The traffic made him dizzy, said Korin in the Chinese restaurant, and he was in constant fear of assault at every road and traffic sign that flashed before him and remained in his mind as if engraved there — Southern State Parkway, Grand Central Expressway, Jackie Robinson Parkway, Atlantic Avenue, and Long Island, Jamaica Bay, Queens, Bronx and Brooklyn — because as they journeyed further and further into the heart of town, he said, it was not the unimaginable, hysterically pounding, mortally dangerous totality of the whole as exemplified by the Brooklyn Bridge, say, or by the skyscrapers downtown that he had read about and the effect of which he had anticipated from the information given in his heavily thumbed travel guides, but odd small details, the apparently insignificant parts of the whole, that struck him, the first subway grille next to a sidewalk from which the steam was perpetually pouring, the first, swaying, wide-bodied old Cadillac they passed by the gas station and the first enormous shiny steel fire truck, and something beyond that, that silenced something in him, or, something that, if he might put it that way, burned its way into his mind without burning it quite through, for what happened, he continued, was that as the taxi swept on without a sound, as if they were slicing through butter, while he was still holding his left hand in the defensive position, looking out of the window, now left and now right, he suddenly felt, and felt most intensely, that he should be seeing something that he wasn’t seeing, that he should be comprehending something he was not comprehending, that there was, from time to time, right in front of his eyes, something he should be seeing, something blindingly obvious, but that he did not know what it was, knowing only that without seeing it he had no hope of understanding the place he had arrived at, and that as long as he failed to understand it he could only keep repeating a phrase he had been repeating to himself all afternoon and evening, something to the effect of Dear God, this really is the center of the world and that he, there could no longer be any doubt about it, had arrived there, at the center of the world; but he got no further with this thought and they turned from Canal Street onto the Bowery and soon enough braked to a halt outside the Suites Hotel, that being their destination, said Korin, and that’s how it had been ever since, he added, meaning that he still hadn’t a clue what it was he should be seeing in that vast city, though he knew full well that whatever it was, was right there before him, that he was actually passing through it, moving through it, as indeed he had been when he paid $25 to the silent driver and got out in front of the hotel, when the taxi started back again, and he was left gazing, simply gazing at its two receding red lights until it turned at the crossroads and set off in the direction of the Bowery, toward the heart of Chinatown.
Twice he turned the key in the lock and twice he checked the security chain, then stepped to the window and watched the empty street for a while, trying to guess what was going on down there, and it was only after he had done that, he explained several days later, that he was capable of sitting down on the bed and thinking things through, his whole body still trembling, and he couldn’t even begin to think of not trembling, because as soon as he tried he started remembering, and there was no way but to sit there and tremble, unable to calm down and think things through, for it was achievement enough, after all, to simply sit down and tremble, which is what he did for minutes on end, and, he wasn’t ashamed to admit it, in the long minutes that followed the trembling he cried for a full half hour, for he was, he admitted, no stranger to crying, and now that the trembling had begun to diminish the crying took over, a kind of cramp-inducing, choking form of sobbing, the kind that makes the shoulders shake, that comes on with excruciating suddenness and stops excruciatingly slowly, though that was not the real problem, not the trembling and weeping, no: the problem was that he was obliged to face so many issues of such gravity, of such variety and of such impenetrable complexity that when it was over, that is to say after the concomitant hiccupping had also stopped, it was as if he had stepped into a vacuum, into outer space, feeling utterly numb, weightless, his head — how should he describe it? — clanging, and he needed to swallow but couldn’t, so he lay down on the bed, not moving a muscle, and started feeling those familiar shooting pains in the nape of his neck, pains so intense that at first he thought his head was about to be ripped off, and his eyes started to burn and a tremendous tiredness overcame him, although it was not impossible, he added, that all these symptoms had been there for a long time, the pain, the burning and the tiredness, and that it was only that some switch had been turned on in his head to turn the lot on, but, well, never mind, said Korin, after all that you may imagine what it felt like to be in such outer space, in this state of pain, burning and fatigue, and then begin, at last, to get his head together and deal with everything that had happened and attempt to cope with it systematically, he said, all this while sitting in a cramped-up position on the bed, going first through each and every symptom, saying, this is what hurts, this is what burns, and this, meaning everything, is what exhausts me, then attending to the events, one after another, from the very beginning if possible, he said, from the surprisingly easy way in which he managed to smuggle money through Hungarian customs without any official intervention, this being the act that made everything possible because, having sold his apartment, his car, and the rest of his so-called effects, in other words when he had converted everything to cash, he had had to think about converting that cash, little by little, into dollars on the black market, but knowing that the chances of getting official permission to take the accumulated sum across the border were negligible, he had sewed the money, along with the manuscript, into the lining of his coat, and simply walked through Hungarian customs, out of the country, without so much as a dog sniffing at him, thus relieving himself of the most terrible anxiety, and it was this success, in every sense, that facilitated the untroubled flight across the Atlantic, and there hadn’t been a major hurdle since, not, at least, that he could remember, apart from the less than major issue of a pus-filled zit at the side of his nose and the problem of constantly having to look for his passport, for the slip of paper with the hotel’s name on it, for the phrase book and the notebook, to check constantly that he hadn’t lost them, to see if they were still where he thought he had put them, in other words, but there had been no problem with the flight, his very first experience of flying, no fear, no pleasure, only an enormous relief, that was until he landed and that was where such problems as he had began, starting with the Immigration Office, the boy, the bus stop, the taxi, but chiefly the problems in his own mind, he said, pointing to his head, where it was as if everything had clouded over, where he had an overwhelming feeling of being suspended in transit, a fact he understood once he had arrived on the first floor of the hotel, just as he understood that he had to change, to change immediately, and that that change must be a wholesale trans-for-ma-tion, a transformation that should begin with his left hand which he must finally relax and to relax generally, so that he might look ahead, because, in the end — and at this point he stood up and returned to the window — everything, essentially, was going well, it was only a case of finding what people referred to as peace of mind, and of getting used to the idea that here he was and here he would stay; and having once thought this he turned back to face the room, leant against the window, took in what lay before him — a simple table, a chair, a bed, a sink — and established the fact that this was where he would be living and that this was where the Great Plan would to be put into effect, and having made a firm decision in this respect he felt strong enough to pull himself together, not to collapse and not to start crying again, because he very easily could have collapsed and started crying again, he confessed, there on the first floor of the Suites Hotel, New York.