Open City (24 page)

My friend looked at me, and said, I wonder why so many people view sickness as a moral test. It has nothing to do with morals or grace. It’s a physical test, and usually we lose. Then he clapped his
hand on my shoulder, and said, My man, suffering is suffering. You’ve seen what it does, you see it every day. It might not be especially comforting to you now, but what you just said about the graceful and strong exit reminds me again of something I often think about. For many years, I’ve thought that the manner and timing of one’s death should be a matter of choice. And I really don’t think it should be limited to situations when terminal illness has made one’s suffering and death imminent. That it should be extended to seasons of life in which one is healthy. Why wait around for the decline? Why not preempt fate?

My friend had by now gone to stand by the window. I remained on the sofa and watched the low sun cut a black silhouette out of him, so that it almost seemed as if I were being addressed by his shadow, or by his future self. There were sparrows flitting about in the distance, attempting to find a place to rest for the night, darting in and out of the network of coves formed by the bare trees and the interlocking arches of the university’s buildings. As I reflected on the fact that in each of these creatures was a tiny red heart, an engine that without fail provided the means for its exhilarating midair maneuvers, I was reminded of how often people took comfort, whether consciously or not, in the idea that God himself attended to these homeless travelers with something like personal care; that, contrary to the evidence of natural history, he protected each one of them from hunger and hazard and the elements. For many, the birds in flight were proof that we, too, were under heaven’s protection, that there is indeed a special providence in the fall of a sparrow.

My friend waited for me to say something, but I didn’t, so he continued. The idea is contrary to the ethics, not to speak of the laws, of our time, but I cannot help but think that in thirty or forty years, when I’ve taken what joy life has to offer me, and come around to making the choice I have just described, it will have become, if not exactly popular or uncontroversial, at least much more common. Think about contraception, fertility drugs, and abortion; think
about these decisions we make so easily about the beginning of life; think about our admiration of figures who chose their own ends: Socrates, Christ, Seneca, Cato. I suppose you don’t like how your professor said what he did about the lions, but you shouldn’t think of it as an insult to Africans. You know it wasn’t meant that way. What he seems to be saying is that, in a better world, the delirium and pain could be avoided. He could walk with his dignity intact into the forest, as he envisioned it, and never be seen again.

He had paused again, standing perfectly still and continuing to look outside. The birds were hardly visible now. Then, in a low voice, almost as if he were talking to himself or regarding his body from a posthumous point of view, he said, The reality, Julius, is that we are alone out here. Perhaps it’s what you professionals call suicide ideation, and I hope it doesn’t alarm you, but I often paint a detailed picture in my mind of what I would like the end of my life to look like. I think of saying goodbye to Clara and other people I love, then I picture an empty house, perhaps a large, rambling rural mansion somewhere near the marshes where I grew up; I imagine a bath upstairs, which I can fill with warm water; and I think of music playing all through this big house,
Crescent
, maybe, or
Ascension
, filling the spaces not taken up by my solitude, reaching me in the bath, so that when I slip across the one-way border, I do so to the accompaniment of modal harmonies heard from far away.

I
t had been several weeks since I had seen Professor Saito. At the end of March, I called him up, and a woman, not Mary but someone else, told me he had died. I gasped the words
Oh, Christ
into the phone and hung up. Afterward, sitting in my quiet room, I felt the blood moving around inside my head. The curtains were drawn open and I could see the tops of trees. The leaves were just beginning to come to life after an indifferent winter and, on all the trees on our street, the tips of branches were swollen, the tight, green buds looking as though they might open at any moment. I was shocked, saddened, but I was not completely surprised. Avoiding the drama of death, its unpleasantness, had been my inadvertent idea in not going there.

I called his place again—no longer his place, the thought occurred to me—and the same woman answered. I apologized for having hung up on her, explained who I was, and asked about funeral arrangements. She said, in too prim a tone of voice, that there would
be a small private ceremony and that it would be for family only. There might be, she added, a memorial much later on, in the fall perhaps, organized at Maxwell College. I asked her if she knew how I could get in touch with Mary. She didn’t seem to be familiar with the name and, as she was eager to get off the phone, our conversation ended.

I didn’t know whom to call. He had meant so much to me but, I realized, our relationship had been so private or, rather, outside a network of other connected relationships, that hardly anyone else knew about it, or about how important it had been to us. I had a moment of peculiar doubt just then: perhaps I had overvalued the friendship, and the importance of it had been mine alone. I knew this was the shock speaking to me.

