Night Soul and Other Stories Page 4

  I come from a city also great, also both beautiful and dark, its people also both abrupt and not distant; and I wanted to (as Baudelaire says) “accost” this boomerang man. However, I could not find the French for what I had to say, remembering that at least in my own language I would know better what I had to say when I began to say it. I had lost one of his boomerangs in the dusk once, but the man himself seemed not to have lost it, although I never saw it land and I heard a sound in the trees near my head.

  The French for all I wanted to say, I found in a dream, and there, I think, it stayed. I lived, during those first weeks, alone, consciously located between the light and darkness of living with someone. This person, sometimes mythical, later materialized as if she had never gone away, perhaps because I was the one who had gone. But in those weeks before American Thanksgiving, reaching toward Frost’s “darkest evening of the year,” dreams found their way to my new door and, unlike the daytime clients of the rare stamp dealer (though his metal plate ENTREZ SANS FRAPPER was all I knew of them or him, apart from what I knew of the subject matter of his business, not to mention a slow leak from a water-pressure valve in my kitchen which I heard nothing from him about), my dreams were by contrast both inside my apartment before I knew it and outside knocking like an unknown neighbor in the middle of the night.

  At least once during my first dreams, the man with the boomerangs threw them all so that they did not come back. Two French friends of mine said he sounded a little crazy (the way in the United States they say that some poor person is “harmless”). A private citizen was how I took him, a survivor-craftsman testing the air. The boomerangs I dreamt were not some American dream’s disposable weapons; my twilight companion’s resources proved renewable, his boomerangs reusably old and known; this wasn’t some Apache spilling the blood of vowels F. Scott Fitzgerald rendered out of Rimbaud, but a native true to the wood from which the aboriginal implements were cut. I made him up out of what I knew, and I assumed he was too authentic to have time to make me up.

  The phone rang and I went out to meet a friend. I checked the Mont-St.-Michel tides and saw a French child on a train wearing a University of Michigan sweatshirt. I came out of the Chartres cathedral and went back inside. I returned to the Jeu de Paume to hear American spoken without hesitation or apology and, from within that temple of light and color, to view through my favorite window the gray spirit of the riverbank—its founded harmonies of palace and avenue, whose foreground proved to be where those water lilies hang, safe-locked in the sister temple of this tennis court, where my three-dimensional fellow wanderers, refusing to disappear into the “Moulin de la Galette” we’re all admiring, crowd about me as if I were my mind. Here, what went up must come down—downstairs, I mean. “What gains admission must find exit,” they say with justice.

  But what goes out—does it come back? I cannot help the signs and symbols; they are as actual as the knocking on my Montmartre door at the moment of my dream when at last I completed the invention of the man with the bagful of boomerangs in the Bois de Boulogne. It was more urgent even than a phone ringing in the middle of the night, that knock at my front door—was it the concierge?—and I must wake from my dream just when I have at last found the French with which to accost the person I have made up. The stamp dealer went home eight hours ago. Who can it be at the door? Well, you can’t always choose your time to make the acquaintance of a neighbor. I’m out of bed, croaking, “J’arrive, j’arrive” (pleased to recall the more accurate English), walking half in my sleep through someone else’s curtain-insulated rooms to ask in French, “Who’s there? What is it?” only to realize I have heard no more knocks, and to suspect that they were not here upon this front door in the pitch-black hall but back in that bedroom where I left the dream. What a way to gain entrance to an apartment! Knock on the door at three in the morning until you rouse your prey, then express such concern over the nightmare yells and cries he did not even know were coming out of his sleep, that helplessly he opens the door to thank you.

  But that was a New York dream. I found the light; I sat on my bed and remembered hearing the French I needed in order to address the boomerang-thrower, only in my dream fluency to pass to a stage in which he spoke to me. Till all the interference in my solitary situation left me in that empty apartment, and the sounds of knocking that had brought me stumbling through rooms I hardly knew faded from me with the French I had found but now lost, though not its sense.

  For the boomerang man from the Bois had told me what I could not have learned had I not already known it: that if it was worth telling, it was worth keeping secret, how he shied those pieces of himself down into the late autumn, his aim at some distance from him, his boomerangs quarrying not prey but chance which was to cast that old and various loop beyond routine success, dreaming the while of a point where at its outward limit the path’s momentum paused upon a crest of stillness and by the logic of our lunatic hope did not return. In this way, although he will not hear me, he is still there when I go, and here when I come back.

  Yet if this is unbelievable, I tried something more down-to-earth. One cold afternoon I spoke; I approached the man and said in French that I had not seen a boomerang thrown “since” thirty years. He answered. He had been throwing them that long and longer, he said. I asked if he had hunted with them. He looked me up and down, his eyebrows raised, his forehead wrinkled. He had not, he said. And were these the same old boomerangs he had always used? Only this one, he said, raising the one in his hand. Speaking for all of us, I asked if his aim was accurate, though not having the French noun for “aim” (which proves to be but), I asked if, when he threw (lancé) he was toujours exact. In English, then, he said, “American?” We smiled briefly; we nodded. “You jog,” he said slowly, “I throw boomerangs.”

