City of God (45 page)

“I ask for reason to hope that this travail of our souls will find its resolution in You, Lord, You of Blessed Name. For the sake of all of us on this little planet of Yours I ask this. Amen.”

Pem returned the microphone to the bandleader. Sarah rose from her chair and came across the floor and hugged Pem, and kissed him,
and as he held her around the waist, she leaned back in his arms and brushed the hair from his forehead.

—In a gallery on lower Broadway, the artist has put down a model railroad track with a train going round and round, the engine of which is welded to the visored headpiece of a suit of medieval armor. So an expressionless iron face mask is leading the train round and round. Trouble is, the train keeps running off the track and the lovely young woman in charge has to get down on her knees and, with her high heels flopping and her tight-skirted and quite shapely ass presenting itself to the onlooker, she must set the train wheels back on the track. . . and as this happens three or four times while I'm trying to look at the other quirky installations in the gallery, I have to wonder if she too isn't part of the artist's intention. I hope so.

A few of the artists are doing wonderfully insouciant and blunderingly lovely things amidst all the ordinary art in our time. I like this fellow who goes around the world wrapping whatever he can get his hands on. . . the Reichstag in Berlin looking like an unusually large package delivered by UPS. . . or, in a Swiss park, the grove of trees bagged in polyester. . . or the Pont-Neuf done in saffron silk, all these rippling shimmering scrims through which light can pass, outlines revealed.. . . He ran miles of open umbrellas along the California coast and wants to come to Central Park and staple it with rows of steel gates flying nylon flaps of gold. Let him come, Mayor. Let him come, Commissioners. I like the idea of out-of-scale art as world occupation, planetary embrace, I like the inverse relations of such projects, the coolness of the years of planning, the huge amounts of money. . . for the capricious result, the abruptly reconformed and freshly wild appropriated public space. I like the outrage of making ephemeral art of the city, the land.

Another haunting artist has been going through the cities of Europe projecting ghostly photographs of the dead on the same buildings in the same windows and on the same sidewalks where they once lived. In a doorway in Berlin, an old Jewish scholar stands with his books, on another street a family posing in front of the apartment
building from which they will be deported, in Amsterdam a company of marching German troops shines down from a window. . . all these spectral images coming on at night for cars to drive past, passersby to walk through, hurry away from, shudder at, as the past conflates with the present and time and space compress to a point.

Bring him to New York, this artist, let him do us! Bring art out of the closet, into the street, bring back the artists who have themselves spray-painted and hung inside picture frames, let the artist who likes to tie himself in a canvas bag and lie down in front of traffic tie himself in a canvas bag and lie down in front of the traffic.. . . And where is John Cage when we need him, or is he still here, with his uncopyrighted music of the world's sounds, every whirring motor, every birdcall, every heartbeat. . . and with each moment of apparent silence the realized art of his consciousness?

I call for cabaret to be spoken in tongues. . . for one giant symphony to be made of all the Irving Berlin songs. . . and let there be an upbeat animated Disney production of Wittgenstein's
Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.
We need all this, I think it must happen, we need for this to happen here in the city.

—Every city has a museum, a park, a church with a steeple, a public school system, and a ball team. Every city has a bank. Every city has a courthouse and a jail. Every city has a hospital. The larger cities have these things in multiples. The larger cities have highways running through them. They have rivers with bridges over the rivers and tunnels under the rivers. They have subways, els, and streetcars, downtown skyscrapers, theaters and opera houses, and neighborhoods of fashionable, less fashionable, and unfashionable addresses. They have outlying districts of warehouses and factories and freight yards, airports, electric power stations, waterworks, and sewage treatment plants. They have slums. They have systems of invisible conduction—radio waves, television signals, cellular phone networks—to link their populations and transact their business.

It has taken time and the blundering wisdom and anarchic greed of
our ancestry to construct the modern city of consolidated institutions. It is a great historically amassed communal creation. If you fly above it at night, it is a jeweled wonder of the universe, floating like a giant liner on the sea of darkness. It is smart, accomplished, sophisticated, and breathtakingly beautiful. And it glimmers and sparkles as all things breakable glimmer and sparkle. You wonder how much God had to do with this, how much of the splendor and insolence of the modern city creatively built from the disparate intentions of generations of men comes of the inspiration of God. Because it is the city of the unremarked God, the sometime-thing God, the God of history.

—The movie from this: And now more and more people are born into it. The wretched of the earth stream into it. All at once it passes its point of self-containment. Its economy is insufficient. It becomes less able to employ, to house and feed the crowds that hunker about in its streets. As the smog thickens and the rising global temperatures bring on intolerable heat waves, droughts, hurricanes, and monumental snowfalls, the sustaining rituals of the society break down and ideas of normal daily life erode. The city begins to lose its shape, its outlines blur as its precincts expand, and the class distinctions of its neighborhoods are no longer discernible. Crimes against property increase. The food supply is erratic, power blackouts come with greater and greater frequency, the water arrives contaminated, the police forces are armed like soldiers, and inflation makes money useless. Prophets arise in their clerical robes to speak of evil, to speak of irreverence and blasphemy. They announce that the wrath of God has come down on the city of unnatural pride, the earthly city. They call upon the pious to destroy the city. And the unremarked God, the sometime-thing God, is alive once again, resurrected in all His fury.

