Fantastic Metropolis

Cold, driving weather like this always brought them out.

It had been there in early morning, a presence, a threat, a promise, and by seven had honed itself to a cleaverlike edge on the strop of wind. From my window on the fifth floor I listened to the schlep-schlep-schlep of that edge on the strop and watched as day congealed and the blade began to slice away at the city.

They emerged on their canes and crutches, in wheelchairs, tottering on artificial and makeshift limbs or balanced like flat-bottomed urns on low carts, pulling themselves along with gloved hands. At these times there is an expression on their faces that’s difficult to describe. Pain, yes—but within it, at the core, the thing that pain comes wrapped around, a kind of joyfulness, I think.

Others, those to whom the world belonged, walked with heads down, swaddled in scarves and layers of wool and heavy caps. But the survivors tore open their own shabby coats and raised faces to the sky, threw out their arms to embrace it all: this wind, this blade, this impossible city.

“Don’t tell me. The fire brigade’s out.” Somehow or another, originating in the punch line of a joke, I’m sure, that had become our name for them. Sandra stood in the doorway arch whose frame evoked both Chinese calligraphy and π with sheet and blanket wrapped about her, a human teepee. Her hair, so blond it was almost white, had begun growing back in. It poked out a quarter-inch or so all around and she was convinced she looked like a dandelion. “Shut the shockin’ window before your nose falls off.”

“Yeah, and I’ve only got one of those.”

In college, as was the fad for a couple of years, she’d had an ear removed. Half the people in the city her age were walking around with newly grown ones, but that wasn’t Sandra’s style. She started something, she stayed with it.

“If I shut the window, it frosts over and I can’t see out.”

“What—they look different this time?”

But of course they never did. They were as generic and predictable as spring, as the run of our daily lives, the news and entertainment piped in to us, what we said to one another. I shut the window. Wind howled as though in complaint and shook the pane fiercely with both hands.

“Breakfast?”

“I’d planned on fishes, but we’re fresh out of loaves.”

“The cupboard was bare.”

“In a word.”

“Not even a bone.”

“A few exoskeletons, but I don’t think those count.”

Sandra and wrappings sank into one of the chairs. “I was dreaming,” she told me. “Standing on the street looking up at a billboard.” With one hand she sketched its cadence, form and line breaks on air. “We’re almost done/ World finished soon/ Thank you for your patience/ B&D Construction.

“I’m standing there and I have this warm feeling in my stomach. I realize that for months, as cold winds blew in across bare plains to the east, I’ve been coming out each morning to admire new buildings that appear overnight, to be among the first to stroll new plazas, arcades, explore tiny parks. I’m tremendously proud of my city, what it’s becoming.

“But there’s also, it seems, a problem. When I return to my apartment, six brutally handsome young men in jeans, black T-shirts and low-slung toolbelts are waiting in the hall outside. They have to tear out my floor, they say. Possibly the walls as well. They’ll know once they get started. But will I be able to stay here while you work? I ask them. Sure, no problem, the foreman says. Long as you don’t need a floor or walls.”

Rising, Sandra walked into the kitchen area and, ever the child of Famine parents, came out with a half-loaf of bread fetched from one hiding spot or another. I drew hot water, crumbled in tea leaves, and we fell to.

We’d been together almost four years. I’d gone with friends to HOUSE OF th’OUGHT and wound up sitting beside her. The House was another of those intermittent hot spots thronged with patrons for months when it opened, afterwards all but abandoned. Here great books were read aloud, in shifts, by professional readers. We were never able to agree on what was being read at the time. I remembered Tristram Shandy; Sandra insisted that by then Burning Cinder Person, the House’s star reader and frequent subject of profiles in local papers during the House’s brief heyday, was well into the 19th century.

(In halflight she turns, murmuring, and I trace the scars along her back, by the shoulder blades. The sky splits open like a wound, and birds cough the sun into morning.)

“So what’s on for today?” she asked.

“Have to deliver my Cowboy tapes to Epoch-Z.”

Cowboy’s a figure so legendary that many claim he never existed. Supposedly he was the first of the great urban freedom fighters—some say the last as well—and went down in the seige of the markets. But street wisdom has it that Cowboy’s still out there. He’d never been photographed except—possibly—for less than sixty seconds of blurry footage I’d caught years ago while filming deconstruction of the Skystop Building. One of the news channels was putting together a documentary on Cowboy. They’d learned of my tapes and offered enough money to keep me afloat, us afloat, for a year.

“What, you can’t just shoot it to them? You’re going outside? To someone’s shockin’ office?”

I shrugged. “They actually called up, on the phone. ‘We may be on the bitter sharp edge, but we’re also a little old-fashioned ‘round here,’ they tell me, ‘in our own way.’ Before I know it, I’m in a conference call with half a dozen vice presidents ranging in age between eighteen and eighteen-and-a-half. ‘We like our people to have faces,’ they tell me.”

