I have been lucky, in my work, at getting visas to closed places. My family have all kept fresh, renewed passports ever since my parents left Europe before the war. Paul-Ernst was my father’s name when he was German. It became Pablo when he bought a Costa Rican passport. He was Paulo when we all became Italians in Lugano. Now he’s Paul on nights when he, improbably, plays poker. My own mind is a tenement. Some elevators work. There are orange peels and muggings in the halls. Squatters and double locks on some floors, a few flowered window boxes, half-dressed bachelors cooling on the outside fire steps; plaster falls. Sometimes it seems that this may be a nervous breakdown — sleeping all day, tears, insomnia at midnight, and again at four a.m. Then it occurs to me that a lot of people have it. Or, of course, worse. There was the time I had blue triangles on the edges of my feet. Triangles, darker every day, isosceles. I thought, leukemia. I waited a few days and watched. It turned out that whenever I, walking barefoot, put out the garbage on the landing, I held the apartment door open, bending over from the rear. The door would cross a bit over the tops of my bare feet. That was all — triangle bruises. I took a little celebrational nap.
“I yield to myself,” the congressman said, at the start of the speech with which he was about to enter history, “as much time as I will consume.”
He was on the phone. I will ask her to dinner, he thought. I will accept her invitation to a party. I will laugh at whatever seems to constitute a joke in her mind, if she will only permit me, with the pact of affection still securely in our voices, to hang up. She continued to talk through her end of the phone, though. When he sounded unamused, her voice seemed to reproach him. When he tried an animated tone, she seemed encouraged to continue. She kept patting every sentence along the line with a little crazy laugh.
I don’t know how many people have ever seen or passed through Broadway Junction. It seems to me one of the world’s true wonders: nine crisscrossing, overlapping elevated tracks, high in the air, with subway cars screeching, despite uncanny slowness, over thick rusted girders, to distant, sordid places. It might have been created by an architect with an Erector Set and recurrent amnesia, and city ordinances and graft, this senseless ruined monster of all subways, in the air. Not far away, there is that Brownsville section of crushed, hollowed houses, an immense metropolis in ruins, with an occasional junkie, corpse, demented soul intent upon an errand where no errand can exist. There can’t even be rats, unless they’re feeding on each other. Then, just on the edge of this deserted strangeness, there begins a little neighborhood of sorts, with tenants, funeral homes, groceries, one or two policemen. Once, along the border street, I saw an endless line of Cadillacs, with men in suits and hats, with chauffeurs and manicures and somber faces. An owner of a liquor store had passed on to the funeral home. The Italians who run that community were paying their respects. The actual street neighbors seemed divided between obligations to the dear departed and protocols toward the men in Cadillacs. Nothing for the foundation here. Nothing for the paper, either. No events.
“Any dreams?” the doctor asked his patient softly, tentatively, as we used to say in the child’s card game, “Any aces? Any tens?”
In actual fact, the lady on the Boeing 707 from Zurich was talking to me about seaweed. I had just come from St. Moritz and she from Gstaad. Nearly all the other passengers were in casts from skiing. Her husband had invented a calorie-free spaghetti made from seaweed. He had invented other seaweed products, including a seaweed sauce for the spaghetti. He was the world’s yet unacknowledged living authority on seaweed and its many uses. She was quite eloquent about it. I was interested for nearly seven hours. My capacity for having a good time exists. It surfaces, however, on odd occasions. Everybody’s capacity for having a good time. It must have been fun before the casts, and there will always be another season. The man who hurls himself in order to be the last person through the closing doors of an already overcrowded subway pushes, after all, some timid souls in front of him. Maybe the stresses of winding toward the millennium.
“Well, you know. His wife was chased by an elephant.”
“No.”
“How extraordinary.”
“Yes. It was too awful. They were watching the elephants, when she simply fell down. The elephant ran over and knelt on her. She was in the hospital for months.”
“No.”
“How extraordinary.”
“Quite different from anything she ever got from Roger, I expect.”
Day after day, when I still worked at the Forty-second Street branch of the public library, I saw the same young man, bearded, intense, cleaning his fingernails on the corners of the pages of a book. “What are you studying for?” I asked him once. The numbers were flashing over the counter as the books came up. “Research,” he said. “I’m writing my autobiography.” There are certainly odd people in that reading room — one who doodles the same bird endlessly on the back of a half of a single bank check, one who hums all the time, and one who keeps asking the other two to stop. A little pantomime concerto. I quit that job soon. The trouble is, I sometimes understand that research project. Or I did understand it. Then.
“What a riot!” a girl of about twenty-five, not thin, exclaimed as the de Havilland Otter started down the runway of the Fishers Island airport. “Is this a toy or an airplane?” a young man with a sparse mustache asked nervously. “I paid for my ticket twice. They pulled the Fishers Island — New York section by mistake, in Groton. Now there’s this.”
“It’s all right,” I said. “I was in a plane like this when I was studying crisis conditions in Southeast Asia. They have outhouses behind their huts, over the rivers. Then they eat the river carp. Ecology. Everyone trusted these planes. The worry was just bombs and mortars. They seemed most concerned about the local cockfights. Gamecocks. I had never seen one till I went there. Ben Tre. It no longer exists. For flights I have these pills.”
“The Wright Brothers’ special,” the Fishers Island girl continued. A clattering began under the floor of the plane’s midsection. All ten passengers started their own tones of laughter. The clattering was overlaid with creaking. “Can you believe it?” the girl said. “It’s fantastic.”
“The most fun is when you hit the clouds and have to pedal,” a sailor said. He was stationed in Groton. The plane incessantly jarred, bounced, and tilted. I counted and found I had enough painkilling pills for everyone. “I always pack too much whenever I travel,” a lady said quite loudly as the windows fogged. “We’re moving from New York. My son has been mugged six times. He’s just eleven. We can’t keep buying him new watches.” She went on like that. The two-ticket man held on to my wrist so tightly that my own watch left marks for hours after, on the white ring watches leave inside a tan. We landed at LaGuardia. The young man let go.
Another weekend. Any dreams. P.O. Box 1492.
The school was run by Communists, although few parents were aware of that. The grades ran from one to twelve. The younger children slept throughout the year on a screened-in open porch that was thought, in wintertime, to confer immunities. There were sixteen double-decker beds on the porch, and one single bed, near the door, for the child who was held to be the most disturbed in any given year. Late at night, the oldest told horror stories. Later still, the most disturbed child would bang her head against the bedpost in her sleep, or cry, or speak in no known language, whatever the disturbance that year was. Before dawn, the rest leaped wildly from top bunk to top bunk, sometimes single file, sometimes racing, sometimes three leapers side by side at a single time. Once or twice in those years, somebody crashed and broke a leg.