The Waterworks (29 page)

So I will not say Donne did not appreciate the depth of the conspiracy—that it was not only a concordance of wealth, and government, and science but a profound … derangement of the natural order of fathers and sons. There was a more fathomless threat there than to Christianity … that left my eyes blasted to peer into it.

I went across to Blackwell’s Island one day from the pier
at Fifty-ninth Street. The ferry was no more than an open boat fitted up with side-wheels and powered by a small coal-fired steam engine mounted on the deck. It barely kept its course against the powerful scalloping currents of the East River. The weather was raw—this was November, when the chill winds huddle you in your coat and give clear, icy indication of the age of your bones. I should also say, in abhorrence of suspense, that I think now, if I wasn’t the only person to visit Sartorius, I was certainly the last before his murder at the hands of a colleague in criminal insanity a few days later.

He wore the gray beltless robe they dressed them in. His eyes were sharp and clear black behind the incongruous pincenez affixed to the bridge of his nose … but his head was shaved, he was beardless … and in this freezing catacomb his legs were bare … so that I was put in mind of some … garden creature … something hairless … and all eyes. I saw him through a meshwork screen bolted, floor to ceiling, to iron bars. He sat quite still on a bench in a constantly moving, muttering, moaning, outraged population of maniacs, some in restraining jackets, others in shackles. They kept these people not in rooms but in what seemed to be a succession of hall wards with high clerestory windows and vaulted ceilings finished in ochered brick. The great volumes of space above the inmates mixed their screeches and shouts and cries of despair into a cathedral of prayerful sound. But it was an institution, you see, and so he seemed quite comfortable in it… this doctor who had run field hospitals and operating rooms and institutes of his own design. He sat and watched…. Even had I not known who he was, my eyes would have fixed on him because he was the only one not moving … not shuffling about, or pacing an imaginary cell, not lifting his eyes to heaven, not twitching, shrugging, or giggling
or dribbling over himself, not lying on the floor and waving his arms like a swimmer, not hideously laughing, not endlessly crying.

A large fire hose was mounted on the wall in the narrow corridor in which I stood. The asylum smell was pungent—from the ammonia wash that was periodically sent over the floors and walls. The guard, who had led me here, rapped his club on the bars to get Sartorius’s attention. What was unsettling about our subsequent exchange was the doctor’s unfaltering poise. He asked me why I had come. I found myself ridiculously flattered that he had recognized me. I said: “I would like if possible to give you your day in court.”

“That would only be hypocrisy. I respect the self-interest behind this expedient,” he said, indicating the hall. “It is more in character with the society. Besides, I don’t intend to remain separate from these people. I intend, as soon as I understand them, to share their rituals … so that a month from now, if you return, you will find me indistinguishable from everyone else here.”

“To what purpose?”

“I have no other means of experiment than my person.”

“What sort of experiment?”

He didn’t answer. Behind the close mesh he was cross-hatched, like a steel-point etching. He turned his back and folded his arms, so that we were looking at all the madmen together, he from the inside, I from the corridor. “You see the profusion?” he said. “Nature reaching out everywhere, endlessly rooting, making more of itself than it needs … profligate, supremely wasteful, and, of course, inured to the agonies of its … specimens. Always willing to transform, to experiment, to propose itself into a new shape, a new way of being, a new mind.”

“I intend to write about the … experiment just concluded,” I said.

“As you wish,” he said. “But it will not be possible for a long time.”

“Why?”

“Until you have the voice for it. And that will only be when your city is ready to hear you.”

I said: “I’m glad I had some small part in halting your work. Do you have anything to say about that?”

He shrugged “It’s past.”

“Yet I don’t think you know my name.”

“It’s of no use to me.”

“Did you know that we found the body of Augustus Pemberton?”

“He could not have survived for long.”

“How did people come to know of your work? It was kept secret. How did a sick and dying Augustus Pemberton hear of it?”

“I am not the one to ask. They are all in communication, these men of the city. It was through the city. Mr. Simmons is well placed. He had heard, I suppose.”

“Simmons is dead as well—did you know that?”

“I think I did. He was a capable fellow. He approached me on behalf of Pemberton. I was impressed with him. At that point I was in need of administrative assistance. The city trustees suggested him as someone who could provide it.”

“Do you regret his death? Do you regret the deaths of your colleagues—Wrangel, certainly, who served under you in the war?”

“I won’t speak of this.”

“Am I right in supposing you feel morality is … atavistic?”

He was silent for a good minute. I heard in the meantime
the Blackwell’s Island birdhouse symphony of shrieks, cries, caterwaulings, trills, shouts, and pealing laughter. Then he spoke along the following lines: “I believe all life is contingent, from the first autonomous springings of the organism itself, to the accidents of its changing form. This is what we know of our biological history, that it is accidental … beginning from an arbitrary circumstance. So, we must rid ourselves of our poetic … conceits. We have now the periodic table of elements to think of, but as the crudest beginnings of our understanding of what is invisible in the composed life-forms. We have the work of the descriptive naturalists, looking always for organizing principles—that this creature is like that creature, that they exist in groups or families—which begins to simplify the seemingly unending diversity of vitalities upon the earth. But this is merely to picture our own limits as perceptive beings. The unifying morphology of living things may be nothing more distinguished than what we are lately identifying as the cell, something that can be seen only with a microscope. And when we have the structure and function of this, it will still be a journey to the truth. The truth is so deep inside, so interior, it operates—if that can be said to be the verb—in total blindness, in the total disregard of a recognizable world that would give us comfort, or in which we might find beauty or the hand of God—a point where life arcs into its first sentient glimmerings … from clashes of inanimate things so small as not to be even things … but where entity is very hot or very cold and gaseous and flaming and senseless and unalive, and quite … mindless … as it is in black space. Philosophy poses the right questions. But it lacks the requisite diction for the answers. Only Science can find the diction for answers.”

