The Boy Detective (8 page)

One photograph in the museum showed TR as a boy about my age then, with shiny blond hair and wearing a formal little jacket. Another showed him at age eight, looking out of a window on Union Square at Lincoln's funeral cortege. Never would I have served as a sidekick to any other detective, but I gladly would have been his, at least while we both were children. My fearless playmate, both of us lost in gallant fantasies.

But now I see my mother signaling that it is time to leave, and the two of us, our separate tours complete, smiling to each other at the museum door, proceed to walk home in the rain.

 

I
T DIDN'T NEED
to be TR. I would have been happy with any worthy friend and partner, but I never had one. Guys I knew, and they knew me, and we were friends in the casual sense of the word. What I longed for was a real cohort, someone with whom to follow suspects or write songs or put on plays, an imaginative mind to keep company with my own and to abet and improve my imagination with his. Detectives sometimes have partners, like Sam Spade's Miles Archer, whose murder drives the moral issue of the story, but who, when it comes down to it, was just another name painted on the glass of the door, easily scraped off. That's not the sort of partner I had in mind. I wanted someone to share wonder and bright days with, and burdens, too, I guess, though the thought of sharing my burdens with another person also seemed unfair, since everyone has enough of his own. Shoulder to shoulder. Like a teammate in basketball, and you never have to look where he is on the court, because you know where he is and where he will be—in position for a look-away pass.

In college I found such a friend in Peter Weissman. I knew exactly where he would be on the court, and I know it to this day. Then, we did write songs and plays together, and we played on the same teams, and we laughed at the same nonsense. It would have been especially good to have known Pete in the detective years—to begin each open day with the question “What shall we do now?” And while asking that same question to myself as I went it alone had its many rewards, wouldn't it have been satisfying to have someone with you who could come up with an adventurous answer.

A child went forth every day, and the first object he looked upon, that object he became. So every day I looked upon the park and became the park, the first object I saw in the morning and the last I saw at night. The gated garden of my heart greeted its counterpart. The smudge that passed for my soul arranged itself to accommodate self-satisfied statues and orderly people. And the patches of lawn. A stone urn here and there. The obligations. The savage courtesies. And in the middle, a prisoner tree reaching up and out for sunlight. Warden, we can't eat this food. Hey! What do you know! I'm going to get off scot-free. I'm going to walk.

 

A
ND SO WE
WALK—
up and down the avenues, past the city's vertical villages, where most of the people do most of the living. “The celestial ennui of apartments.” That is how Wallace Stevens saw them. And here they are, layer after layer of apartments, and the turmoil therein, and the schemes, the celebrations, the resolve and remorse. But ennui? I don't know. The woman in
King Kong
who was sleeping, minding her own business, when the ape reached in and snatched her out of her bed and tossed her to her death, random, casual. The woman in the dark nightgown. Was that ennui? Hardly. In the older apartment houses around Gramercy Park, and on lower Fifth, each apartment seems a drawer in a jewel box, solid and intact. In the newer buildings, the apartments seem to move laterally, as if they were light shows shuffling and sliding between and away from one another. Paper thin walls. The TVs blast color in high definition, more clearly defined than in life. I look straight up to observe the humming hive, but tonight Visigoths seem to have raided the fortress and no life is on display. Only one man, alone on a penthouse balcony.

Have you read Ray Bradbury's “There Will Come Soft Rains”? The story's title comes from a poem by Sara Teasdale, and both pieces are about the end of the world brought about by people's self-destructive impulses. In Bradbury, a California house is shown with all its machines turned on and working, but the people have disappeared. Maybe that's what happened to this apartment house tonight. A limited nuclear holocaust.

Or the residents may be lying down, so I cannot see them from my vantage point on the street. My voyeur's vantage point. They may be screwing or sleeping. And they remain celestial in Stevens's heaven, until that hairy hand, the size of a barn, reaches in the window, plucks them from the sheets, and flings them, nightgown and all, into my waiting arms.

