The Colossus of New York (5 page)

HE WALKS and then he slows. Kinda tired. No small bit hungry. Scrutinize menus in windows for hearty fare. The prices are outrageous, he checks his wallet and touching his pocket becomes mortal again, reduced to what he pays in rent. No more strolling, he must stop, because Broadway only gives this once a year, and grudgingly. It’s the little taste that makes them go, and keeps them here year after year for these key afternoons. It gives this. Broadway is generous and knows that if it did not dollop out, it would be dried up. These occasional gifts cost nothing. Terrible and generous. Broadway knows that every footfall is its heart beating, that we keep its heart beating, that it needs suckers and citizens to keep its blood flowing. Broadway knows that if this secret ever got out it would be empty, so periodically it offers a glimpse. It costs nothing, this harmless jousting.

HE’LL BE BACK next year. Around the same spot on the calendar depending on frontal systems and his own inner weather. Because they understand each other, him and Broadway. He will come once a year until he dies and another takes his place. Move those feet. Walk and walk. These are the terms of the truce he has made with Broadway.

CONEY ISLAND

SUCH A MULTITUDE of stenches means it must be summer. It’s the baking asphalt that adds that special piquancy. Discomfort without end, surely this planet is hurtling into the sun. Some cavort like idiots in uncapped hydrants, others head for the edge of town. South, to the beach where a broom of briny air sweeps away this miserable funk. So they fall to the bottom of the subway map, settling there like loose change in various denominations. What they will find under their feet will not be pavement but something shiftier.

ALL TOMORROW’S sunburns gather in wait. Heads dart to and fro as they seek the right spot. Homestead and land grab. This must be the place. Try to remember your personal formula for comfort on a beach, the whole towel thing. Sizzle on the griddle. How to serve man. Gritty evidence of the last visit to the beach clings to the neck of the bottle of suntan lotion. In unison ask, Can you do my back. The sun sets this melting pot to furious boil, brings it all to the surface, the ancient liaisons, the hidden complexions. That extra seasoning. The struggles of everyone’s ancient tribes are reduced to how their descendants fare against ultraviolet. People emphasize particular ideas they have about their bodies via too-tight tops, trunks, and T-shirts. Take it all off and don’t forget your favorite scars.

EVERYTHING disappears into sand. Objects get lost in sand the way people get lost in streets. There is refuge on the shores of the new world. This is the cozy retirement community for pull-up tabs that have not been manufactured in years, cigarette butts that have seen better days, limbs of crabs. Wood drifts over from native lands. Naturalized styrofoam bits recite pledges and names of presidents at the slightest provocation. Dirty gulls patrol beats, sidestep seaweed bums and their sob stories. Rumor has it someone over there is eating a sandwich. Scavengers peck away, undertake vain missions. Flies buzz and hop over the dead and the dead-seeming. The crazy guy with the metal detector zigs and zags in efficient search pattern or out of habit to avoid teenagers’ thrown projectiles. His take-home pay is quite astounding. The number of house keys lost this day will fall within the daily average of lost house keys. Hypocrites complain about the quality of the sand, as if they are not blemishes on its expanse, and scavengers, too, ripping little shreds of comfort from an afternoon.

FRONT LINE in the ancient blood feud between city and nature. What side are you on. Every grain a commando on recon probing for weakness and reporting back. Here are some places sand gets into: eyes, sandwiches, shoes, under beds, scalps, carpets, car floors. Crotches and brainstems and decision-making places. Kids with pails move this bunch of sand from here to there to undo the secret design of tides. Aeons in the making and now it’s all ruined. Rule is, violence on purpose and beauty by accident. Their castles rise proudly from soggy plots of real estate, yet despite their enthusiasm a very small percentage of these children actually go on to careers in construction, it’s very strange. School’s out for the summer but sand is an elementary with lessons. What they shape are cities, no less so for being soft and miniature. Imposition of human order on nature. Sand slips through fingers but no one takes the hint. Our juvenile exercises. What they build cannot last. Fragile skylines are too easily destroyed.

THIS STRIP piggybacks one of the world’s magic meridians: keep swimming and you’ll end up in England, keep digging and you’ll end up in China. So they say. Children yo-yo at the tideline, run in when it seems safe and out when a wave approaches. Depressing mechanical regularity. Mimicking parents and ruthless commute. Sometimes a workweek will grind you into sand, pulverize you into particles. Those who live near expressways recognize the sound of waves. The ocean traffics in ebb and flow, that’s its business. Parents surge to teach offspring how to swim. Close your eyes. That wasn’t so bad now, was it, says mother to child. He spits out seawater. Riptide and undertow are the world’s hands grabbing to save you from cities and their influence. The unseen infrastructure of waves. Events a thousand miles away find their final meaning in these gentle little consequences begging at the shore. Do the dead man’s float and drop out of society, no sound, no weight, just you and the forces that pushed you here, set you apart. Anchorless. So safe. Is it possible to stay here, renounce the city, swim the other way. The direction of their final strokes this day is an oath of fealty. Look at this pretty shell.

