower blocks, a long way from fertile pavement, these streets now ruled by darker races of the plains. It was early afternoon and soon to rain, nondeliverance in the air, a chemical smell from the river. The bridges were cruelly beautiful in this weather, gray ladies nearly dead to all the poetry written in their names. Tall black kids in sneakers charged up out of the subway, cutting left and right across a street, fast-breaking, three on two, one of them turning now in the air, ancient stick-fingers tapping a parking sign. A man demanded money, sitting on the arm of an abandoned chair, its springs exposed. I kept forgetting Skippy was with me, then would turn to see her, body bent forward in a coughing spasm, head pointed, moving like a dog in water. We walked behind two resplendent little women wearing plastic liners over their hats, coats and shoes, one of them loudly cataloguing various items along the sidewalk.
NEWSPAPER VOMIT SHIT GLASS CARDBOARD BOTTLE SHIT SPIT NEWSPAPER GLASS SHIT GARBAGE BOTTLE CARTON BOTTLE PAPER STOCKING SHIT GARBAGE SHIT GARBAGE GARBAGE SHIT
In barbershops Latin men stood talking in button-down shirts with collars open and sleeves folded two cuff-lengths to the lower forearm, apparel of an earlier Madison Avenue, that somber street now freshly regimented, paunchy and gay in Kool-Aid fiesta colors and Spanish sideburns. We headed west from the bridge districts and reached Chinatown, where Skippy seemed confused, apparently thinking this was San Francisco, and had to calm herself by standing for a while before the window of a fish market, watching a man guide a jagged blade up the belly of a trout as bits of fishy insides dripped onto the flaked ice. We hurried into the Criminal Court Building for warmth and sweets. The lobby was crowded and noisy, a chorus of the accused, the counter-accused, the victimized, and the lawyers, families and friends of all of these. With it all, more irate than the rest, came that special whine of minor violators. Everybody was smoking, shouting, biting down on stony Chiclets, sucking cough drops, everybody but the pimps, regal and absolute, who merely scanned the landscape, property-hunting. Behind his counter the blind newsdealer loomed as justice does, something of a self-parody, appearing to sense every nuance in the hall. He lived through his fingers, working their heat into every coin, tapping out change for the doomed and for the brothers-in-law of the doomed. We bought some candy and stood in a corner. Short purposeful men crossed the lobby on their way to and from duty, each slightly overweight and carrying the Daily News folded under one arm, civil servants, custodians of some kind, herders of jury members from room to room. I licked chocolate from the heel of my hand. A family of blacks surrounded a pustular lawyer, crowding his panicked grin.
Outside we saw a man with hands to eyes in the shape of binoculars and he was slowly turning on a street comer, clouds, taxis, birds, detectives, all nautically viewed by this revolving man, once drunk perhaps but well beyond that now, persevering, in full command, sensing he had found a way of dealing with the world. We walked down to the Battery, past all the forty-story objects. Wind seemed to drop directly down the flanks of buildings before ripping along the narrow streets and we passed men clutching their black hats and moving shoulder first in quick bursts of locomotion and sometimes even backward, ten or twelve men at a time, their briefcases filled with mergers, all walking backward into the wind. A rag man at the edge of the park retched into his scarf, working himself up to a moment of vast rhetoric. His seemed the type of accusation aimed at those too constricted in spirit to see the earth as a place for gods to grow, a theater of furious encounters between prophets of calamity and simple pedestrians trying to make the light.
