by Mark Helprin
“Who is this character who talks about winter and tells you to throw out your hard-earned television sets?” the mayor asked in a mocking tone.
But Asbury Gunwillow was in the crowd, and he answered, “Praeger de Pinto! Praeger de Pinto!” until the chant spread among the millions, and the mayor was forced to change his tack.
“Well, actually,” he said, “I seldom watch television myself—only the good programs. You know, the culture stuff.”
“What’s the difference what you watch?” Praeger shot back. “When that stream of hypnotic electrons starts winging into your brain, you’re finished, good-as-gone, condemned to hell. No matter what it is, if you don’t move your eyes and set the pace yourself, your intellect is sentenced to death. The mind, you see, is like a muscle. For it to remain agile and strong, it must work. Television rules that out. And besides, Minnie,”—which is what he sometimes called the Ermine Mayor—“you just watch all those dramatizations of literature because you’ve forgotten how to read.”
“You’re not just talking about me, sir,” said the Ermine Mayor. “You’re referring to and insulting the entire electorate!”
“The number of disabled and electronically pickled brains is not at issue, Mr. Mayor,” Praeger stated. “The issue is that the slaves may want to be free.”
“You call our citizens slaves?”
“Yes. They are slaves of the winking eyes that tie them down and tell them what to think, what to buy, and how many blankets to put on their beds each night.”
Forced onto the defensive, the Mayor blurted out, “Television is the common ground, the agora of democracy, the great communicator.”
“That’s correct, but it only communicates in one direction,” Praeger answered. “It subjects everyone to its decrees, and will not discuss a single one. It takes away not only the right, but the ability to speak. Besides, I don’t want to communicate with pickles.” The crowd was enormously pleased. They could not have been more grateful if he had contrived to pass out several million pints of hot buttered rum. “Look at ’em all out there,” he continued. “They have legs. They have muscles. They can breathe, and go outside at night. They can even walk in the cold. In fact, I’ll bet they can even hunt, ski, chop wood, weave, whittle, and fix huge machines.
“Give me a night by the fire, with a book in my hand, not that flickering rectangular son of a bitch that sits screaming in every living room in the land.”
“That’s retrogressive,” the Ermine Mayor declared.
“I rest my case,” Praeger answered.
Then the moderator introduced the question of whether or not to abolish the garbage man’s training academy on Randall’s Island, since most of the cadets had recently been unable to pass the noise-making course.
“I won’t talk about that,” Praeger said, after the Ermine Mayor delivered a long treatise on how to rattle a trash can. “I only want to talk about important things—a decent wage for hard work as well as for skilled work, getting the criminals off the street, banning automobiles from Manhattan. I want to talk about great things, about history and the city, about where we’re going, about the minor tyrannies and the major tyrannies that must be overturned, about my love for this place where I was born, and where I grew up.
“I don’t care about garbage cans. I care about the bridges, the rivers, and the maze of streets. I believe that they’re alive unto themselves. . . .
“Look,” he said, “sometimes I want to quit, to withdraw from the race and leave the city. It’s a hard place—too big for most, and nearly always incomprehensible. But at those times, I stop, throw aside my ambitions, and view the city as a whole, and in so doing I am immeasurably encouraged. For, then, the city’s fire burns away the mists that frequently obscure it. Then, it looks like an animal perched upon the shore of the river. Then, it seems like a single work of art shrouded in changing galleries of climate, a sculpture of unfathomable detail standing on the floor of an orrery that is filled with bright lights and golden suns.
“If you’re born here, or if you come here from some distant place, or if you see the city rising over fields and forests from a home not far away, then you know. Rich or poor, you know that the heart of the city was set to beating when the first axe rang out against the first tree to be felled. And it has never ceased, for the city is a living thing far greater than just its smoke and light and stone.
“The city,” he said with emotion that moved even his opponent and held him in the rhythm of the rolling words, “is no less an object of divine affection than life itself or the exact perfections of the light-paced universe. It is alive, and with patience one can see that despite the anarchy, the ugliness, and the fire, it is ultimately just and ultimately kind.
“God, I love it. I do love it. Forgive me,” he said, covering his eyes and bowing his head.
The mayor dared not break the silence of the crowd that stretched from the Sheep Meadow to Eighty-sixth Street, on a great cold night, bathed in the silver glare of floodlights. The open-mouthed incumbent feared that his challenger, who stood before him plainly overcome, was going to take the election for having seen the soul of the city and fallen deeply in love. He feared that the city was going to answer Praeger’s unusual appeal. And indeed it did. Not only were its citizens enthralled, but, when Praeger looked up, the city made itself very clear. For it was all around him, and it was sparkling like a diamond.
