Besides, why are Chip and Casey still with me? Is it something I’ve said or done? Chip was only meant to walk for an hour or so, but he’s been dogging me for four now. It’s 1.15, time for lunch, and still he lopes along with his book bag full of dress shoes, and his urbane conversation that so keeps urbanity at bay. The truth is, we agreed a few miles back that he’d gone over the tipping point, and the seesaw of the walk was now impelling him down towards Manhattan. Hell, he might as well come the whole way, and be the third man to have walked in from JFK. It’ll be something to tell his womenfolk, should they need a sedative.
Past the Philadelphian Sabbath Cathedral, once a beautiful 1920s movie theatre, now decorticated by religion so that only the Art Deco husk remains. Then, for the purposes of enthusing Chip, as we reach the Brooklyn Museum and can see, in the notch of Washington Avenue, the towers of Midtown piercing the lunchtime smog, I go into a riff, imagining the skirling skein of a mournful clarinet slung out from the city to lasso me with its plaintiff notes: ‘Wawawawaaaawawawawaaawawa wawawawawaaaaaaaaaaa. .! Rhapsody in Blue, yes, Gershwin’s jazzy hymn to holy New York. What could be a better tocsin to awaken a footsore slogger, who’s parted the Atlantic with his Gore-Tex boots, to the delights of this Canaan?
But unfortunately I’ve long since traduced this tune. Its synaesthetic horrors were confirmed for me by a bad acid trip in Oxford, in 1979, when, having pushed the button of a wickedly red microdot into my still-plastic psyche, I mistakenly chucked a ’78 of it on to the turntable, only to hallucinate a Hades, populated by galvanised skeletons, banging out the ‘diddleumdumdumdiddleumdumdumdiddleumdumdum!’ on the ribs of their fellows. Gross, it tipped me into a colloidal cesspit, where every thought or action whipped up thick waves of agonising nausea. I ended up lying at the bottom of a great, hollow spire, the interior of which was lined with thousands upon thousands of rows of disembodied mouths; all of them wide open, all of them screaming. . nothing.
In my novel How the Dead Live I employed Rhapsody in Blue as the metallic death rattle of Lily Bloom, the protagonist based on my own mother. Later, on my return from New York, I looked up the relevant section and was appalled to find this:
‘It’s a tune — not a rhapsody. A rinky-dink, tin-pan-crash-bang bit of Yid slickery, played out in the trash choked alleys around Times Square and Broadway. The city of my majority swims towards me now — out of the dusty deathly darkness of this suburban room an ocean away. At first I’m relieved to have this effortless ascendancy, rising in a smooth parabola from the coxcomb of Liberty into the clouds over the toe of Manhattan, so that the leggy length of the island rears below me, each neon street switched on by my own awareness.
‘“Diddleumdumdumdiddleumdumdumdiddleumdumdum!” A set of a certain unreal age, with no distinction between the fabricated and the constructed; between interior and exterior. A musical New York peopled by eternally young songsters clad in sky blue Runyon shmatte. See them dance down the block, pirouette around the corner, leap into the subway, while Top Cat trades gags with Officer Dibble and the Jetsons head home in their flivvers to White Plains.’
Egregious, perhaps, to quote oneself, and contrived to use the future past — an uncomfortable tense at the best of times — in which to do so. But there it is, and it’s not nice. Worse still, the resumption of this familiar Manhattan ennui, of interior-exteriority, is what I felt as I walked through Prospect Park to its highpoint, and failed to find any prospect at all. And this is what I continued to feel as we moved down through Grand Army Plaza, and Chip told me his Bush anecdote, which made the lame duck President seem even more hateful, in a kick-in-the-shins, frat-boy kind of a way. And this is what I felt as we proceeded on down Flatbush Avenue, and then stopped in at the Burrito Bar and Kitchen to eat unleavened satchels full of spicy meat paste to the noise of the Doobie Brothers.
And this is what I felt as, flatulent as the subway itself, I moved off down the scrag-end of Flatbush Avenue, turned into Tillary Street, and at last gained the approach to the Brooklyn Bridge. Rhapsody in Blue had grabbed me, all right, and shifted me into a simpler — yet even more savage — past. My mother’s idiolect was like an infestation of head lice, irritating my psyche. Her savage putdowns: ‘emotionally tight-fisted’, ‘dull’, ‘weak’; her delight in the expression ‘chagrined’. I recalled the desperate entry in her diaries, describing the final occasion on which she went to her ex-lover’s studio apartment on Fulton Street, to retrieve her pitiful little things. Impedimenta she had attempted to place in that interior, in the hope of warding off the dreadful and approaching agoraphobia of death itself.
Standing in the middle of the gargantuan harpsichord that is the Brooklyn Bridge, I looked around at helicopters, launches, cyclists, the stalled traffic and the steady trains on the Manhattan Bridge — yet still I was enfolded in that dreadful interior-exteriority: my mother’s clarinet moan and faltering snare drum heartbeat, resounding across the ocean. She had died twenty years before, in the Royal Ear Hospital; yet only now did it feel as if I were truly listening. And because we had to — being within a few blocks of the pit — Chip and I fell to discussing 9/11, for not to do so would’ve been to leave a gaping, narrative hole. The walk without talk of this would’ve been like seeing Jaws, digitally re-edited so as to omit every reference — verbal or visual — to the shark.
Chip was about to enter the Lincoln Tunnel on a bus when he saw the smoke rise up across the Hudson. The cell phones went down — and his denial went up. He returned home to his New Jersey ’burb, and sat there, like a kid playing truant from school, uncomprehending of what had happened. And still uncomprehending, after many days, despite the dust furring the windscreens of the cars slumped in the commuter bus parking lot. Cars, the drivers of which were never to return.
At the base of one of the columns of the colonnade that runs alongside the municipal building at Centre and Chambers Streets in Manhattan, a Muslim was buckled in prayer on a rush beach mat. His white sneakers were off and neatly arranged next to him, and the grey seat of his trousers was in the air. Next to his lowered head, the stone was stained where discarded gum had been unpicked. Mecca may have been his ultimate objective, but to me it looked as if he were making obeisance to Manhattan itself.
The day was clouding over, and it impinged on me, looking up at the umpteen storeys of the block — its cut-and-shut architecture, reminiscent of a Loire chateau that has been customised into a stretch limo — that in Manhattan’s very elevation lay its decline. Only the gods lease office space on Olympus; yet here, on the twentieth, thirtieth, fortieth floor, a man picks his teeth with a paperclip, a woman adjusts her bra strap. Mars and Venus send out for pastrami on rye.
I was weary — so was Chip. As I suspected, he’d developed a blister. He left us at the first subway station, limping off through the afternoon crowds, his book bag bumping on his shoulder. Casey and I kept on, and the snapper, who’d spent the whole day circling around me on his mountain bike, as if I were visual carrion, now took on the role of my Virgil, leading me into the next circle of urban hell. We paused to examine a fanciful Chinese grotto — dinky greenery water plashing into teensy pools, the whole wreathed in dry-ice vapour, that was for sale on stall. Casey told me that there are forty thousand registered professional photographers in Manhattan. You can make of that what you will.