by Mark Helprin
“What are spielers?” he asked them as they splashed their reddened sweaty faces with cold water from the fountain.
“Where are you from,” said the big one, “that you don’t know what are spielers?”
“I’m from the marsh.”
They didn’t know what he was talking about. As they distributed the money they told him about spieling. “We dance, like in a crowd, and we get their attention. They throw money . . .”
“Money is what you give the monkey, or the monkey pee on you,” said Peter Lake. The two girls looked at one another.
“They throw money, and Little Liza Jane picks their pockets. That’s spieling.”
“Why were you dancing now, after they stopped throwing money?”
“Dunno,” said the big one. “Why not?”
The big one was Little Liza Jane, and the little one was Dolly. There had been a third, a dark girl named Bosca, but she had died not long before.
“What did she die of?” asked Peter Lake.
“The washtub,” answered Little Liza Jane, without explaining further.
They took him in as a replacement for Bosca. He would dance with Dolly while Little Liza Jane picked pockets. He asked them if they had a soft place to sleep, and they said they did. It took them three hours to get there. They crossed several small rivers and five streams. They wound down a hundred crooked alleys that looked like opera sets. They passed over great bridges, through commercial squares where men ate fire and meat was roasted on swords, and by half a dozen wide doors that led far into smoky factories that pounded like hearts. As they walked, Peter Lake sang the sounds that he heard coming from within the iron workplaces—“Boom, atcha atcha rapumbella, boom, bok, atcha atcha, zeeeeeee-ah! bahlaka bahlaka bahlaka, ooooh-tak! chik chik chik chik! beema! um baba um baba, dilla dilla dilla, mash! um baba um baba, dilla dilla dilla okk!” He noticed that in the city people walked not only like chargers but in strange rhythmic dances—their bodies moving up and down, their arms going in and out, their hips tattooing in womanly zeal (if they were women, and, sometimes, even if not). He asked the two spielers if there were a war, or if something terrible had happened, because he could not understand the leaping fires, the homeless armies, the rubble, the commotion. They looked around, and said that nothing seemed to be out of the ordinary. He was ready to faint from exhaustion.
They reached a street of symmetrical tenements. The spielers lived not in the tenements themselves but within the hidden square they formed. They went through a dark whitewashed tunnel and discovered a vast concealed court surrounded by perhaps a hundred buildings. In the center was a broken garden not yet revived by spring, except for a dense growth of weeds. At its edge, dwarfed by the tenements, was a little shack. The spielers lived not in the shack but in its basement. They descended through a cellar door and found a small dark room with a tiny window near the ceiling. Some leftover coals glowed in the belly of an oil-drum stove. Dried vegetables hung on the wall, as did a pot and a few utensils. The one piece of furniture was an enormous bed with uneven legs that gave it a list, and upon it were half a dozen tired pillows, sheets, and blankets. Surprisingly, they were not too dirty. This was the soft place in which the spielers slept.
“Little Liza Jane lit a tallow lamp, and Dolly threw some wood in the stove,” said Dolly after it was done. She often spoke of herself in the third person. “It will take an hour for the water to boil and the vegetables to cook.” Peter Lake showed them the fish wafers and explained how to make a stew by shredding them and tying them in knots before tossing them in the boiling water, to improve the flavor.
They thought they would rest before they ate, but instead they drank most of the clam beer. Little Liza Jane pulled off her shirt in the crossing of her arms, and Dolly followed. Then they took off their skirts. Peter Lake was already in quite a float because of the clam beer, and this appealed to him rather strongly. Little Liza Jane was sixteen, and fully developed. Dolly was still pubescent, but what she lacked in volume she made up for in freshness, and, anyway, Little Liza Jane had volume enough for two. Her dancing bosom filled Peter Lake’s eyes. He thought that what was now bound to occur would be the same as it had been with Anarinda, but with two anarindas. Moaning with pleasure, he removed his own clothes. This was as difficult as pulling a sidesaddle through a lobster trap. When finally he was free, he opened his eyes to feast upon the many breasts and legs in the bed. But they were all tangled up in one another already, and the two girls were breathing in slow lascivious hisses. He heard a small trickle of sucking. What was going on here? He checked to see if both were, as he had thought, anarindas. Both were anarindas—there was no doubt about that. This was something new, but since everything about the city was new, he was not surprised. He took note. They were not interested in him, although they let him enter and satisfy himself several times, after which he was not interested in them. Then, hours later, no one was interested in anyone anymore but only in the stew. They ate in silence, and went to sleep just before the sun came up.
