Remembering (7 page)

And all of this was characteristic of Nathan, who had known a war that was his country's and his time's, and who had made a peace that was his own. He entirely lacked the strenuous dissatisfactions with self and circumstance and other people that had been so much a part of the bond between Andy and Elton. He was Andy's third cousin on Andy's father's side, and he was, in a fashion, the son-in-law of Andy's mother's father, Mat Feltner. He was a good, quiet man, as if he were Mat's blood son as well as the husband of his onetime daughter-in-law. There was an accuracy of generosity in Nathan that Andy wondered at, and no nonsense. He said little and spoke well. And Andy began to live in a kind of fear of him. That clamp of Nathan's hand, by which Nathan had meant to include him, excluded him. Because he could not answer it, it lived upon his flesh like a burn, the brand of his exile.

As though Nathan is standing beside him now in the little dark room, Andy turns away. He begins to dress, avoiding the mirror now, fearfully, as if, looking in, he might see himself with the head of a toad. He does not think, but only feels. He does not think of the origin of the pain he feels, or of the anger hollow and dry in his heart.

And now, dressing, he hurries to get out. He has begun to hear again the night noises of the city. He has known the city since his first travels, nearly twenty years ago, and he feels it around him now, standing stepped and graceful on its heights, and around it the always arriving sea, the sea and the sky reaching westward, past the land's edge, out of sight.

He darkens the room and goes out into the dim hallway and the interior quiet of the building, away from the street sounds. The long hall is carpeted, and he goes silently past the shut doors of rooms where people are sleeping or absent, who would know which? There is an almost palpable unwaking around him as he goes past the blank doors, intent upon his own silence, as though, his presence known to nobody, he is not there himself.

At the elevator he stops and looks at the button saying “Down.” But he does not push it. He does not want to hear the jolt of machinery as the elevator begins to rise, or the long groan of its rising, or the jolt of its stopping, the doors clanking open. He does not want to enter that little box and see it close upon him and be carried passively downward in it.

He goes on along the corridor and lets himself out into the stairwell. He has made no noise, but now his steps echo around him as he descends
the rightward turning stairs, five floors, to the lobby, where the carpet silences them again.

The lobby is deserted. The empty chairs sit in conversational groups of two or three, their cushions dented. There is no one behind the desk. The clock over the desk says twenty after four.

Remembering as if far back, he knows what he did with it. He stood up there in the room like a graven image of himself, telling over the catalogue of his complaints. There is a country inside him where his complaints live and do their work, where they invite him to come, offering their enticements and tidbits, the self-justifications of anger, the self-justifications of self-humiliation, the coddled griefs.

When he looks at the clock again, it is almost four-thirty.
This is happening to my soul. This is a part of the life history of my soul.
Outside in the street a car passes, stops for the light at the corner, its engine idling, and then turns and goes on. He must go. He must get outside. He is filled suddenly with panic, as though the doors have begun to grow rapidly smaller.

In the street the wind comes fresh against him, smelling a little of the sea. He stands outside the hotel entrance, the street all his own for the moment. Off in the distance he can hear a siren baying, and then another joining it. A taxi eases up to the intersection nearby, waits for the light, and eases on. Two or three blocks away a garbage compressor utters a loud yawn followed by something like a swallow. And underneath the noises there is a silence as of the sleep of almost everybody, and beside or within the silence a low mechanical hum.

A frail-looking woman passes by, drunk and walking unsteadily but with an attempt anyway at dignity, holding her jacket closed at the throat as if she is cold. Watching her, he feels his silence. An unknown world would have to be crossed for him to speak to her. And yet something in him for which he has no word cries out toward her, for the world between them fails in their silence, who are alone and heavy laden and without rest.
This is the history of souls. This is the earthly history of immortal souls.
He begins to walk slowly past the deserted entries, the darkened windows. A truck passes, shifting into a lower gear as the grade steepens. Somewhere there is an outcry, a man's voice, distressed and urgent, unintelligible. A car engine starts. The garbage truck again raises its wail.

Other night walkers appear, meet him and pass and go on, or go by on the cross streets. They are far between, alone. He can hear their steps, each one, echoing in the spaces around him. It is the time of night, he
thinks, when the dying die —
O greens, and fields, and trees, farewell, farewell!
— and the dead lie stillest in their graves, when the dying who are not yet to die begin again to live.