“It is only a matter of the right diction?”

“Finally, yes, we will find the language, the formulae, or perhaps the numeration … to match God.”

“And God himself cannot be relied upon for the answers?”

“Not as God is now composed.”

Not as God is now composed. I should say … in those days the interview was not a defined journalistic form…. It would not come into being, as such, for a few more years … not until the telephone made people more accessible to reporters and we could take statements routinely without having to run all over the city for them. So I doubt if, as I questioned Sartorius and he answered, I thought I was practicing a particular form of journalism … but I did know enough to write down as much as I could remember of this … interview as soon as I was out of there. Everything I could hear in that din, at any rate.

By contrast now I’ll tell you something I remember verbatim because I was able to read it and commit it to memory—it was too tasty to do otherwise…. I’ve recited it at parties over the years … the deposition of a Cuban provincial, a fisherman named Merced, taken by Ensign Forebaugh, of the U.S. Navy, who commanded the river gunboat
Daniel Webster
. They were chasing Bill Tweed through the Cuban jungle, you see…. Tweed had escaped from jail and had fled to Cuba.

This is in translation, of course: “I see him wading ashore, a white man of girth, with an unkempt beard, and clothes all torn. On a rope he pulls his pirogue up on the bank. He slaps at the mosquitoes and hops about. He has no paddle or provisions, no shoes, but from his pocket he removes a wet and wrinkled green American dollar and asks for a drink. I give him water. In his eyes writhe the snakes of desperation. He takes the name of the Lord in vain. What kind of country is this, I said
a drink, you ignorant black person of no ancestry. I do not countenance his bad behavior and go to my house and make my children stay inside. He sits out on the sand all day and we hear him wail from time to time and it is clear to my wife he is a poor afflicted soul. She is a gentler spirit than I, and after crossing herself, she brings him some fish and rice and beans and her good flatbread. In his ragged pants he finds another wet dollar, which he presents to her. Every time we tend to him he produces another wet dollar. The man is not a Christian. And what besides will I do with such worthless currency? He says, You know who I am? He shows interest in our birds. He sees the egret on the bank, he sees the parrots in the trees, and the white sandbirds and diving little big-headed birds who fish in the river, and the red-blue birds who hang by their beaks on the blossoms to drink, and these are of great interest to him, because he strides back and forth, calling to them their cries, though badly, tweet tweet, he says, over and over, I am tweet, which has no meaning, but then he is clearly crazy. He is impoverished of language but with grand ideas. Of the egret he says in his city they are worn as hats by women of sport. I do not wish my wife to hear this and send her inside. Oh yes, he says, my city is the city of God. And these women are beautiful who wear the hats of birds. And he tells mad stories. That in this city of his god, they make burning gas explosions to light up the darkness of night so the ladies with the hats of birds may walk there and call out to men their birdcalls. And they have burning wheels that do the work of men, and pull vast weights of cargo on silver paths without the need of oxen or mules … and others to cut the crops, and weave the cloth, and sew like tailors, all of these burning wheels. And the houses are not like mine, of poles and thatch, but of a substance harder than stone that is made out of fire. And with this substance they build
houses high as mountains and bridges to cross rivers. He is a wonderful madman, and he says he is the god of this city where there is no darkness and the women wear birds. He speaks in such a manner. My children play around him and I have no fear because he sees them and laughs and does tricks for them and then he cries, he so loves children. He gives them a wrinkled dollar too. So he is a poor madman. He says he is going to Santiago and then across the sea. Before he leaves he produces another dollar, which he throws on the water, and he waves from his pirogue as he drifts away downstream … which of course is not the way to Santiago!

“And the last thing I remember … he says … in his city of God they have learned the secret of eternal life … and when he returns to it he will be anointed to live forever.

“And he waves and once more says he is the bird calling tweet tweet, except now this bird is roaring like a beast and we hear him roaring even after he disappears from sight down there where the river turns. He was a wonderful madman.”

Twenty-eight

F
INALLY
, after all, I have been talking about our city. Sartorius’s head was one day smashed against the asylum stone floor with such force—the strength of his attacker the strength that is given only to maniac rage—that the skull caved in like an eggshell and the brain … there is no other word for it … ran. The precise nature of his offense was never determined … perhaps the attempt to treat … but he, like all his artwork of immortal dead men, was forever stilled. He was buried in the potter’s field on Hart Island, which is in the Sound, off the shore of the Bronx.

Augustus Pemberton was buried on the sward at Ravenwood where he had died. This required the permission of the absentee owners, a commercial firm that bought and sold real estate … and was the idea of his widow, Sarah, who was able to feel as no one else could the pitiable nature of her husband’s brutally selfish life.

Eustace Simmons was committed to a public grave in Rockland County. Like Sartorius, he apparently had no living relatives. Nor did the loyal, oxlike Wrangel. One way or another, these were all single, unrelated men … as were Donne, and Martin Pemberton, and I, for that matter.

I don’t know whether the cast-off families of the mortuary fellowship were ever informed … or where the old men were buried or, indeed, if any of the collected funds they had contributed for their eternal welfare were ever recovered.