As if they were smokers of opium, the three of them half heard the voice of Little Liza Jane. She said, “Tomorrow we’ll go to Madison Square. There are a lot of suckers in Madison Square.” And the gray smoke of sleep filled their little chamber and pressed them down pleasantly upon their soft, tilted bed.
THE NEXT morning, Peter Lake saw the city through different eyes, as he would from then on whenever he awoke. It was never the same from one day to the next. Dark, close, smoky afternoons; oceans of rain; autumn days clearer than crystal paperweights; sunshine and shadow—no one city existed.
He arose early. The two girls were caught up in the blankets. Peter Lake dressed and was quickly outside, the first to see the sun light the highest chimney top of the surrounding tenements. Standing in the garden, waist-deep in weeds, he wondered what the insides of these structures were like. He had never been in a building. For all he knew, when he opened the door he would see a new city within, as vast and entertaining as the one he had just discovered. On that late spring morning, almost summer, he went to the nearest tenement door and swung it open, expecting to see as if from a high hill a great city in winter laid out before him in a cold dawn. Someday, perhaps, he would. But now there was only darkness and a sickening smell. He cautiously negotiated a flight of stairs (having been raised on the marsh, he knew nothing of height) and came to a landing. Cord and twine had been tied all about the banisters. Children playing, he thought. He saw in the blackness that the dark walls were scratched and gouged. This was a horrible place, far from water, sky, or sand. He would have left and forgotten it had he not for some reason been impelled to go up one more flight of stairs. He was in the heart of the building now, as far away from the light as if he had been deep in the grave. He was just about to turn around when suddenly he became motionless with the graceful and quick self-restraint of a hunter who has stumbled upon his prey. A child stood before him, not an ordinary child, or so he hoped. It could not have been more than three or four, and was dressed in a filthy black smock. Its head was enormous, shaven, distorted. The brows and crown protruded as if to burst. In back, it was the same. Peter Lake winced. This creature, standing in the rubble, had its hand in its mouth, and was leaning against the wall, staring blankly ahead. Its jaws trembled, and the hideous swollen skull rocked back and forth in convulsive movements. Peter Lake’s instincts told him that there was not much life left for it to live. He wanted to help, but he had no experience or memory to guide him. He could neither leave nor stay. He watched it shake and bob in the near-darkness until, somehow, he fell reeling back into the light.
Such a thing as the child left alone to die in the hallway was unknown on the marsh. But here, in the dawn, was mortality itself. In the city were places to fall from which one could never emerge—dark dreams and slow death, the death of children, suffering without grace or redemption, ultimate and eternal loss. The memory of the child stayed with him. But that was not to be the end of it, for reality wen
t around in a twisting ring. Even the irredeemable would be redeemed, and there was a balance for everything. There had to be.
He went back to the spielers.
“Leave your sword,” the girls had said, “or the leatherheads will take after you.”
A Bayman never parted from his sword except to swim or roll. “I wouldn’t leave my sword here,” Peter Lake said, thinking that he had come up with a wonderful new phrase, “for a lot of money.”
“That’s a good one,” said Dolly. “I hope you spiel better than that.”
