Open City (28 page)

We were in the day’s last light, and the street was largely in shadow. It was unlikely they would have recognized me again even in strong daylight. Still, I was unnerved. And it was in the middle of that thought that I felt the first blow, on my shoulder. A second, heavier, landed on the small of my back, and my legs gave way like sticks. I fell to the ground. I don’t recall if I cried out, or if opening my mouth I was unable to make a sound. They began to kick me all over—shins, back, arms—a quick, preplanned choreography. I shouted, begging them to stop, conscious of a man on the ground being beaten. Then I lost the will to speak, and took the blows in silence. The initial awareness of pain was gone, but now came the anticipation of how much it would hurt later, how bad tomorrow would be, for both my body and my mind. My mind had gone blank except for this lone thought, a thought that made my eyes sting, a prospect more painful, it seemed, than the blows. We find it convenient to describe time as a material, we “waste” time, we “take” our time. As I lay there, time became material in a strange new way: fragmented, torn into incoherent tufts, and at the same time spreading, like something spilled, like a stain.

There was no mortal fear. Somehow it was clear that they did not intend to kill me. There was an ease to their violence, and even though no gun had been brandished and no explanations given, I
knew that they were in control. I was being beaten, but it was not severe, certainly not as severe as it could be if they were truly angry. “They” were not two, as I had thought: a third had joined them, and there was laughter, easy laughter, interspersed with profanities. When my eyes came into focus, I saw that, or had the impression that, they were much younger than I had guessed before, that they were no older than fifteen. And the words, fluent, spiking in and out of their laughter, seemed somehow distant from the situation, as if they were addressing someone else, as if this were like all the other times I had encountered those words: never hostile, never directed at me, as innocent as when these same words had been foreshadowed at the crossing. They were intended, now, to humiliate, and I shrank from them. My hand was raised against curses, too, as the blows kept coming, though less quickly. The boys continued to laugh, and one of them stepped on my hand one last time, especially hard. The world darkened. They left, sprinting, their basketball shoes thudding and squeaking against the ground.

They left, and time’s shape was restored. They’d taken my wallet and my phone. I sat on the road in silence, bewildered, thinking it could have been worse, thinking, too, that it had been inevitable. Above me, the evening lights of apartments came on, and there was still a little light in the sky; incoming night was poised between daylight and electric light; the light shining from interiors I could see but not reach seemed to promise that life was continuing. People were returning home from work, or preparing dinner, or finishing the last fragments of the afternoon’s tasks. People; but there were none on the street, just the dry wind falling through the trees. I sat in the street looking into a nettle-choked ditch. The intricacy of the weeds startled.

It could have been worse: an infuriating thought, a false thought, because what had happened was worse, worse than safety and an un-violated body. Then pain came streaming in, physical pain, as if the ambient temperature had suddenly risen and a dry heat was spreading
to all parts of my body. The tears fell from my eyes. It hurt to breathe. I guessed at a broken rib or two, though that turned out not to be the case. The knuckles of my left hand were covered in sand and blood, and there was a gash across the back of the same hand, beyond the wrist; this was the hand I had lifted to protect my head as I lay curled on the asphalt with my knees brought up and head lowered. My mouth was numb, as after a visit to the dentist. It wasn’t my mouth, I thought as I moved my tongue around inside it, this uncooperative, alien, ugly mouth.

I saw someone, at last, at the far end of the street. It wasn’t the far end, just two blocks down. The person was small, slow, like a memory approaching. Picking myself up, brushing my clothes clean, I began to walk, limping a little, gritting my teeth, feeling the ugliness spread across my face. But this person bought my disguise. It was an elderly man in overalls. He walked past, and did not notice, or did not care to notice, that I had just been beaten.

