Ploughing my way through burger ’n’ fries in the laminated belly of the Pinecrest Diner, I envied them all the easily converted currencies of youth: sex and bullshit. Envied even the kid who sat opposite me, the hood of his H. H. Geiger alien rubber suit pushed up off his brow to expose the pained maquillage of pimples and white-blond bum-fluff.
At the Prescott yet again, I naively slept, then cynically dream-dollied myself in through the doors of the Moscone Convention Center. The Little People of America were gathered — no less grotesque than any who sport celluloid name badges, yet certainly no greater. My mobile phone rang and I answered it as quickly as I could, although not fast enough: a clutch of dwarfs swarmed about me. ‘Have some goddamn respect,’ said a termagant with a perm as tight and prickly as a burr. ‘Can’t you see there’re royalty present?’
What gives? Sherman’s voice in my ear.
‘Um, n-nothing.’
Are you attending some kind of levee?
‘I thought the lady told you to cut that out!’
The phone was snatched from my hand, and before I could remonstrate there was a Nagasaki of flashes, a low moan, and the dwarfs surged towards the main doors — then were checked by a force field of awe.
Tiptoeing into the convention centre came a brother and sister; they had the same white-golden hair, worn shoulder length, and must have been in their late teens. They held hands, and seemed not so much shy as bemused by the adoration they had provoked. I noticed first the tiny patchwork denim bag the girl wore slung over one shoulder, then their savagely undershot jaws and keel noses, then their stature: for they stood at most twenty, maybe twenty-one inches high.
‘Aren’t they beautiful?’ said the burr-headed woman, clutching my leg so fiercely that her nails dug into the tendon behind my knee.
‘Beautiful,’ sighed the little man who’d snatched my phone. He pulled a silk handkerchief from his blazer pocket and mopped his eyes.
I understood that these were the dwarfs’ dwarfs, embodying for them all the aesthetic qualities the actual sized ascribe to the miniature. Wishing Lévi-Strauss was with me, I found myself being pushed forward and instinctively I offered my hand to the primordial dwarf girl. She rearranged the strap of her handbag and I was acutely aware of the quail’s ribcage beneath her doll’s cardigan — then the grossness of my fingers, with their elephant’s knees knuckles and fertile crescents of dirt beneath the nails. As our hands Sistined together she turned to quicksilver and burst into a spray of droplets, one of which hung from the chin of the burr-headed woman. I stared at this bubble world and saw in its mirrored convexity the dwarf conventioneers, the concrete and glass of the foyer, and my own moon face, cratered by its passage through deep space.
I awoke with the Barbour’s waxen arms wrapped around me, my face buried in its musty tartan lining, its double zips nipping my neck — and couldn’t stop weeping until a young woman in the line for the breakfast buffet offered me a Kleenex and said, ‘I’d appreciate it if you didn’t.’ Determined to walk away these black-and-blues, I went back to my room, packed the Barbour’s pockets, then headed out into the sunshine.
The temperature was in the mid-seventies and the jacket wasn’t a mistake — it was burden that had to be endured as I toiled up Nob and downhill, passing show couples with show dogs posing outside pacific patisseries. I cursed myself for a fooclass="underline" far from being unencumbered here was I, beneath an ice cream headache, sweating with the exertion of carrying a shooting jacket.
At Marina Boulevard, where the Palace of Fine Arts hid its Moorish fakery behind an arras of pines, I nearly gave up — my progression was purely arithmetic. Only the previous week, when I was either 53,710 or 537 miles away, district officials had scuttled the idea of plastering the Golden Gate with corporate advertising. ‘If you ain’t into this you real sucka,’ J. J. Bigga told the 500- 50-? 5,000-? — strong audience at the Cow Palace… House repos were up 622 per cent to 10,427 in the last quarter… or was it 104,270, or even 1,042? At Crissy Field I stopped a bucktoothed Scotswoman on a bike and asked her for directions to the inconceivably big thing that arced through the haze to the green hills above Sausalito, and she looked at me the way the sane look at the mad.
I plodded on — the Barbour was a waxwork effigy of William Cavendish, 4th Duke of Devonshire, which melted across my shoulders. I set the sludge down on the grass and moulded it into a semblance of Alcatraz, which stood off in the bay. Then I took it up once more and went on, while my LongPen shaded in an afternoon two months previously: an exhibition of Ron Mueck works at the Scottish National Gallery in Edinburgh, where, wandering through the rooms, I was arrested by the follicle-perfect dummy of a depressed woman lying in bed, her white face five times life size. Around the peak of her nose a security guard came hurrying — he told me to stop taking photographs. Perhaps if he’d been a Canadian he would’ve added, civilly, ‘It’ll do you no good to confront your past writ large. Besides, that is not your mother, wrung out by postnatal depression and eking out the years between parturition and cancer with gardening and library books.’
At the time I’d realized that what Mueck was doing reversed everything I thought I understood about the distortion of scale: far from his giantess being a purely intelligible object, she was all feeling — her desperation magnified until it filled the gallery with the ultrasonic howl of a harpooned leviathan—
Mounting the path that switch-backed up through Fort Point National Heritage Site, I was seized not by the Ektachrome of the evergreens and the waters of the bay; nor by the towers of the bridge that rose up before me, which appeared sandy-damp, as if freshly moulded by giant hands, then raised by massed Lilliputians drawing on their steel cables. What grabbed me were the walkers, in their T-shirts and sneakers, their jeans and sweat pants, who converging on the bridge’s approach reached a pedestrian density I’d seldom seen in the States before, except in an airport concourse, a mall or Midtown Manhattan.
I, better than most, understood the compelling urge to walk across a big thing, an urge separated by a mere carpaccio of neurones from the compelling urge to throw yourself off it. It goes without saying that thoughts of suicide were never absent, but burbled repetitively in my ear — ‘Kill yourself, kill yourself, kill yourself’ — just as did the stream of anxiety: ‘You forgot to turn off the gas/shut-and-lock the door’ and, more recently, the times-10/divide-by-10 tic. It took only the signs to alert me: EMERGENCY PHONE AND CRISIS COUNSELING and then, a few score paces on, CRISIS COUNSELING. THERE IS HOPE. MAKE THE CALL. THE CONSEQUENCES OF JUMPING FROM THIS BRIDGE ARE FATAL AND TRAGIC.
If I had had any reservations at all the ‘and tragic’ banished them entirely. The composers of the signs understood entirely not merely the anger-born-of-fear of the felo de se — in my view an emotion much exaggerated — but, more importantly, our narcissism. Yes! A tragedy! That’s what it would be, a fucking tragedy, I had been cut down in my prime, after struggling manfully for years against this debilitating condition, one that I had — still more tragically — vouchsafed to hardly a soul. My notebooks, left open on the table in my room at the Prescott, would explain all that, explain also the awful shame that pursued me, the tiny Eumenides sprung from the Titan’s blood.
By the time I had reached the middle of the bridge, and was standing there listening to the wind shear lament through the cables, and watching the drop yawn below me, I had succumbed to its sublime contours. If the monumental was an architecture of social control, then what could be said of monumental bridges, save that they were very obviously for jumping off — that they in fact ordered you to jump off them? ‘Jump!’ they bellowed, sergeant-majors on the vast parade ground of civilization, and so the Mayans, the Easter Islanders, the Norse Greenlanders, the Romans and now the entire West did their bidding.