Madison Square was just as far as the park where he had met them. After a ferry, two bridges, a train, and half a dozen tunnels, they had to weave for several hours through a labyrinth of streets, passages, alleys, and arcades, all exploding with life. Peter Lake was exhausted even before he got to work. But then, in the middle of the wonderful park surrounded by high buildings interconnected by a web of aerial bridges, he began a series of moon dances, clam dances, and reed sways. Dolly danced around him, while Little Liza Jane walked to and fro in the crowd, picking pockets.
Little Liza Jane (a beauty, really) had a perfect venal sense, and when she saw a fat man in a plaid suit waltz out of the Bank of Turkey, she went for him like a bee. She discovered in his overcrowded wallet exactly $30,000. Trembling, she made Peter Lake stop a wild clam dance and accompany her and Dolly to a corner of the park. There they divided up equally, with Peter Lake’s share of the morning’s take amounting to $10,004.28. Little Liza Jane said that the police would be after them if the fat man complained, so it would be wise to break up and meet again that night. “Right here,” she said. “Meanwhile, put the money in a bank.”
“What’s that?” asked Peter Lake. She taught him to read the word “bank” and told him that if he put money in the building where the word was written, the money would be safe. Peter Lake readily accepted this advice, and they parted. He found a bank, walked inside, tucked his pile of new bills neatly against a wall, and left, assured that he now had money, so that no monkeys would pee on him. With that out of the way, he wandered into the glass palace at Madison Square, intending to pass some time until work resumed in the evening.
MACHINES. EVERYWHERE there were machines, and more machines. At first, Peter Lake thought they were animals that had learned how to dance in one place. For him, the metallic underworld, or overworld, was immediately glorious and irresistibly hypnotic. Never before had he seen such stuff. Light flooded in the windows and cut through high squadrons of palms. A suspended orchestra played swaybacked music attuned to the strange mechanical dances. From the center of an overfattened block of steel shapes, a green piston struggled to rise, gasping. Wheels of all colors everywhere trembled and reversed, and then set to rolling as if chased by a dog. Balls on rods rose and fell; gears ticked and tocked; slammer blocks crashed together repetitiously like angered elk. Little plumes of steam riffled through the palms, and surprise squirts of water and oil were spat out sideways from monstrous prestidigitating engines as large as a city square. Peter Lake loved these things. And there were two thousand of them on the floor, each and every one laboring and puffing. For the first time, he was glad to have been turned away from the marsh. In the movement of the machines, he saw beyond everything he had yet known. Like waves, wind, and water, they moved. They were, in themselves, power and elation.
Wandering among the machines—two thousand machines!—he grew dizzy and ecstatic. He didn’t know what a single one of them was for, so he decided to ask. Standing next to each sputtering behemoth was a guardian of sorts, actually a salesman. Peter Lake had never met a salesman, and it is strange to imagine that a man with a fifty-ton $200,000 machine to hawk would spend any time at all with a twelve-year-old boy dressed in muskrat booties, skins, feathers, and shells. But all Peter Lake had to do was walk up to one of the giant engines and say to its guardian, “This, what is this?”
“What is this? What is this! This! my dear sir, is the Barkington-Payson Semi-Automatic Level-Seeking Underwater Caisson Drill and Dynamite Spacer! You will not find, in all this exhibition or in all the world, another SALSUCDADS that even compares with it. Let’s start with the design. Come over here to the finely crafted pumble shoe fabricated in Düsseldorf. Notice the solid turkey piece, the gleaming yodelagnia, and the pure steel bellows spring. Now, the turkey piece is directly linked to a superbly calibrated meltonian rod, at the base of which you will find an unusual feature common only to top-of-the-line SALSUCDADS—a blue oscar chuck! This is the best quality you can get. I use it myself. I don’t normally tell people this, but I’ll tell you. I wouldn’t go near any other SALSUCDADS. I swear, I’d trade my wife for it. Look at those intake blades. Have you ever seen such intake blades? The crust drill alone is worth the entire price of the machine. Pure salinium! A doubly protected fen wheel! Shielded from the pacer by a rock-solid tandy piece! Open it and feel the smooth calabrian underglide. Now, let’s get to the point. You have half a million dollars of undercracking to budge across. Do you use a cheap piece of cat crap? Of course not, not someone like you. I know an expert when I look him in the eye. You can’t fool me. You, my friend, are one of God’s own mechanics! A craftsman like you wants to budge across with something solid and fine, something dependable and well constructed, the Barkington-Payson. Come over here and inspect the whistle pip. Pure volpinium! Now, let me let you in on a little secret about the price. . . .”