EVEN OUT HERE still too close to neighbors. Horizontal tenement. Loathe neighbors and their loud boorish talk and unfortunate ditties. Envy neighbors on their well-equipped expedition. Yeah, they know how to do it right, with their everlasting cooler and state-of-the-art collapsible seating. What will they pull out next, a Grillmaster 9000 or merely a famous chef. Just when you get settled a breeze or hooligan ruins things. The insult that made a man out of Mack. Please adjust: parts squeezing out of bathing suits, parts having natural reactions to changing temperatures, the bashful edges of the towel, your attitude because it’s really getting on my nerves I go to all this trouble why can’t you just enjoy yourself for once. Probably not the right time for a sexual reverie but the view argues otherwise. All that stuff they hide when they dress up in civilization. Don’t blink or else you’ll miss it—that father’s annual display of affection toward his son. Seeing this is like looking at the sun. It can blind you.

OUT THERE slow barges cart away tires and exiles, black arrowheads sailing through blue air. Wooden contraptions provide sure footing. Along the top of the pier, fishermen skewer hope on hooks and drop this bait, wait for a little nibble. Along the sides of the pier, barnacles cling with telltale rent control tenacity. Up and down the boardwalk visitors establish their cruising speed. Underneath the boardwalk is where they store failed mayoral candidates. Improbable clam shacks. Hot dog vendor to the world. What was true for citizens a hundred years ago remains so. Generation after generation marvel over the salt air as if they are the first to remark upon it. They keep to themselves the odd feelings brought on by the novelty of a horizon after so many horizonless days. What to do with these notions. Old-timers have seen it all before. We’re the reruns they can’t help watching. Old-timers will tell ya that every plank on the boardwalk has a story to tell and a secret name. This is in fact untrue. It’s just dead wood after all.

OFF SEASON this place is dead. Don’t tell anyone but the Wonder Wheel is a gear in the great engine of the metropolis and when it stops moving systems fail. Amusement park rides are disguises for other things. Taken medicinally, periodic trips to the bumper cars can prevent road rage. Cherish the fear in loose bolts, statistical inevitabilities, the substance-abuse problem of the operator as suggested by his glassy stare. The ancient metal seats get repainted every season. Dark metal like a stain where people put their hands. They have yet to invent an amusement park paint that can withstand the corrosive agents in fear-sweat. There is no way to avoid it, all must ride the Cyclone. A loop of ribbon lifted by a breeze, sloping down here, twisting up there. Seems so rickety. Struts and girders, toothpicks and straws. The old scares are the best ones. Couples on dates queue up nervously. The country cousin in from the country is egged on by sadistic kin. They make up scary stories about the fatality rate to scare him but when the restraining bar slams shut are swayed by their own fictions.

TOO LATE to back out. Scream if you think it’ll help. Clutch my thigh according to plan. Citizens of this new vertiginous city. Up and down. Reel this way and the ocean is upon you in a wave, in beckoning gloom, reel the other way and slam into highrises, into broad brickfaces. A rollercoaster is your mind trying to reconcile two contradictory propositions. Earth and space, cement and air, city and sea. Life and death. Choose quickly. The city and the sea don’t get along, never have. Two trash-talking combatants, two old bitter foes. This ride is them throwing punches and you ride on their arms, dip and rise and coast and roll on shifting muscle and sinew. If only they would stop squabbling over us. Dizzy now. Punchdrunk on the view, tide-tossed and beaten, staggering between what is and what could be. Why doesn’t the ref do something. It’s a massacre. Close your eyes. Relax—it will all be over before you know it.

BROOKLYN BRIDGE

SO SQUINT. It’s over there, that striated island, cut up carved out and waiting. Pick your favorite cuts and gorge. You can always tell the hungry ones by how they move. Case in point, this one approaching the bridge. Her steps give her away: she has appetites. Her whole history hordes behind her with its unfashionable area code and immigrant spices. The names of her streets commemorate the city’s less famous heroes. Mayors and back-room fixers. None of the syllables that built this city, just seeing their names on her mail leaves her famished. Sometimes the wind shifts and ferries aroma across the river. You’re hungry, admit it. Grab your forks and knives to get your piece of it.

