by Mark Helprin
“Look, there you find child prostitutes, not one or two, but dozens. They live, if you can call it that, until about age nineteen. Then it’s too much cocaine, or syphilis, or a knife. Shall I take you to the room where we keep only the pieces that we find, and the cadavers that have been two months in the river—or for years in some hovel, undiscovered? Shall I show you the half-dozen other rooms in this hospital where these scenes are repeated? And what of the other hospitals? Printing House Square is small and tame. Even in the private institutions uptown you can see a show just like this: there is nothing as disgusting as an obese cadaver in which all the futile pleasures of many years finally arise to fill it full-blown with stinking rotten gases. The city is burning and under siege. And we are in a war in which everyone is killed and no one is remembered.”
“What am I supposed to do, then,” Peter Lake asked, “if it’s like you say?”
“Is there someone you love?”
“Yes.”
“A woman?”
“Yes.”
“Then go home to her.”
“And who will remember her?”
“No one. That’s just the point. You must take care of all that now.”
Aceldama
PETER LAKE rode Athansor at a lope over snow-covered streets with the north wind against him. It was very cold, and the wind put icicles on his mustache. Though the doctor hadn’t known that the woman Peter Lake loved was in the midst of dying, his advice could not have been more appropriate or more painful to hear, especially because it echoed what Beverly had said not long before in the second (though by far not the last) delirium in which he was to see her. “I’m just like you,” she had told him. “I come from another age. But there are many things that we must take care of now.”
Because he was confounded so by the strength of his love for Beverly, its suddenness, and its onrushing end, and perhaps because he had no way of helping her, he joined her in what she believed. Far-fetched as it was, he accepted it simply because he loved her and would share any mortification or pathetic confusion just to be with her. And only after he had come to half-believe what she said did he give it any thought—only after he had been to the hospital in Printing House Square.
If she were correct, it would explain why the world sometimes seemed to be a stage behind which was a strangely benevolent, superior, and indifferent power. The suffering of the innocent would be accounted for, if, in ages to come or ages that had been, the reasons for everything were revealed and balances were evened. It would explain destiny, and coincidence, and his image of the city as if he had been looking from high above at a living creature with a pelt of dusky light. It would explain the things that called to Beverly from a far distance and a far time. It would suggest that Athansor, who could leap high into the air, was leaping toward something he already knew. It would explain the strong feeling Peter Lake had that every action in the world had eventual consequences and would never be forgotten, as if it were entered in a magnificent ledger of unimaginable complexity. He thought that it might explain freedom, memory, transfiguration, and justice—though he did not know how.
Peter Lake remembered when, once, for no apparent reason, Pearly had leapt back, drawn his pistols, and fired ten .45-caliber rounds at a dark window behind which had been nothing but a winter night. Pearly had shaken for an hour afterward, saying that, leering at him from outside the window, with its teeth bared, was a giant dog twenty feet high, the White Dog of Afghanistan, come to get him from another time. Peter Lake thought he was mad—too much bumping of the head on doorposts and tabletops. When Pearly had finally stopped quivering, he slept for forty-eight hours and had nightmares every single minute.
The Baymen were waiting, Peter Lake knew, for a great window in the cloud wall to open and reveal a burning city that was not consumed, a city that thrashed like an animal and yet did not move, a city suspended in the air. Sharp on detail and alert to small signs, they insisted that such a thing would appear, and that, after it did, the world would light up in gold.
All these things were shaken about within Peter Lake like pots and pans banging against the side of a peddlers swaybacked horse. It was hard to bear the weight of partial revelations which refused to venture past the tip of his tongue. He was no Mootfowl or Isaac Penn, not a deep thinker at all, but just a man. He was only Peter Lake, and he rode to the Penns’ with the uncomplicated expectation of taking a bath in the slate bathing pool and then watching Beverly as she dressed to go to Mouquin’s. He rode fast through the lights of early winter traffic, weaving among panting horses, clouds of steam, lacquered carriages with brass lamps, and showers of dry cold snow. Athansor’s gait was so smooth that riding him was like riding a noiseless whip, or gliding down the slope of a mid-ocean swell. Peter Lake and Beverly would go to Mouquin’s oblivious of all dangers. The new year was rolling at them as wide and full as a tide racing up the bay, sweeping over old water in an endless coil of ermine cuff.
