To Walk Alone in the Crowd

by Antonio Munoz Molina

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  RIVERS OF GOLD FLOW IN FROM ALL ENDS OF THE EARTH. Times Square is an aquarium and a lake hundreds of feet deep, an underwater park, a theme park sunk beneath the waves, like an exact replica of the city above. Rooftops and spires poke out of the water like the outcrops of a coral reef. Clouds and plumes of vapor drift across facades of blue or tinted glass. Large screens attached to buildings produce a swaying sense of moving currents or immense aquarium tanks, a silent flood where radiant creatures of the deep are seen to drift and glide sedately. Now you are forced to look up, raising your head, craning your neck. Different kinds of creatures teem on the ocean floor, in the muddy silt and detritus of the sidewalks and pedestrian zones. Tight groups of tourists move like shoals of identical fish, wide-eyed, open-mouthed, with fluttering gills, enveloped in the bioluminescent glow of their cell phone screens. Masked and helmeted like deep-sea divers, shod in heavy shoes, the superheroes, the Disney figures, and the Statues of Liberty wave their arms in big aquatic gestures as they try to call attention to themselves. At these depths there is a swampy thickness to the air. The superhero suits and capes are made of cheap, outworn materials, flimsy plastic breastplates, giant heads of greasy plush, tights that are patched and threadbare and full of holes, crudely stitched synthetic fabrics that make those who wear them sweat profusely. Abandoning their strictly separate realms, the mascots and the superheroes mingle like species native to distant oceans gathered in the same aquarium tank. Batman and Superman were already coeval, but they are joined by Spider-Man, Darth Vader, Wonder Woman, Captain America, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and the Power Rangers, lumped together in the venal multicultural fraternity of degraded super-heroism, reduced to a spectacle for an idiotic tourist photograph, like Indian chiefs taking part in Buffalo Bill’s circus with painted faces, decked in warrior headdress. Peering out of Mickey Mouse’s gaping smile is the dark-skinned, frightened face of an undocumented Central American immigrant. The superhero costumes of Times Square are made in hidden sewing shops, in basements and industrial sheds in Queens and in the Bronx. The Statues of Liberty wear sunglasses and foam crowns, their faces are covered in glitter and the hems of their robes are soiled from being dragged over muddy patches of unmelted snow. On every corner, garbage spills and overflows from metal cans. The ground is a dunghill as thickly carpeted in plastic trash as the bottom of the sea.

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  THE BEAUTY THAT DWELLS IN THE CITY. Near the surface, in a brighter area, high above the tourists with their selfie sticks and the puppet-headed superheroes, higher even than the signs over the restaurants and souvenir shops and the theater marquees, flow the powerful currents of the advertising screens, swaying with a slow and silent motion. Moving cameras follow from above as cars race at strangely tranquil speeds through desert landscapes, on winding lakeside roads, along a cliff with breaking ocean waves or down the long, straight avenues of cities without any cars, pedestrians, or even sidewalks. People jump and stay afloat as if submerged, as if jumping in a space station or on the moon. Hair floats around women’s faces like that of diving mermaids. Three girls, golden-haired, with glowing faces, run in light H&M dresses through prairies of high grass that wave and buckle in the wind. They run to the top of a hill with such ease that their feet don’t seem to touch the ground, then they jump and glide through the boundless space that opens up on the other side. A man wearing a helmet and a pilot suit that make him look almost like an astronaut jumps in a parachute, swaying in a pristine sky that turns pink on the horizon where the sun begins to set. He loses altitude harmoniously, like a seagull soaring on still wings or like a hang glider. He lands on his feet on a paved road, a highway stretching away in a perfect line toward a mountain range. By the side of the road there is a Hyundai. The pilot packs his parachute with ease and stores it in the trunk. He takes off his helmet. He is a man with tousled brown hair, an explorer’s sunburned face and a scruffy three-day beard. He gets in the car, turns on the engine, and drives away, disappearing into a horizon that is still aglow with a luxurious sunset. A moment later he is back in the parachute, descending just as slowly as before toward the same red car.

