by Mark Helprin
Though the fires had liberated enormous amounts of energy, and numerous inversions had trapped warm air close to the ground (making some areas as hot as summer and most of the city comfortably springlike), it was still winter, and cold breezes much like cold streams in an otherwise tepid river wound through the mild inversions like smooth serpents of ice—refreezing pools of melt water, slicking down the sidewalks, and contracting whole neighborhoods of air in strange ebullient booms. Chelsea was warm. The trees were in leaf. The bushes had thickened up, and stood in stable plumes pressed against iron fences or congregated in the square. Flowers repossessed flower boxes, as self-assured as cats who sleep outside on a summer night.
“A florist must have been here,” Cecil offered, his mouth slightly open as he tried to take in more air than usual, so that he might smell the flowers.
“A florist indeed,” Peter Lake answered. “These are some of the plumes. Some will be a mile high, others no bigger than a leaf.”
They turned into a narrow passage that led to a garden courtyard. An iron gate secured with a bicycle lock barred their way. It could not have been opened with its key as fast as it was picked by the chief mechanic of The Sun. At the end of the passageway was an enclosed garden that ran from east to west for two blocks. The residents of the buildings looking over it had torn down the fences that separated their plots, to make the narrow close a private park.
Peter Lake realized that he would best reclaim Athansor alone. He stopped, and turned to his friend, who knew that yet another very short time was now over. Cecil was not about to press himself on Peter Lake the way he had done at the beginning of the century, begging to be his squash cook, promising to make money with tattoo jobs on the side, sticking to him wherever he went even though it was hard to keep up.
Often when someone dies those left behind think to themselves, if only I could have one more day: I would use it so well—an hour, perhaps even a minute. Cecil Mature had been given his time with Peter Lake, and it was now over. Tears would have tumbled down his cheeks had not Jackson Mead and Mootfowl taught him not to cry. “It’s not good for the digestive system,” Mootfowl had said, as severe as the Connecticut undertaker he had once been.
“It’s all changed now,” Peter Lake said. “For us, it’s come to an end. But, you’ll see, when you sleep it’ll well up so strongly that you won’t know which is the dream. And when, finally, there is nothing left of you, you’ll be overpowered by the strength of another time that will—mark my words—reclaim you. It will snap you up and pull you under like a trout taking a bug—all suddenness, all surprise, something silver rising from the depths. And then you may find that it starts all over again, because it has never ended.”
“I understand that. It doesn’t make it any easier.”
“Now you’ve got to turn your back on me and go.”
“I can’t.”
“Yes you can. You’ll have to do it sometime, so you might as well do it now.”
Cecil thought that it would be impossible to turn from Peter Lake. But Peter Lake was smiling, and perhaps because of the promise that he sensed in the smile, Cecil was able to turn and leave.
Now Peter Lake was alone in the garden. He moved slowly among the trees until, halfway through, he found himself on a slight rise, from which he could see the other end. Standing there in perfect calm, looking straight at him, was his white horse.
The minute he saw the white horse, all the powers that had brought him to that very moment left him forever, and he became just a man with a wound in his side. The horse, too, seemed no longer like the great balloon-limbed statue that he had been. He seemed to be smaller, perhaps not as good a fighter, and there was something about him which suggested . . . a milk horse. He followed Peter Lake with his eyes, and bent his neck way over to one side when Peter Lake went around a clump of bushes. When Peter Lake emerged, Athansor’s ears were pointing back, his face was strained forward, and his right legs were touching the ground only tentatively, which was the way he used to lean sometimes when he was drawing milk wagons in summer, and would stop under a curbside horse-shower of the Horses’ Aid Society.
Peter Lake looked into Athansor’s eyes. Though the horse seemed more diminutive now, and his wounds and scars were anything but beautiful to see, and though he would not have seemed out of place harnessed in the traces of a wagon, he still had his round and perfect eyes.
