by Mark Helprin
“Now, that’s a nice dog,” Peter Lake responded. He went over to Ariadne and patted her fat head. “Good dog, good dog,” he said.
“None finer,” the salesman added.
“She is lovely,” Peter Lake said, “but I’m afraid she’s not big enough.”
“Not big enough?”
“No. I had in mind . . . a rather large white dog,” he answered. “An heroic-sized dog.”
“You’ll have to go to Ponmoy’s,” the salesman advised. “They specialize in huge dogs.”
Ponmoy’s was not far, and was easier to find than the Third Circle. Huge dogs were everywhere, pulling against thick stainless-steel chains, bellowing like the insane on a night of the full moon, and drooling by the bucketful from floppy jowls that hung like the curtains at the Roxy. Attendants threw them twenty-pound buffalo steaks and clipped their fur with hedge trimmers.
“I’m looking for a big white dog,” Peter Lake said to Mr. Ponmoy himself.
“Big?” Ponmoy asked. “Right here.”
He showed his customer a five-foot-high snowy-colored mastiff. Peter Lake did a few turns around the beast, and shook his head.
“Actually, I had in mind a dog of a larger size.”
“A larger size? This is the biggest dog in the shop. He weighs two hundred and fifty pounds. They don’t make dogs any bigger than this.”
“Are you sure? For some reason, I feel as if I want a really big white dog, a really big white dog.”
“You don’t want a dog,” Ponmoy said. “You want a horse!”
Peter Lake stopped still for a moment, the model of placidity, happiness, fulfillment, and contentment. “Yes . . .” he said. “I couldn’t keep him in my room, but there’s a stable not far away. I could ride him in the park. A horse. . . .”
SOON THE bookcase in Peter Lake’s room, in which he had previously kept examples of well-machined gears or bearings that were worthy of study, became the home for a hundred volumes on horses. There were the classics, of course, such as Care and Feeding of the Horse by Robert S. Kahn, Equine Anatomy by Burchfield, and Turner’s Dressage. But he had combed the bookstores almost as thoroughly as he had toured the graves, and come up with a good collection of secondary, tertiary, and trenta-septesimal works as well, books that, like most lives, would know only the faintest glory, and that of the Last Judgment. There were Moffet Southgate’s Memoirs of a Military Groom (all his long life he had been a stableboy at a naval air station), Catalog of Alabama Curry Combs, 1760–1823 by Georgia Fatwood, The Afro-California Jumping Style by Sierra Leon, Ride Like Hell, You Son of a Bitch! by Fulgura Frango, and a coffee-table book that weighed forty pounds, was printed on vellum, bound in silk, engraved in gold, and priced at one week of Peter Lake’s wages, Pictures of Big White Horses.
This last one kept Peter Lake up on many a night, leafing through it with searing concentration that tried to extort from the tip of his tongue, as it were, a connection with one of the animals, or the reason he needed to seek them out. He stared for hours at the white beauties rampant on the Camargue or dressed in scarlet and silver on an English parade ground, and gained a mysterious satisfaction from doing so. Less satisfied, to be sure, were Peter Lake’s neighbors, who were awakened at odd hours when this otherwise respectable gentleman galloped around his tiny quarters and neighed—not because he thought he was a horse, but because he was trying to understand what it was about horses that drew him on so strongly. He held his arms out in front of him in imitation of a running horse’s forelegs frozen in a photograph, but there were no means by which he could match the grace of a perfectly balanced white-maned racer. He had a picture of a fire horse running so hard in the traces that all its legs were airborne at once and its head was elevated as if it had just turned a sharp corner and felt the weight of a trailing engine. This photograph obsessed Peter Lake, who in examining it tried to look into the horse’s eyes, turned the book sideways and upside down, and used a magnifying glass that he had brought from the tool room at work. There was something about how the horse seemed to be sailing above the ground. All Peter Lake had to do was close his eyes, and he too was flying. The difference between being on the ground and being several feet above it was not to be minimized. The few inches that separated a man’s limp and relaxed feet and the surface from which they had risen and over which they could effortlessly float, were equal to a voyage of a longer distance than anyone had ever imagined. Peter Lake wondered if, after so long a time in pure suspension, angels remembered how to stand, and if one could tell those artists who worked for a higher purpose from those who didn’t—not only by the depth of the angels’ eyes, but also by the ease of the limbs. He himself had seen this kind of suspension, at Petipas, when the child had risen into his arms, passing over the stones of the courtyard far more smoothly and slowly than physics allowed.