It was nine-thirty in the morning, and three hours earlier than that in San Francisco. I was surprised that Nadège answered the phone. I apologized again and again when I heard the sleepiness in her voice. It’s Professor Saito, I said, he died. You remember my old English literature professor, Professor Saito. He died of cancer, and I just found out. He was so kind to me. I’m sorry, is this a bad time to call? She said, No, it’s fine, how are you? And as she said this, I heard a man’s voice say, Who is that? And she, responding to him, said, Just give me a second. Later in the morning, she called me and said that it was best if she told me the truth, that it was simpler for everyone that way: she was engaged to be married. He was Haitian-American, someone with whom she’d been family friends for a long time. They would be married in late summer. It was best, she said, if I refrained from calling. Just for now; that would be best.

I had the ulcerous sensation of too many things happening at once. What did she think I wanted from her? But I knew she had freed me from the faint hopes I had been harboring. It helped bring a concrete end to what had, in any case, ended long before. I was annoyed only at how long it had taken, and how much wasted thought had gone into it; annoyed, too, that it would surprise me at all that
she’d moved on so quickly and so decisively. So my griefs interfered with each other. I put Bach’s Coffee Cantata into the stereo that afternoon and lay in bed. It was a recording by the Academy of Ancient Music. The music, rhythmic and jocose, had no entry into my mind, but I let it play on, recognizing its beauty without feeling it. Then I thought perhaps Purcell would be better, more soothing, so I put in “An Evening Hymn”: a beautiful score, for tenor and six viols, but that was too lugubrious, and I was insensible to it as well. So I lay there in silence, watching dust motes, until I decided to get up, and run an errand I had been putting off—a package I had been meaning to send—and keep the self-pity at bay.

I walked into Morningside Park. There was snow on the ground still, in dirty patches. It was a world of brown and black, gray and white. My pace was reluctant. Then I stopped: I had the distinct sensation of being watched. In a tree, I saw a hawk. Or, rather, he saw me. His predatory glare pricked the back of my neck, and I turned round to discover him, all intent, on a low branch not more than twenty feet away from where I stood. The park was empty, and the sun was ineffectual, invisible, hiding. He was a strong bird, big, in his presence an embodiment of an extreme elaboration of the evolutionary process. I wondered if he was, perhaps, kin to Pale Male, the celebrated hawk in Central Park who had nested on a Fifth Avenue building, or if, indeed, he was Pale Male himself. He regarded me less with disdain than with disinterest. We looked at each other, and looked, until, spooked, I lowered my eyes, turned around, and carefully, evenly, walked away from him, the whole while feeling those eyes boring into me.

When I came out of the park just north of Central Park North, not many people were about. There were two men in a doorway near the entrance of the post office, one of whom I had seen before. He had dirt-encrusted brown hair that fell about his face like fine ropes. His beard was bushy, flecked with white, and the odor of unwashed weeks emanated from him; his feet, bare and splayed out in front of
him in his sitting position, were ashen. The second man, who was clean and much younger, and who was unfamiliar to me, was on one knee, holding the older man’s foot. When I got closer, I saw that they were talking, quietly and congenially, as though they were at a dinner table in a restaurant. They spoke Spanish, and laughed every now and again, seemingly unaware that their interaction was taking place in public, oblivious to my staring. The clean man was clipping the dirty man’s toenails. He did it with such attentiveness that I couldn’t help guessing that the man he was caring for was an older relative of his; his father, perhaps, or an uncle.

I entered the post office. It was late, almost closing time. Unable to find a customs form for my package, I joined the dishearteningly long line, but just then, one of the postal workers redivided the lines, opened a new window, and asked if anyone was sending an international package. I suddenly found myself at the head of a line. I thanked her, and moved toward the window. I told the man behind the glass, a pleasant, bald, middle-aged man, that I wanted a customs form. I filled it out with Farouq’s address. The memory of my conversations with him had convinced me to send him Kwame Anthony Appiah’s
Cosmopolitanism
. I sealed the envelope, and the postal worker showed me various booklets of stamps. No flags, I said, something more interesting. No, not these, and certainly not these. I finally opted for a beautiful set featuring quilts from Gee’s Bend, Alabama. He looked up at me and said, I know. And he added, after a pause, I know, my brother. Then he said, Say, brother, where are you from? ’Cause, see, I could tell you were from the Motherland. And you brothers have something that is vital, you understand me. You have something that is vital for the health of those of us raised on this side of the ocean. Let me tell you something: I am raising my daughters as Africans.

