He always wanted to live in New York. His Uncle Lloyd lived downtown on
Lafayette, and in the long stretches between visits he daydreamed about
living in his apartment. When his mother and father dragged him to the city
for that season's agreed-upon exhibit or good-for-you Broadway smash, they
usually dropped in on Uncle Lloyd for a quick hello. These afternoons were
preserved in a series of photographs taken by strangers. His parents were
holdouts in an age of digital multiplicity, raking the soil in lonesome
areas of resistance: a coffee machine that didn't tell time, dictionaries
made out of paper, a camera that only took pictures. The family camera did
not transmit their coordinates to an orbiting satellite. It did not allow
them to book airfare to beach resorts with close access to rain forests via
courtesy shuttle. There was no prospect of video, high-def or otherwise. The
camera was so backward that every lurching specimen his father enlisted from
the passersby was able to operate it sans hassle, no matter the depth of
cow-eyed vacancy in their tourist faces or local wretchedness inverting
their spines. His family posed on the museum steps or beneath the brilliant
marquee with the poster screaming over their left shoulders, always the same
composition. The boy stood in the middle, his parents' hands dead on his
shoulders, year after year. He didn't smile in every picture, only that
percentage culled for the photo album. Then it was in the cab to his uncle's
and up the elevator once the doorman screened them. Uncle Lloyd dangled in
the doorframe and greeted them with a louche "Welcome to my little
bungalow."
As his parents were introduced to Uncle Lloyd's latest girlfriend, the boy
was down the hall, giddy and squeaking on the leather of the cappuccino
sectional and marveling over the latest permutations in home entertainment.
He searched for the fresh arrival first thing. This visit it was the
wireless speakers haunting the corners like spindly wraiths, the next he was
on his knees before a squat blinking box that served as some species of
multimedia brainstem. He dragged a finger down their dark surfaces and then
huffed on them and wiped the marks with his polo shirt. The televisions were
the newest, the biggest, levitating in space and pulsing with a host of
extravagant functions diagrammed in the unopened owner's manuals. His uncle
got every channel and maintained a mausoleum of remotes in the storage space
inside the ottoman. The boy watched TV and loitered by the glass walls,
looking out on the city through smoky anti-UV glass, nineteen stories up.
The reunions were terrific and rote, early tutelage in the recursive nature
of human experience. "What are you watching?" the girlfriends asked as they
padded in bearing boutique seltzer and chips, and he'd say "The buildings,"
feeling weird about the pull the skyline had on him. He was a mote cycling
in the wheels of a giant clock. Millions of people tended to this
magnificent contraption, they lived and sweated and toiled in it, serving
the mechanism of metropolis and making it bigger, better, story by glorious
story and idea by unlikely idea. How small he was, tumbling between the
teeth. But the girlfriends were talking about the monster movies on TV, the
women in the monster movies bolting through the woods or shriveling in the
closet trying not to make a sound or vainly flagging down the pickup that
might rescue them from the hillbilly slasher. The ones still standing at the
credit roll made it through by dint of an obscure element in their
character. "I can't stand these scary stories," the girlfriends said before
returning to the grown-ups, attempting an auntly emanation as if they might
be the first of their number promoted to that office. His father's younger
brother was fastidious when it came to expiration dates.
He liked to watch monster movies and the city churning below. He fixed on
odd details. The ancient water towers lurking atop obstinate old prewars
and, higher up, the massive central-air units that hunkered and coiled on
the striving high-rises, glistening like extruded guts. The tar-paper pates
of tenements. He spotted the occasional out-of-season beach chair jackknifed
on gravel, seemingly gusted up from the street below. Who was its owner?
This person staked out corners of the city and made a domain. He squinted at
the slogans cantering along stairwell entrances, the Day-Glo threats and
pidgin manifestos, a.k.a.'s of impotent revolutionaries. Blinds and curtains
were open, half open, shut, voids in a punch card decipherable only by
defunct mainframes lodged in the crust of unmarked landfills. Pieces of
citizens were on display in the windows, arranged by a curator with a taste
for non sequitur: the splayed pinstriped legs of an urban golfer putting
into a colander; half a lady's torso, wrapped in a turquoise blazer, as
glimpsed through a trapezoid; a fist trembling on a titanium desk. A shadow
bobbed behind a bathroom's bumpy glass, steam slithering through the slit.
