Out of all mankind I couldn’t place these two men at all. Nothing I had taken up in forty years through the world had prepared me for them. The basic usages and assumptions which linked man — even savage with literate man — were absent here. Yet I was not gazing at robots; these two had life.
And then I knew what it was. There was nothing absent in them. They were as ordinary as any men. It was I who had lost something at last — a received vision of mankind. For so long in life, in my job, I had been taught to categorise and define, to value or hate something only when I could name it, to fear always the unknowable and unnameable. And these two men had sprung up at me from the sidewalk without definition, identity. There was no meaning I could attach to them, as when one gazes so long at an object that the language we have ceases to justify it, as a fork will lose its forkiness and the world itself become mysterious and chaotic once we have broken through the barriers of common usage. In just the same way I had looked so long, so casually at men that they had lost their true capacity and potential. I had come to assume simply their existence and death and had forgotten that one is obliged to them in other ways, that they themselves have other moments.
But that afternoon in the city, from having been wraiths and carcases, these two people stood up in front of me as freshly and sharply as parents must when a child can first name them, and place them in a common territory. And it was then too, I think, in that moment of new recognition that I finally passed from the world of Marlow with all its distortion and disaster into that of George Graham — a world which I could now make over completely in a new shape.
2
‘I’m Wheel of Reports,’ the man said, snuffling and choking from a terrible cold on the 33rd floor of the UN building. ‘Adam Wheel and pleased to meet you.’ I took a step towards a big grey metal desk done in a curvilinear style of the early fifties which backed out onto the East River.
‘Don’t touch — for God’s sake!’ the man cried hoarsely. He gestured towards two huge wobbly piles of mimeographed paper on his desk and then to similar stacks which reared up all over his office.
‘Committee Reports,’ Wheel advised me. ‘Six thousand tons of paper a year. The UN and its agencies must be one of the biggest despoilers of woodlands anywhere. The 24th Committee on Namibia — South West Africa to you; the 6th on St Kitts and the Windward Islands; report on the 1038th session on the Decolonisation Committee, 19th session on pollution in the atmosphere, the 7th on underwater pollution, the 22nd Committee on the implementation of the 1947 Kashmiri Treaty …’ Wheel padded round his office, touching and naming the piles like a commander remembering famous regiments and their battle honours.
‘You’ll come to it all in good time, sir. And good to have you with us, Mr Graham. Sit down and welcome to the glass house.’
Wheel was something like Henry Miller in middle age, a big man, balding, with a loping, easy-going confident American manner. There was a heavy jaw and a wide, beaming, friendly face with long bones in the right places, yet there was nothing clumsy about him. He seemed neither diffident nor pushy — seemed to lack all the labels of contemporary American malaise, to be a Middle American in a forgotten sense, neither a smart East Coast liberal, Golden State conservative, nor a hick from the grass roots; not a Nixon man or a Kennedy one either. The only real bias he showed lay in the unfashionable impression he gave of being at ease in his own country.
Wheel’s department — a new flower in the wildly blooming bureaucracy of the place — was dedicated to reporting on the reports. It was his job to study the need and efficacy of the tons of paper that rolled from the basement presses every day in three languages; the often illiterate reflections of general, plenary, ad hoc and other committees — reports in hundreds of copies that were usually only read by two people; the speaker, and the translator. But of this I learnt later. For the moment the talk was of my own future contribution to this babel. ‘On the Improvement and Co-ordination of the UN Information Services, with particular reference to the broadcasting media’, to give my projected work its full title. Wheel handed me over a copy of the ‘Projected Preliminaries’ on this scheme, a droll and lengthy document which I had tried to read on the way over. Everything was ‘projected’ or ‘preliminary’ in the UN; it was safer that way; action or completion were horrifying thoughts.
‘I suggest you just read things up for a week or two. Look around. Listen to some tapes. See some film. Meet the people. Can’t rush this sort of thing — reporting on the reports, sort of spying on the spies, what?’
I nodded to each of his suggestions except the last.
Wheel gestured round his office again hopelessly, then took another momentous puff into his hanky.
‘What you’ll have to realise here, Mr Graham, is that the swords have been beaten into Xerox machines not ploughshares. That’s all we really do here — a living memorial to memoranda. That’s all. I don’t know how that ploughshare business ever came into it. This is the real 3M organisation, I tell you — “Memoranda, Mediocrity and Money”. There are men in this building, I tell you — farmers, even goatherds who never saw this side of the Mexican High Sierras until ten years ago — who are pulling down 25,000 dollars a year now, with fourteen dependent children at 700 dollars a throw, three wives at double that, no tax and a pension that makes mutual funding look silly. How can you better it?’
I looked at Wheel with intent. These homespun truths were not expected.
‘Well you can’t, I’m telling you,’ Wheel went on with some vehemence.
His bald pate ducked in and out of the huge pencils of sunlight that came in off the East River, the whole morning lit up with a fine sharp blaze — water, air and sky as crisp as broken ice, special weather everywhere. But isolated at this height over the river, in a room silent and humming with warmth, there was something more: the ridiculous sense of being in a magic machine, a personal airship. There was the sure sense that one could detach the glass cubicle from the rest of the building and float over the Erie and Pennsylvania Railroad barges that swung awkwardly in the stream, saunter in the air above Welfare Island before drifting down with a Circle Line steamer towards Chinatown and Battery Park. Then, of course, I didn’t know these names or places. But in my own office next to Wheel’s, I came to know them, spending most of my time gazing eastwards towards Queens, becoming adept in all the shifting geography of the river.
I had wandered over to the broad window as Wheel was talking. A small sea-plane had dipped down suddenly from up river, just cutting over the top span of the Triborough Bridge, to our left, starting its glide now in front of us, the floats, like big black pear-drops, wavering for a moment, the rudder swinging as the pilot steadied himself in the cross-wind before dropping to the calmer airs beneath. It seemed to wait forever, hanging just over the water, in the long perspectives far down river. And then, when one felt that it must have decided to rise again for some safer terminus, like a wary bird, it suddenly dropped and disappeared behind a fountain of white water.