A man overtakes and passes him, carrying a lunch box, walking fast. He meets a woman with long blonde hair, dressed in leotards, spike heels, and a zebra-striped cloth coat. He sees a couple crossing an intersection ahead of him, young and beautiful, their arms around each other, going home. He imagines them risen from their fallen clothes like resurrected souls, stepping toward each other open-armed.

The city at night, he thinks, is like the forest at night, when most creatures have no need to stay awake, but some do, and that is well, for the place itself must never sleep. Some must carry wakefulness through the sleep of others.

He is walking northward, along Mason, toward Aquatic Park. He wants to reach the city's edge. He longs for the verge and immensity of the continent's meeting with the sea. Stopping now and then to listen and to turn and look down into the street behind him, he climbs slowly up the steepening hill. It is shadowy and dim between the streetlights; above him, above the building tops, the sky is dark, its still spaces measured out by stars and the dwindling moon. He pauses by a tiny garden behind a wall, dusky and still amid the buildings; it contains a few dark shrubs and flowers whose pale blossoms seem to float in the shadows. A bird is singing there, and another somewhere toward the top of the hill. The dawn must be beginning now; there must be a little paling in the eastern sky, invisible yet within the city's bright horizon. But at the next cross street, looking eastward across the bay, he sees a cloud with just the first suggestion of daylight touching its underside.

At the top of the hill the Fairmont is brightly lighted. The pavement in front has just been washed, and the lights shine in the wet. Andy stops on the corner to look. He would like to go into the lobby and see it, opulent and empty so early in the morning. He almost does so, and then stops, remembering himself: a one-handed man, unshaven and carelessly dressed. He does not want some elegant-mannered doorman or clerk to ask him, “May I
help
you?” He stands and looks and goes by, and on across
the hilltop and onto the downward slant of the street. Behind him a robin is singing in the foliage of one of the cropped sycamores in front of the Pacific Union, and he can hear a street sweeper whistling prettily over the harsh strokes of his broom.

There are trees now, here and there along the street, their crowns dark. As he passes under one of them a bird begins to sing in it, a complex lyric sung as if forgotten all through the night and now remembered. Now wherever trees are, singing is in them. Where the buildings are the city is, and is quiet. Where the trees are the world is, and a sweet worldsong is singing itself in the dark.

He is a walker in the dark, excluded from the songs around him.

Taxis are creeping along the empty streets almost silently, like beasts of prey. A baby cries, and high in a dark wall to his left a window is suddenly lighted. At the corner of Jackson Street he stops while a noisy Volkswagen bus pauses at the intersection, but when the bus shifts gears and goes on, Andy continues to stand still, looking down Jackson at the bay. He can see the lights of the Bay Bridge stepping out into the air above the dark water. He can hear the cable car machinery humming under the street. A man in a hooded shirt, walking a dog, crosses Jackson and goes on up the hill, his steps echoing in the quiet. Andy is filled with a yearning toward this place. He imagines himself living here. He would have a small apartment up here on the hillside, a cliff dwelling, looking out over the bay. He would live alone, and slowly he would come to know a peacefulness and gentleness in his own character, having nobody to quarrel with. He would have a job that he could walk to in the morning and walk home from in the evening. It would be a job that would pay him well and give him nothing to worry about before he went to it or after he left it. In his spare time he would visit the museums. He would dress well and eat well. He would learn Japanese and spend his vacations in Japan. He would become a student of Japanese culture and art. He would bring back pottery and paintings. His apartment would be a place of refuge, quiet and orderly, full of beautiful things. In his travels he would meet beautiful, indolent, slow-speaking women as solitary and independent as himself, who would not wish to know him well.

But he reminds himself of himself. Something else in him is raging at him: “Damn you! Damn you!” And he says then lucidly to his mind, “Yes, you sorry fool, be still!” For the flaw in all that dream is himself, the little hell of himself alone.

The cable hums under the street. The bridge swings its great stride out into the dark. Now the city parcels itself out in his hearing: the hum of the cable almost underfoot, and in the distance the hum of the night-waking of the whole city. Except for those sounds near and far, for the moment it is quiet, and he can hear the birds singing wherever there are trees. The birds brood or dream over their song, as if the song knows of the coming light that the birds have not yet suspected. The time is neither night nor morning.

He reminds himself of himself.