After leaving the salver against the new branches that had stubbornly sprung from the foreshortened stump of a tree, Peter Lake made a quick mount, and they started for the tunnel at the other end of the close. Green leaves rushed by them as if it were spring or summer, and when Peter Lake looked up, he knew that dawn was not too far away. “Come on,” he said, as he guided the white horse through the dark foliage. “Hurry now. You’re going home.”
THOUGH THE fires had died down, they had burned nearly everything, and the beams of gutted buildings glowed with heat. Apart from these dark red bars that made the city a luminescent blueprint of what it once had been, very little was left intact. The protected islands stood amid fields of destruction that once again reflected natural features of the underlying terrain, and open distance had returned to Manhattan after many hundreds of years. Smoke and steam drifted upward from the rivers, in white, gray, and silver. The streets were deserted. The city had been conquered and destroyed, and it looked much smaller.
Just before dawn, Peter Lake cantered Athansor up and down the long avenues. Athansor’s strides, matchless in their grace, carried them from one end of the island to the other, and back, as if they were using a razor strop or looming a sheet of cloth. They sailed to and fro so smoothly that it was as if they were gliding on ice, and as they passed by, time was compressed in the ruins, enabling them to see the city as it was and as it would be, all at once. No richer tapestry had ever been devised, for here all time was at issue. They were able to see it not because they were gifted and high, but, rather, because they had been humbled, and because the world had been pushed back as quiescent images had rebelled and surged forward in disorder and victory. Though the city lay in ruins, nothing about it seemed dead, and it continued as if its spirit had never needed the material frame that now was gone.
They saw a black thunderstorm race in on a summer day and scatter children through the park, their hair blowing in the sudden wind, hoops rolling free, the forked ribbons of the little girls’ gondoliers’ hats luffing as violently as the wings of a bird trapped inside a house. They saw an airplane rising alone at night, its powerful white light coming for them in the empty air as if God had sent an angel. They saw ships and barges rush from north to south and south to north as if supplying far-flung endangered regiments, cutting the clear blue band of the Hudson with silver wakes that flashed like swords. They saw wrestlers straining on the mat, their struggling limbs unknowingly symmetrical, parodies of bridges, beams, and rock formations. They saw a poor child kissing a doll. They saw a pile driver six stories high hypnotizing a lunch-time crowd in the garment district with the otherworldly strikes of metal upon metal and the crazy exhalations of steam that lifted its heavy weight over and over, again and again—very much like the garment workers themselves, who sewed and stitched through the hours and days of their lives. They saw a family walking by a pond, and they knew from the houses and the wooden walls that the ducks in the pond had never heard any language but Dutch. They saw courageous little boats rushing through Hell Gate, waltzing in a white current between walls of rock. They saw a young actress who, bathed in rose light, was playing her part, and mastering her fear. They saw the steel-gray bridges, in the sunshine and in snowstorms, standing about the city like giant bedsteads.
These things unfurled before them like flags rolling out on the wind, and seemed to be an important part of the truth if only because they presented again and again the same curves, the same colors, the same flowing symmetries, the same feelings, operations, and acts, all of which, over time, spoke and sang in one language and one son
g of one central beauty.
Peter Lake rode past dance halls and symphonies ten deep in the same space, and discovered that their sounds combined in a single perfect tone. Part of the overlay of flawless images seemed to be that Athansor was leading a phalanx of fifty horses, or more—mares and stallions, colts and fillies, grays, chestnuts, blacks, and spotted ponies, red Shetlands, Percherons with manes above their hooves like African dancers, Arabians, war-horses, thoroughbreds, and dray horses. But when Peter Lake looked carefully, he saw that they were real. More than just images, they were flesh and blood, and they had gathered to Athansor as he shuttled along the streets. Pulled from their hiding places in rubble-filled lots, they had banded together, and now all were cantering with the same smooth stride, the milk horse in the lead.
