by Mark Helprin
His first desire was to fight, and there was plenty of opportunity for that, as the streets were filled with armed and desperate men who had been trained since childhood to rob and kill. That they, too, had no fear, and sought violence the way bees crave pollen, did not bother him.
“What are you out for?” he was asked by two men who blocked his way late that night on Eighty-seventh Street.
“I beg your pardon?” Hardesty asked in return, smiling in what they took to be appeasement. It was, rather, pleasure.
“I mean, what are you doing in this neighborhood? Answer it straight!” one of them said, stepping forward aggressively.
“I live here,” Hardesty said with perfect calm.
“Where!” they screamed, one after another, in a manner calculated to terrorize him.
“On Eighty-fourth.”
“That’s not this neighborhood, man. I asked you what you’re doing here,” the bigger one demanded, pointing a finger at the ground as he worked himself up into a rage.
“You don’t think very big, do you,” Hardesty asked rhetorically. They were amazed. “That’s because you’re pinheads. But I have a friendly feeling for pinheads, and I’m going to tell you exactly what I’m doing here. I’m here because it’s gambling time, pinheads. I went home to get some cash, which I have in my left coat pocket. There’s so much of it that I have to keep it in one of those thick document envelopes. It won’t go into my wallet. The wad’s too fat. Now, just to make sure you two pinheads understand what I’m talking about, I’m talking about money, thirty thousand dollars, and an extra five or ten thousand in the wallet.” Hardesty actually had less than eight dollars on him, and he didn’t move an inch.
His assailants blinked, and started to back away. “Just leave us alone,” they said, but Hardesty came after them, his eyes narrowed with fight.
“What’s the matter? Aren’t you going to rob me? Are you afraid?” he screamed. They began to run, and he ran after them. He chased them for ten blocks, screaming at the top of his lungs. When they jumped over the wall into the park, he followed, racing across the moonlit snow.
The beads of sweat on their faces made them look as if they were studded with tiny dazzling moons. They turned to fire their pistols, but this made him run faster, still screaming. Then they threw their guns on the ground and ran for their lives, finally managing to disappear in the thick underbrush near the north pump house. In a mad double time, Hardesty walked out of the park and into the West Side. It was one o’clock in the morning. The city was just waking up. He figured that he would start on Broadway and rake its spine.
His first stop was a pool hall in the Eighties, a place where everyone’s every gesture was calculated to convey the smoothness and certainty demanded by the game. The idea was to make others think that you were a great pool player who was trying to hide it. The real sharps had no need for any kind of pose, because those from whom they extracted their living were too busy cultivating an image to notice anything else, or, for that matter, to shoot good pool. It was de rigueur for each player to have something to wiggle in his teeth—a cigar, cigarette, pipe, or toothpick—to accompany his use of the pool cue the way a dagger complements a sword. The studied motions of the pool players, who walked about the tables making decisions of angle and force, were appropriately geometric.
Hardesty, who arrived with not much more than wild eyes, threw off his coat, paid a five-dollar entry fee, and asked for the best man in the house. This quieted the players en masse, and they stood motionless as Hardesty was led through a grid of brightly lit tables to the corner of the room where the top shooter held court. Usually, such professionals were very fat or physically unimposing. They tended to look like burnt-out cases from West Bend who were obsessed with truck-stop waitresses. They tiptoed around the table like mushrooms on wheels, and were seldom flamboyant. The flamboyant players were the fakes who wanted to scare off big bets because they didn’t dare take them.
The top player here, however, was not only flamboyant, he was a huge rail-splitter type at least six and a half feet tall, dressed in a tuxedo and a fancy shirt with small diamond studs. His was the kind of face which, when attached to a large frame, made even a man like Hardesty (who was no midget himself) feel like something the size of a navy bean. This fellow had vast waves of swept-back blond hair which, along with his forward-looking bone structure and wildly confident expression, made him look like a wing walker straining into a three-hundred-mile-an-hour wind. He and his entourage were delighted to see Hardesty.