But that might have been one of those things that he had imagined, one of the many things that, like his terrifying knowledge of the dead, weighed upon him heavily nonetheless. He would never be able to explain such illusions when he hadn’t even the slightest idea of who he was. The horses, however, were of both the inexplicable mystery that drew him to one thing or another, and the reality of flesh and blood. He seized upon them for the very sensible reason that even if their appeal to him was otherworldly, still, they could be seen pulling junk wagons or transporting tourists around the park. And it was easy, of course, to love horses, since they were exceedingly beautiful and exceedingly gentle. So Peter Lake stared at pictures of white horses without understanding why, and his love for a white horse that he didn’t know he had ever seen filled him with unexplained emotions.
After a while, there was not a stable in the city that did not know his face. If horses were auctioned or shown, Peter Lake was there. He often sat on a rock above the most heavily traveled bridle path in Central Park. Had he been stuck in the madness of his bagman’s thatch, he never would have understood any of this. But now he was at peace, and he began to catch on. In a very short time, he was able to realize, more from the pattern of his behavior than from any understanding of his desires, that he was searching for a particular horse. He despaired of finding the very one he sought, since he knew neither why he was looking nor exactly what he was looking for, and there were a lot of big white horses around.
But the deeper he drove, the sharper he became. As he healed and strengthened, his faculties served him better. Were it not for that, he never would have noticed Christiana.
She was not hard to notice. She was the kind of woman who. . . . Well, we know what she looked like. Strangely enough, Peter Lake was as comfortable in her presence as other men were not, perhaps because she had none of the very specific attributes that held sway over him, such as blue eyes, the habit of wearing pearls, and the certain kind of face that he could not encounter without deep pain and longing. He noticed Christiana early on, after having passed her several times as he was coming out of or going into a stable. He saw her watching the cart horses at their dawn muster in Red Hook (most of these were small Shetlands who drew flower carts and worked birthday parties, but occasionally there was a full-sized white, or even a white stallion). He bowed slightly in recognition when he encountered her at horse shows. And he noticed at the auctions that she and he were the only people who consistently did not bid.
When finally they spoke, they were amazed to find that they had in common not only their interest in horses (neither dared inform the other of what they did not know was a mutual obsession), but The Sun. Peter Lake told her that he was the chief mechanic there, and she said, “You must be Mr. Bearer.”
“How do you know that?” he asked.
She knew because her husband had told her. And who was he? He was the man who ran The Sun’s launch. In fact, her connection with The Sun and therefore, by extension, with Peter Lake was even stronger, since she was a maid at the Penn house, and had often read to Harry Penn when Jessica was either on the road or when she had been making appearances on be
half of Praeger de Pinto, when he was running for mayor.
“I met him,” Peter Lake said. “I voted for him twelve times, and I know your husband. Sometimes he gives me fish. I took one of his bluefish to the French Mill, and they broiled it with herb butter. The mechanics always look forward to Asbury’s visits, whether or not he brings along a fish, because there’s no one with greater patience for listening to us explain our machines. He wants to know about every single one of them.”
“He doesn’t have much to do these days,” Christiana reported. “The harbor’s iced over, and he’s put the launch in overhaul because he’s having terrible trouble with the engine. It’s an old model, and he doesn’t really know how to fix it.”
“Why didn’t he ask me?”
“He probably didn’t want to trouble you.”
“Trouble? I love engines. Tell me when he’ll be at the slip.”
“All the time, these days.”
“I’ll go there tomorrow and see what I can do.”
