Yep, it’s one of those awful contraptions coming at you at full speed, and just to be safe, you decide to cross the street after the death mobile has already passed. In the meantime, you stand and listen to the rope on the flagpole in front of the store slap against the pole (a thwacking sound that’s drowned out by the passing car), while you slowly exhale again and examine the ground in front of you (where the first few yellow birch leaves are now scattered, pasted to the wet asphalt like memos put there to remind everyone of the coming cold), so that you can avoid staring at the annoying neon sign, but you can’t help it, you glance at the store window where the flickering neon sign has been blinking on and off the whole time, seemingly at random, but nonetheless with a strange tendency toward rhythm, so to speak, which is extremely difficult to predict; the window is dark, then lit, dark a short moment then lit, dark a longer moment, then lit a short moment, a longer moment, dark a moment so short it almost didn’t happen, in the blink of an eye, dark.
only to reappear on the other side after a long time had passed. From his high vantage point, he could see the transition point from city to country, where the green spaces became more frequent and the buildings fewer the farther one got from the city’s center, apartment buildings giving way to condos and single family homes, and the mass of buildings (no matter their type) gradually giving way to individual farms surrounded by large fields and ponds, in addition to wooded slopes and ridges, which toward the northwest stacked up behind each other and grew to form mountain rises and peaks, until they vanished at last into a distant haze.
Kingly. Like a king on high. Because when you (he thinks, lying there in the darkness, or half-darkness, or shadow, and sweating) see the city spread at your feet, it almost feels like you’ve already conquered it all, like you’re lord of the land, king of the city, like the whole shebang is at your beck and call, like the opening scene of a movie, where you’ve just come to the city from the provinces, from Hicksville, that’s it, from cow sheds and pigsties, that’s it, and from your vantage point up there on that mountain ridge you can see the city spread at your feet and you know all the wonders of the world await you there, that’s where you’re going to make it, somewhere in that promised land of banks, hotels, clothing stores, restaurants, advertising agencies, insurance agencies, supermarkets, car lots, shipping companies, oil companies, theaters, police stations, chocolate factories, publishing houses, funeral homes, airlines, gyms, film studios, travel bureaus, recording studios, computer companies, export and import firms, dance schools, and industrial cleaning companies, somewhere in all that, perhaps on one of the countless floors of a skyscraper (which look to him like dark towers framed by a bright harbor), that’s where you’re going to make it big, not to mention all the interesting people you’re going to meet, not to mention the fact that one day, somewhere down there in that urban Fata Morgana, El Dorado, Klondike, and Soria Moria, you’ll meet your heart’s desire. When he looked toward the hill, he could see a scoop of soft ice cream, partially melted and squished by a bike wheel, which had left smooth, creamy-white tracks, one for every rotation (and the tracks were clearly stamped into the ice cream, where the mass had been pressed into two small hills by the stiff, air-filled rubber, the same dynamics as when you bite into an ice-cream sandwich without taking the top off), the spots of ice cream documented the wheel’s circumference, though each spot grew smaller and fainter with each rotation, smaller and fainter, until at last there was only a grayish white smudge, then nothing.
He forgot to fluff the pillows, but he doesn’t have the energy to sit up. A flicker of light reflected in the wall mirror: a breeze parting the curtains. A telescope is sufficient not only to show one particular building, but precise enough to zero in on one particular window, and not just one particular window, but one particular individual behind that window, and not just that one particular individual, but, a microscope now, this individual’s thoughts, hopes, desires, mental states, memories, and so on, he thinks, and from way up there on that ridge, it could also show a throatless old man imprisoned in his two rooms and kitchen, lying there in bed, trying to remember an excursion he made in recent days walking with the help of two crutches, one for each arm, in the process of comparing the thrilling city view in his imagination to the lack of magic and excitement in his own life, thinking that if a young man was standing up there now, up there on the terrace in front of the restaurant, and looking out over the whole city (where streetlights, neon signs, and windows are just starting to come alive in the late summer evening), feeling a shiver of anticipation and a thirst for adventure, he’d be totally unaware that there’s a throatless old man lying there, not in “the whole city,” not in a city of boundless possibility, but right there in his bed in the dark, thinking that, unfortunately, to judge from experience, the young man’s expectations of adventure will probably wither for lack of nourishment, wither and sink, never to rise again. No, they’ll rise and fall, rise and fall, perpetually.
Too many people want too much. But at the very least. At the very least, to have a real voice, even the worst voice in the world, he thinks, a hideous, grating, unbearable, but nonetheless intelligible voice, not to whisper sweet nothings in a woman’s ear on a mild summer night, but to be able to order coffee and waffles loud and clear. Not to whisper sweet nothings in a woman’s ear on a mild summer night? Okay, that too. Or rather, the thought that a long time ago, he might’ve been able to do that, but couldn’t. He thinks and thinks. He thinks too much. He closes his eyes.
The thunder and the voices are audible. Some evenings they’re absent. It depends on what direction the wind is blowing, he assumes. A heavy, metallic thunderclap, followed by a long, percussive echo, then silence, which might last a while, broken every now and again by the clipped, authoritative sound of a voice over a loudspeaker, like an officer barking commands, but the orders or updates or instructions are impossible to understand, because the individual words all run together, although it’s clear the voice is human, even if it’s sometimes drowned out or accompanied by the thunder, the boom of coupling hitting coupling, tons of steel on tons of steel, it’s a train yard, a so-called classification yard, he knows, where train cars are towed up an incline and then released to roll of their own weight through the confusion of tracks (which are controlled from a central room where a schematic of the area is dotted with bright lights); a whole cargo train being pieced together car by car in the humid summer night, accompanied by the steady boom of coupling against coupling. They work while he lies in bed.