With Athansor bedded down on a pallet of hay in the Penns’ stable, forelegs stretched before him and head bowed in a restful dream, Peter Lake ran up to the second floor of the house and spun the hot-water valves. After the bitter cold, the water was an unparalleled joy. As he floated and turned, buoyed by great volumes of foaming bubbles, the door opened and Beverly came in.
“They’re all at The Sun,” she announced, pulling her blouse over her head in a movement as quick as a good fly-fisherman’s cast. “The New Year’s parry won’t be over until seven or eight.”
“What about Jayga?” Peter Lake asked, wary of Jayga’s compulsive peeping and eavesdropping.
“Jayga at this moment is under my father’s desk in the city room, a tray of smoked salmon on her knees, a magnum of French champagne at her side. They find her on the third of January, after an exhaustive search of the entire building. She will have eaten enough salmon, caviar, chopped liver, and shrimp to carry her through a much longer hibernation. But only she, Harry, and I know that. We are her confidants.”
“We’re alone then.”
“Yes!” Beverly shouted, and threw herself into the pool.
They embraced as they floated, they circled, they were turned by flowing water and dashed under the falls. Beverly’s unplaited hair spread around her, soft and humid; her breasts had their own way in the water; she kicked her long graceful legs in a rose-and-white scissors; the heat added a fine patina to her skin; and her penetrating eyes were softened and cheered. They glided over to a ledge, where they talked, their words half hidden in the white fall.
Numb with desire, Peter Lake managed to tell her what had happened with Cecil Mature, Mootfowl, Jackson Mead, and the doctor in the hospital in Printing House Square. She had no answers for him. Though she was reassuring, her method was inexplicable. She made no reference to his implied questions, and continued to speak in calm certainties.
“There are animals in the stars,” she declared, “like the animal that you describe, with a pelt of light, and deep endless eyes. Astronomers think that the constellations were imagined. They were not imagined at all. There are animals, far distant, that move and thrash smoothly, and yet are entirely still. They aren’t made up of the few stars in the constellations that represent them—they’re too vast—but these point in the directions in which they lie.”
“How can they be bigger than the distance between stars?” he asked.
“All the stars that you can see in the sky don’t even make up the tip of a horn, or the lash of an eye. Their shaggy coats and rearing heads are formed of a curtain of stars, a haze, a cloud. The stars are a mist, like shining cloth, and can’t be seen individually. The eyes of these creatures are wider than a thousand of the universes that we think we know. And the celestial animals move about, they frisk, they nuzzle, they paw and roll—all in infinite time, and the crackling of their coats is what makes the static and hissing which bathes an infinity of worlds.”
Peter Lake stared at the water as it came over the fall. “I’m as
crazy as you are,” he said, “maybe crazier. I believe you. I do believe you."
“That’s only love,” Beverly answered. “You don’t have to believe me. It’s all right if you don’t. The beauty of the truth is that it need not be proclaimed or believed. It skips from soul to soul, changing form each time it touches, but it is what it is, I have seen it, and someday you will, too.”
He lifted her in the water and set her gently on a slightly higher step. “How do you know all this?”
She smiled. “I see it. I dream it.”
“But if they’re just dreams, then why do you speak as if they’re facts?”
“They’re not just dreams. Not anymore. I dream more than I wake now, and, at times, I have crossed over. Can’t you see? I’ve been there.”