Hardesty’s tortoise-shell glasses and Brooks Brothers suit (he could not afford Fippo’s) indicated to them that he was a man of some responsibility, honesty, and means. They didn’t know if he could shoot pool, and they didn’t care. “I don’t care how good you are, or how good you’re not,” said Wing Walker. “I have ten thousand dollars, and I’ll play for any sum up to that and over a thousand.”
“Make it ten.”
“Have you got it with you?”
“No, I have only two dollars and change. But I’ll give you identification and a marker.”
“Would you like to play eight-ball, tortoise, or planetarium?”
“Tortoise sounds fine,” Hardesty answered. “But you’ll have to explain the rules.”
“Now wait a minute,” Wing Walker said, sensing trouble.
“Don’t worry,” Hardesty assured him. “If I lose, I’ll pay.” Then, almost under his breath, he said, “I intend to win.”
“Then how come I have to explain the game?”
“Look,” Hardesty said as he chalked his cue, “I don’t play pool. The last time I did was in college, and that was a long time ago. I wasn’t very good then, and I haven’t played since.” He looked up. “I’m going to beat you.”
“How do you propose to do that?” Wing Walker asked. “I never fall for a bluff. So you better not have a bluff in mind.”
“I never bluff,” Hardesty declared. “Let’s play.”
Wing Walker smiled. “I know you,” he said. “I’ve met guys like you before. You’re in love with the impossible.”
“For the moment, yes.”
“What for?” Wing Walker asked, with some sympathy, as he took off his jacket and prepared to beat Hardesty and take his $10,000.
What Hardesty said made Wing Walker slightly nervous: “To bring back the dead.” But Hardesty was not interested in the effect, only in the shining green felt of the newest table in the house.
After Wing Walker explained the rules of tortoise, they shot to see who would break. The professional’s ball returned to within an inch of the cushion. Hardesty prepared to shoot, and this is how he did it.
First, he remembered what he was doing and why he was doing it. It was for Abby. It was to learn the feel of the impossible, so that he might know what to do when the time came when no one ever knows what to do. It was an act of defiance, dangerous not because of the money at stake but, rather, because it was a rebellion against omnipotence. But love moved him, and he trusted that he would do well in his attempt to travel through a succession of gates that seldom had been opened. To do so, he had to concentrate.
And concentrate he did. He drove from his mind the way angels were flung from heaven all thoughts or desires unrelated to the table in front of him. He did not see or hear the spectators, his opponent, or anything living or dead beyond the green felt. He did not think of winning, or losing, of Wing Walker’s flowing hair and diamond-studded shirt, of the time of night, or where he was, or the nature of his gamble. He thought only of one thing—the geometries before him. Here was God speaking in His simple absolute language, according to the same grammar that He had used to start the planets on their smooth and silken dance. With purity and concentration, Hardesty would force his imperfect eyes to make the proper movements, and sense the truth of distances. He would will that each cell and each fiber of every muscle do as it was bid, to impart to the cue the necessary force and correct guidance to impact upon the cue b
all an impulse that would allow it, in turn, to serve a higher will without subsequent degradation.
They watched him prepare, and felt heat coming from him as if there were a fire in the middle of the room. They saw that he was as tense as steel, and they knew that Wing Walker was in for a hard time. A hundred and fifty spectators had crowded around to see this, many of them doing the unheard-of in a pool hall—standing on the tables. But Hardesty was aware of nothing save absolute physics. The bright lamps above the table shone like double suns, and blackness reigned everywhere but on the green floor of the universe.
He mastered his sweating hands and positioned the cue. With a deep infatuation for the true and exact force that would bring the ball close to the cushion, he struck. His eyes followed it as it rolled smoothly to the end of the table. Its crash against the far side was as shocking as the collision of two express trains. Then it rolled back, with a telltale smooth deceleration that elevated the murmuring of the spectators. Slowly, slowly, it rolled past Wing Walker’s ball, nudged itself silently against the cushion, and stopped. Cheers went up. They loved it. But Hardesty didn’t hear, for he was preparing to break. Neither did he see Wing Walker, whose expression indicated that he, too, was conjuring up all he had. The game was being played for $10,000, but there was something far more valuable at stake—the idea of certainty itself.