As it grew light enough to make out individual forms in the distance, Peter Lake saw astonished Short Tails, their mouths hanging open as he thundered by at the head of the procession. This suited his purpose well enough. They would soon discover the pattern he was making, and get the news to Pearly, who would probably also hear that Athansor had now turned himself into fifty synchronized horses.
On their last pass over the north of the island, they sent the fifty horses into the river, and watched them ford to Kingsbridge and escape along the river’s edge. Now Manhattan was cleared of its horses but for one. Because they saw that the sun was about to rise, Peter Lake and Athansor galloped this time, and they stopped somewhere south of the park. There were hardly any landmarks left, and it was hard for them to know exactly where they were.
The rider dismounted. One cannot properly embrace a horse—they’re too big. So Peter Lake was content to look in Athansor’s eyes. “I suppose,” he said, “that you know where you’re going.” The horse sneezed. “Do you think they’ll let you in up there with a cold?” Peter Lake asked. “In those pastures, they probably don’t worry about that sort of thing. But who knows, maybe they’ve got a quarantine. Maybe that’s what kept me out.
“Now it’s time for you to do what you’ve been able to do and haven’t done, on my account, for God knows how long. Go ahead. I won’t be with you. You have to do it by yourself.”
The horse didn’t move until Peter Lake clicked his tongue and waved his hand.
Then Athansor whinnied, and began to walk. The very fact of his motion took hold of him, and he started to gallop, faster and faster, until the ground rumbled beneath him and he was far away from Peter Lake, who was deeply saddened. He would never see the white horse again, but he was confident that the horse would find his right and proper place, where he had started, home.
ATHANSOR VAULTED from the ground as if to rise. Though he came down after sailing only ten or fifteen feet, he was little discouraged. He tried once more, in much the same spirit of a man who, awakened from a dream of flying, goes back to sleep confident that he will fly again. He found a long rubble-free avenue, and began to run. At first, he cantered, holding himself back. Then he started to gallop. The air whistled past his bent-back ears. His hooves seemed to touch the ground as lightly and infrequently as the hand that seems effortlessly to power the potter’s wheel. Now, certainly, with the speed he possessed, he had only to draw up his front legs, tighten his neck, and turn his face to the sky—the way he had always done—and he would soar into the air in a strong ascending curve. He threw himself forward and up, and courageously refused to expect anything but flight.
And then, despite his courage, he came crashing down on the pavement, lost his balance, rolled several times in uncontrolled somersaults, and smashed into a line of garbage cans that had formed a barrier on either side of which was absolutely nothing. The tremendous clatter shocked him, but not half as much as his simple earth-boundedness.
After the shock and humiliation of skidding along the street and bowling over the garbage cans, he retreated to the park. Alone in an empty field, he bent way down and pushed his head between his forelegs until he was rolled up in a compact package that resembled an equestrian statue done by a cubist, or, as Craig Binky would have said, a cuban.
The purpose of this was inspection. From various stables and from the street, he had many times witnessed the churchly and unassailable process wherein an auto mechanic elevated a car in the presence of its silent and intimidated owner, and examined its entrails from underneath. So, he did it himself. He was no mechanic, however, nor a veterinarian, an anatomist, or (more to the point) an aeronautical engineer. Everything seemed perfectly fine—his hooves were glistening, black, and hard; his muscles were taut; the tendons underneath his hide were as strong as steel cables; and his belly was firm and streamlined.
Encouraged because nothing seemed to be amiss, he decided to try again. He would gain speed in a mad rush up the walkway to the Belvedere, and then sail out over the lake and past the high rubble on Fifth Avenue, to make a breathtaking orbital curve to the south.