Politicians arise who decide the city is adaptable to any political abstraction impressed upon it. Strange diseases appear for which the doctors have no cure. Schools are closed. They become neighborhood armories. Plagues break out, hospital corridors become morgues, the elected leaders declare martial law, troops are everywhere, and the befouled shantytowns that have sprung up on the metropolitan outskirts are routinely swept by machine-gun fire. When the God-soaked impoverished mobs rush upon the city, they are massacred. The military mount a coup, the elected leaders who called them in are jailed, a
governing junta closes down all television and radio stations, home computers are declared illegal, and around the beleaguered enclaves of the wealthy, high walls are built with periodically spaced guard towers.

It becomes a political commonplace resisted not even by theorists of the democratic left that totalitarian management, enforced sterilization procedures, parentage grants issued to the genetically approved, and an ethos of rational triage are the only hope for the future of civilization.

At this point we are introduced to the hero and heroine of the movie, a vitally religious couple who run a small progressive synagogue on the Upper West Side.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:

BOURNE COMPANY
: Excerpt from “Me and My Shadow,” words by Billy Rose, music by Al Jolson and Dave Dryer. Copyright © 1927 by Bourne Co. and Larry Spier, Inc. Copyright renewed. All rights reserved. International copyright secured. Reprinted by permission.

WARNER BROS
.
PUBLICATIONS U
.
S
.,
INC
.: Excerpt from “Dancing in the Dark” by Howard Dietz and Arthur Schwartz. Copyright © 1931 (renewed) by Warner Bros. Inc. Rights for the extended renewal term in the U.S. controlled by Warner Bros. Inc. and Arthur Schwartz Music; excerpt from “For Me and My Gal” by Geo. W. Meyer, Edgar Leslie and E. Ray Goetz. Copyright © 1917 (renewed) by EMI Mills Music Inc.; excerpt from “Good Night Sweetheart” by Ray Noble, Jimmy Campbell and Reg Connelly. Copyright © 1931 by Campbell, Connelly & Co., Ltd. (London). Copyright renewed. Rights for North America administered by EMI Robbins Catalog Inc.; excerpt from “I Wanna Be Loved by You” by Bert Kalmar, Herbert Stothart and Harry Ruby. Copyright © 1928 (renewed) by Warner Bros. Inc. Rights for the extended renewal term in the U.S. controlled by Warner Bros. Inc., Harry Ruby Music and Edwin H. Morris & Company; excerpt from “Shine On Harvest Moon” by Nora Bayes and Jack Norworth. Copyright © 1907 (renewed) by Warner Bros. Inc. (ASCAP); excerpt from “Someone to Watch Over Me” by George Gershwin and Ira Gershwin. Copyright © 1926 (renewed) by WB Music Corp.; excerpt from “Star Dust” by Hoagy Carmichael and Mitchell Parish. Copyright © 1929 (renewed) by EMI Mills Music, Inc. and Hoagy Publishing Company in the USA. All rights outside of the USA controlled by EMI Mills Music, Inc.; excerpt from “Varsity Drag” by B. G. DeSylva, Lew Brown and Ray Henderson. Copyright © 1927 (renewed) by DeSylva, Brown & Henderson Inc. Rights for the extended renewal term in the U.S. are controlled by Ray Henderson Music Company, Chappell & Co. and Stephen Ballen-tine Music. Rights for the rest of the world are controlled by Chappell & Co. All rights reserved. Used by permission of Warner Bros. Publications U.S., Inc., Miami, FL 33014.

UNIVERSAL
-
POLYGRAM INTERNATIONAL PUBLISHING
,
INC
.: Excerpt from “The Song Is You,” words and music by Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II. Copyright © 1932 by Universal-Polygram International Publishing, Inc., a division of Universal Studios, Inc. (ASCAP). Copyright renewed. All rights reserved. Used by permission of Universal-Polygram International Publishing, Inc.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

E. L. Doctorow's work is published in thirty languages. His novels include
Welcome to Hard Times
,
The Book of Daniel
,
Ragtime
,
Loon Lake
,
Lives of the Poets
,
World's Fair
,
Billy Bathgate
, and
The Waterworks
. Among his honors are the National Book Award, two National Book Critics Circle awards, the PEN/Faulkner Award, the Edith Wharton Citation for Fiction, the William Dean Howells Medal of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the presidentially conferred National Humanities Medal. He lives and works in New York.

ALSO BY E. L. DOCTOROW

Welcome to Hard Times
Big as Life
The Book of Daniel
Ragtime
Drinks Before Dinner
(play)
Loon Lake
Lives of the Poets
World's Fair
Billy Bathgate
Jack London, Hemingway,
and the Constitution
(essays)
The Waterworks

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously.

Copyright © 2000 by E. L. Doctorow

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American
Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by
Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by
Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

R
ANDOM
H
OUSE
and colophon are registered trademarks
of Random House, Inc.

Owing to limitations of space, acknowledgments of permission to quote from previously published material will be found at the back of the book.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Doctorow, E. L.
City of God : a novel / E. L. Doctorow. — 1st ed.
p. cm.
1. City and town life—New York (State)—New York—Fiction.
2. New York (N. Y.)—Fiction. 3. Spiritual life—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3554.O3 C57 2000
813'.54—dc21 99-053215

Random House website address: www.atrandom.com

eISBN: 978-1-58836-190-5

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