City on Fire (124 page)

He slams the door so hard it seems the glass might break. But the feet in the stairwell, instead of descending, head up to the roof. And William is left standing here like an idiot. There is water, somehow, between the windowpanes. It has beaded up in one corner and elsewhere left ghostly tiger-stripes on the glass. Beyond it, Mercer’s cinderblock planter is a graveyard. The sky is the dark purple-gray of a bruise. Again, the idea threatens to come. Something about showing versus saying. But how to gesture at the thing doing the gesturing? Coffee—is that the idea?

Five minutes later, the damp stairs are again squelching beneath his Chucks. The door at the top is half-open, the bottles massed on the uppermost step burning with the imminence of morning. This used to be where he came to savor his isolation. Like all large canvases, his city required that: a place far enough away to step back and view it. He would run into Bullet up here, might even plunk down next to him and have a beer or three, and still, a certain inwardness obtained. He was a connoisseur of that inwardness. Still is. But his city is changing now. There will be waves of new pioneers, like the Angels stretched out here and there on the tarpaper, sleeping off the blackout. Or unlike them, who knows? And where has Mercer gone? To the top of the giant “O” of the Knickerbocker Mints sign. He sits there Indian-style, eight or nine feet up, like a thumbtack pinning this present to the past. There’s enough light now to make him look broody, solitary. Adult.

William stands below. “Hey, look at us. Breaking night.” That local idiom has always rung heroic in his ears, but Mercer has never before—even in their earliest dating—managed to make it all the way till dawn. And he says nothing now.

“Anyway, I brought you something.” On tiptoe, William reaches up to place the mug of coffee from downstairs beside Mercer. Then, hunching forward for balance, he scurries up the sloped girder that supports the O. He settles at the letter’s opposite end, maybe an arm’s length away, with the coffee between them. It’s El Bandito Instant, but smells so good he’s tempted to try it. N.A. has habituated him to the lowliest swill, from the biggest, most burnt-smelling urns. It occurs to him to tell his unresponsive lover about the meetings, so he does. Since kicking methadone, he’s been going almost daily, hanging in. “It’s sort of the substitution of one set of addictions for another. But I did just get my first chip. Clean and sober thirty days. I thought you should know before you read me the riot act.”

Mercer looks away. The light is rising steadily around him, as though operated by sliders on some cosmic mixing board. Objects acquire shadows. Away to the south are the trade towers, the farther hiding behind the nearer like a child behind its mother. William raises the camera. Lowers it.

“Another thing is, I saw my dad. I mean I didn’t just see him. I sat with him through most of last night. He’s kind of losing his marbles.”

At this, Mercer finally turns to look at him. One eye is nearly swollen shut. The other’s so brown as to look black.

“It actually makes things easier, it turns out. The loss of marbles, I mean, not the sobriety. Although I suppose it’s made Daddy vulnerable to people who don’t have his best interests at heart. A category that possibly includes me. Anyway, it looks like we might be seeing more of each other, so that’s something, right?” A blaze of red has appeared at the tip of the gray north tower. “It’s a good thing I speak silence so fluently, Mercer.”

“What’s left to say, William? I don’t know what it feels like to be whacked-out on drugs, and you obviously have no idea what it feels like to wait around for half a year for your lover to call.”

William wonders if there is an exposure long enough to capture the range of looks Mercer is giving him. “So help me understand.”

“Understand what? How every time the phone rang, my heart would catch? How I almost wanted you to be dead in a gutter somewhere? Because I must have known even then this was what would happen instead. You’d come back knocking and knocking and working on me like this to let you in. But when were you ever going to let me in, William?”

Ah. So there it is: Mercer is no longer unaware of the essential predicament. He has discovered its exact dimensions—that his body is a dwelling built for one. But William feels now, in his longing to reach Mercer, that he’s stumbling upon a door. One that, all this time, has been locked from inside. Snick.

“I wasn’t telling you that stuff because I expected you to take me back, Merce. I just wanted you to see what you gave me. I was probably too slow to see it. I know there was something I was too slow to see.”

The red blur, tinged with distance, is racing down the east edge of the trade center at the rate of the earth’s turning. It is as if the building is on fire. Photographic, he thinks. Written in light. And then, nonsensically: Pornography. Written in porn.

