It suits you, I say.
Yes, speaks to my boundless appetite for danger, doesn’t it?
Through the window I see a raven land in the field to the side of the house, stately, its feathers iridescent across the shoulders. In better weather they were always battling with the gulls, executing twisting dives to escape the larger birds. If a single raven was under pursuit, others would show up to harry the gulls. They’re smart, ravens, but something about their intelligence, devoid of compassion, makes me dislike them. They are neither brave nor curious, merely efficient hunters equipped with bodies large enough to allow them to fend for themselves. The gulls attacked only because the ravens raided their nests. William Push had been a fan, and had lobbied to have the building named not the Apelles but the Raven.
Push was the guiding spirit behind the Apelles, and the reason I have come to visit my father. When the Apelles opened in 1915, Push intended it to be the most technologically advanced building in the city. He was an automat mogul, an engineer of renown, and his considerable wealth bought him a position as consultant to Black and Simms, the architects of record, who assigned him the responsibility of designing the pneumatic tube, waste disposal, ventilation, heating, and dumbwaiter systems, all of which, as he would eventually prove, enabled a resident to close the door of his apartment behind him and abandon the world to its self-destructive urges. Push died in 1938, having spent the last nine years of his life sequestered in his apartment. Why he did so can be chalked up to that distinctly human tendency to define oneself by the depth and breadth of one’s discontent.
He considered the human organism to be inefficient and alarmingly fragile. According to his personal taxonomy of the world’s beings, wild animals were far more advanced than Homo sapiens. Take, for example, the lion, which operated at maximum efficiency, lying at rest unless seized by a biological imperative. A lion, Push argued, had no desire to be anything other than what it was. If an un-lionlike thought ever put into the harbor of a lion’s brain, it would be raided, burned, and sunk on the spot. If, by a perversion of nature, there should ever be a lion given to lolling about in the dirt thinking up poems, it would be quickly set upon by marauding elephants, tusked and trampled and left to dissolve into the savanna floor. Lions never looked at birds and wished for wings. They couldn’t have spent years musing on the beauty of a tree if they wanted to. They were pure, the elegant result of evolution’s dispassionate murder of any trait that didn’t increase the lion’s ability to hunt and reproduce. Likewise the raven, whose very image spoke to Push of ecological efficiency.
The note card my father had written on that night in 1978 when Turk’s Christmas tree had blocked his way had itself been designed by Push. His pneumatic tube system once carried hundreds of them an hour all over the Apelles, and the job of sorting the cylinders fell to young women who worked twelve-hour shifts in a basement room. The job was notorious for inducing nervous diseases, in no small part because of the elevated swivel chairs designed by Push according to his interpretation of ergonomics, which dictated that the female’s delicate anatomy required a wicker seat and a low wooden backrest that, in practice, crushed the kidneys and liver, threw the sacrum into disorder, and bit into the lower spine. No matter how the workers complained, he insisted they use the chairs, even though no sorter lasted more than a month, most leaving the building’s employ for less physically debilitating occupations in sweatshops. As a consequence, few of the girls became competent in the job, and with forty containers a minute sluicing through the tubes at times of peak activity, messages rarely reached their intended recipients on the first try. For Push, these setbacks only confirmed his assessment of Homo sapiens as infuriating creatures whose utility had been weakened by centuries of miscegenation, inbreeding, and the insistence on caring for and even cultivating the weak and sick.
Over the decades, use of the pneumatic tubes dwindled, and by the time I was a girl, the system had been shut down. Hence the cards in the elevator lobbies.
Is it any surprise that Push’s design included a set of tubes that allowed him to divert any branch of the system to a delivery bay in his apartment? When I was a girl I could tell something was weird about the empty room in our apartment, something beyond its antiseptic air of disuse. My parents could feel it, our housekeeper could feel it. They knew well enough to leave it alone. My father parked a few boxes of books in there, but otherwise it remained unused for decades. When Vik and I moved in, we avoided it.
As it turns out, it was waiting patiently for me, the one room in the apartment with no ghosts from my childhood, and no memory of Vik. A few months ago, when I decided to abandon the bedroom and move the bed to the empty room, the electrician, punching neat little squares on either side of the headboard for wall lamps, found Push’s matrix of secret tubes. He said there was no way to run wire without ripping out the entire wall first. In every direction, his test taps struck metal. I told him I’d go with floor lamps, and I had a drywaller tear out the plaster, all of it. There, packed as tightly as cigarettes from one side of the room to the other, were vacuum tubes, and affixed to each were gauges, inlets and outlets, a series of interconnected flat handles that, like organ stops, opened and closed the valves that made possible Push’s voyeurism.
In the Apelles, there are many ways to listen. The heating vents, the doormen who are only too happy for you to stop by for some gossip, old-fashioned hallway loitering, the pneumatic tubes. By manipulating the handles, I can pick up transmissions from all over the building. Most of the inlet slots in the apartments have been covered over, but even through plaster and paint they provide a little sonic connection. At night I open all the valves and let the building sing me to sleep.
What do people talk about? The contours of their day, how much they hate people who they wish liked them more. Money, their bowels. Eavesdropping is spiritual pornography, a novelty that ceased to interest me much after I realized that the source of my excitement was not the content of the conversations I overheard, but the power to overhear them. I prefer the insect hum of all the voices at once, the droning proof of life. A building full of people, a living entity.
I can only assume that William Push spent his last years, his decade of sequestration, sitting at the controls there, pulling levers, monitoring the gauges, sorting through his neighbors’ pneumatic notes, playing the valves with the virtuosity of Rachmaninoff, teasing music from the building’s residents, plucking each one like a guitar string, sounding discord on the ninth floor, generating joy on the third. He must have come to believe he was the composer of their desires, that their every feeling was an expression of his grand structure, his direction giving form to the unspoken, the unfelt, the unimaginable. Without him at the helm, the building’s fragile organic systems would rot. Thus the trouble with endless observation—we come to mistake interpretation for creation. Even our own behaviors, so quaintly called choices, are nothing more than observation and reaction followed at light speed by a transformative brain trick that bends temporal perception: voilà, free will.