He remembered how things used to be, the customs of the skyline. Up and down
the island the buildings collided, they humiliated runts through verticality
and ambition, sulked in one another's shadows. Inevitability was mayor, term
after term. Yesterday's old masters, stately named and midwifed by
once-famous architects, were insulted by the soot of combustion engines and
by technological advances in construction. Time chiseled at elegant
stonework, which swirled or plummeted to the sidewalk in dust and chips and
chunks. Behind the façades their insides were butchered, reconfigured,
rewired according to the next era's new theories of utility. Classic six
into studio honeycomb, sweatshop killing floor into cordoned cubicle mill.
In every neighborhood the imperfect in their fashion awaited the wrecking
ball and their bones were melted down to help their replacements surpass
them, steel into steel. The new buildings in wave upon wave drew themselves
out of rubble, shaking off the past like immigrants. The addresses remained
the same and so did the flawed philosophies. It wasn't anyplace else. It was
New York City.
The boy was smitten. His family stopped by Uncle Lloyd's every couple of
months. He drank the seltzer, he watched monster movies, he was a sentry at
the window. The building was a totem sheathed in blue metal, a changeling in
the nest of old walk-ups. The zoning commission had tucked the bribes into
their coats, and now there he was, floating over the tapering island. There
was a message there, if he could teach himself the language. On rainy-day
visits the surfaces of the buildings were pitiless and blank, as they were
this day, years later. With the sidewalks hidden from view, the boy conjured
an uninhabited city, where no one lived behind all those miles and miles of
glass, no one caught up with loved ones in living rooms filled with tasteful
and affirming catalog furniture, and all the elevators hung like broken
puppets at the end of long cables. The city as ghost ship on the last ocean
at the rim of the world. It was a gorgeous and intricate delusion,
Manhattan, and from crooked angles on overcast days you saw it disintegrate,
were forced to consider this tenuous creature in its true nature.
If you'd asked him on any of those childhood afternoons what he wanted to be
when he grew up--tapping his shoulder as the family car inserted itself into
the queue for the Midtown Tunnel or as they hummed toward their exit on the
Long Island Expressway--he would have had nothing to offer with regards to
profession or avocation. His father wanted to be an astronaut when he was a
kid, but the boy had never been anything but earthbound, kicking pebbles.
All he was truly sure of was that he wanted to live in a city gadget,
something well-stocked and white-walled, equipped with rotating bosomy
beauties. His uncle's apartment resembled the future, a brand of manhood
waiting on the other side of the river. When his unit finally started
sweeping beyond the wall--whenever that was--he knew he had to visit Uncle
Lloyd's apartment, to sit on the sectional one last time and stare at the
final, empty screen in the series. His uncle's building was only a few
blocks past the barrier and he found himself squinting at it when it strode
into view. He searched for the apartment, counting metallic blue stories and
looking for movement. The dark glass relinquished nothing. He hadn't seen
his uncle's name on any of the survivor rolls and prayed against a reunion,
the slow steps coming down the hall.
If you'd asked him about his plans at the time of the ruin, the answer would
have come easily: lawyering. He was bereft of attractive propositions,
constitutionally unaccustomed to enthusiasm, and generally malleable when it
came to his parents' wishes, adrift on that gentle upper-middle-class
current that kept its charges cheerfully bobbing far from the shoals of
responsibility. It was time to stop drifting. Hence, law. He was long past
finding it ironic when his unit swept a building in that week's grid and
they came upon a den of lawyers. They slogged through the blocks day after
day and there had been too many firms in too many other buildings for it to
have any novelty. But this day he paused. He slung his assault rifle over
his shoulder and parted the blinds at the end of the corridor. All he wanted
was a shred of uptown. He tried to orient himself: Was he looking north or
south? It was like dragging a fork through gruel. The ash smeared the city's
palette into a gray hush on the best of days, but introduce clouds and a
little bit of precip and the city became an altar to obscurity. He was an
insect exploring a gravestone: the words and names were crevasses to get
lost in, looming and meaningless.
This was the fourth day of rain, Friday afternoon, and a conditioned part of
him submitted to end-of-the-week lassitude, even if Fridays had lost their
meaning. Hard to believe that reconstruction had progressed so far that
clock-watching had returned, the slacker's code, the concept of weekend. It
had been a humdrum couple of days, reaffirming his belief in reincarnatio...
Zone
One: A Novel
