6
My father worked as a switchman for the phone company. There was a five-story turret on the roof of the main office building downtown. The turret was the microwave tower. He would sneak me up there. The tower wasn't the familiar lacy truss of criss-crossing struts. This tower had been sheathed, for some reason, with sheets of corrugated metal painted the gray of battleships. Near the top were two decks for the white microwave collectors and transmitters. They looked like ears, of course, listening to the buzz in the air. Housed in this unusual structure they also looked, when I thought about it, like gigantic fungi, mushrooms scalloped on the bark of a tree. They hummed below us when my father took me to the top. In every direction, off in the distance, I could see the other microwave towers, the next nodes of the network. On each the white sails of its antennae cocked back toward our tower. I did think of it as a net, this invisible grid of electromagnetic impulse stitching the distance together. Off to the north, the high ground of my town, was the forest of transmission towers. The television and radio stations, a baker's dozen of the slender spires, were arranged on the horizon. All of them had the pulsing red warning lights, all on their own sequence. The tallest, because it was the tallest, also had a white strobe light. Every few seconds this explosion of light, like the radiation emanating from the tower on the old RKO Radio Picture logo, flashed out its bright bubble of energy. I think we mostly forget about these towers the way we forget about all the wires that circulate above our heads. Electric. Telephonic. The pipelines of data. We are so earthbound. We forget to notice this strata of travel. We actually go places on this plane. There, our voices carry. There, our images stream like choirs of angels on a bright ring of this elevated ether. It is only when you do physically get above this above that you see the airy layer of connection. The towers talk to one another, winking back and forth over the distance, over and over.
7
I like to call home from the tops of tall buildings. There always seem to be banks of pay phones on observation decks. "Guess where I am," I say. My parents never guess. I always say, "I think I can see your house," no matter where I am. I tell them what I can see. What states the sign says I can see. I tell them about the other tall buildings cropping up around me. I tell them about the radio stations on the observation deck. There are often radio stations. I tell them all the things I can see hidden-things hidden from below-on all the surrounding roofs. The water towers, the air conditioners with their slow-turning blades, the housings for the elevators, the skylights, the helipads. Phone calls from the tops of tall buildings are like postcards-compressed, tenuous, transmitted with a view. Thinking of you. And come to think of it, the brain is lodged on the observation floor of the body. Our thoughts peek out like so many tourists gazing from the windows in the Statue of Liberty's crown. Traveling up is a meditation. Being up is reflection. See your face reflected in the window through which you observe. What else to do but look. Look at the looking going on. Observation decks are most often hushed. If they are enclosed, there is no other sensation but sight. I begin to feel I am looking out of my body like I am looking out of the building. The world below begins to fit together as I gaze. I can see the way it fits together. That world becomes like a map; it begins to make sense like a map. To hover over it like this is to simulate the vantage of a map. Traveling up actually changes the scale of my vision. The people look like ants. Why go but to get this other angle on things? My head, yes, in the clouds.
8
There I was on the observation deck of the Sears Tower when it was the tallest building in the world. I was on the phone calling home. A cloudless day. The blue of the lake met the blue of the sky above like two swatches of paint sample, a minute modulation of the base tint separating them, blue one and blue two. A flock of crows launched from the green sward of Grant Park. As they rose the black birds transmuted, compressed and stretched into helicopters climbing. Four or five of them rising, rising up to my eye level where the two lead aircraft stalled and hovered in silence, their crew doors open and men inside looking back out at me. The tails of the hovering craft turned in circles as the others rushed past the windows, nose down, their blades pitched and biting in, the wash from their rotors beating the windows. Gone. Then those left, still levitating, drifted lazily straight up out of sight, gyring in the updraft of the building. A voice in my ear told me it was the president leaving town.
9
My little dictionary suggests that "story," the second meaning of the word-the complete horizontal division of a building constituting the area between two adjacent levels-comes to us from the Medieval Latin historia, "picture story." "Probably," the dictionary muses "from painted windows or sculpture on the front of buildings. See HISTORY." Indeed. I like this accident of history that abuts a synonym for floors in a building with "an account or recital of events or series of events, either true or fictitious." It conjectures a whole culture of gawkers staring up at the new buildings, getting the news from the stained glass, the has relief, the metopes tucked under the eves. The other story, the narrative one, is said to have a rising action, its pinnacle climax and its falling off. To travel vertically is to actually feel the feel of gravity, the rush of blood to your feet on a lift, the G in your seat in the airplane. And only then the hint of weightlessness at the peak when all that's solid vectors off as you descend. There is also the experience of the other weight we take for granted, the bearing down of all that's invisible, the mass of air that isn't there until you peel through its layers and its piercing registers in your ears. John Barth calls plot an incremental perturbation, a disturbance of gravity. Sure, the borders one crosses when one travels horizontally are real. They are cultural, national. You move from one dialect to the next, one language to another. But this journey is more picaresque perhaps, mere adventures. Traveling up and quickly, it is always quickly, one transgresses frontiers not of difference but of our very physical adaptation. The air thins. The blood boils. The story of Babel is the story of the invention of babble.
10
The story goes that a camera was found in the rubble of the collapsed World Trade Center. The disc inside the camera has miraculously survived and the image that arrives via e-mail, you are told, is only the most remarkable of the many recovered. From that image, you can imagine the story behind its taking. The camera's owner and a friend are on the tower's observation deck. "Stand over there and let me get a shot of you and the city below." You see a young man, smiling broadly in the foreground. Spread out behind him and below him is the grand canyon of the metropolis, the buttes and plateaus of lower Manhattan, the glinting river, and the escarpment of New Jersey. In the near background you can see the lip of the tower itself, the observation platform elevated and set back on the roof of the building. There, a few stories below, captured digitally, is the silver fuselage of the first plane a few meters away, it seems, from that morning's first catastrophe. The picture stands for the moment before the moment things all changed. It's a hoax, of course. The debunkers point out that even if you could believe the survival of the camera within the destruction, the deck hadn't yet opened that morning. I suppose too that an electronic camera would have time-coded the image and the real moment of its composition would have been recoverable. Still. It is the stillness of the shot that transfixes the viewer. Strangely, I want it to be real. Here would be Zeno's paradox. That airplane can never transverse the infinite and infinite regressing distances between points A and B. It never happened. The subject of the photograph, the smiling young man, is looking up at the camera. He looks like he doesn't know what is about to happen. How could he? When this picture was really taken, the one that was photoshopped into the fake, it was days or weeks before the events of September 11. His innocence is so convincing. What would be the other shots on that disk? The routine record of observing. The panoramic view of the island. The river widening out to the sea. The minute Statue of Liberty, a paperweight, on its slip of an island. The crowd of tourists on the observation deck, many of them taking pictures of what they had seen, proof they had been there stunned by this ordinary, this uneventful day.