My father stands, two or three years after 1900, at Sixty-fourth and Broadway. For support they use a great extension girder at right angles to the Elevated where it crosses above the excavation trench. The first fifty-one-foot subway cars are to be four feet longer than the existing Elevated cars. Mahogany for the car doors, galvanized corrugated sheet iron for the bed on which is laid the fireproof flooring called “monolith.”
Ah what happened to the wheels! So shining in 1903, steel-tired with cast-steel-spoke centers, now their gray gleam has turned to screaming space. I envision a constructive nightmare in which please find the formula for a new asbestos-veined synthetic tire, balance perfected as if in space, soft as rubber, softer-sounding than the London Underground, diamond-hard.
What Brunel would do with space! Run a vacuum bridge to Jupiter’s lakes. Will, my son, asks about Skylab; I mention sun-sensors which from earth-orbit may learn how the sun turns hydrogen to energy, thus teach us a thing or two to solve pollution. Will tells his friends at school. They mention my accent, a sound I hear but not so loud as they.
I had a purpose. It was to see June in order to pass information to the Jerry-John cluster, thus to Outer Film. The London system tying Reid to the red-haired woman to the gallery and thus to the Indian and even to acts of a subversive sort aimed at removing our film from the DiGorros’ flat lay parallel and (for today) secondary. The New York sequence had seemed to rule the field whose forces formed it, singled it out like a crescent or some other line, but as I came to the change booth (an oak original from 1903) the field seemed to equal the noise from the walls which in turn equaled the power whatever it was of our film destroyed unedited; and the noise came from the sidewalk concrete where I was born and then from deep under the tunnel the presumed bedrock above which, buried during construction, how many bodies will rise again when New York falls; and the noise was all those machines blowing past on the street above yet also on a dozen superimposed semipriceless maps of the Thames estuary Dagger juggled through customs, and on the tracks below (for a train was pulling out); and maybe the noise was some escalator ahead whose noise was also the breath of shyness in Rose’s college friend Connie when I helped her ride the elevator; and the noise was rock from the change booth where a black girl stared at her newspaper through blue-smoked cartwheel glasses as big as Jenny’s the once I saw her riding behind Reid in daylight with her knees out and she stuck out her arms as if Reid spinning past on his black motorbike built for two would turn two ways at once; and the retreating noise of the train that might have been mine was like ten tomcats and the noise above and below was not something you’d turn tail from because for one thing I thought that besides the black girl pushing tokens, there was no one but an old fellow in a herringbone with the hems drooping toward his ankles who preceded me through the turnstile and made for the stairs maybe because he didn’t like escalators, which I see now made no sense, for the old do like escalators down or up.
But you’ve been here before and you’re looking back and forward, so you know the escalator wasn’t running. All those grooved steps dropping away in front in a noise like motion weren’t moving, but the new steps behind me were, and their nature would have made me turn (for the clicks were at once close and slow, fast closing yet dream-slow like two rates simply merged), but I could look only ahead: for as you know I got a shove bang like a silent noise in my sacrificial shoulder-wings which when I told this before seemed coincident with my hands fast-stuck in the tight slash-pockets of my raincoat but now seems to have trapped my hands, and the rest you know as well as I, down to almost the foot of the fast-dragging grade all stopped as only an escalator can be stopped. I’d found a beat, so I kept myself from plunging head under hem, arms pinioned by hands socketed; and if I had fallen thus, no telling what I might have done to myself, my dry-mouthed momentum crashing into this moveless sequence of stairs. Yet when I began this story did I think this momentum mine? I think I did. But it was my pusher’s first, then mine, which I see now is like what I, if not (no surely not) Dagger, saw us doing in the film, taking other energy in process and using it for our own peaceful ends. But was not the end there that of my pusher?
Plunging then up the dead escalator as if I had taken its energy, I reached the top again and would have run on up to the street but thought of June and stopped and asked the change-booth woman what she’d seen, but she mustered a moist smile with a new mild dreamy song for background on her transistor and she said how busy she was and in her glasses like a wide-angle fish-eye out of some bad movie about nerves and death I saw that the pusher had pushed me because I must have in some way pushed him; but I saw that I might not have in my head why my film got destroyed, I’d have to do more than just recall things. And I had better not go back. It may be a bad rule of detection, but the right way now had been don’t go back. And as soon as I had thought this, I saw that the way to survive the pusher’s push was to use its force to move on.
The pusher would not be at June’s stop. I caught the old man’s train just.
A pale brown woman next to me on the subway seat yawned, and I smelled on her breath a doughnut with coffee in the hole. Live in New York and you might have subway dreams. Of white men sitting and black men roaming. White men reading newspapers and engrossed in some inner page so they don’t seem to notice the black men loping through the car as if it has no movement, the black riding between cars, returning to the head of your own car, batting his eyes for action, tramping through again patrolling his space station, not catching your glance which is like a blink, then passing into another car, leaving your door open sliding to and fro with the car’s rushing lurch. A white woman with fat hands does her crossword with a white, company ballpoint. The black women do not look either.
June was where she’d said she’d be but was looking toward the other end of the train that I got off. Between a flight of steps and a post with a chewing gum machine she waited with her back to me, the highsprung ancient crown of hair independent as if turned also away. Two people moving toward either side of the platform crossed between us and at the point of my view where they crossed, June had turned and for that second hadn’t seen me and then had, and I was like some expected surprise at the end of an avenue.
She was in color today, brown and gray and melancholy mauve, mid-thigh soft boots, a hot-pants suit.
She had hold of my arms, she leaned back smiling as if it had been a long time when in truth it had, for Corsica had come between us in the pica lines of Dagger’s note to Claire which I’d left on Aut’s desk, the space of that dubious isle emptying into our Beaulieu lens and the hours and days we’d exposed and lost.
June and I were arm in arm on a platform bench. She crossed her legs. The top rim of one mauve boot stuck up away from the dark thigh so one saw down in. Like a banner signing an interesting entrance, a label hung from inside the rim half unsewn. I’d seen it before.
She wasn’t the same person as twenty-four hours ago, yet now seemed not to need the words really really like you, in order to show with the lean of her chic gray shoulder pad against me and the attentiveness of her whole eyes that moved all over my face as she spoke, that she really did need to act.