There was no one in line behind me, and the postal window was partially concealed by a column. Terry (that was the name on the ID card around his neck) finished processing my parcel, and asked if I
was going to pay for it with cash or a credit card. See, brother—Julius, I said—okay, Brother Julius, the thing is, you’re a visionary. It’s the truth. I can see that in you. You’re someone who has traveled far. You’re what we call a journeyer. So let me share something with you, because I think you’ll get it. He placed his hands on the metal scale in front of him, inclined his head toward the window, and, lowering his voice to just above a whisper, began a recitation: We are the ones who received the boot. We, who are used for loot, trampled underfoot. Unconquered. We, who carry the crosses. Yes, see? Our kith and our kin used like packhorses. We of the countless horrific losses, assailed by the forces, robbed of choices, silenced voices. And still unconquered. You feel me? For four hundred and fifty years. Five centuries of tears, aeons of fears. Yet still we remain, we remain, we remain the unconquered.

He held the last line in a meaningful pause. Then he said, You know it? I shook my head. It’s one of mine, he said. I’m a poet, see. I call that one “The Unconquered.” I write these things down, and sometimes I go down to the poetry cafés. That’s my gift, you see, poetry. If you liked that, he said, listen to this one: The catalogue of pain, that comes with cocaine, is not from us. They made it, they made the stuff, they made us tough, it was they, the bringers of pain, who brought the rough times, where once all things were calm. And now what we need, you feel me? We need to seed a new balm, a new creed. From within. From our ancestors. For our children. For our future.

Again, moved by his own words, he fell into silence. Brother Julius, he said, with great feeling, you’re a visionary, keep hope alive. I think we should see some poetry together. I can see that you instinctively get it. We must be a light for this generation. This generation is in darkness, you feel me? I know you understand. Do you write, yourself? I took the card he slid under the glass. It was printed in gold ink on off-white stock.
TERRENCE MCKINNEY, WRITER/PERFORMANCE POET/ACTIVIST
. No, I said. I wouldn’t exactly
call myself a writer. Well, drop me a line sometime, he said. We can go to the Nuyorican Poets Cafe. I’d like to talk to you. Sure thing, I said.

It was, in the circumstances, the simplest thing I could say. I made a mental note to avoid that particular post office in the future. When I came out of the building, the younger of the two Spanish-speaking men I had seen earlier had left. The bearded man who’d just had his toenails clipped sat in the golden glow of the sun, which had now come out, and the day became much warmer than I had anticipated. The light fell straight down from the corner of the building across the street. He lay there half-asleep in the pool of light, transfigured. Beside him were three empty liquor bottles. I had paid for my postage with cash, and had some change. I gave the drunk two of the three dollars in my pocket. There was a feral cat behind him, seeking shade from the sudden brightness.
Gracias
, the man said, stirring. When I had walked three steps beyond him, I came back again and gave him the last dollar, and he smiled at me through broken teeth. The cat struck with its paw at its own shadow in the concrete.

I got on the subway at 110th Street. I disembarked at 14th Street, and cut across to the East Side, and I walked all the way down the Bowery, with no particular destination in mind, past the innumerable shops selling lamps and restaurant equipment, shops that, from the outside, resembled exotic aviaries. I finally came to a busy square on East Broadway. It was only a short walk from the part of Chinatown that was most popular with tourists, but it felt like an entire world away, for here no tourists were to be found and almost no one, in fact, who was not originally from East Asia. The signs on the shops, restaurants, businesses, and advertisements were in Chinese characters, and only occasionally were these supplemented with English translations. In the middle of the square itself, a square that was hardly more than a traffic island bounded by the crossing of seven streets, there stood the statue that, from a distance, I guessed was of an emperor or an ancient poet but that turned out to be Lin Zexu,
the nineteenth-century antinarcotics activist. The severe monument commemorating this hero of the Opium Wars—he had been appointed commissioner in Guangzhou in 1839, and was much hated by the British for his role in impeding their drug traffic—was the one around which now pigeons flocked. They streaked it with gray guano, enriching the dried white material they had earlier left on the dark green finish of the statue’s robes and head. A few people ate ice cream or fried snacks as they sat on the benches of the traffic island, or walked around the statue enjoying the sunshine. Little sign remained of what the neighborhood had been in the early 1800s: an open-air market for livestock and horses, a district of flophouses, tattoo parlors, and saloons.