  “I used to throw a boomerang as a child,” I said in French.

  He was looking downrange, shaking the boomerang in his hand downward at arm’s length, first one big shake, then a series of diminishing shakes. “Moi aussi,” I heard him say.

  Like a knife-thrower pointing at his target, he launched his toy. Like a passerby, I continued on my way.

  MISTER X

  The rider coming off the North River bike path, at risk even at two in the morning cutting across the highway and into an old side street, must have been recognized. That was what he later believed summoning from memory the figure who had emerged almost from nowhere, a warehouse doorway, into the rain just as he could feel his rear tire go. Across slick cobblestones a man was making his way toward him as he bent to look down at his wheel, forgetting his back and straightening up in some pain. He’s in no doubt he can defend himself but the man’s slight but curious limp is a challenge, not some panhandling drifter but on home ground, street lamp out, steam escaping a manhole cover twenty yards down the block. It was late. A car speeding north along the highway flashed shadows, and then a car southbound. “You don’t want to ride on the rim,” the man said. He was younger. Behind him a crack of light where a warehouse door was propped open. “The bad news is I can’t get to it till morning.”

  Each man wearing a camouflage jacket, trimmed beard, glasses, sneakers—some fool thing shared between them, you almost felt. “Street fails you, cut through the house,” said the younger man, leading the way. No joke exactly, it sounded like some tactic of the war encroaching that you might have to use yourself. “I’ve got a flight in the morning,” said the other wheeling his bike. What was he getting into? “You’ll make your flight.” “It’s a long one.” “Sleep on the plane.” The younger man stole a look at him.

  “I missed my turn but I know this street,” said the bicyclist. “You don’t miss much, eh?” said the other.

  Through a nomad’s door they left the street now for a space of overhead floodlights like a new outside or a shoot. Areas of dim dimension reached through to the back of the building and seemingly beyond it southward. Orange peel somewhere, paint thinner, the insidious metal burn of welding earli
er in the day in a plan not yet realized, a loose rot of garbage needing to go out, warm scent of sawn lumber, pipe tobacco and sweat close as a thought, all building the flow here, the host muttering some welcome—what did he say?—deciding if he wanted you here setting foot in the place, but he did.

  An alcove in progress of raw sheet rock framed up. Computer video units, old, facing off at a distance. Sander disks. Filled poly-prop bags like logs wound for strength in a spiral form. Manuals stacked, working drawings spread out, a convection heater on a yellow extension cord running under a swivel chair, reappearing near a futon, a brick wall half demolished taped to it a photograph of Bonaparte on horseback facing the Sphinx with its nose broken off. Stacked next to a barbell and two dumbbells were ten- and twenty-pound weights. Over here the teeth of a worm-gear assembly honorably glistening on layers of Sunday Classifieds and a brass binnacle compass gimbal-mounted with a healthy needle when you tripped on it. A mess, all this, of things in themselves to work with, sheets of plexiglass, two aluminum studs bent but usable, resin blocks, gray areas of litter, even a perfectionist buried in here somewhere in future space, an extension ladder going going. A cork bulletin board crammed with intelligence, a lighting plot tacked up, a clipping of a couple dancing, a drinking zebra taken by a crocodile jumping up out of the water, tracing-paper maps like overlays of riverfront with shots of two city bridges. How did the guy keep it all straight?

  Materials, he was explaining—that was what he was doing for the visitor as if the flat tire had been a means to bring you in and tell you about this multi-use neighborhood project like the latest thing. Though then, “Smart materials,” he said, like a joke between the two of them but the visitor looked upward, to where the second floor had vanished or become a twenty-foot ceiling. Resist impulse to pull out cell and take a picture.

  This person in the night who’d fix your flat—but when?—was he kidding? “Whey. Bob Whey, w-h-e-y?” he said. “No tools? No tube?”

  “Just me and the bike.” The visitor’s back half out again. His host eyeing him, “It’s been a tough evening,” said the man. “Tough day,” was the reply.

  A day getting ready to go away. Plus two weeks of talk ahead, mainly his but coming at him like night terrain to a paratrooper. And then tonight, dinner on his best behavior, and afterward his first flat in years by accident taking this route of three or four routes sometimes at night when the city belongs to him, redoing it in his head, his chest, arms, and butt. The end of a difficult evening—and now this guy, one more city sell with some point probably of value offered in the end. Fix your flat but step in here, see what we got goin’ on. Parking his visitor’s bike up against a table-saw this not uninteresting guy who, whoever he was with, didn’t like to be alone. Self-taught veteran you felt, wounded person (?), with one jagged half-broken tooth—partners (he said—but you wondered) in this and the building backing onto it—semi-raw space from two city decades ago, how had it escaped?—who would talk himself out of a job you would bet.