 

A
S FOR THE
man standing at the waist-high Plexiglas wall of the penthouse balcony, he appears to track the stars, but he is thinking of her. She has been asleep since eight. She sleeps a great deal lately, heavy with painkillers. Her voice is faint, like someone heard through a wall. He makes attempts to soothe her. It'll be okay, he tells her. OK. OK. In a few months we'll be driving up to Connecticut again, taking the boat out. He used to believe himself when he said things like that.

Now he thinks of the penthouse apartment behind him, all twelve rooms dark. He wonders how much bigger it will seem when she goes. He wonders how it would have been if they had had children, if he should get a smaller apartment in the same building, or on the other side of town, or in another town, or if he will remarry. He thinks he will get an apartment on a lower floor, nearer the street.

A story he never read, by Dino Buzzati, involves a hospital where the least serious cases are assigned to the top floor and the most serious cases, those expected to die, are assigned to the floor on the ground level. Buzatti's story is about a man who enters the hospital suffering from a mild case of flu, and who is assigned to the topmost floor. But soon something goes wrong with the plumbing on that floor, and so the man is asked if he would mind moving down a floor. On that floor they find there are not enough beds, so again the man is forced to move down. This pattern recurs, floor after floor, until the man who entered the hospital with the flu lies motionless on the lower level, gravely ill.

She coughs twice, then three times, then is quiet again. He remains unmoving on the penthouse balcony. He does not turn his head. In a kind of chorus, like a chant, the rooms of the apartment call his name. They say, we will miss you when you both are gone. You were kind to us, generous. It was good to have you around. But perhaps it is all for the best. The penthouse probably was too big for you, too much for just the two of you, you and the missus.

 

G
LASS PUNCH BOWL
of a night. I step across an oil slick that easily might be mistaken for a small puddle, when I am less alert. But something about tonight, the cold, sharpens one's senses. I detect the moon where it attempts to hide behind four black mules who (Godknowshow) have trudged up there beside it. When I approach the Dutch doors of a garbage can, I do not enter. But, on a night like this, that is my choice. On a night like this, I have a heart for everything, including, especially, you. To say nothing of the Holy Ghost and the duck (from the fable of the same name) at the rectory connected with the Church of the Transfiguration, known as the “Little Church around the Corner,” at Twenty-ninth Street, which has been around since 1849 and yet has just gone up before my eyes in a confusion of snowflakes. So, to say nothing of it, I won't.

 

W
HO COULD TIRE
of New York? Dr. Johnson said that anyone who tires of London tires of life.
London?
Was he kidding? The roses in the window of an old bar and grill. The stick marks on the sidewalk made when the cement was still wet. The courage of small birds. The courage of people coming from work, going to work. Sometimes, when I drive in from Long Island, before teaching, I pull off to the side, stop, and watch. I close the car windows and put on a CD of John Lewis of the Modern Jazz Quartet, playing a souped-up version of Bach. Or I play the Rach Three, so that my fellow citizens may go about their errands to the accompaniment of Rachmaninoff. The Rach Three moves as they move, alternately melancholy, sprightly, sweet, bittersweet, aggressive, bombastic, sad, and exultant. How brave are these people. Rachmaninoff weeps without tears.

The city does not exist without people walking in it. Does not exist, I say. And if you doubt me, recall those scenes in science fiction movies that attempt to show the end of the world. For the scenes to be persuasive, the cameras do not go to the mountains or to the seashore, both of which can do quite well without human company. Show the Rockies as they would look after a nuclear blast, and the picture would be no different from an ordinary spring day. But when the moviemakers seek to indicate total and absolute lifelessness, they shoot the empty city, and it's almost always New York. Deprived of people, the place is lunar. The buildings look lost. The empty streets look lost. Where people once defined the space, merely by walking here and there, space no longer is.

This is strange, is it not? People walking create the space in which they walk. The walk lays out its own street. Does this mean that when the walkers are removed, the city itself no longer exists? That the space they defined is unreal? And if that is so, no wonder the city feels like a dream. Why, man, it is a dream. I told you so.

