… for however long the earth shall last.
My relocation to New York (that denizen-abyss of stridence and foul smells) had been by necessity and not—I re-emphasize, not—due to the divestment of my position at Brown, as a professor of mythology and ancient histories, two years ago. The latter had been the work of this bungling and greed-induced calamity they are now calling the “Great Depression,” whose attendant turmoil left no room for teachers of subjectivities. Only academicians skilled in mathematics, industry, and the sciences could be retained in such troubled times of bread lines and twenty-five-percent jobless rates. For the rest of us (history, literature, the arts) the coffers of higher learning were closed.
Instead, I ventured hither, to this mephitic necropolis of concrete, dirt, and clamour, in the steadfast hope of ascertaining the whereabouts of my sister and only sibling, Selina, who’d relocated here some five years ago for a $14-per-week accounting position with the well-known Monroe Clothiers chain. She would be twenty (eight now—seven years my junior) and with her youth had come the zeal of wanderlust. “I want new horizons, Morgan,” she’d implored five years afore with her over-bright eyes and buoyant enthusiasm. “New places to see and new people to meet, and don’t worry, I’ll write you every week!” So she had, for three years, until her unforeboding and quite energetic missives in the post had dropped off all at once in an eerie silence. Either Fate or the god Selina believed in but I did not had seen fit to parallel my sister’s disappearance, nearly to the day, with my own woeful dismissal from Brown. I took the ten-six, with no hesitancy whatever, to Penn Station, and have been here ever since.
Or at least, in a sense…
It was in stifled shock that I first beheld this labyrinthine canyon of crime and leering, stubbled faces; shock that palsied my gait and numbed my mind—a seething urban mass of filthily attired bodies of clearly all ancestries save for the Anglican; bodies that moved shiftily through garbage-heaped streets pressed on either side by grimy concrete towers so spiring as to obfuscate the light of day—indeed a noisome Babel of movement, ill-will, and malodour; of sweat-shined foreheads and menacing scowls. Squalid ghettoblocks stretched shabbily betwixt skyscrapers too dizzying to look upward at; and the smell—the unsurceasing and absolutely maleficent smell—which imbued itself in my clothes and, I often suspected, my very pores. This—city—was not for my sensitive kind, but circumstances offered me little choice. I scrupled at once to take my place in the human crush so erroneously named for James II, the Duke of York, lest I be swallowed whole by its incogitable machinations.
That Selina had been so swallowed remained my most teeming fear.
Degradation after degradation pursued me posthaste—things I cannot, must not recount. Here squalor and hatred reigned supreme, for if the flumelike streets proved this evil urban pustule’s veins, then surely the ignoble masses served as its blood. I will not say how my first pitiable meals came to my mouth; nor how oft misfortune nearly left me bloodied and broken-boned by mongrel hoodlums in nighted alleyways.
But my bounden duty to find Selina steeled my perseverance. Amid the stinking crowds of pick-pockets and fugitives, and amongst cramped, sunless thoroughfares sided by drear-paned walls zigzagged by clattery iron fire-escapes, I travailed first to secure 30-cent-per-hour employment at a reformed scrivenry; and an unutterably pestiferous “room” on 28th Street, for a half-dollar a day.
Time acclimated me to most of my inner horrors and my loath for what I could only metaphor as the societal elephantiasis in which I lived. Selina’s rescue, in the very least as my strained mind envisioned it, was all that gave me the will to forge on. I fared well at my new post (a man of erudition? A university professor?) and rose up the few ladders of advancement that were extant; whereas I soon was promoted to night-office manager whose undesirable hours rewarded me with a modest pay increment. The enterprise, namely Bartleby & Sons, L.T.D., occupied the top floor of a rather Dickensian building that harkened from the middle of the Nineteenth Century, in the lower “meat-packers” borough. Of course, they’d long-since refitted materially with modern typing-machines, (chiefly Remington Model One’s on which I’d grown adroit at Brown) and more recently curious devices of almost supernatural capability, called Mimeographs. My status quickly charged me with the overwatch of the night-staff: all stalwart men and women possessed of acceptable typing skills and an accurate eye, who’d been discarded from better posts by the all-pervading economic gloom. It was for the most part elder holographed documents of financial and governmental importance that we were charged with transcribing, from seven o’clock in evening to three-thirty or so in the morn.
As for Selina, however…
It necessitated less than a week’s time to discern that the illustrious Monroe Clothiers chain was illustrious no more; the abrupt sign on the front doors announced that the enterprise had gone on “Holiday” much the same way as most banking institutions; in a more accurate manner of speaking: bankrupt, and all employees let go. Worse than that, by far, however, was my horror in learning that Selina’s apartment building in the West Side had burned to the ground; though I was relieved to be informed by the New York Office of Public Safety that no deaths or injuries had been reported. Next, my forlorn sojourn through the mephitis piloted me to the local police precinct’s Missing Persons Bureau. Here, to my abject despair, I was informed that said bureau was no longer operational due to budget decreases and the simple unserviceability of such a function. “You got any idea how many people ‘disappear’ with the economy the way it is?” my complaint was chastised by a surly sergeant at the desk. “Well do ya, bub?” Ultimately, of course, I could comprehend his point; in such dismal economic times, people moved on to unknown pastures they hoped would be greener but oft were not. But Selina would’ve written me had she elected to relocate, I knew full well. The granite-faced sergeant was unkind enough to add an acerbic statistical datum: “Lots’a women have took to sellin’ thereselfs, ya know. What else they got when there’s no jobs and bread’s up to a dime’a half-loaf?” Then, another datum: “Oh, and bub? You do know that the murder and suicide rate’s doubled since the Crash in ‘29, don’t ya?”
When not tending my duties at the scrivenry, then, I walked…
Walked, I say, through every chasm, byway, and alley in vicinity to Selina’s former home and place of employment; walked through the harrowing and ill-scented masses—that loathly, dead-faced human sprawl—thrusting forward my only photograph of Selina to random passersby and shop-keepers, coppers and vagrants alike, refugees and natural-born citizens—indeed, anyone, with the plea hot in my voice, “Have you seen this woman?”
None had.
When I’d covered the most logical geographical propinquities, an absence of alternatives forced me to proceed in depressingly widening radii. First what remained of Manhattan, then Queens, the Bronx, then ghastly Flatbush and the horrendous Brooklyn and its appalling appendage Red Hook full of leaning tenements and unrestrained hooliganism; Staten Island and its waves of cretins, then across the blackly gushing Hudson to Hoboken, Union City, and beyond. All, all to no avail. In no time, however, I became deft in all modes of travel (ferries, trolleys, motor-carriages) and during my scouring of the stolid, grey Brooklyn borough, even traveled in the impossible underground trains that had commenced in 1904, in particular this BRT Line; and then the reeking, flesh-packed 9th Avenue Line—these being deafening, subterrene contraptions they now called the Subway.