Walking back, I stayed in the shadows for as long as I could. It wasn’t far. The boys had melted away into the park, and were probably far away, somewhere deep in Harlem, by now. The lobby was empty, the elevator free. I entered my apartment and stood before the bathroom mirror for a long time. I touched my jaw, traced a finger gently up onto the cheek. It hurt, swollen to a furious purple. I removed my clothes, first the filthy black coat, then the pristine powder-blue shirt rumpled underneath it. The shirt, which I rarely wore, was a gift from Nadège. Clarity returned: I must clean the wounds (a hospital visit did not seem necessary), and I must make a report. My credit cards, too: that was the first call to make, to limit the financial damage. Then the campus police, who would put up a sign by the elevator announcing (as so often before, in all the previous instances when I wasn’t the victim) that someone had recently been attacked in the neighborhood, and that the suspects were male, black, and young, of average height and weight.

I opened the window and looked out. It was total darkness now,
and the sky was a charcoal gray, the darkness interrupted closer to ground level by distant halogen lights. The buildings across the street were apartments, mostly occupied by students and faculty of the various institutions of the neighborhood, Teachers College, Union Theological Seminary, the Jewish Theological Seminary, and Columbia Law School. In one of the apartments, the one almost directly level with mine, a young woman faced a wall. She was wearing a shawl, and bowed her head repeatedly, davening in the yellow light of a standing lamp. A few floors above her, on the flat roof of the building, a large chimney belched out gray smoke in a wide plume. The smoke was like a slowed-down explosion, silent, billowing, being absorbed at its edges into the deeper darkness of the sky. My own apartment was dark. I had made some tea, and I drank it as I watched the woman pray. Others are not like us, I thought to myself, their forms are different from ours. Yet I prayed, too, I would gladly face a wall and daven, if that was what had been given to me. Prayer was, I had long settled in my mind, no kind of promise, no device for getting what one wanted out of life; it was the mere practice of presence, that was all, a therapy of being present, of giving a name to the heart’s desires, the fully formed ones, the as yet formless ones.

It had been only two hours. I trembled from the shock, still gasped inwardly at the suddenness of it; but already, it felt in some way like a school yard scuffle. Had I sailed through a brief moment when, like an old man welcoming death, I had accepted the next blow and the next? No, I hadn’t. I had felt only the fear of pain and the love of being free of pain. But how could I have missed this! I’d thought, lying in the dirt. How could I have been less than completely aware of how good it was to be injury-free?

Now every cliché by which the assault could be minimized hurried to claim space in my head. These things happen, it was only a matter of time, count your blessings, and, yes, it could have been worse—and such bile rose into my throat at these thoughts. Three personal days from work would be enough to restore my equilibrium,
I thought, and I would try to be frank about the reasons for my time away, for my staying out of sight. In the meantime, I would have to reach out to my friend for help with some practical things. He, at least, would not make more of the event than was necessary.

I had listened to others’ stories of being mugged. A colleague on the service had had her purse snatched. One of the nurses—a burly, soft-spoken Portuguese-American—had had his jaw broken by a gang, and they had left his wallet, his watch, his gold chain, and taken only his iPod. He’d needed seventeen stitches across his face. Violence for sport was no strange thing in the city; but now: me. I had cleaned the wounds on my shoulders, arms, and legs, mostly numerous small bruises that would heal quickly. My disfigured mouth and my hand troubled me most. As I examined the bruises, a herd of thoughts clattered through me: Why had this same body hale so often hurried past its lovers?

The woman had stopped praying. She ran her fingers through her fair brown hair, and took the tallit from her shoulders, pausing for a moment as though she’d forgotten something. Then she folded it, and switched off the lamp.

T
HE YOUNG WOMAN WAS UNCERTAIN, THINKING HARD BEFORE
she said each word. The man sitting next to her, to whom she had looked for confirmation, shook his head and corrected her. No, that’s World Health Organization. Try it again, do you see? That is World. Trade. Organization. Yes, that’s trade. Do you remember the word for trade?

He pointed, and trilled a pair of fingers on the page. She mulled it over awhile, then gave another answer in Chinese, which sounded similar to the first. This one pleased him more, and he asked her if she would like to review the list from the beginning. I was at a small table, alone, drinking coffee, picking out their conversation from the fugue of voices in the diner. They were at the bar across from me,
drinking Cokes. The student was Asian. Her inky black bangs cut straight across her face, and she moved a stack of flash cards from one hand to the other, restless. Her teacher, not much older than she was, was a blond man in a tracksuit.