See there, pal? If you blur your vision, the soldiers' uniforms become their wars. And instead of merely watching the soldiers on leave as they walk here on Eighteenth and Broadway, you see them in dangerous territories where they earn their stripes, riding in armored MRAPs, in olive, yellow, and brown places where the natives plant IEDs in their path. Not camouflaged in front of Paragon sporting goods, they stand out in a crowd. Earlier, when I passed her, I should have saluted. Even if she blushed or rushed to get by, I should have saluted for the very patch of land that became her uniform. Even if she giggled.

 

'T
IS OF THEE
, my country, that I sing, feeling in love with it as ever yet estranged these days, removed from politics and policies, more than when we were in Vietnam, more than when we were in Cambodia, out of it, like a guy suddenly flush, who jiggles the change in his pocket, looking for someone to give it to, and finding no takers, shrugs.

I was in Cambodia, too, not in it exactly but next door, at the Khao I Dang refugee camp in southern Thailand, on another case, talking to children who had escaped Pol Pot's work camps. Some had buried their parents, digging with their little hands. Many had been tortured. In the refugee camp they danced the water drop dance to entertain the visiting journalists. Outside the tent rose a small Golgotha of prosthetic limbs. The weather was inclement. The rain would explode, soaking us from top to bottom, clothing clinging to our bodies. And just when you thought you might go under and drown, the sun would blast the rain away and drape you in a dry heat. You stood where you had stood, unwrinkled as you were before the rains. I felt at home there. Awake. Alive.

America is a detective story, is it not? It runs from hope to crime to pursuit to justice to regeneration, and back to hope. I've always had a special taste for the beginnings of detective stories, when we come upon our hero, who is either glum and disheveled or elegant and cocky, doing nothing but waiting to be called into action. He receives a client. Or the cops need his help. Off he goes, from crime to pursuit to justice to regeneration. But before all that, oh! That first blush of hope, when the case is laid before him like the shores before the sailing ships, and the promise of adventure and decency and virtue is as innocent as daylight. Our private eye has been engaged to solve the most pressing, important problem in the world. He is Einstein. He is Darwin. Once he accomplishes his mission, nothing ever will be the same. He is Columbus.

 

W
HAT IF THEY
had fallen off the flat earth? The early explorers, I mean, who were afraid their tall ships would fall off the flat earth if they sailed to what they supposed was a new world, but sailed anyway, thinking what have we got to lose? Wild men, crazy men, desperados, cutthroats. How could it not be worth a high-stakes gamble for lowlife like that? A chance at riches, homes of their own in a paradisiac place, with a native woman, perhaps, naked from the waist up, red flowers in her hair, black comforting eyes. A second chance at life, just like Lazarus. Who would not risk falling off the flat earth for such a payoff?

But what if, in fact, they had fallen off the earth, which, as they had feared, was flat as a pancake—their great sails ballooned with wind, plowing straight ahead and then straight down, as if they'd tumbled from a kitchen shelf, into night forever? Imagine that, won't you, as I recall an astronomy professor who gave a lecture at the Smithsonian some years ago, about a mystery concerning the human race. He stood at one end of the stage holding an orange, which he called the sun. Then he walked to the other end, holding a speck of dust, which he called the earth. He stood silent for a moment before saying, as if to himself: “Either we are alone in the universe, or we are not alone. I find both propositions equally unbelievable.” By the way, did you know that the word
planet
derives from the ancient Greek verb
planasthai,
meaning “to wander”? Well, there you go.

To return to the hypothesis then: What if the early explorers had fallen off the flat earth instead of discovering the round earth, with all that went along with that discovery—the riches, the homes, the native women with the bare breasts and the comforting eyes? What if they fell and disappeared, and thus we had disappeared before we got started, you and I, and everything disappeared, and nothing was ever heard again of the new world, because there was no new world. Nothing. Either we fall off the flat earth, or discover a world that goes round and round indefinitely. I find both propositions equally unbelievable.