CONTRADICTIONS, paradoxes, and strong waves of feeling were things that Peter Lake had long before learned to call his own, so he was not surprised to be surprised by the gentleness of Mouquin’s usually boisterous New Year’s Eve. He remembered that it had been the same when the century had turned, when the celebrants had been unable to celebrate and could only stand in awe of history as it moved its massive weight (as Peter Lake saw it) like the vault door of a central bank. On the night of December 31, 1899, despite a thousand bottles of champagne and a hundred years of anticipation, Mouquin’s had been as quiet as a church on the Fourth of July. Women had wept, and men had found it hard to hold back the tears. As the clockwork of the millennia moved a notch in front of their eyes, it had taken their thoughts from small things and reminded them of how vulnerable they were to time.
But this odd-numbered frozen year far outdid the turn of the century in solemnity and emotion. Then, the quiet had set in an hour or so before midnight. Now, when Peter Lake and Beverly arrived at nine, they and the well-dressed people who had come for an evening of drunken dancing found themselves bathed in clear light, aware of every detail, tranquil, and contemplative. There was no customary ring of people around the fire soaking up its heat and screaming at each other, with drinks in their hands and an eye always cocked to see who had come in out of the cold. Nor did the women magnetize the scene as they could and often did, setting the pace for their men. There was no tension as in richer places, and none of the usual dances like the Barn Rush, the Rumbling Buffalo, the Grapesy Dandy, or the Birdwalla Shuffle. When the orchestra finally did begin to play, the incomparably beautiful “Chantpleure and Winterglad” of A. P. Clarissa was offered for Stillwater quadrilles and other dances of counterpoint and restraint in which mainly the eyes moved, and the heart pounded as if in the breast of a hunted stag.
This was no place for Pearly, but he and a dozen Short Tails were there anyway with what they called women—high-toned madams, corrupted country girls sick of working all day in hairdressing salons and oyster houses, lady pickpockets, and professional gun-bearing molls with, as Pearly said, “teats so sharp they could cut cheese.” When Pearly saw Peter Lake come in, he rose in anger and his eyes began to electrify. But when Beverly joined Peter Lake, it was as if her presence sent darts into Pearly’s flesh, pacifying him with antivenom. Glazed and paralyzed, he and the other Short Tails could do nothing but stare fixedly toward the kitchen, in the manner of a Five Points cretin with a tin cup. Astounded molls tugged at the Short Tails’ sleeves and turned to one another in amazement. The Short Tails were dreaded ambassadors of the underworld, whose active presence was feared and tolerated. Had Mouquin’s not accepted them, they would have immediately burned it to the ground. Despite the fact that Pearly usually hit his head when he came through the doorway, he and his underlings ruled the place. But now they were entombed in a nerve dream. A dentist could have worked his wily and expensive arts on them without eliciting the slightest protest.
Peter Lake glanced at Pearly, a giant white cat all suited-up in clothes half a century out of date, and wondered how long his enemy would be immobilized. Beverly seemed able to push Pearly deeper and deeper into a condition in which he was cemented in a body that was trapped absolutely in stilled time.
Peter Lake and Beverly took a table and ordered a bottle of champagne, which was brought to them in a silver bucket fill of hysterical ice.
“The only time I ever saw this place this dull was the night before nineteen hundred,” Peter Lake said. “Maybe, purely by coincidence, all the people here have just lost dear relatives.”
“Liven it up,” Beverly commanded. “I want to dance—the way they were dancing at the inn that night.”
“Who, me?” Peter Lake wanted to know. “How can I liven it up? I suppose I could shoot or stab Pearly now that he’s stuck on the flypaper of time. But then everyone would run out. We’ll have a quiet evening, and wait for the new year.”
“No,” she said. “It’s my last damned New Year. I’d like to see some fire in it.”
She turned about in her seat and faced a set of French doors against which the cold wind was pushing a shower of winter stars. Without warning, they burst open. Then, inexplicably, the next set of doors flew open, too, and so on and so forth right down the line, until the twenty-one sets of doors at Mouquin’s had all opened in a machine-gunlike percussion that stopped the orchestra and the dancers. The fresh air stoked the fire and turned it from a softly purring cat into an enraged Bessemer furnace, and the icicle-covered trees outside began to ring like a thousand sleigh bells. Then the hands of the clock started to race like the tortoise and the hare, and both reached midnight at the same time. The clock struck along with every clock in New York, and church bells, fireworks, and ship whistles sounded all at once, turning the entire city into a giant hurdy-gurdy.