MULTIPLE BRIDGES but this is her favorite. Various anchors hold the island in place so it won’t drift away.

You’d try to flee, too, if everyone heaped their dreams upon you. Pack mule and palimpsest. It starts out slowly. At the entrance religious types hawk bean pies and religious literature to cars stalled at the light. Cars wait to enter the borough, she steps on the bridge to exit. Level at first, lulling her. A bridge takes a while to get to the heart of its argument and for a while she is seduced by honey talk, but then she looks to the side. Hardly noticed the gentle lift, but then she looks to the side and she’s waist level to buildings. Up in the air before she knew it. Admire the bridge for its exemplary rhetoric, necessary for this rather spectacular leap of faith.

FREE PASSAGE. The only toll is what you need to be rid of. Deposit it in conveniently placed receptacles. Respect the honor system. Refugees pass her going the other way and she wonders what they know that she doesn’t. Forsaking what she seeks. Concrete walkway becomes wooden slats and less assured. Going back in time. Farther on it becomes a rope bridge probably, how else to explain their swaying. American flags scare-crow atop the arches. What we’d give for an energetic ripple now and then, it would stir our souls. Nary a breeze this moment. Then she’s over water. After land, after industrial waterfront, peek through slats to see the river. Time it right and your spit will hit a tourist on the boat.

LET’S PAUSE a sec to be cowed by this magnificent skyline. So many arrogant edifices, it’s like walking into a jerk festival. Maybe you recognize it from posters and television. Looks like a movie set, a false front of industry. Behind those gleaming façades, plywood and paint cans. Against it we are all extras. Walkers add incremental wear and tear to footwear. Joggers speed past walkers, seeing nothing but their inner skylines, long indifferent to the miracles around them. Bicyclists speed past them all, spinning spokes, a different species. He makes up lyrics to his song, humming and snapping his fingers. People who whistle in public get rebuked by glances. Parents shield children with their bodies to protect them from passing crazies. Under her headphones her favorite music is ironic commentary on the spectacle around her. The chorus especially denouncing this panorama with witless enthusiasm. A different atmosphere up here, favoring alternate evolutionary paths. The birds do what they will, equipped with wings.

HER LAZY PROGRESS along the bridge is tracked for half an hour by a man in an apartment. Each time she stops, he tries to figure out what she is looking at, thinking of. To be with her, her companion across this thing. Unwitting prop in one man’s mania. One speck among many specks. At junctions emergency boxes offer aid but there’s no way help would arrive in time. Break down in the middle of the desert. Outlaw territory, between places. Need a tuneup, prescribe this walk. Pop a gasket here and you’re on your own. Broken police call boxes report to nowhere. Pick up the receiver to reach a precinct that burned down years ago. What is the nature of the emergency. Shrugs travel poorly through fiber optics. And no one to stop you from tracing a beam to the edge and leaping into space and water. No one could stop you. Traffic slows to rubberneck, other walkers cheer or dissuade, but no preventing hands. All will be revealed in those final seconds before you hit, but at that point no chance to act on those revelations or apologize. Keep moving forward. Please move it along. By making this journey making the case for life or weakness of conviction. Up here everything looks hazy.

SIT A SPELL to appreciate. According to ancient calculations, municipal commissions decide where to place the benches. But they have always tried to regulate your views. As they sit there listlessly gazing, none suspect his palm cups her ass beneath denim. This program has been brought to you by the Department of Public Works. Civil engineering landmark. Available in die-cast metal at assorted trinket outlets. Bronze plaques here and there maintain history. But nothing to commemorate the magic spots of people. A couple of years ago he stopped in this very spot, shook his fist at indifferent skyline and declared, You can’t break me. Now he has two kids and a corner office. The day after their first night together they walked across the bridge, seeking its blessing. So far so good. One time you were caught in the rain and huddled against an arch for safety. Nowhere to run, prey to the elements as usual. A trick of the wind left you a tiny dry space until it was okay to move, but before that moment everything came into focus and you made pledges. Inflate experiences to metaphorical dimension. Relate a tale of personal significance, receive nondescript nods despite emphatic adjectives. Years ago she picked a window and told herself one day she would live behind that window and watch them walk on the bridge like she walks now. Tenants replace each other and curtains. The curtains of the latest occupants are shut against her and her ilk. Closer to the city, doubtless, but how much closer to what she wants.

