City of God (2 page)

Lifts his tray of watches out of reach: “Get away, you got no business wit me.” Looking left and right as he says it.

I was in mufti—jeans, leather jacket over plaid shirt over T-shirt. Absent cruciform ID.

And then later on my walk, at Astor Place, where they put out their goods on the sidewalk: three of the purple choir robes neatly folded and stacked on a plastic shower curtain. I picked one and turned back the neck and there was the label, Churchpew Crafts, and the laundry mark from Mr. Chung.

The peddler, a solemn young mestizo with that bowl of black hair they have, wanted ten dollars each. I thought that was reasonable.

They come over from Senegal, or up from the Caribbean, or from Lima, San Salvador, Oaxaca, they find a piece of sidewalk and go to work. The world's poor lapping our shores, like the rising of the global warmed sea.

I remember how, on the way to Machu Picchu, I stopped in Cuzco and listened to the street bands. I was told when I found my camera missing that I could buy it back the next morning in the market street behind the cathedral. Merciful heavens, I was pissed. But the fences were these shyly smiling women of Cuzco in their woven ponchos of red and ocher. They wore black derbies and carried their babies wrapped to their backs. . . and with Anglos rummaging the stalls as if searching for their lost dead, how, my Lord Jesus, could I not accept the justice of the situation?

As I did at Astor Place in the shadow of the great mansarded brownstone voluminous Cooper Union people's college with the birds flying up from the square.

A block east, on St. Marks, a thrift shop had the altar candlesticks that were lifted along with the robes. Twenty-five dollars the pair. While I was at it, I bought half a dozen used paperback detective novels. To learn the trade.

I'm lying, Lord. I just read the damn things when I'm depressed. The paperback detective he speaks to me. His rod and his gaff they comfort me. And his world is circumscribed and dependable in its punishments, which is more than I can say for Yours.

I know You are on this screen with me. If Thomas Pemberton, B.D., is losing his life, he's losing it here, to his watchful God. Not just over my shoulder do I presumptively locate You, or in the Anglican starch of my collar, or in the rectory walls, or in the coolness of the chapel stone that frames the door, but in the blinking cursor. . .

—We made our plans standing in front of one of the big blue-green paintings of water lilies. It is a matter of when she can get away. She has two young children. There is a nanny, but everything is so scheduled. We had not touched, and still did not as we came out of the Met and walked down the steps and I hailed a cab for her. Her glance at me
as she got in was almost mournful, a moment of declared trust that I felt as a blow to the heart. It was what I wanted and had applied myself to getting, but once given, was instantly transformed into her dependence, as if I had been sworn to someone in a secret marriage whose terms and responsibilities had not been defined. As the cab drove off I wanted to run after it and tell her it was all a mistake, that she had misunderstood me. Later, I could only think how lovely she was, what a powerful recognition there was between us, I couldn't remember having felt an attraction so strong, so clean, and rather than being on the brink of an affair, I imagined that I might at last find my salvation in an authentic life with this woman. She lives in some genuine state of integrity almost beyond belief, a woman of unstudied grace, with none of the coarse ideologies of the time adhered to her.

—Drifting around town picking locations like the art director of a movie. I place St. Timothy's in the East Village, off Second Avenue around the corner from the Ukrainian hall and restaurant. There had to have been at least one church's worth of WASPs down here in the old days. Before Manhattan moved north to the sunnier open spaces above Fourteenth Street. . . St. Timothy's, Episcopal, typical New York Brownstone Ecclesiastic, little brother of the grander Church of the Ascension on lower Fifth Avenue. So to please the good Father I've now changed the name and the locale. (There is an actual old ruin of a church on East Sixth, but the wrong color, Catholic gray granite, with a steeple more like a cupola and the stained-glass bull's-eye all blown out and pigeon shit like streaks of rain on the stone. Three young men on the steps, one in the middle eyeing me as I pass, the other two covering each end of the block.)

Here in the neighborhood of St. Tim's, lots of people just getting by. On the corner, young T-shirted girl, braless, tight cutoffs, she is running in place with her Walkman. Gray-haired over-the-hill bohemian, a rummy, he affects a ponytail. Squat, short Latina, steatopy-gous. Stooped old man in house slippers, Yankees cap, filthy pants held up by a rope. Young black man crossing against the traffic, glaring, imperious, making his statement.

East Village generally still the six-story height of the nineteenth century. The city is supposed to deconstruct and remake itself every five minutes. Maybe midtown, but except for the Verrazano Bridge, the infrastructure was in place by the late thirties. The last of the major subway lines was built in the twenties. All the bridges, tunnels, and most of the roads and parkways, improved or unimproved, were done by the Second World War. And everywhere you look the nineteenth is still here—the Village, East and West, the Lower East Side, Brooklyn Bridge, Central Park, the row houses in Harlem, the iron-fronts in Soho. . .