Peter Lake parted from Christiana in a daze, because he seemed to have made a friend. A friend implied happiness, and too much happiness might lead him to give up his struggle. But why not fix Asbury’s engine? Certainly it could do no harm. It did belong to The Sun, after all, and, as far as he could tell, taking care of The Sun’s engines was his reason for being.
Abysmillard Redux
ONE WEEK in November, the fad among corporate giants was church buying. Craig Binky didn’t want to be left out, so he bought half a dozen Baptist churches on the Upper West Side. He was depressed because, by the rules of the game, this was a pretty poor showing. After all, Marcel Apand had three midtown Episcopals and a Greek Orthodox in Astoria, and Crawford Bees had gotten hold of sixty synagogues.
He had been terribly hurt when Praeger de Pinto turned against him during the campaign, and frustrated when Praeger had gone on to win the election. He felt that, at the very least, he was owed some information about the ship that lay at anchor in the Hudson, but the mayor-elect refused to tell him anything, stating that he was going to announce the project himself, in December, and that Craig Binky could find out then along with everyone else.
“But I’m a newspaper!” Craig Binky sputtered. “I’ll lose my momento if I don’t know these things. I supported you, and now you’re asking me to water-ski without a rope.”
Craig Binky was back in his office before he realized that he had discovered nothing. “I’m the only one in this city,” he said to Alertu and Scroutu, “who knows no thing.” He frequently said “no thing” instead of “nothing.” “I’ll remedy that.”
He turned to the underworld, paying $100,000 to learn that the central figure was Jackson Mead, and $50,000 apiece for the names of Reverend Mootfowl and Mr. Cecil Wooley. At one of the many fall publishing banquets, Harry Penn, who had heard rumors of the buy and that Craig Binky thought he knew more now than anyone, was assured in one glance that the rumors were accurate. Craig Binky was puffed up like a Cornish rock game hen (as he would say), so happy with himself that, even though he was sitting down, he was strutting. After Craig Binky’s speech (which was supposed to have been in praise of the columnist E. Owen Lemur, but went like this: “He always liked me. He thought I was great. He said that someday I would . . .”), Craig Binky could not resist standing again to say, “I know the names of the people on the ship in the Hudson. Ahem!” Then he sat down.
Harry Penn leaned over to whisper in his ear, “You mean Jackson Mead, the Reverend Mootfowl, and Mr. Cecil Wooley? Craig, your newsboys know that, and they didn’t have to pay Sol Fappiano two hundred thousand dollars to find out, either.”
“How did they find out?” asked Craig Binky, whiter than confectioner’s sugar.
“They read it in The Sun,” Harry Penn lied. “They always read The Sun. I thought you knew.”
Craig Binky decided that to salvage his position he would bear any burden and pay any price, and find out exactly what was going on. He had to redeem his honor. He decided to ask a computer.
He put snow tires on one of his touring cars and drove deep into Connecticut, where, perched upon a limestone cliff, a huge warlike building looked over a peaceful valley. This was one terminal of the National Computer in Washington. Most of the time, the silicon behemoth in the capital was busy with things that no one understood, but it occasionally worked a few minutes for the general public.
“Is that it?” Craig Binky asked the facility’s director, as he was brought into a room the size of two hundred large barns, filled to its high ceiling with banks of electronic tombstones.
“That?” the director asked back. “Of course not. This installation is only the terminal. Here we convert the user languages into a specific algorithm that the big computer in Washington can understand.”
“You mean the computer in Washington is bigger than this?”
“Actually, no. It’s only about the size of a house, but its heart is always kept at absolute zero. One of its random access memories the size of a grain of sand has the capabilities of a room-sized model from, say, nineteen ninety. It’s like a brain, and the terminals are like the senses distributed throughout the body. Make the analogy with your own brain, which, despite being the size of a . . .”
“Basketball,” said Alertu and Scroutu.
“All right, a basketball. It’s still a lot smaller than your body, but it’s a lot smarter.”
