City of God (40 page)

—We know of the Earthly City and the City of God, but there is a third city, the City of Birds, at Valdemingomez, an enormous garbage dump north of Madrid. After you do the Prado, do Valdemingomez, it is a great urban aviary, its population of storks, hawks, egrets, linnets, kites, jackdaws, ravens, condors, and turkey buzzards, when aroused, can circle Valdemingomez and, with a boost from the trade winds, wing-whiff its miasma of sulfurous gases as far east as Rome. The birds of Valdemingomez don't migrate, why would they? Summer and winter, here they stay, over a hundred thirty species of them, even a few accidentals from the tropics—the albatross, the blue-footed booby—have come to look things over. Eggs are laid in old Big Mac containers, nests are lined with cassette tape, the songbirds flitter in and out of rusty cans, grackles huddle in TV cabinets, gulls bomb old sofas with the clamshells of paella, and when flocks of rock doves go cooing and pecking over fields of chicken bones, the bones clack like train tracks, clink like wind chimes, shiver and shirr like shuffled cards, bongo and bop, and chickuh-chick-chick like a hot marimba band. Special rates for ornithologists.

—Of the Sunday in Central Park, I remember too that the boys found a brown ant population in a patch of dirt under a tree and I hunkered down with them to watch these infinitesimal creatures, each not an eighth of an inch long, go about their business building an underground city. Two or three different trails of them radiated from the mound, and ants coming and going got in each other's way, sometimes bumping. They waved their antennae about as if they'd never seen another one such as themselves before, though that was clearly not the case, the case being that some sort of chemical messages were being synapsed back and forth before each continued on its way or,
sometimes, reversed itself and went back the way it had come. Ants don't look for that much out of life. They may be brainless, but nothing alive is more purposive, disciplined, and with a stronger work ethic, their lives are all work, even the queen's, perhaps especially, down there under the mound where we couldn't see her. Lacking brains, ants make do with genetically programmed little nervous sym-pathies that allow them to contribute to the general welfare. Whatever their role in the society, as egg tenders, warriors, guards, food gatherers, they are all working for the queen, preserving and protecting her as an egg-laying monarch whose fecundity determines the future of the society. Yet any given ant in its life probably never sees the queen, or more than its immediate confreres, although if it circulates more widely than that, certainly with no memory of having met any specific fellow ant before. Yet ant by ant, body by body, and without any visible central decision-making mechanism, they seem to take instruction from one another, antenna to antenna, and are unified in their responses. . . almost like parallel processors, or in fact our own cortical structure of neurons. They each comprise one cell of a group brain, unlike our own in being unlocatable, somewhere above and around them, an invisible organ of thought that is beyond the capacity of any one of them to understand.

And these are the simplest, most modest kinds of ants, as I explained to the kids, these are domesticated Central Park ants, the house sparrows of the ant species. There are others in the jungles and rain forests and veldts of the world, big ones, that build leaf bridges in trees, cultivate crops, float across rivers on rafts of their own devising, march, make war, eat meat, bite like hell. They are ants that have a patriotic sense of their anthood, if not a degree of self-esteem.

And then everything was all right again, the adults having come over to see what we were looking at, and enjoying the rap.

But now I speculate re the ants' invisible organ of aggregate thought. . . if, in a city park of broad reaches, winding paths, roadways, and lakes, you can imagine seeing on a warm and sunny Sunday afternoon the random and unpredictable movement of great numbers of human beings in the same way. . . if you watch one person, one couple, one family, a child, you can assure yourself of the integrity of the individual will and not be able to divine what the next moment will bring. But when the masses are celebrating a beautiful day in the
park in a prescribed circulation of activities, the wider lens of thought reveals nothing errant, nothing inconstant or unnatural to the occasion. And if someone acts in a mutant un-park manner, alarms go off, the unpredictable element, a purse snatcher, a gun wielder, is isolated, surrounded, ejected, carried off as waste. So that while we are individually and privately dyssynchronous, moving in different ways, for different purposes, in different directions, we may at the same time comprise, however blindly, the pulsing communicating cells of an urban over-brain. The intent of this organ is to enjoy an afternoon in the park, as each of us street-grimy urbanites loves to do. In the backs of our minds when we gather for such days, do we know this? How much of our desire to use the park depends on the desires of others to do the same? How much of the idea of a park is in the genetic invitation on nice days to reflect our massive neuromorphology? There is no central control mechanism telling us when and how to use the park. That is up to us. But when we do, our behavior there is reflective, we can see more of who we are because of the open space accorded to us, and it is possible that it takes such open space to realize in simple form the ordinary identity we have as one multicellular culture of thought that is always there, even when, in the comparative blindness of our personal selfhood, we are flowing through the streets at night or riding under them, simultaneously, as synaptic impulses in the metropolitan brain.