The city grid was laid out in the 1840s, so despite all we still live with the decisions of the dead. We walk the streets where generations have trod have trod have trod.

But, Jesus, you're out of town a couple of days and it's hypershock. Fire sirens. Police-car hoots. Ritual pneumatic drilling on the avenues. The runners in their running shorts, the Rollerblades, the messengers. Hissing bus doors. Sidewalk pileups for the stars at their screenings. All the restaurants booked. Babies tumbling out of the maternity wards. Building facades falling into the streets. Bursting water mains. Cop crime. Every day a cop shoots a black kid, choke-holds a perp, a bunch of them bust into the wrong apartment, wreck the place, cuff the women and children. Cover-ups by the Department, mayor making excuses.

New York New York, capital of literature, the arts, social pretension, subway tunnel condos. Napoleonic real estate mongers, grandiose rag merchants. Self-important sportswriters. Statesmen retired in Sutton Place to rewrite their lamentable achievements. . . New York, the capital of people who make immense amounts of money without working. The capital of people who work all their lives and end up broke and gray New York is the capital of boroughs of vast neighborhoods of nameless drab apartment houses where genius is born every day.

It is the capital of all music. It is the capital of exhausted trees.

The migrant wretched of the world, they think if they can just get here, they can get a foothold. Run a newsstand, a bodega, drive a cab, peddle. Janitor, security guard, run numbers, deal, whatever it takes. You want to tell them this is no place for poor people. The racial fault line going through the heartland goes through our heart. We're
color-coded ethnic and social enclavists, multiculturally suspicious, and verbally aggressive, as if the city as an idea is too much to bear even by the people who live in it.

But I can stop on any corner at the intersection of two busy streets, and before me are thousands of lives headed in all four directions, uptown downtown east and west, on foot, on bikes, on in-line skates, in buses, strollers, cars, trucks, with the subway rumble underneath my feet. . . and how can I not know I am momentarily part of the most spectacular phenomenon in the unnatural world? There is a specie recognition we will never acknowledge. A primatial over-soul. For all the wariness or indifference with which we negotiate our public spaces, we rely on the masses around us to delineate ourselves. The city may begin from a marketplace, a trading post, the confluence of waters, but it secretly depends on the human need to walk among strangers.

And so each of the passersby on this corner, every scruffy, oversize, undersize, weird, fat, or bony or limping or muttering or foreign-looking, or green-haired punk-strutting, threatening, crazy, angry, inconsolable person I see. . . is a New Yorker, which is to say as native to this diaspora as I am, and part of our great sputtering experiment in a universalist society proposing a world without nations where anyone can be anything and the ID is planetary.

Not that you shouldn't watch your pocketbook, lady.

—Uncounted billions of years idle away as this single-cell organism, this speck of corruption, this submicroscopic breach of nonlife, evolves selectively through realms of slime and armor-plated brutishness, past experimental kingdoms of horses two feet tall and lizards that fly, into the triumphant dominions of the furry self-improving bipeds, those of the opposed thumb and forefinger, who will lope out of prehistory to sublime into a teenage nerd at the Bronx High School of Science.

Of the brilliant boys I knew at Science whose minds were made to solve mathematical problems and skip happily among the most abstruse concepts of physics, a large number were jerks. I've since run into a few of them in their adulthood and they are still jerks. It is
possible that the scientific character of mind is by its nature childish, capable through life of a child's wonder and excitements, but lacking real discernment, lacking sadness, too easily delighted by its own intellect. There are exceptions, of course, the physicist Steven Weinberg, for example, whom I've read and who has the moral gravity you would want from a scientist. But I wonder why, for instance, the cosmologists and astronomers, as a whole, are so given to cute names for their universe. Not only that it began as the Big Bang. In the event it cannot overcome its own gravity, it will fly back into itself, and that will be the Big Crunch. In the event of a lack of density, it will continue to expand, and that will be the Big Chill. The inexplicable dark matter of the universe that must necessarily exist because of the behavior of galactic perimeters is comprised of either the neutrino or of weakly interacting massive particles, known as WIMPs. And the dark-mattered halos around the galaxies are massive compact halo objects, or MACHOs.

Are these clever fellows mocking themselves? Is it a kind of American trade humor they practice out of modesty, as the English practice self-denigration in their small talk? Or is it bravery under fire, that studied carelessness in the trenches while the metaphysical rounds come in?

I think they simply are lacking in holy apprehension. I think the mad illiterate priest of a prehistoric religion tearing the heart out of a living sacrifice and holding it still pulsing in his two bloodied hands. . . might have had more discernment.