(If you want a bar, incidentally, I’d recommend Errol’s around the corner.)
Note that voyeur is not even capable of fully appreciating the lobby, since architect’s express mission was “to create a transitional venue to be absorbed molecularly in daily passage, subordinating ocular experience to a dopaminergic rush and overcoming the perils of habit(u)ation.” Note that even we have only a partial clue of what the fuck the architect was talking about; hence, to pretend that you, a mere pedestrian onlooker (henceforth “voyeur”), will “get it” in some fell swoop like some mathematical savant bypassing all the dirty little scratch pad pencil and eraser work is just plain ludicrous.
Dos?
Do wallow in silent appreciation. Bask, even. Marvel at how the lintels, by way of fractal tilework, suggest the expansion and eventual contraction of the universe. Ooh and aah at the way the right angles ooze and the curves flatten. Twitter at the use of barklike textures. Gape at the juxtaposition of so-called choosy mirrors that resolve age-old paradoxes of regress through their tasteful editing of visual ephemera. Revel in the inimitable touches—the portrait of the yeti hung mischievously aslant, the coquettish positioning of the mailboxes.
Then, at some point, exit, returning to your (henceforth “your”) existence as pedestrian, free to merge into the anonymous tumult of human transit, speaking nil of what you’ve seen today, abiding no scar of it in the retention orifices of your mind, for to recall it thusly will entail your having become part of the lobby; hence, according to the provisions set forth above, prohibited from speaking of oneself, crippled, I tell you, as one who must fall silent and expressionless each time I walk through those heart-rendingly simple doors.
Those, there.
The mayor of Morrisania decreed that no longer would its citizens be plagued by rain. Over the airwaves, the voice that the pundits had dubbed “fascist . . . in a good way” rang out as though outrage were a stringed instrument; he plucked, bowed, implied nonintuitive fingerings. “What century are we living in,” he thundered, “that I still even need to think before I set forth from my door about what I will wear, for fear of getting drenched to the bone? Do not our heads have roofs over them? Do awnings not jut out from our doorways to curbs? Must we constantly adjust to the whims of outmoded gods and goddesses?”
Immediately, building began citywide with fanfare and all-hands-on-deck resolve. Grandmothers simmered marvelous soups, salvaging bones from the near oblivion of trash mounds. Construction teams lent out their brawniest, resplendent in colorful T-shirts sporting memorable slogans. Street performers busked with renewed vigor, sending sweat and falcons skyward and forging their own signatures in luminous contrails. Philosophers set up tables at which they contemplated in lively and vigorous fashion the premises and consequences of the whole endeavor, debating, for instance, whether the open or closed form of the umbrella was more authentic and fundamental. Closed was originary, yet its very existence had meaning only in the context of the open; never had these pallid intellectuals come so close to blows. School was canceled—what teacher, no matter how inventive, could hope to minister about roots of square in the midst of such fervor? The streets were closed to traffic and attics swiftly divested of twine, canvas, and wire—in sum, anything remotely resembling a tarpaulin or a zip line that would bear a covering.
Pulling aside those canvases that were least water-resistant upon which to work, artists rendered their visions of Morrisania. The futurists depicted pulleys and levers controlling a many-tiered canopy that would emerge from apartments and rooftops, and would come into existence as though instantaneously, each covering sloped and hemmed with gutters that, in labyrinthine fashion, would bear each drop on its cascade downward. Via these it would be shunted out to the Longinard River, coursing toward the sea after passing through a series of turbines that would keep the city energized for days. The surrealists’ visions were no less inspired, though their canopies were made of earlobes and genitals and their raindrops were engulfed by the sky.
Then, it began to rain. More, it began to pour, no ordinary rain, not even that which cats and dogs have long been associated with—through no fault of their own, I might add. No, this rain began as butter and moss and chinchilla pelts, gradually picked up until it was repo men and tenterhooks and foyers, and finally coalesced into an onslaught of grand piano lids and conveyer belts and marketing departments. Everyone ducked, tried to shield themselves, ran for cover. Cover was indoors, of course. Unfazed, the mayor planted himself firm in the crosshairs of an intersection and got on a megaphone. His voice was toxic violet putty. He called them cowards—no one knew whether he meant the citizens of Morrisania or the gods themselves. He pointed the megaphone skyward, wielding it as a makeshift umbrella, but the water funneled through it and it hit him like bottled riptide. He’d always been a bachelor, and his genes tried to jump ship at the last minute, but their life rafts were old and uninspected and had been devoured by the moths and rats and other vermin that had had the word plague hurled at them countless times before and now found only serenity in the fricative rub of its consonants.
When we were awash with youth, we were all led to believe that our father was assembling a book called The Atlas of the Voyages of Things, or, as we shortened it, The Atlas. That it was eventually destined to enter the world was incontestable—one day, assuredly, we would march into the bookshop behind his gallant stride, and there, on the shelf, would sit the book, sprawling, coffee table—ready, his name beaming from the front as on a theater marquee. “You see, boys?” he’d say, and we would solemnly nod.
But before you get overly swept away in such childhood reverie, I owe you a snapshot of him from years later, nearer the present: in a hospital bed, riggered to a set of machines that monitored many of his bodily functions. My memories of the strapping man I once knew—almost fiendish in his independence, wearing his learning like his plaid flannel at barbecues and on vacations, splitting hairs with the tour guide in an underground cave about this or that obscure fact—vied with the presence of the helpless man before me. His body itself had been extended through tubes into clear hanging bags—transparent, clearly labeled external organs. His body was being perpetually translated into the language of quantification, via feedback machines through which rates and levels looped again and again.
His body; his body. In such mantras, electronic and otherwise, I could achieve a semblance of peace. Amid the faint hum of fluorescent lights and machines, an image would sometimes materialize for me of a brown-haired girl with a Hula-hoop. She was so adept and satisfied with its steady motion that she could gyrate it indefinitely. At some point in each of my visits, I arrived at some version of that peace, which came to stand, however fleetingly, for infinity. Those visits were frequent. I was trying to make up for the fact that Aidan, my brother, was far away, and that when these rhythms reverted to silence, it would register barely a blip, I think, in my mother’s day.
Seeing him so reduced, though, it was impossible not to think of The Atlas and the fervid energy it had once commanded. Behind the door of his office, which jutted proudly at the stern of our first house, overlooking the yard and taking in maddening sunsets, he was supposedly huddled amid his papers in the evening hours, piecing together a masterwork, a lifelong enterprise. There was a certain comfort in glancing up on summer evenings while we built a fort at the edge of our yard where the woods began, with the volley