  “Do it from the ground up human scale, human materials.” “The ground?” the visitor weary now, “the ground—?” thinking, Who’s we—? “Groundscraper not skyscraper,” the other broke in, who’d been so mysteriously prompt out in the street, almost before the tire had blown. Perhaps a little unbalanced, like his limp, but no. “Decentralized community unit if we could only buy—you know what I’m saying, you do, I feel you do—designed fer—shoot, use what you have. Aren’t we glad the Towers went down?” (the voice rising, the bridges on the bulletin board coming back in focus)—“get outta this damn strait-jacket everywhere you look architects asked to come in but no chance to preciate the situation, study it, honor it, put the neighbor back in the hood. When’s it going to be our turn? All they can talk about is uncured violations.” The voice asking you for approval, how familiar these thoughts at a stretch they could have been the older man’s own once that he cut his teeth on, imagining these connected insides, the bare spaces of this building and the next, and a third building backing on the next block south (?). Yet this came to you now more a room you could live in, that leads to another also with a window, a ceiling, some circulation. These words in the middle of the night told a story, the speaker’s own—what was he saying, this almost structure taking instruction from…the body, that old architect’s dead end?—not seriously lame, this guy stranded though in a wee-hours expanding burrow—but he was halfway interesting: “Try another city,” he said as if to himself. “Boston for godsake.”

  The visitor looked about him needing to get home, but the man counted on him.

  For what?

  To speak? Wasn’t there a materials show coming up in ten days? said the stranded bicyclist offhandedly, picking up a magazine off a chair, wincing. Whey seemed not to hear. “See a whole goddamn city planned for where was it Borneo, and one for Lake Victoria (?)—Jesus Christ.”

  Welcomed off the street, he felt competed with, disturbed by this man Whey, his overlarge glasses. Half wanting you here, half what? Some violence just setting foot in a building—had Whey said that? Well, when was any empty building complete? said the visitor. “Most buildings are a lie,” was the reply, bitter, private.

  “It’s how your work gets used.”

  “Oh,” said the host with feelings one could deeply grasp, “you know it. My stuff’s been—you smile?—appropriated, God knows.” Whey draped his jacket over the bike seat. “Yup, it hurts, your own materials, flesh and bone,” said visitor.

  “Quit before they fired me. Blow them off, the lot of them. Travel light,” the gesture took in the space.

  “Bonaparte will find his Leonardo,” said the visitor, and when his host challenged the dates but Thanks for the company, you could ride that two-wheeler back there, Whey pointed—clear through into the next space, prob’ly easier on your back that angle, million years of insane evolution—he was irritated at Whey as if with his limp, his weights, something of a loser, his work underfoot, clippings tacked over one another, dancers, bridges, he knew in advance what was communicating itself to the visitor about his lower back, this successful traveler who couldn’t spend another minute here and, on two tracks somehow, his gray-and-black helmet hung from the handlebar stem, thought only of how to hobble home yet for a split second also of architecture as clothes, or the body.

  Violence, the man had said—to even set foot in a building, let alone this in-progress—his hand describing a shape—multi-cellular experiment, this nest that takes its instruction from the body, its cue and summons—“said I was kidding myself.”

  “Who did?”

  “Just now.” Whey pointed at the phone on the floor.

  “Kidding yourself about…?”

  “All this.”

  “It’s only the phone.”

  “Depends who it is for godsake—‘Go into another line of work, asshole,’ was what it meant. That’s the phone for you,” said Whey, “then they tell you go get a breath of fresh air. I hung up but I took the advice.”

  So that was how he had come to be out in the street.

  “So. Missed your turn?”

  “Yeah’d you hear the—” the visitor cupped his ear.

  “The boom? You heard it? Explosion, whatever.” Whey pinched the flat, ran a finger up the rim. “How long since these wheels were trued?” Want to siddown? How far ya got to go? an odd ring to it. Hey that’s ten, twelve blocks from us.

  Who was us? Someone who could live with this strewn floor. Here’s to the late-night advice about lower back but—

  “Home is home,” Whey swept his jacket off the bike seat, “a fix—a fix—if you can just come off it. You see what’s here. All out in the open.”

  What did Whey want? The visitor, ready to wheel his devoted bike into the night—is he just someone off the street? Summoned into some building that might never get done. God, an installation virtually. Two citizens in theory in the middle of the night. And someone coming to join them here? Or phoning? One didn’t ask. What was t
he emergency? “Don’t know where your thoughts turn up these days,” the man exacting some price. “Far from home,” said the other, thinking of the morning’s flight. “Zactly,” said the host, “criminal—” he tripped, lunged, got his footing—