Jack London said to understand totalitarianism, picture a boot heel stamping on a human face—forever. Big business is soft Italian-leather loafers carressing that same face. However long and hard we espouse bohemian, alternative, libertarian, contrary lifestyles, we all live off big business, fleas on a dog. I tried to remember when heads of major corporations had begun showing up for work in pullovers and jeans. Revolution in America? Radical change? The country’s very genius is its capacity to absorb anything, absolutely anything—to appropriate it, bear it on a flood into the mainstream, vitiate it.

“Anything I can pick up while I’m out?” I asked.

“Ginger would be good, for tonight’s curry. Oh, and I guess some vegetables and rice. So there’ll be a curry? Assuming I ever see you again.”

“Think of it as an adventure,” I said.

“Think of it as stupid,” she said. “Not to mention the possibility of freezing nose, fingers and like wee appendages off.”

“_Wee?_ Did you say wee?” Reaching for a Scottish accent, which came out, inexplicably, Jamaican.

“Don’t forget the ginger.”

We say it together: “A Redemptionist never forgets.”

---

There on the street away from river’s edge, I encountered a more normal population—normal for this quarter of the city, that is. Fully half those out in the bite and slash hobbled along on feet with tendons fatally damaged by the police’s standard interrogation technique: if they didn’t like your answer, they stood on your foot and heaved you mightily backwards. Meanwhile uptown folk were paying clinics huge sums to have facial muscles injected with botulism. The bacteria paralyze the muscle and, in doing so, erase age lines. When these people talk, their eyebrows don’t move but float cloudlike above their mouths, like dialog balloons in cartoons.

I began to penetrate the city’s many folds and strata. I’ve always suspected it to be more laminate than veneer, thin sheets pressed close to form something of apparent substance, nothing, not even inferior materials, at its core.

At the corner of Market and Force, several hundred protestors converged in absolute silence on the plaza before City Hall. Riot police formed a human moat around the complex, beating sticks backhand against shields. The juxtaposition was uncanny. Protestors stood motionless looking across. Police beat at their shields. At some invisible cue the protestors withdrew as silently as they’d come.

At First and Desire, a small park had been set fire by the Children’s Army. We burn the bones they throw us, a placard read. Children in red armbands stood alongside monitoring, making certain the fires did not spread. The fires were doing anything but, however. They were lowering, folding in upon themselves, benches turning to smolder. One of the children stepped forward into the park and gave a fingers-into-palm, come-to-me sign. Incoming, he shouted as half a dozen Molotov cocktails rained from windows of the high-rise project skirting the park.

Two blocks up, a crowd had gathered. They shouted encouragement, chanted, raised fists in the air. Leaning against the wall of a nearby credit union was a piece of cardboard cut from a heavy box and laboriously hand-lettered in cockeyed, backward-leaning block letters.

STREET FITING!

It was already over, though, the crowd dispersing, as I approached. One man lay broken and bleeding, body in the street, head on the curb as though on a pillow. I watched as his eyes went still. The other, the winner, wiped blood from his eyes and picked up the hat with the money. Then he walked to the sign, lifted it for a closer look, tucked it underarm. His now. Spoils.

The city I find when I come out into it, the one I’m a part of, is invisible to many. As though the city’s gone belly up, as though this gray sky were an overturned stone. These are the forgotten people, the ones who don’t matter, those ground down on the city’s mill, used up, thrown beneath the wheels. Here there is neither history nor future, only a perpetual present tense of motion, hunger, need and momentary ease, a fire that consumes and goes on consuming, through whose flickering silent tongues sometimes we glimpse the shape, the form, the suggestion, of another reality, another world. A better one? Different, at least. And different is enough.

“Cowboy!” I cried out.

He stood at a street corner, buckskin fringe blowing in the breeze, looking a little confused when I approached him. We were at the dangerous border between uptown and down. Age lines crouched like homesteaders, deepset, at eyes and mouth. I took note of the missing ear.

“What’s up?” I said. Like so many others, looking for guidance.

“What’s ever up but more of the same? Just they practice new grimaces in the mirror is all, tell us more outrageous lies. You feel connected?”

No.

But had I ever?

“We have to keep changing. Dodging under, going over, scrambling. We can’t let them get a hold, take us for granted.”

“But you…”

Seeing the sudden sadness in his eyes, I understood. He was an icon. He couldn’t change.

“Here’s my ride,” he said, stepping not into the city bus one would have thought he awaited but into an ancient VW bus. “Keep the faith?”

I watched him pull away.

Against the horizon the day still burned into life and burned steadily away, like alcohol, in a blue flame. No heat to any of it. What could a man do?

After a moment I snapped an ear plug off the tab and fit it in as I started walking again along the street, past crews of workers tearing up streets, crews of workers rebuilding them. You never know what you’ll get, of course, that’s part of the deal, but this was okay. We’ll Meet Again in Glory. I watched my breath go out in plumes with each step.

Glory was the next town over.