“You’re going to make me say it, aren’t you?”

“Say what?”

“No, you’re right, probably it makes no difference.” He reaches for the warm brown hand resting on the verge of the aught, but it’s already slipping out from underneath as Mercer drops down to the roof proper, leaving the coffee behind. He’s moving with such purpose that William is scared he might just speed right off the rooftop, like the roadrunner from the cartoons. Or (the image comes with Magritteish lucidity) spread his arms and flap up into another life. In this one, of course, neither is possible—Mercer will stop at the parapet, as close as he can get to his first New York sunrise—but William still is not ready to be limited to mere possibility. He wants to freeze Mercer Goodman like this, the way he looks through the viewfinder, against the vanishing city. Behind the bones of its buildings, a red line is rising out there, the leading edge of a curve that might keep arcing outward forever. The tiny specks of black poised against it may be the first birds of morning or the last ones of night … or the ashes of a thousand incinerators, or incipient blindness, he doesn’t know which yet, but surely there’s a message here, if he can just look hard enough. A sign. A sight. An end or a beginning. He holds off on pushing the button another second, another second. And one more after that. Because if he plays his cards right, William feels, if he can just stop trying to race out ahead of himself, one of these moments is going to prove decisive.

POSTSCRIPT

THIS CITY, WHICH NOT TO LOOK UPON WOULD BE LIKE DEATH

Nothing dies; all is transformed.

—BALZAC

Pensées, sujets, fragments

TO: [email protected]

SUBJECT: Re: Disposition of Estate/Evidence III

8/27/03, 4:52 a.m.

ATTACHMENT: TCWNTLUWBLD.doc

First, Mom, let me say I owe you an apology, not least for the lateness in replying to your email of 7/14. If it helps, you were right about almost everything, including how much longer all this would take than I estimated. I seem to need to believe a piece of work will be easier than it is in order to begin it. Which is at least doubly true here, in that we’re talking about more than one kind of work. These last weeks, I’ve been at the laptop all day and half the night just to get my notebooks typed up. The good news, though, is that as of the close of this email, it’s done, I think. And I finally settled on a way of presenting the third part of the triptych that feels true to what Uncle William was after. Augenblick introduced me to a computer programmer he knows up in Murray Hill. Now there’s a little piece of software logging every keystroke. Including these.

You’ll notice that all traces of the U.S.S.R. not collapsing in ’89 and John Travolta becoming leader of the free world have been weeded out of the attached document; you were right about that, too, and I’m sorry for blowing up at you for reacting as you did to that first, more fantastical schema. I was in a bad way at the time. I felt like your resistance on principle to posthumous exhibitions was overriding your ability to see what I needed. In my defense, artistically speaking, I think I really was trying to demonstrate the possibility of things being other than they are. But of course what I’ve learned is that you can’t prove most of the things that matter; it seems to be a violation of the rules, which require you rather to dream. Besides, the nature of life on earth is so breathtakingly unschematic. It ended up being both cleaner and more honest, somehow, to leave open the whole question of ontology, preserve some freedom of play. I mean, you and I both know that all this really happened—I’ve got the documentation here—but I’ve found that even in a courtroom, documents are increasingly unlikely to persuade the unpersuadable. And thinking about issues of legal indemnity, not to mention the larger implications, maybe it’s better to leave room for people who still need to imagine “Evidence III” as some sort of fairy tale. Certainly, for me, it’s been that, among other things: a path to somewhere other than the awful place I was last winter.

I’m aware that I’m falling back into it even now, the habit you pointed out to me. Cleverness as a defense mechanism. “Intellectualizing.” Or should I say temporizing? The bald fact I’m avoiding writing about is that after our long summer apart, Julia is due in tomorrow night, which is now tonight. (You can see from the timestamp above how well I’m sleeping, but I’m happy to report no bad dreams.) And when I think of her plane touching down, her voice, the fact that maybe since we last spoke she’s changed her mind about being willing to do whatever it takes—to surrender me for three months to this mitzvah—I get nervous. Though sometimes nervous can be good. I hope this is one of those times. The truth is, I missed her awfully, Mom. Miss her.