Peter Lake listened to him for two and a half hours. The boy’s mouth hung open as he strained to understand every word. He thought that this, along with picking pockets and red-robed monkeys, was one of the cornerstones of the civilization into which he had tumbled. But he was interrupted by two police officers and a priest, who seized him, tied his hands behind his back, took him from the sparkling exhibition hall, put him in a prison wagon full of children, and drove him off to Reverend Overweary’s Home for Lunatic Boys.
All over the city, children without parents could be found huddled together like rabbits, sleeping in the warmth of daylight, in barrels and cellars and wherever there was a little quiet and stillness. At night, the cold set them in motion and flung them into the arms of adventures and depredations for which children have never been suited and never will be. There were more than half a million of them, and they succumbed as fast or faster than did their elders to diseases and to violence, so that as often as not the coffins in potter’s field were of diminutive and touching proportions: gravediggers could sometimes handle two or three at a time. No one knew the children’s names (in some cases they had not even had names), and no one ever would. Sometimes people of good conscience would ask, “What happens to these children?” meaning all the children on the streets, summer and winter. The answer was that some grew up to work or steal; some passed from institution to institution, or cellar to cellar; and the rest were buried—out in the fields beyond the city, where it was quiet and flat and full of scrub.
Children sometimes lost their senses and wandered about, insane. And so there was the Overweary Home, set up to provide shelter and training for boys of the street who had gone mad. In one of their sweeps, Reverend Overweary’s associates had noticed Peter Lake because of his costume.
He discovered rather quickly that the home was ruled by three men. Reverend Overweary himself was a tragic figure, always incapacitated by his deeply felt compassion for the boys. He was frequently in tears, and suffered greatly because of the sufferings of others. Because of this, he had neither the time nor the energy to supervise properly his second in command, Deacon Bacon, and Deacon Bacon was sure to find in each new batch a few boys who responded with vigor to his direct and enthusiastic attentions during the first delousing. The moment of truth came when Deacon Bacon joined the happy boys in the steaming baths, ready to apply the patubic acid. Peter Lake refused to have the patubic acid applied by the deacon, insisting upon doing it himself. Some of the new internees simply did not know. Some were eager for the approach of the kindly looking six-footer with horn-ri
mmed glasses and a nose like the beak of a bird. Things soon sorted themselves out (as they always do), and Reverend Overweary looked the other way as Deacon Bacon retired with his entourage for days at a time to a cottage which was furnished and decorated like a sultan’s front parlor on an isle in the Sea of Marmara.
But who was Reverend Overweary to chastise his deacon? His house stood like a palace, dwarfing even the cell blocks of gray stone in which more than two thousand boys lived at any one time. Reverend Overweary threw extravagant balls to which he invited the rich, the intelligentsia, and visiting royalty. They came because the food was good and because they thought that he was a man of means who had channeled a personal fortune of millions into sheltering his charges. Quite the opposite. The boys supported him, for in the guise of training and education he leased them out in gangs to anyone who needed them. The going rate for unskilled labor was four to six dollars a day, twelve hours, no nonsense. Overweary had his boys out every day at five dollars a head. He spent a dollar on their upkeep, and thus realized a profit of about $8,000 a day; less, actually, for the totals were constantly eroded by sickness, death, and escape (the three of which often combined in a unified process). The compassionate reverend got the boys off the street, taught them how to work, saved them from potter’s field, and took in several million dollars a year. When the boys left, they left without a cent.