The White Dog of Afghanistan
PETER LAKE thought the healing powers of time had finally overcome his madness, and that he was learning to live in harmony with other men. In fact, when the man for whom he had cast his twelve votes in the Five Points was elected by a landslide, Peter Lake began to feel rather like a power broker. On election eve he was intensely self-satisfied. It was easy to reinforce this budding pomposity by obtaining from Fippo’s, the city’s best men’s clothing store, an outfit that was not only respectable but handsome as well. With a haircut, a shave, and a careful trim of the mustache, his face emerged from the raggle of white beard’s nest and shiny eggish cock-eyes that had been his madman’s trumpet, and he was surprised to see that he did indeed look like a power broker, or, if not that, a stockbroker, or, at the very least, a ship broker.
His face had been aged and tutored until he looked like the kind of war veteran who didn’t talk about war, a family man, a good citizen, a senatorial businessman whose ambitions had long cooled—paternal, understanding, a lover of good music and poetry who held some great secret in his soul, the way all such men do, never to be fathomed.
The greatest shock was to see that his face was kind. Where, he wondered, did he ever have the time or opportunity to become kind? He did not associate kindness with the recent past in which he had been powered through cellar walls like an artillery shell. And rather than puzzle about it, he set out to milk for all it was worth the new mildness that had found its way into his heart.
He took decent lodgings. His salary at The Sun had accumulated, and he had more than enough to make him comfortable. He chose a small room in an old building in Chelsea. It was in such a backwater that returning home to it every evening was like coming back to a farm. And the woodwork and moldings around the fireplace and near the ceiling, having had the tranquillity and patience to remain unflinchingly in the same place for 150 years, were a great comfort.
At night, Peter Lake made a fire in the grate and rocked back and forth, listening to the clock ticking in the hallway. Like all old clocks, it said, “North Dakota, South Dakota. North Dakota, South Dakota. North Dakota, South Dakota.” Although he did not know why, he was moved to tears whenever he heard the hoofbeats of a horse passing by outside. Even as he lay in bed in the early morning and listened to the clomping sound of women in high-heeled shoes as they rushed to work, he thought he was hearing milk horses. Perhaps, he hoped, this would be enough—the clock that said North Dakota, South Dakota, the quiet old room, the fireplace, the shadows, an occasional horse that passed by, the slightly Edwardian
cut of his suit. Perhaps he would be forgiven for not remembering what he could not really remember. Perhaps that time was truly lost, and he, like others who had been hurled ahead or backward, would succumb and adapt, and become a quiet citizen with faint and inexplicable memories.
This path was easy. The small pleasures were intensely satisfying—not only the eloquent clock, but the fine sound of the piano, which he pretended was welling up through the floors from the apartment of a young musician (but which he knew, in fact, to be coming from within). No matter, the music was beautiful, and he did not question it. He had to rest, to survive. What a delight, then, was survival. Forgoing meals at The Sun (since he preferred to be alone), he ate in a restaurant called the French Mill, where the waiters brought over a slate that had some ten things written on it. He said what he wanted, and it was delivered without fanfare. The food was always extremely good, cheap, and accompanied by a glass of fruity alpine wine.
Every night after dinner he went to the public baths. First a barber gave him a shave and a day’s trim. Then he put his clothes in a locker and took a high-pressure shower in one of a hundred marble cubicles. After that came a series of alternating steambaths, ice dips, saunas, whirlpools, and showers, until he staggered out, as clean as a baby pearl (even his insides felt whitewashed and scrubbed), all set to rock for an hour or two by the fire and then go to sleep on clean sheets under a vast down comforter.
He had no difficulty falling asleep. Not only did he walk ten miles every day on his way to and from The Sun, but he was not the kind of master mechanic who farmed off the heavy work onto his skinny apprentices. When a web skirt, a piston, or a roller had to be moved, Peter Lake strained as hard as anyone else, and five hours in a health club could not have done him better.
Now the exercise, the good air on his long walks, the fresh vegetables and lean meats at the French Mill, the daily small glass of wine, the restorative baths, the clean linen on the bed every night, and his heavy reliance on the Swedish Hand (a local laundry) to provide him with starched shirts and clean socks each day, were excellent prods to health and vigor. But his body would have remained the wreck that it had been, were it not for the magical recuperation of his mind.
And this, in his opinion, was due to the meadowlike calm of his old room, the ticking of the clock, the soft talk of the fire, the many many hours of solitude, and the rest that had come to him after his unspeakable dream of hurtling through all the graves of the world. He tried to put it out of his mind, for nothing was more contrary to the new serenity and equanimity of his life in Chelsea than the frightening truth of the matter—which was that he, Peter Lake, the master mechanic, the citizen who imagined that he had at last settled in and found peace, was indeed the living registrar of the dead, and was capable of recounting them, in their multitudes, each and every one, all of them, one by one.
ONE EVENING, Peter Lake was sitting by himself at the French Mill, awaiting a small steak, shoestring potatoes, a salad, and a glass of Brennero mountain wine. As it somehow always manages to be before the winter solstice, but never after, the early darkness was cheerful and promising, even for those who had nothing. For Peter Lake, who had at least half of something, the lights up and down the length of Hudson Street were like those of a Christmas tree.