Is this a stretch? But think of the contingent human mind, how fast it snaps onto the given subject, how easily it is introduced to an idea, an image that it had not dreamt of thinking of a millisecond before.. . . Think of how the first line of a story yokes the mind into a place, a time, in the time it takes to read it. How you can turn on the radio and suddenly be in the news, and hear it and know it as your own mind's possession in the moment's firing of a neuron. How when you hear a familiar song your mind adopts its attitudinal response to life before the end of the first bar. How the opening credits of a movie provide the parameters of your emotional life for its ensuing two hours.. . . How all experience is instantaneous and instantaneously felt, in the nature of ordinary mind-filling revelation. The permeable mind, contingently disposed for invasion, can be totally overrun and occupied by all the characteristics of the world, by everything that is the case, and by the thoughts and propositions of all
other minds considering everything that is the case. . . as instantly and involuntarily as the eye fills with the objects that pass into its line of vision.

So we, too, are subjected to a kind of quantum weirdness, defined in our indeterminacy by how we are measured. . .

—Sunday

In my new vestments, blue blazer, charcoal slacks, and a gray turtleneck, I launch from the cement dock and high-wire it over the river on the Roosevelt Island Tramway. Windy day, rocks a bit. Are you up here, Lord?

Nobody in the crowded car notices that I am no longer a priest.

East River estuary, heavily tidal, inviting, aglitter with sunlight.

Why am I doing this? Apparently Sunday is still subject to the old urges, the residual feelings. But mostly I wanted to see that one dying lunger, name of McIlvaine.

Not that it was easy, deciding to come out as a layperson.

The hospice, run by the city for indigent terminals, a low yellow-brick building on the south end of the island.

Gulls in a line on the bulwark breasting the wind. The surging currents look unswimmable, suggestive of exile. Confirmed by the view across the river of the immense risen wall of Manhattan. At its foot, the FDR Drive traffic crawls along ant-file. And from this vantage the Fifty-ninth Street underbridge throws a broad shadow across the river as it soars past on its way to Queens.

In the lobby people wave, nod, as they always have. “Cool threads, Father,” says a security guard. One of the aides asks if I have a heavy date.

Not to worry, right, Lord? They think we're still talking.

I climb the stairs to the men's floor, the third. Sound of my new loafers, bought too large, clopping on the stair treads. That and my loud breathing.

You walk into a ward and are met by the generic blank stares of the pre-dead. People dying retreat into themselves. Everything of interest in life seems foolish and pointless to them now. Everything vital—the
sun in the window, the sympathetic visitor, the nurses who suppose a continuing daily life—is a matter of deep, painkilling indifference.

Old McIlvaine, dying, was not of the pre-dead. Nor was he among the pious few who came out of themselves to pray with the father, grip his hand.

Not this old man.

Bed after bed. Some new faces, some old faces, some rasping away with noses pointed in the air, their mouths open. Lord, don't have taken him, let him still be here.

His anticlericalism was gentle. If I wanted to pray, he told me, go right ahead, if I wanted to read a psalm, he would listen with a smile. Made these concessions, as if in some instinctive understanding of the trouble I was in. “That's very pretty, Father.. . . If you say so, Father.. . . I wouldn't want to disillusion you, Father.”

A newspaperman, a city reporter all his working life, moving on every time a paper closed under him.
World-Telegram, Journal-American, Herald-Tribune, Daily Mirror,
God knows what others as the papers hyphenated themselves out of existence. He attributed the closings to himself:
“I am become death, the shatterer of newsrooms. Waiting that hour that ripens to their doom.”

He is not where I last saw him, do they move people around, why would they do that?. . . and then I hear the unmistakable cough of the lunger, it seems to come up from the city sewer system, cavernous and gurgly, gravel-spewing.

Here he is, next bed to the end, still alive, though more emaciated than ever, the nose even bonier, the eyes and cheeks like sinkholes, the incongruously full head of gray hair in a wilted pompadour on the pillow.

“Mr. McIlvaine!”

The skeletal hand rises in greeting, he puts a finger to his lips. “We're doing our hymns,” he says in his juicy whisper.

Only now do I register the nun sitting beside McIlvaine's bed, a young sister in an attractive contemporary habit. She is strumming a guitar and in a thin, lovely soprano she sings

Oh, shine on, shine on harvest moon, up in the sky.

I ain't had no lovin' since January, February, June
or July. . .

I'm bewildered, so intently in my own mind, I hadn't seen or heard her. McIlvaine's voice has summoned up an actual pitch, he stares at the ceiling and growls along in his fashion, his eyes shining. On the last line and without missing a beat, they swing into

The bells are ringing for me and my gal

the parson's waiting for me and my gal. . .

which melds into

There's a somebody I'm longing to see.

I hope that he

turns out to be

Someone who'll watch over me. . .

Clearly they've done this before. The nun sings with her eyes closed. She has to be Hail Marying in her mind. McIlvaine presses on. A fierce humor is carried on his sepulchral voice. The duo is now into “Sentimental Journey.”

I look around the ward and see from the heads on the pillows an uncharacteristic alertness, something other than the generic blank stares of the pre-deads. . . here a gaze back at me, there something like a smile, and in one bed, a living cadaver, completely still and staring upward without expression, but his hand, raised barely above the bedclothes, waving in time to the music. . .

Lord, what have you done to me?

Now McIlvaine's motioning for me to sing: “Follow the bouncing ball,” he says, and because this is the man I have chosen to hear my confession, I do, adding my baritone to the soprano and the growl, one golden oldie after another, and feeling the same love for You, tears welling hot in my throat, as when in the pulpit, with my congregation, I belted out,
A mighty fortress is our God. . .