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  ENTERTAINMENT WITHOUT LIMITS. People rise and fall on digital displays at various depths with the same light grace. Rhinemaidens sway in submarine choreographies. A single ripple spreads across the screens, lifting all the floating people. Every thirty seconds it all repeats exactly as before. A lipstick tube is falling through the void, through a glistening darkness of silk or velour. Suddenly it shatters. A thousand particles of glass, metal, and red matter spread in all directions, blooming rapidly, expanding like a sea anemone. But just as quickly as they burst they fly back together and transform into a woman’s red lips, then a hand with bright red fingernails pulls a zipper to reveal a nascent cleavage. The zipper’s downward motion turns once more into the falling tube of lipstick which explodes again within its brief parenthesis of darkness, a lavish catastrophe, a burst of fireworks in the summer night.

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  ONLY THE BEST CAN REACH THESE HEIGHTS. Words, too, flow in streams along ribbon displays that curve around the Morgan Stanley building or the Fox News building nearby: a river and a sea snake of words curving like a whip around their facades, relaying share prices, financial news, warnings: St. Petersburg subway hit by suicide blast, rivers in flood leave hundreds dead in Colombia. The letters and symbols of a brand come together on a screen. The title of a Broadway musical, a car model, the latest Netflix series, the silhouette of a helicopter on a yellow background in an ad for Miss Saigon. A Norwegian Airlines Boeing 787 lifts off powerfully and flies in a straight line through a Himalaya of clouds. With dizzying swiftness, a cell phone screen transforms into a high-tech business park that opens its gates invitingly in Beijing: treelined avenues, glass buildings under clear skies, huge doors that open to let in a heavenly light. A muscular Black man leaps from a diving board toward a swimming pool of gleaming blue, his arms spread wide, a little like the Boeing 787 in the next screen over. In this oceanic trench, this theme park, reality has been abolished so completely as to unleash in everyone, including himself, this furtive traveler, a dizzying euphoria. The artificial paradises of the old city wanderers have finally become superfluous: De Quincey’s laudanum, Poe’s laudanum and cognac, Baudelaire’s hashish, Walter Benjamin’s opium and peyote. Urban hallucinations no longer need to arise from the mind, since they are made objectively available across a thousand simultaneous screens. The cars, the women, the tubes of lipstick that appear on them are as large as creatures of the deep, as whales and giant squids. Store signs attain the pitch of apocalyptic prophecies: LAST DAYS, FINAL LIQUIDATION, everything must go. Signs for clearance sales, worn as sandwich boards by men with drunk and ravaged faces, cannot be told apart from signs raised with vengeful zeal by preachers of the end of days. “You shopaholics,” one of them yells, waving his arms among the tourists, “you better kneel down and pray for the mercy of the Lord.”

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  THERE IS HORROR, AND PIERCING JOY, AND SOMETIMES CRUELTY. He feels that he will never leave Times Square behind. His steps seem weightless and anesthetized. He must reach a shore of reason and reality as soon as possible. He must leave Broadway’s underwater canyon, emerge as quickly as he can from the liquid realm of screens. In broad daylight, its digitized glow prevails over the antiquated light of the sun. The world seems entirely submerged beneath the perfect unreality of advertisement. Families as softly obese as sea lions guzzle down manufactured foods in the corporate decor of a McDonald’s, a Wendy’s, a Popeyes, a Subway, a TGI Fridays. They eat meat drenched in hormones and antibiotics, French fries doused with saturated fat, drinks sweetened with genetically modified corn syrup. Each person leaves behind a trail of bags and plastic straws and food containers. Homeless people rummage in the garbage cans and find half-eaten burgers, nibbled bits of fried chicken smeared with ketchup, aluminum cans with dregs of hot soda inside. Pigeons as dirty and gra
y as the trampled snow peck at a slice of pizza. Now and then, seagulls come down from the cliffs of Times Square, drawn by the irresistible smell of melted cheese, burned fat, the cornucopia spilling out of every garbage can at the end of the day.