Two hundred spectators were now ringed around the corner table, and their money was changing hands so fast that it made them look like an academy of lettuce handlers. As he studied the rack of pool balls, Hardesty felt himself slightly derailing, but he was calm enough to note that the bettors standing on tables and chairs were like the spectators at a cockfight. This in turn led him to see the triangle of multicolored balls as a formation of freshly painted Easter eggs. Further associations would endanger his concentration, so instead of following or denying them he bent them into a curved needle which he then aimed at the heart of the matter. Here were the planets, suddenly disordered, herded together on a single orbital plane under two suns. It was his task to set things aright, to clear the savannah of the perfect spheres. But how was he going to do this? It was one thing to return the cue ball close to the cushion, but the variables here were overwhelming. Wing Walker’s lifetime of experience and his wide-apart angle-judging eyes were not to be duplicated merely by intense resolution. Hardesty again felt himself derailing, and his hands were sweating so much that every few seconds he had to dry them on his thighs.
The more nervous he appeared, the more the betting went against him. While Wing Walker began to breathe easy, Hardesty trembled and felt incipient tears. To hide them, he stared at the bright suns over the table. Their rays diffracted in the water of his eyes, and made rainbows, roads, and square beams of light that guillotined the room like a thistle of crystalline broadswords. This diamond-shattering, thundering light took him back to the cathedral in North Beach, where a line from Dante inscribed across its front had always served him well in times of difficulty. Often, he had stood in the park, facing the cathedral, and read it with great satisfaction:
La gloria di colui, che tutto muove,
per l’universo penetra e risplende
He had always believed that ultimate justice would be brought about by the light (though he had not considered that the reverse might, in fact, be more likely and more splendid).
“Shut up!” he commanded the rowdy onlookers, for what he had to do demanded primeval silence. He was going to remember what his father had taught him, and apply the laws of celestial mechanics to set straight the dazzling but disordered model of the solar system that was in front of him. It was not an easy task. He had to calculate all possible effects of velocity, acceleration, momentum, force, reaction, static equilibrium, angular momentum, friction, elasticity, orbital stability, centrifugal force, conservation of energy, and vectoring as they would apply to the sixteen spheres, the waiting pockets, the mechanical qualities of the cushion, the coefficient of drag of the felt, and the exact force and import of the big bang from the cue. This he had to do without the benefit of precise measurement, and in a relatively short time. He consoled himself by thinking that since all forms of measurement were relatively inaccurate, and never as perfect as the theory that had spawned them, he would be able to get by with eyes and instinct. He worked at the calculations, doing the mathematics in a way that made the spectators rather nervous. He had to contrive so many sets of figures and then abandon them for later recall that, even in his heightened state, it was difficult to work the numbers and remember them at the same time. He solved this problem by changing the spectators into an abacus for his memory. By associating their faces and dress with his vectors and coefficients and the figures by which they were expressed, he was able to store a prodigious amount of information. He broke up each man into anatomical shelves, assigning various sums and angles to kneecaps, feet, head, neck, etc. This made categorical comparisons far easier.
But to do this successfully he had to prevent them from moving. Had they changed positions, his equations would all have gone to hell. “Don’t move!” he commanded. They and Wing Walker thought this was strange. But it was nothing compared to what he then did, which was to walk about and stare at the onlookers, talking to himself under his breath at high speed, pointing, lifting invisible burdens (his numbers) with his fingers and moving them from one man to another. And if they did not heed his commands he barked at them ferociously, calling them by the function he had made them represent. “Shut up, Sigma!” he yelled at a little fat man in a Hawaiian shirt. “Cosine! Damn it! Stay put!” he screamed, pointing at a tall black in a leather jacket. Dripping sweat from all the rapid-fire thinking, he found that he was going faster than his lips could move, so he began to sing the calculations in a strange, unearthly song. After five minutes, he was finished, and he was nearly dead from exhaustion. He had calculated the exact aiming point on the rack, the point of departure for the cue ball, the aiming point for the cue, its coordinates of approach, and the force necessary to do the job.