I pretended to look out at the street. The shadows were long, the light yellow, and, on the sidewalk, two women with high heels and large shopping bags embraced. The negotiation between the blond teacher and his student was that of a new relationship, with the roles set already but a certain formality still prevailing. She laughed every now and again, and he corrected her pronunciation. She seemed to be struggling to draw what little she knew of the language to the surface. Her eyes searched, oblivious of being seen. His manner seemed more self-conscious. He was aware of the incongruity between his features and his task, aware of carrying out that task in a public space. He seemed to be presenting his credentials, addressing not her alone, but anyone within earshot who might pause for a moment at the sight of a white man teaching Chinese to an Asian woman. He sounded a little pleased with himself. He repeated the phrases again, and in a quick upward glance, caught my eye in the storefront glass of the diner.

The diner was on Broadway, between Duane Street and Reade Street, and close to the Brooklyn Bridge–City Hall subway station, opening into a park that, by the standards of lower Manhattan, was tranquil. That morning it was busy with office workers, park workers, and the odd tourist, but the volume hardly rose above a hum. People came up the stairs out of the station and made their way to work; those on the early shift were already out in the park, taking their first coffee break of the day. An unlit neon sign that said
COMIDA LATINA
swung outside the café, and inside the restaurant workers cleaned out steam-heated chargers. These would shortly be filled up with yellow rice, fried plantains, chow mein, barbecued spare ribs, and the various Dominican, Puerto Rican, and Chinese dishes that places like these set out for the lunch-hour rush. It wasn’t
a big place, but it was easy to tell that it did good business, no doubt because of its proximity to the massive buildings all around, and the countless civil servants who daily streamed in and out of them.

It had been two weeks, and everything else had healed. As it turned out, I hadn’t needed to go to the hospital for my mouth. But my left hand troubled me. What had felt like a minor bruise now seemed to have been a bruise of the bone, and turning a doorknob, or lifting a full cup of coffee, hurt. Mostly, I kept the hand in the pocket of my coat. Across the street, in front of the largest of the federal buildings, there had formed a snaking queue. No one lined up in front of a federal building early on a weekday morning unless they had to. When I came out of the diner, I saw that the crowd seemed to be an immigration crowd, as opposed to a jury-duty crowd, which was the other possibility at such a building. The air was of nervous anticipation, a palpable effort to project readiness for the interrogations ahead.

I walked across the street so that I would pass directly along the line. A group of Bangladeshis—the tiny silver-haired matriarch in
salwar kameez
, the young man dressed in wool coat and brown slacks, the young woman in a calf-length skirt, the young children bundled up—all seemed to be fumbling with their papers. There appeared to be an unusual number of interracial couples standing in line. One pair, I guessed, was African-American and Vietnamese. The security officers were, their uniforms revealed, also from Wackenhut, the same private firm contracted to control the immigrants in the detention facility in Queens. As each expectant family reached the front of the line, they were instructed to remove jewelry, shoes, belts, coins, and keys, so that the official fear of terrorism played along, like a bass figure, to the private fear of being found wanting by an immigration officer once they got upstairs.

From where I stood, I could see, behind the diner, the massive AT&T Long Lines building on Church Street. It was a windowless tower, a giant concrete slab rising into the sky, with little more than
a few ventilation openings, which resembled periscopes, to indicate that this was a building rather than a dense brick fabricated by a gargantuan machine. Each floor was at least double the height of that found in a normal office building, so that the whole tower, intimidating though it was, came to only twenty-nine stories. The military aspect of the Long Lines building was intensified by the thickened corners, elongated shafts with which the building mimicked the form of a castle’s keep flanked by gatehouse towers, and which concealed the elevators, ductwork, and plumbing. Those few workers who used the building, I imagined, must after a few years become moles, their circadian rhythms completely distorted, their skin de-pigmented to the point of transparency. Long Lines, which I continued to stare at, as though it had drawn me into a trance, seemed like nothing so much as a monument or a stele.