It soon got so cold that the men rushed to close the doors. When they had shut them and the room was again silent, they saw that several women had begun to cry. The women said it was because of the numbing air that had washed over their bare shoulders, but even strangers embraced sadly as they coasted into the new year and felt its strength commencing. They cried because of the magic and the contradictions; because time had passed and time was left; because they saw themselves as if they were in a photograph that had winked fast enough to contradict their mortality; because the city around them had conspired to break a hundred thousand hearts; and because they and everyone else had to float upon this sea of troubles, watertight. Sometimes there were islands, and when they found them they held fast, but never could they hold fast enough not to be moved and once again overwhelmed.
“Country dances!” shouted a man as he jumped to his feet, and he was echoed by the fashionable crowd. In lightness and relief they began even before the music caught up to them. Now the floor of Mouquin’s pounded under the pure white reels of the winter countryside, and the magic of the Lake of the Coheeries swirled almost visibly about them. Beverly, in a blue silk dress, danced with Peter Lake. There was much talk among the crowd as Pearly and the Short Tails began to thaw. Glasses sparkled until they broke. The room grew hot. Beverly was dancing. In the oyster houses, in the stove-lit salons of the ferryboats out on the bay, in the ballrooms uptown so gilt and argent that in the daytime they thought they were banks, in the common rooms of hospitals, and in the miserable dark cellars, they danced—even if only for a moment.
Peter Lake sensed that some stupendous inner machinery of the world had turned, rendering its decision, and that much would follow. But soon he stopped thinking and was quickly lost in the sight of Beverly, a young blond and blue-eyed schoolgirl who twirled and kicked with the rest. Her hair flew. The music seemed to be in her, and she stomped the floor at just the right times, a precise and joyous part of the dance. She had always conserved her motions, gathering them to her and storing their power. Now she unleashed them. He had never seen her this way: she had never been this way. Though he feared for her, he sensed that this scene would not be lost, and that by some mechanism of translation or preservation it would last and be free sometime to start up again. Her motions flowed in a hundred thousand pictures, each of searing beauty, each on its way through the bla
ck cold of archless accommodating space. They would land somewhere, he thought, bravely. Everything always comes to rest, and flourishes. That, anyway, was his hope.
They lost themselves in dancing, staking everything upon the images that billowed out from Mouquin’s and expanded effortlessly in all directions.
“I WAS terrified,” Beverly said as they were riding home in a motorized taxi.
“Terrified? How do you figure that? You were the queen of the world. First you put Pearly to sleep. Then you seemed to have opened the doors, stoked the fire, and made the clock spin. You led the dances like a prima ballerina. The evening revolved around you. When we left, the party collapsed like a wet tent.”
“I was so afraid,” she said. “I was trembling the whole time.”
Peter Lake lifted a skeptical eyebrow. She ignored him.
“I’m so glad it’s over. I hate crowds of people. I wanted to do it once,” she pronounced with measured deliberation, “and I’ve done it.”
“I didn’t see that you were at all nervous.”
“But I was.”
“There wasn’t the slightest sign of it.”
“That’s because it was so deep.”
No one was home when they arrived. New Year’s had scattered the Penns all around New York. Even Willa was sleeping over at the house of Melissa Bees, the daughter of Crawford Bees, yet another master-builder, a lord of stone and steel. Peter Lake and Beverly threw themselves down on a couch in Beverly’s second-floor bedroom. He noticed that she was hot and sweating, but she seemed so happy and light that he believed her when she told him that it was just the normal evening elevation in temperature. After a bath, and some cold hours on the roof in the dry winter air, she said, she would be fine. She felt as if she were getting better, and claimed that she was stronger than she had ever been. In fact, she wanted to try cycling or skating the next day, for she was sure that she could breathe more easily now. Something had happened. Despite her optimism, Peter Lake was scared, and despite his fear, they made love.
