And Martin was busy: as the excavation deepened, as carpenters began to construct wooden forms for the foundation walls, he moved about the city, visiting art museums, waxwork museums, dime museums that displayed four-legged chickens and bearded ladies, the new nickelodeon parlors with rows of hand-cranked machines, photograph studios, scientific exhibitions, fortunetelling parlors, the mezzanines of public buildings where he looked down at patterns of people moving in parallelograms of light cast by great windows — and one day, up at the building site, a row of cement trucks with revolving drums stopped one after another beside an open space in the hoarding. All over the city, workmen were breaking up streets. Martin liked to stand on boards thrown across torn-up avenues and peer into deep ditches heaped with rubble; sometimes he could see the arch of a subway tunnel. It pleased him that the city was going underground, that even as it strained higher and higher it was smashing its way through avenues and burrowing through blackness; and Martin imagined a new city growing beneath the city, a vast and glimmering under-city, with avenues and department stores and railroad tracks stretching away in every direction.
One day not long after the new building had begun to rise above street level, Martin decided to pay a visit to the old Bellingham Hotel. He hadn’t been down that way in more than a year. He had been thinking lately of Marie Haskova; perhaps she would like a job in one of his buildings, he wondered why he hadn’t thought of it before. The idea pleased him, even excited him; he wondered how she was getting along, he hadn’t really treated her very well, after all she had been a kind of friend, even if their friendship had been ambiguous from the start. As Martin walked down Riverside toward his old street he recalled his wedding night, the sharp-turning stair-flights dropping away, the dark corridor lit by dim gas-jets, her weary startled eyes. She had taken him by the arm, she had led him in. Had he married her that night? Then his other marriage was only a dream-marriage, and Marie Haskova was his bride. He tried to remember the way she looked, the swift sad smile, the slight bitterness about the mouth. It all seemed long ago, more distant than his Sunday walks with his mother to Madison Square Park. In the warm air that smelled of asphalt and riverwater Martin turned onto his old street. He saw at once that he had made a mistake, he had turned onto a different street, and that was strange, it was downright baffling, because he never made mistakes like that, surely he hadn’t forgotten the number of his old street. And even as he stood puzzling it out, looking about and frowning in the bright sunlight, he felt ripples of anxiety passing across his stomach, for already his stomach knew what he himself was only beginning to realize. No, he hadn’t made a mistake, it was his old street sure enough, but the Bellingham was no longer there. In its place stood a line of five-story row houses with wrought-iron balconies and street-level front doors. He walked up the cut-stone sidewalk, looking at the doors with their brass knockers and electric bells, and an absurd idea came to him: behind one of those doors was the old Bellingham Hotel, with the little parlor off the main lobby. He became aware of someone looking down at him from an upper window and he walked quickly past. The Bellingham had simply vanished. That was the way of things in New York: they were there one day and gone the next. Even as his new building rose story by story it was already vanishing, the trajectory of the wrecker’s ball had been set in motion as the blade of the first bulldozer bit into the earth. And as Martin turned the corner he seemed to hear, in the warm air, a sound of crumbling masonry, he seemed to see, in the summer light, a faint dust of old buildings sifting down.
A fear came over him that the old Vanderlyn was gone, even though he had walked past it not three weeks ago. In its place he saw a heap of rubble, with Mr. Westerhoven’s rubbers sticking out. But when he arrived, the Vanderlyn was still there. At lunch Walter Dundee complained that motorcars were worse than the El trains when it came to scaring horses. Only the other day he had seen a drayhorse start up, toppling a barrel onto the street. Martin saw the horse in Harwinton’s ad, the bright red coal burning in its back, the eyes wild with terror. Dundee’s blue eyes were sharp, but the skin of his neck was slack, and there was an occasional note of disapproval in his voice; he spoke of retiring soon, fixing up a house he had his eye on, out in Brooklyn. He asked Martin in a reserved way how the new building was coming along. He asked after Martin’s wife. And a restlessness came over Martin, through the smoky air he glanced at the clock, somewhere a woman began to laugh, a little rippling phrase that rose in a series of four notes and repeated itself, over and over again, and Martin became enraged: what was so funny, why couldn’t she stop laughing like that? But when Dundee set down his empty beer glass streaked with foam and said he ought to be getting back, Martin felt a desire to hold him there, surely it wasn’t necessary to rush away, they had barely begun to talk. But Dundee had already risen to his feet. “Take care of yourself, Martin,” he then said, holding out his hand, and Martin was moved: after all, they had once been partners, even though a lot of water had flowed under the bridge since then. And at the phrase, which he thought distinctly, an image of the great bridge rose up, as he stood by the rail of the ferry with the spray in his face and looked up at the sunny arches, the swoop of the cables, and the dark bridge-pier, sun-striped, where gulls flew in and out of light and shade.
From his lookout station on the roof garden of the New Dressler, Martin watched the skeleton of the new building rise, the Cosmo, the Grand Cosmo: steel beams held by wire cables at the ends of booms swung through the air, cutting torches flared, plumbers and electricians walked on the floors below the ironworkers, and far away Rudolf Arling had only to raise his eyes to see through his window the Brooklyn tower of the suspension bridge, while in another part of town Harwinton was planning a three-part campaign. At lunch Harwinton spoke of image clusters, groups of unrelated images that, presented together, took on special associations. Martin noticed that Harwinton never aged. In thirty years he would have that same look of a schoolboy with blond-lashed blue eyes and small neat teeth. His short straw-colored hair would turn gray so gradually that no one would notice. Omnirama, Cosmacropolis, Unispeculum, Cosmosarium, Stupendeum: he had proposed a long list of names, fretting over each in turn, until Martin woke in the night with the right name ringing in his mind. Consider the fountain pen, Harwinton said. A pretty woman bends over a sheet of paper, smiling as she writes with her fountain pen — all very elementary. Now consider the same woman sitting in a field of daisies. She smiles dreamily as she touches the cap of the pen to her cheek. In the background you see a steamer’s funnel, with white smoke puffs blown back against a blue sky. Instantly the pen is associated with the field and the ship, which is to say, with romance and adventure. Buy this pen and you buy love. Buy this pen and you buy life. For the Grand Cosmo he had prepared several sketches with image clusters designed to pique interest. The question at this stage was simply to prepare the public, to create expectation, for after all the Grand Cosmo was so all-embracing, so overwhelming, that one couldn’t present it all at once, like a safety razor or a dental cream. Martin looked through a number of sketches and stopped at one. In the foreground stood a skyscraper concealed by an immense white cloth. In the background, small but visible, rose an Egyptian pyramid, the Eiffel Tower, and one tower of the Brooklyn Bridge, draped in cables and suspenders. And Martin was startled: it was as if Harwinton had divined his love for the bridge, as if the image of the bridge suddenly bound him to Harwinton. Was it possible that even Harwinton felt the power of the bridge? But Harwinton, if he felt anything, felt it as a private citizen; as an advertising man he saw the world as a great blankness, a collection of meaningless signs into which he breathed meaning. Then you might say that Harwinton was God. That would explain why he never grew old. The thought interested Martin: he was having a ham sandwich and a cup of coffee with the Lord God, King of the Universe, a youthful American god with light blue eyes and blond lashes. But of course God could not believe in the Grand Cosmo, just as He could not believe in the universe, a blankness without meaning, except as it streamed from Him. For only human creatures believed in things: that much was clear.