He leaned against a wall and watched as people hurried through the unusually frigid November wind. Bombarded by ice crystals that were the emissaries of a blizzard, a subway motorman clutching his hat raced for the warmth underground. An expensively dressed woman, who, to judge by her appearance, looked as if she seldom ventured outside the Upper East Side, went by with a pained expression. How impudent of the cold to sneak under her furs. Her pearls gave Peter Lake a painful start. He took note, for it had happened before.
He had to consider women for the first time since he had awakened to see the young red-haired doctor at his bedside. It did not occur to him that part of his reason for going on the bum may have been to avoid women. And he had no memory of any former loyalties, except that he was unable even to look at a woman with blue eyes, at least not directly; and young girls with a certain kind of face had the same effect; and, now, the pearls.
The main door of the French Mill opened, let in some glassy snow, and shut. At first, Peter Lake thought that the wind had done this, but then he looked down and saw two small men walking to a table on the opposite side of the room. Not only were they no more than five feet tall, but they both wore bowler hats, and ragged jackets that, before they were trimmed in the back, had once been tails. Their eyes were sunken, their faces had a leathery look, and they had bony cheeks and mouths that would have been large and toothy on men twice their size. Their hands were fat little balls of flesh with flat infantile thumbs, as delicate and strange as the paws of a tree frog. Their voices matched the rest of them in that they were small and sounded like the supplicating chirp of men who are married to female lumberjacks or prison matrons.
Feeling neither antipathy, nor sympathy, nor curiosity, Peter Lake was, nonetheless, unable to take his eyes from them. They weren’t conversing: they were conspiring. They seemed to hate one another ferociously, and yet they were apparently close. They quickly began to argue, and the more impassioned they grew the more they bounced up and down in their seats. Their peculiar voices kept on rising as they grew agitated and angry.
Peter Lake’s food was brought to him by a waiter who motioned in the direction of the screaming midgets in bowlers and cut-off tails, and then rolled his eyes up to the ceiling and back as if to say, “La Madonna!” (All the waiters at the French Mill were, naturally, Italians from the Brenta.)
Peter Lake started to eat, trying as best he could to ignore the two little men. But try as he might there was no way he could avoid hearing those words that were emphasized in their argument. He had wanted to enjoy his steak, but at one point he almost choked on it.
Their conversation had gone like this: “Something something, something something, something something something . . . the White Dog of Afghanistan . . . something something something, something, something, something else, something entirely unintelligible.”
“The White Dog of Afghanistan.” These words stuck in Peter Lake like a fishhook.
The next thing he knew, he was walking briskly against the north wind. He overshot Chelsea and was aimed toward midtown. Whatever the “White Dog of Afghanistan” meant, it had a powerful effect on him, and he feared that it might smash his newfound equilibrium. “Fuck!” he said, impelled forward by legs that were hardly under his control. “Damn!” He didn’t even know why he was walking, but he felt that if he had returned to his room everything would have been spoiled.
“Save the clock, save the clock, save the clock that goes tick tock,” he found himself chanting, as in the old days of his dereliction. And when he neared the bright and crowded shopping districts he discovered that despite his cleanliness and fine clothes people on the street were once again giving him a wide berth.
“No!” he cried out, unwittingly providing himself the luxury of an empty path. “Stop it! Stop it! Stop it. Stop it . . .” And then, very softly, “Stop it.” He restrained his maniacal strides. “I’ll buy a dog,” he said to himself. “I’ll buy a white dog, and take him to my room. He’ll be a good companion. I’ve always loved dogs. Actually, I don’t know if that’s true, but I’ll buy one anyway, a white dog, a white dog of Afghanistan. That must be it. I must be yearning for a dog.” He cleared his throat. “Aaarrch! That’s it—a dog, a white dog.” He walked toward the great stores.
Kublai Khan could not have decreed a better shopping district. Anywhere anyone looked, anyone could buy anything, because everything was everywhere, in department stores that were half a mile square, a hundred stories high, and lined up along the avenues like dominoes. The people of the city of the poor could see these temples of materialism across the distant river, flashing their electrical signs in the night or gleaming like fixed bayonets in the daytime sunshine. They wondered what t
hey were.
Peter Lake found a dog store, where he asked for a white dog.
“Would you like a nice Shar Mein?” the salesman inquired.
“I already ate,” Peter Lake replied.
“A Shar Mein, sir, is a very fine white dog.”
“Oh. All right, let’s have a look.”
The salesman disappeared, and returned with a dog under his arm.
“For Christ’s sake,” said Peter Lake, looking at the dog. “I don’t want a mop. Where are its eyes? That’s for an old lady who doesn’t even know what a dog is. Don’t bring me anything that can’t jump over a sawhorse.”
“What about Ariadne, then,” the salesman said, pointing to a beautiful snow-white Saint Bernard.