HAND FOOT ARM GOD NOSE TOE FACE GOD LEG ARM LEG GOD SEE IT SEE IT RAIN TWAIN CAIN PAIN BRAIN SLAIN STAIN GAIN VAIN SEE IT SEE IT MOUTH EYE TEETH GOD NECK CHEST GOD SEE IT IN THE DARKNESS AND THE LIGHT
Harbors reveal a city’s power, its lust for money and filth, but strangely through the haze what I distinguished first was the lone mellow promise of an island, tender retreat from straight lines, an answering sea-mound. This was the mist’s illusion and the harbor’s pound of flesh. Skippy tugged at licorice with her teeth, the black strands expanding between hand and jaw. She had a shaded face and she was ageless, a wanderer in cities, one of those children found after every war, picking in the rubble for scraps of food the gaunt dogs have missed. Such minds are unreclaimable but at the same time hardly dangerous and governments acknowledge this fact by providing millions of acres of postwar rubble. On our way to find a bus stop we saw the subway crowds drop into openings in the earth, on their way up the length of Manhattan or under rivers to the bourns and orchards, there to be educated in false innocence, in the rites of isolation. Perhaps the only ore of truth their lives possessed was buried in this central rock. Beyond its limits was their one escape, a dreamless sleep, no need to fear the dare to be exceptional. Dozens of pigeons swarmed around a woman tossing bread crumbs. She was in a wheelchair held at rest by a young boy, both on fire with birds, the pigeons skidding on the air, tracing the upward curve of the old woman’s arm. I watched her eyes climb with the birds, all her losses made a blessing in a hand’s worth of bread.
Pigeons and meningitis. Chocolate and mouse droppings. Licorice and roach hairs. Vermin on the bus we took uptown. I wondered how long I’d choose to dwell in these middle ages of plague and usury, living among traceless men and women, those whose only peace was in shouting ever more loudly. Nothing tempted them more than voicelessness. But they shouted. Transient population of thunderers and hags. They dragged through wet streets speaking in languages older than the stones of cities buried in sand. Beds and bedbugs. Men and lice. Gonococcus curling in the lap of love.
We rode past an urban redevelopment project. Machine-tooth shovels clawed past half-finished buildings stuck in mud, tiny balconies stapled on. All spawned by realtor-kings who live in the sewers. Skippy coughed blood onto the back of her hand. The bus panted over cobblestones and I studied words drawn in fading paint on the sides of buildings. Brake and front end service. Wheel alignment. Chain and belt. Pulleys, motors, gears. Sheet-metal machinery. Leather remnants. Die cutting and precision measuring. Cuttings and job lots. Business machines. Threads, woolens, laces. Libros en español. We left by the back door and Skippy went back to whatever she was doing (or dealing) in that hotel. Rain blew across the old streets. The toothless man was still at his cart, a visitation from sunken regions, not caring who listened or passed, his cries no less cadenced than the natural rain.
YOU’RE BUYING I’M SELLING YAPPLES YAPPLES YAPPLES
The bed remains at the center of the room. Visitors are rare now and I begin to feel I’m sinking into history. After Essex Street I spent weeks of deep peace. I lived in true eunuchry, bed-watching, forced to respond to nothing. Having no words for the things around me affected even my movements across the room. I walked more slowly, as though in fear of objects, all things with names unknown to me. Some of the careless passion people feel for unteachable children began to communicate itself from one part of my mind to another. I was unreasonably happy, subsisting in blessed circumstance, thinking of myself as a kind of living chant. I made interesting and original sounds. I looked out the window and moaned (quietly) at the lumbering trucks below and at the painters and sculptors now occupying windows across the way, placid faces suspended over Great Jones Street. But whatever else it was, the drug was less than lasting in it
s effect. Mouth was the first word to reach me, dropping from one speech mechanism to the other. It happened while I was looking at my face in the mirror, examining its strange parts, hanu, ous, leb, oog, nakka, and when I opened my mouth out came the word for that part, word instead of sound, mouth, startling me. More words followed and when I spoke them aloud the sound waves reached my brain in proper coded notes and I was able to comprehend what had passed between my tongue and inner ear. Soon all was normal, a return to prior modes. This was my double defeat, first a chance not taken to reappear in the midst of people and forces made to my design and then a second enterprise denied, alternate to the first, permanent withdrawal to that unimprinted level where all sound is silken and nothing erodes in the mad weather of language. Several weeks of immense serenity. Then ended. But I see no reason to announce the news. Let viscid history suck me down a bit. When the season is right I’ll return to whatever is out there. It’s just a question of what sound to make or fake. Meanwhile the rumors accumulate. Kidnap, exile, torture, self-mutilation and death. The most beguiling of the rumors has me living among beggars and syphilitics, performing good works, patron saint of all those men who hear the river-whistles sing the mysteries and who return to sleep in wine by the south wheel of the city.
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Don DeLillo, Great Jones Street (Contemporary American Fiction)
(Series: # )
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