  WILD CREATURES OF THE ASPHALT JUNGLE. He walks and walks. It’s been three hours and it seems like days, or lifetimes. His walks form a thread that runs through many times and places. One of his rules is to stop only once, and only long enough to eat. If there’s no wind he can sit on a park bench. Other than that, he only comes to a stop at red lights. There’s no need to rest. He is the tireless little man in the traffic signal, the white silhouette marking the paths reserved for pedestrians in a park. The exertion of the walk generates the very energy that sustains it. He steps lithely on the firm rubber soles of shoes made specially for walking. The body’s weight and balance are centered at the base of the spine. The head of the femur slides in its hip socket like a well-oiled piston. There is a sense of physical exaltation that is sharpened by the morning cold. The clarity of the air seems to transfer directly to the eye and mind. Walking is now a permanent condition, an organic rhythm as efficient and well-timed as the beating of the heart or the periodic intake of air into the lungs. There’s a kind of folly in walking for so many hours; a stubbornness; a sense of incipient delirium, like drinking and drinking and wanting to drink even more. Walking is a gradual drunkenness without heaviness or hangover, a psychedelic trip fueled by oxygen and serotonin. The senses sharpen instead of growing dull, the will is perfectly at rest and simultaneously exerts itself along a constant path. The rule requires that he only stop for lunch and that he only make use of what he carries; he must not take anything that is not a gift. A newspaper is fine if it’s free. Outside a tea shop, up in the seventies, a girl in a black apron is offering samples of hot tea. He takes a tiny cup and thanks her and drinks it as he goes. It warms his fingers, rouses his spirits and adds percussive force to his heels. The broad expanse of the river is now visible on side streets leading west. He is not allowed to browse through secondhand books at a street stand or to stop at the strange sidewalk bazaars set up on pieces of plywood laid across a pair of supports.

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  RELAX YOUR SENSES. He has reached one of the small triangular parks formed by Broadway as it cuts diagonally through the city grid. There are benches in the scant and deceptive February sun. There’s a garden, a statue, a kind of recumbent nymph in Greek sandals with an ancient tunic draped over opulent curves and a hairstyle circa 1914. He has an old weakness for irregular city squares with gardens and statues. After three and a half hours of walking he is suddenly beset by great hunger, by soreness on the soles of his feet and weakness in the knees. There are lost souls and castaways sunning themselves on the benches. He chooses a sunny spot that is a little sheltered from the traffic. He takes the satchel off his back and takes out the sandwich wrapped in foil, the paper napkin, the canteen, the small bottle with its measure of red wine. Being a meek and fearful person, anxious to obey whatever rules are placed upon him and to read all prohibitive signs and regulations, he knows that consuming alcohol in public spaces is forbidden by the city, especially in parks, where one is not allowed to smoke either. But what could be a greater pleasure than a bite of rye bread, olive oil, fresh tomatoes, Spanish ham, and the drippings of a scrambled egg, followed by a drink of wine the more enjoyable for being surreptitious, while on a different bench someone sucks on a straw from a tub of soda overflowing with malignant sweeteners, stamped with the seal of Kentucky Fried Chicken and made of materials that, after being used just once, will take a thousand years to degrade into a cloud of toxic microfibers that will go on poisoning the water and our lives.

  VOTRE VOYAGE COMMENCE ICI. I saw him in Straus Park, sitting on one of the benches facing the midday sun and the receding view of West End Avenue, which is rather stark and severe in the foreground but then turns blue and gold in the distance at that hour on a clear day. I thought I’d seen him the prior Sunday at the farmers’ market, on that terrible stretch of sidewalk in the freezing morning shade up by Columbia University. What made him hard to recognize was that I’d never seen him so bundled-up before, dressed in a winter coat and wearing a fur-lined cap with earflaps. There was an incongruity between the elaborate hat he wore that Sunday—no doubt effective against the cold, but somehow archaic, like some piece of equipment for a zeppelin expedition to the North Pole—and the rather flimsy coat, which suggested a person lacking harsh experience with intense cold. He had been attentively examining the offerings at a mushroom stand. While the vendor, standing in front of his simple stall, stomped his feet and tried to huddle into his coat, he went on looking at the various types of mushroom with the calm attention of a naturalist, unaffected by the cold as the minutes passed. His mild and natural composure softened my surprise at seeing him, though just a moment later he was gone. A blast of freezing wind had shaken the frail arrangement of poles and the plastic sheeting protecting the stalls. One of them collapsed, dismasted by the wind, toppling a pile of crates that sent a bunch of apples rolling unevenly down the sidewalk at people’s feet.