LAYERS OF flaking paint pinpoint beautification projects. If only they understood that all that paint was added burden, that it groans beneath our good intentions. Next time will bring it all crashing down. The bridge pants, exhausted. Rattles. Rattles. Every vehicle on the motorway sends its vibration through the bridge and into her soul. If it shakes it can fall. Twin motorways bracket the walking path, squeezing. Given their druthers there’d be no people at all, just tonnage rushing to and fro, not these fleshy vehicles and their hapless pacing. The moment each day when the number of cars going into the island matches the number of cars going out of the island. No flashing alarm, no blinking light, but the bridge looks forward to that moment all day and sighs when it happens. She walks across. A scale inside her seeks equilibrium as she walks this larger scale. Too much of one thing, a mood or an idea, will send her tipping. Her enemies look forward to that moment all day and applaud when it happens.

IN THE MIDDLE. Nowhere to go but farther on. Caught in the act of changing your mask, this act of transformation. Don’t look back, you will be shocked by negligible progress. A man pitched a tent here once and was hauled away. He told the police, I renounce all boroughs. You have the right to remain. You have the right to shout to the gods. If you have no philosophy one will be appointed to you. Search the eyes of people for kindred glint. Finding no converts despite all your proselytizing. Talking on a cell phone kinda defeats the purpose unless you are describing every detail to the bedridden. Murmur something romantic, will you. It has a certain wavelength. Cables dip and rise, human fate in solid coil. People walk between these tusks, scaling an elephant. Run-of-the-mill fleas. Tourists with cameras speak in the native tongues of the men who built this thing. The bones of their ancestors lie at the bottom among refrigerator doors and license plates. They cannot wave but currents stir their bones and perhaps that is a gesture toward kin. Can’t see anything in this murk.

FARTHER ON, the true length of the island is visible. The truth of the matter is not in the window-dressing monstrosities at the foot of the island but the monstrous length of the island behind them. It says, You have not thought this whole thing through. But she’s never been one to take a hint. Hardheaded like streets and bridges. None of this means anything to him. What he stands on, what he sees across the river, is no more than the arrogance of men. He is unpopular at parties. Look west for a reminder of oceans, search for proof that you have not always been landlocked. The rest of the world resides in your peripheral vision. A fresh view turns them toward introspection. Introspection is a cheap date up here, wooed by vista and perspective, these cheap flowers. Decide against bad behavior. Decide on better choices. Get rid of him. Get a pet. Little choices magnified to life and death stakes. I can see my house from here.

LOUSY WITH photographers. Why they pick their particular spots is a mystery. They just look and stop and declare, I want this forever. There’s something cumulous going on up there and it ruins the light. Minting postcards by the minute. Stand and pose. Click and shudder. Preserving more than sunsets. From now on this place will remind him of their last vacation together whenever he looks at the photographs. Grandchildren look at the photographs later and are unable to marry those images to the drooling elders they know and fear. Mail the photographs you take this day to a friend to maintain the illusion you are still friends. The background says it all: against that skyline we are as brief as a camera flash. Blinded for seconds. But then it returns. That jaw at the foot of the island and its hungry teeth.

THIS SPANS WATER. She spans days. Both fight gravity. This little rivet here is doing all it can but it’s only a matter of time. Like you, exerting miraculous will to keep from flying apart. Do not tire. Do not falter. Listen up because I’m only going to say this once: We need all our monuments, no matter what size, carved stone or mortal clay. Do not doubt you inspire with every breath, that every breath is a marvel of engineering. Deserve everything. If not for a plaque shortage she’d have a plaque riveted to her stomach detailing her pertinent details. Space left blank for the day of completion. Up here there are fresh breezes and gulls, brief creatures. She and the bridge have so much on them, possess a weight that will not be blown away.

WHAT DID YOU hope to achieve by this little adventure. Nothing has changed. Nothing ever changes. Presentiment of doom. Closer you get to the other side, the slower you walk. On the other side there is no more dreaming. Just solid ground. So put it off for as long as possible. Here comes another sign, no portent, this one is bolted metal but a sign nonetheless: the mayor welcoming you to the borough of Manhattan. They paste the name of the new mayor over the name of the old mayor to save our tax dollars. A greeting continuous across administrations, timeless and sure. Because no matter their political bent they understand the romance of bridges and have taken this walk more than once. This is non-partisan emptiness. Just yards to go. Remembering that disappointed feeling she gets each time she reaches the other side, then feeling that disappointed feeling. Check yourself for damage. Everything is where it should be. No miracle. The key to the city fell out of her pocket somewhere along the way and she’s level again. Bereft again. Multiple choices into this labyrinth. Today she picks a new route into it, learning from mistakes. Who knows where she will end up this time. Disappear into a crowd. It’s right there in the city charter: we have the right to disappear. The city rushes to hide all trace. It’s the law.