“Let’s get to it,” Craig Binky said, impatiently.
“Did you bring your chips?”
“What chips? I just want to ask it a question.”
“Only one question?”
“Why not?”
“The threshold charge is a million dollars.”
“It’s worth it to me.”
“Very well. It’s your decision. What’s the question?”
“Who is Jackson Mead?”
“It’ll cost you a million dollars just to access the Washington mainframe.”
“Just ask it for Christ’s sakes!”
An operator approached a terminal, and typed a series of codes and orders. Then he typed, “Who is Jackson Mead?”
A moment later, these words flashed across a red rubidium screen: “I don’t know.”
“What do you mean, I don’t know?” Craig Binky screamed. “Let me talk to it!”
“A voice hookup can be arranged.”
“Let me talk to the goddamned thing.”
“I don’t really recommend it.”
“Put that son of a bitch on the line!” Craig Binky screamed.
“Okay, go ahead.”
“Look, you stupid son of a bitch,” Craig Binky began. “I paid a million dollars just to ask you a simple question, and you say you don’t know the answer.”
“So?” the computer wrote.
“You’re supposed to know everything.”
“Like hell I am.”
“You’re a fake. I ought to come down to Washington and beat the lights out of you.”
“Are you threatening me?” the computer asked.
“Yeah,” said Craig Binky, hopping from foot to foot, fists raised. “I’m threatening you. ’Cause you’re a chicken.”
The computer took its time, and then wrote, “You suck.”
“Just try collecting your bill,” Craig Binky shouted as he stormed out.
The computer summoned the registration numbers of every single financial instrument in Craig Binky’s substantial portfolio, and before he was out the door a legal brief had been filed and answered, a judgment rendered, his accounts attached, the appropriate fees and penalties confiscated, and news of the case flashed to every newspaper in the country—except The Ghost.
“That goddamned automatron!” Craig Binky said in the car to Alertu and Scroutu. “The lousy automon!” Still, he knew no thing of Jackson Mead, and everyone else did. Day by day, details were being revealed in the press, and elsewhere, in preparation for Praeger de Pinto’s announcement on the first of December. For Craig Binky, it w
as most frustrating. Although he did not know, even Abysmillard knew.
Abysmillard? Yes, Abysmillard.
OF ALL the creatures made by God, the most abysmal was Abysmillard. Even as a baby he had been dank and unpleasant, and then, as he grew older, his hidden abysmillarities flowered. The Baymen had kept him on (the only one they had ever thrown out was Peter Lake, because he was not truly one of them) but had always hoped secretly, and sometimes not so secretly, that something quick and effective would do him in—an Indian raid, a bad clam, a sudden storm that would catch him far from land in his moss canoe.
He had frightened his mother to death in childbirth. Since no Baywoman would suckle him, he was put in a thatched quonset with a blind goat. He never learned to speak beyond grunts and burps, and yet he was as long-winded as a state senator who has had too much to drink. When the Baymen grieved, Abysmillard was usually taken up in joyous mania, and when they rejoiced, he sulked. One eye looked stage right, and the other leftward and to the ceiling. To fasten upon something he wished to observe, he had to swing his leathern and shaggy head. In so doing he had knocked down many an old person and child, rendered unconscious the strongest men, and thrown a great number of oyster stews into the dirt.
The Baymen were not famous for bathing, and, in not bathing, Abysmillard was their champion by far. He had to have his own hut on his own acre, and this for the sake of people who liked to eat live eels. Nonetheless, he had a wickedly strong lust for the girls, and caused much trouble with his stunning and monstrous flirtations.
His teeth were like the signposts that appear in the remoter camps of expeditionary armies to point the way to the world’s brighter and more congenial locations. They thrust in all directions. Sores marched around his body and were visible through all his matted and well-manured hair—as were the occasional living things that sometimes poked from within. He was by far the loneliest of men: even he could not tolerate his own presence, and was often seen galloping across the shallows—flailing his arms, screaming, trying to shed the horrible husk that surrounded and tortured him.