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  AN ÉMINENCE GRISE. The second sighting, to use a UFO term that he would surely have enjoyed, took place at The Hungarian Pastry Shop. Just as in Madrid, his movements, or apparitions, were circumscribed to a few particular areas and neighborhoods: Straus Park, the farmers’ market up by Columbia, The Hungarian Pastry Shop, delimiting together a small area of ten blocks between two avenues, since the pastry shop, a less portentous place than its name might suggest, stands at the corner of Amsterdam Avenue facing St. John the Divine.

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  THE MOMENT HAS COME. One morning I was having coffee at the pastry shop and for a moment I felt sure I’d seen him walk past the door and turn to look inside, where he would not have been able to see much, given the contrast between the bright sun on the sidewalk and the relative darkness within; a darkness as pleasing as the murmur of conversation, the soft lamplight, the waitresses’ voices calling out in thick accents the names of customers who had ordered something before sitting down at a table. Sometimes I would work there in the mornings, reading or jotting things down over a cappuccino. If I had to meet someone, I did so at the pastry shop. I liked that it was a real café, a well-stocked patisserie, with a certain Austro-Hungarian expertise when it came to pastries, yet with all the precariousness of a small American shop. I liked the coffee and the croissants, but I especially liked that it was not a Starbucks; that its tables were not taken up by zombies plugged into white earbuds and staring into screens; that real conversations between people could be heard and sometimes even laughter, and no music governed by a corporate algorithm, in fact no music at all. I liked that there were waitresses behind the counter or serving people at their tables, often politely, often even smiling, attractive waitresses who always seemed a touch exotic, perhaps Eastern European, moving among the tables and holding up a tray. Always, or almost always, there was a woman sitting alone with a book. I liked the absence of any design, corporate, hipster, bohemian, eco, ethnic, pseudovintage, pseudo-French, or any other kind. The walls had a yellow tint, as if they dated back to a time when people were allowed to smoke and had never been repainted. I liked to get there early so I could sit in a corner in the back, by the faint glow of a lampshade and with a good view of the narrow, cavernous length of the café, the to-and-fro of the waitresses, the air that grew thick in winter with the breath of people coming in from the street and with the damp steam of their coats and hats in the heated room.

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  THE WORLD AT YOUR FINGERTIPS. The day I saw him go by I was sitting closer to the door, facing it. On a different day, hurrying to get somewhere, I turned the corner and glanced inside. It was one of those cold mornings when the café would fill up right away and seem even fuller because everyone was bundled up. That time I recognized him by the Arctic hat. He was holding a fountain pen and looking over some sheets of paper on
the table. He seemed so absorbed that I felt I couldn’t interrupt him, couldn’t draw him from that private rapture that enclosed him in a perfect isolation that was not, however, unsociable, partaking as it did in the sounds, the warmth of bodies, the smell of coffee and of pastries that filled the shop.

  EVERYTHING OLD IS NEW AGAIN. Back then I had come to accept that my only meaningful connections in the city were with the dead, with absent or imaginary people, and only very rarely with the living, those who moved about me or who lived down the hallway or next door, even on the other side of the wall. I knew more about dead people I had never met and about ghosts of the past and figments of the imagination than about most of the living. The real ghosts were my closest neighbors. I knew of their existence only indirectly. A funereal cough would begin in the middle of the afternoon or in the middle of the night, somewhere in the building above my head, and it would last for hours. It was a man’s cough, deep, rich, sometimes gravelly, as if stirring up thick matter, other times as dry as a slow bark. Sometimes I woke up at three or four in the morning and the sleepless cough was ringing, maybe it was even the reason I was up. In the lobby or in the elevator I never ran into anyone who coughed that way. It came in the dark, like the crazed sound of hammers or crunching gears when the heat came on and scalding water caused the old iron pipes and radiators to expand. Heavy blows like the fist of a revenant at the door, like the knocking that the dead apparently employ to send a message to the living at a spiritual séance.