“All right,” he said, waving his hand at those who, with open mouths, had been unwittingly holding his numbers for him, “erase.” He had it now. There were only a few things to remember, and he had fixed most of them visually.
“I’m going to break,” he announced. “The one ball goes to the left side pocket; I’ll put the three, five, and fourteen balls in the far left corner pocket; the two, four, sixteen, and seven balls in the near right corner; the six and ten balls in the right side pocket; the nine, eleven, and twelve balls in the near left corner pocket; the thirteen and fifteen balls in the near right pocket; and then, lastly, the eight in the far right corner.
“That is,” he added, clearing his throat, “if all goes according to plan.” He nervously chalked his cue.
“Aren’t you going to give me a chance to shoot?” Wing Walker asked sarcastically.
“No,” Hardesty answered, and took his stance.
He had to impart a great deal of force to the cue ball, for not only had all the numbered balls to find their pockets, but some had to do a lot of bouncing and traveling around before they actually fell in, while others were slated to give encouraging bumps to their more reluctant confreres. And yet the force could not be greater than that which would make the balls jump the sides of the table. Needless to say, Hardesty placed the cue ball very carefully. He lined himself up, got his cue into position, drew his arm back, and shot.
As the rack exploded, Hardesty turned to Wing Walker and said, “This is going to take some time.” He was perfectly relaxed, and looked on approvingly as the balls began to leap into the pockets. About four or five dived in immediately. The others, however, seemed intent on presenting a tattoo, and they careered about the table, missing one another, sometimes colliding, and sometimes even stopping. But, certainly enough, when they stopped, they would receive a glancing blow from a speedy cousin, and slink off in shame to the mouth of a nearby cave. As Hardesty had predicted, it took some time, u
ntil, finally, the eight ball, after a long drive in the country, rolled in at a businesslike pace and slapped itself into the right corner pocket.
No one dared move or speak—except Wing Walker, who, with a packet of bills in his hand, bravely approached Hardesty. Wing Walker’s big face was half twitching in puzzlement and shyness.
“I don’t want the money,” Hardesty said, already lost in consideration of his next task. “I didn’t do it for the money.” He walked out.
They would have followed him, had they not been rooted in place. Eventually, they began to tremble and shake. And then they screamed and wailed like Holy Rollers to whom an angel has appeared. These men were very tough and very big, but their shrieks were shrill and squeaky. They didn’t know what was happening to them, and people passing on the street looked up in wonder, imagining that they had stumbled on the climax of some great urban voodoo.
Hardesty was already half a mile south.
EARLY ONE morning, after several hungry days of terrible encounters and unspeakable physical tests, all of which brought nothing, Hardesty awoke in what appeared to be a Byzantine cathedral that had been converted into a gymnasium. With no memory of how he had come to be there, he knew only that he had exited from a cold and uncomfortable sleep, and found himself lying on an exercise mat. He went through a long hallway to a deserted lobby where he discovered that he was in a health club on Wall Street. He had it all to himself. From investigation of the time clock, he determined that the first employee punched in at ten.
Just as the clock struck six, the heat began to come up. Little whistles and plumes and the strange briny smell of radiator steam vied for attention with the knocking pipes. In the big room where he had awakened, the light from the rising sun hit a high bank of frosted windows and exploded in fumes of white and yellow that colored the ropes and balance beams, warming the hemp and the wood. Hardesty watched the sun track its course. Nearly drained, he could think of nothing, and had so little strength that he ignored the beckoning gymnastic equipment.