But anyway, as regards the first part of your email, the plan is: vitrines. Those plexiglass containers like in the D. Hearst (Hurst?) installation with the shark. Augenblick is having sixteen of them made to my specifications, long low things with frames of reclaimed wood. The “Evidence III” material will be distributed among them and sealed permanently inside—all those archives from ’77, the fanzines and Groskoph’s manuscripts and so on, but also Uncle William’s correspondence and interview transcripts from the fall of 2001, when he was getting back in touch with what his diary calls (with a level of sarcasm not ascertainable on the page) “the old gang.” In keeping with the idea of leaving room for other people’s New Yorks, you’ll be able to see in these vitrines the paper trail I followed here, though not all of it. They’ll line the front room of the gallery, the one you enter through.

In the other, larger room, the walls will remain big white blanks. In the center will be rows of chairs facing four ways, and likewise four projectors. The night of the opening, Augenblick will press “play” on his computer and the little piece of software I mentioned above will run like a player piano. Over the course of the next ten days, the walls will fill up with projected pages from this attachment, 220-odd sheets per wall, as though a ghost were writing. And then, at the midpoint of the exhibition, which is to say when the entire document has been “typed” onto the wall, the program starts to run backward, and over the final ten days, letter by letter, page by page, the whole thing disappears.

Augenblick’s arranged to keep the gallery open day and night during that time: people can come and go at all hours. Afterward, I guess he’ll sell the vitrines, assuming the Feds don’t swoop in and impound them in Area 51 or wherever they bury the cases they just want to go away. Any proceeds, minus his commission, will be added to Uncle William’s estate, and thus pass to you. But I’ve already told Augenblick he can’t have my end of the piece, attached here. (Into which, hoping you don’t mind, I will also paste this email as a postscript.) As of September 30, your inbox will hold the sole copy. What happens after that I leave to your executorial judgment. The important thing for me, I want to believe, is to put all the ghosts to rest. To feel like it is done.

As for our itinerary, Julia has us flying back to LAX the 12th, the day after opening night. I know she’s right. It’s time. In a way, though, as much as I’m feeling now an incredible and totally unexpected gratitude for the life I do have—and as much as I mean never again to let her go—I wish we could stay in New York for the full run of “Evidence III.” I find myself curious, especially, to see who fills the chairs. Mostly Augenblick’s black-jeaned disciples, probably, and a few members of the press. But, crazy as it is, I’m imagining Mercer Goodman might come, too. I only ever met him that one time at Thanksgiving, obviously, but found him amazingly understanding and helpful on the phone, and (though perhaps you already know this) he and his husband Rafe apparently flew over from Paris there at the end to help Uncle William with cooking and cleaning and getting down to the new park along the Hudson every so often to see the sunset. And I’ve invited the Pulaskis, for whom I insisted there be space for a wheelchair. And maybe Charlie Weisbarger got my email after all and will take a few days off from his work with juvenile offenders in Boston. I’d like to meet him in person. I’d like nothing better, Mom, than to have a chance to reintroduce you.

And this brings me to the most unexpected thing of all: the people whose faces I’d most like to see watching the thing unfold (not counting Julia’s) are yours and Dad’s. Maybe you sensed all along what the outcome of this summer would be—maybe it’s why you helped arrange for this apartment—but I find I’m not mad at either of you anymore. Can’t stop trying to think my way into you, in fact.

I find myself recalling, in particular, how the morning after the blackout, the two of you came back to Brooklyn Heights together. Do you remember? Cate was snoring on the new master bed, doing that cocooning she always did with the covers. I was stretched across the foot, pretending to sleep. The light was everywhere. Dad was the one who spotted on the windowsill the wine-bottle I’d half-emptied in the night (and which—let’s be honest—I probably left there to be found). Through slitted eyes, I saw him turn to you, swirling it around by the neck. And you were the one who shrugged. Please, Keith, let them just sleep. You were wearing my sneakers. You used to have this certain way of taking off your shoes, kicking up each leg behind you and reaching back. I watched you swap out the sweatshirt you’d been wearing for a white V-neck tee Dad seemed surprised to recognize was his own. And then you climbed into bed and folded yourself into the space between me and Cate and closed your eyes. I wonder now if you meant for him to feel tested. Stay or go? Either way, the knowledge of what he’d done was going to follow him. Either way, there would be constraint. It occurs to me that what adulthood actually is is the problem of what one wants to constrain oneself to.