Going up the trails was as easy as if there were no grade. Even the steps and curves of the walkway were no hindrance. When he flew outward in the turns, he checked his inertia with four hooves against the vegetation on the side of the path, bounding ahead as if he were rushing down a mountain. Reaching the top, he dashed across a surface of flat rock and pushed himself into the air with the power of his briefly coiled and compressed rear quarters. Up he went, enthralled. Remembering what it was to fly, he experienced the lovely weightless updraft that the angels feel. And then he began to fall.
This was by no means the controlled glide that he had habitually used to descend, a fall in which every moment of apprehension had brought a cease-fire with gravity, until he and it signed a treaty on the ground. Not at all: it was a flailing, tumbling, sinking rout. He turned in the air, his nostrils flared, his eyes opened wide, and he fell into the lake a hundred feet below the Belvedere, sending up plumes of foaming white water that looked for a moment like wings sprouting from his sides, though, fortunately for him, he was unaware of that irony.
Despite the way in which he had taken to the water, he swam beautifully, and climbed up on the bank as nobly as ever a horse emerged from river or lake. Perhaps because he was dripping wet, he seemed crazed or panicky. But he was not to be deterred, and he started for one of the long and straight avenues, where he hoped to gallop for however many miles it might take before he flew.
THOUGH AT first they could not see its color in the strange light that came between the darkness and the dawn, after the fires had died and the moon had poked between tremendous Himalayan clouds of vapor and ash, the surface of the harbor was as green and smooth as emerald. Asbury guided the launch through the repentant waters, steering between upturned chunks of ice that looked in the blinking moonlight less like icebergs than the harmless polar bears in paintings, that are forever immobile and only three or four inches high.
On the Isle of the Dead, the gravedigger had disappeared. He had fled when he heard the launch, leaving his hat and his shovels. Hardesty threw aside the hat, took one of the shovels, and began to dig. He wouldn’t let Asbury help him, and he wished that before his shovel struck wood he would die and awaken in another world. He lifted shovelfuls of the soft earth, and the others watched.
It did not take long to get the little coffin above ground. “Now what,” he asked, afraid and unwilling to open it.
“Take her out. It hasn’t been long, and the ground is cold,” Virginia said. Hardesty clenched his teeth, and thrust the shovel under the lid of the coffin. He pried it up, took it in his hands, and threw it violently to the side. Abby lay within, much the same as she had been when they had last seen her. From a distance, someone might have thought that she was asleep.
Hardesty bent to pull her close to him, listening for life. But she was completely still. He carried her as he had so often done when bringing her home in the evening, when she had fallen asleep in his arms.
Asbury held the launch against the dock while Hardesty stepped down, took Abby from his shoulder, and laid her on the hatch cover. Virginia and Mrs.
Gamely lifted Martin in and climbed aboard, and Christiana pushed off, nimbly jumping onto the stern.
The rumbling of the old engine beneath the hatch cover cleared Abby’s hair from her face. Only Martin noticed, for he alone dared look at her, since he alone truly believed that she would awaken. He knelt beside her, waiting for her eyes to open. Mrs. Gamely nervously fingered the poultice that she carried in her bag, but she knew it was for curing the sick, not for bringing back the dead. The rest of them looked everywhere but at Abby, though Virginia kept her right hand on the little girl’s shoulder. They set off across the harbor, among the melting cakes of ice, with a gentle wave from their bows, and hardly a wake.
It was beginning to get bright.
INDEED IT was. The sun was just about to come up on the first day of the third millennium, to view the destruction of the city and see with what pleasure, determination, and nerve its inhabitants would face this, the newest of their days. As always before the dawn, there was a certain sense of urgency.
The messages and messengers that had been coming to Jackson Mead in a steadily swelling flood in the previous hours suddenly broke off. No one arrived to break the silence, and even Cecil Mature sat quietly in his place, gazing sadly through the large windows that gave out on the green harbor. Tranquil now for the first time in too long a time to recount, Mootfowl was perched on a sort of dunce chair behind and to the side of Jackson Mead. He had prayed silently for at least an hour, though for what, exactly, no one knew.
