Arc of the Comet

by Greg Fields

  If the drive into the city and his first glimpse of its jabbing granite towers had aroused Finnegan’s desires, his first few seconds on its streets awakened them fully so that they screamed in every corner of his mind. In this sprawl lay greatness and immortality, potency and power. But within it first lay a groundswell, a teeming, blank-visaged throng that set its own ceaseless throb. Crowds swept by him, some rubbing past him so firmly as to knock him down. Now and again he would overhear snippets of the conversations of the gray people rushing by him. Their words spun past him like dragonflies, as subtly heartbroken as their blanched faces.

  “It’s the art of the deal, Jocko. No prisoners.”

  or

  “Knicks plus seven. I’ll take it. A dime, that’s all.”

  or

  “Can’t touch that bitch. Can’t get near her.”

  or

  “That’s all I coulda done, ya see? To shut her up. Youda dun the same, wuncha?”

  . . . and the ever-present figures darting out from storefronts or on corners handing out tickets for discounts at electronics stores or massage parlors. And the cases of ties, watches and cheap jewelry hawked in mid-block, almost every block, by sharp-tongued hustlers. And the worn men, with unshaven grey whiskers and tatty clothes, that appear like ghosts or zombies, shuffling ahead of you, conglomerations of bad smells and unrelenting despair.

  And the homeless, the addicts, the winos, sticking out their hands, “Yo, Jack, whachew got? You got a dollar for sompin’ to eat? I swear to Christ I ain’t gonna spend it on booze or drugs. Swear to Christ. I useta be an altar boy. Gimme a hand, hey?”

  Finnegan heard it all in bits and pieces, passed through it without stopping, his feet moving automatically, his head turning from side to side, his eyes wide to miss nothing. He saw their faces, saw their eyes, and wordlessly recalled fish he had seen in the supermarket. He saw their complexions and noted their walks, each signifying station and purpose, and wondered in God’s name how anyone could carve a place in this congestion. From time to time he would see a figure standing out from this miasmatic swarm: a young man whose face shone with animation, whose walk was light, whose mouth might form an unconscious smile, or a young woman who captured all the glamour, the poise, the latent sexuality that femininity could possibly convey. But he did not dwell on these scattered exceptions. He merely noted that they did indeed exist, and felt reassured by this, less alone, and passed on as the crowd demanded.

  And in his first few steps he perceived an undercurrent of brutality, of violent force, of abomination that, unleashed, could strip human existence to its barest rudiments. The souls of fifteen million people were bound in this city, and so many of them blank, interchangeable, the city itself a process of working, pushing, acquiring, distributing, acquiring again, thrusting against the anonymous, overpowering and impersonal forces that defined it all to begin. The city could not be a place to live in the traditional sense; it could only be an arena, a testing ground for valor, creativity, and resource. The cost of failure might be tremendous, might indeed be the ultimate cost, for if the city were only an arena, and all the faces anonymous, then how might a man convince himself that he is not a brute and, in so being, the subject of brute forces? What compels him to civility?

  A single touch, perhaps, or a warm bed where he knows he belongs. A voice that belies his own anonymity. A welcoming glance, and one who knows his name. Of little more than this do we build ourselves against the merciless tides.

  Finnegan watched it all, and the hunger rose within him, his heart surged with an exultancy that he had not realized. For he had never witnessed this savage fury except in his imagination, and yet he might be a part of it. Finnegan had a mind, and he had a soul. He had not been beaten down by the vicious demands of responsibility, of propriety, of thwarted ambition. He stood out with his quick and agile mind, his strong body. Finnegan walked into the teeming sea of humanity around him and saw at once that he was different from this mass. He thought at once of the bodies of his ancestors lying in the ground in dust and decay, fetid husks of now-nameless souls passed into an unknown ether. He looked at the anonymous faces here whose collective fates would differ little from those of a forgotten past. And he rejoiced inwardly because he was different from all this. He possessed more than a soul, he possessed a spirit. And, above all else, he possessed the one component that, once lost, would seal his doom with all the others. He possessed his youth.

  Finnegan’s hunger for all things good and rich and meaningful swept through him as if he had swallowed a burning coal. For if this city stood at the center of man’s highest achievements and greatest longings, what could he not attain, what could he not hold as his own, should he desire it? The nature of Conor Finnegan, he knew, ran stronger, sharper, quicker, brighter than any he had seen around him here. If these shapeless forms rushing past him might, in their own fashion, partake of the contentment of accomplishment, if they could make their way in this most turbulent of places, then what flaming glories, what profound mysteries, might he not in his day achieve?

  The six young men walked down Lexington through the upper forties. They were headed for 55th Street. Lanny O’Hanlon, smooth and very self-assured, took the lead. He walked with a quick, businesslike pace, paying little heed to the streets around him. O’Hanlon possessed a callous urbanity that his friends so far lacked. Perhaps it stemmed from a youth spent outside Boston, another vibrant, congested Eastern city, or perhaps it was from his frequent forays into the city when he was in prep school in central Massachusetts. Perhaps it was all a façade. Keeping O’Hanlon’s pace, the group arrived at the restaurant in seemingly a few short minutes, although the walk had taken more than half an hour. The evening had been brisk enough so that the walk had not tired them. Only Dan Rosselli, slightly overweight, was breathing the least bit hard.

  The maitre d’ approached them. The restaurant itself was darkly lit, all wood and mock leather.” We’d like a table in a far corner,” said O’Hanlon. “We may tend to be a bit boisterous tonight.”

  “Certainly, sir. Wait right here and I’ll see what’s available.” Their host spoke with a slight undefined accent. He had obviously seen groups like this before and knew what to expect.

  “Phony accent,” said O’Hanlon as he turned back to his charges. “Probably lives in the Bronx and takes the Yellow 7 line. A man of the city, that one.”

  The maitre d’ rematerialized quickly. His black suit blended into the restaurant’s motif. Even his complexion seemed dark—Hispanic, or perhaps Middle Eastern. He smiled a patterned smile, smooth and well-practiced.

  “Right this way, gentlemen,” and they were seated in the most remote corner of the building, three strides from the kitchen door. They sat three on either side of a booth with high wooden backs that shielded them totally from other diners.

  “Nice place, Mick,” said Rosselli. “You’ve been here before?”

  “I know it by reputation. Guys at Fairfield used to come in here on weekends and get completely hammered. Without question this is the cheapest drunk in the city, if you’re so inclined.”

  “How’s the food?”

  “No one could ever remember. Play it safe and order a steak.”

  “You know any other places we might go after dinner?” asked Reg Coleman.

  “Let’s take it one step at a time, boys. We may be in no condition to show ourselves in public. Besides, why are you asking me? You guys grew up in Jersey, God help you. Except for the two wandering Golden Boys here. They wouldn’t know New York City from fuckin’ Malibu. But the rest of you should have spent more time in this jungle than I ever did.”

  “Never got in here much,” said Rosselli. “Anyway, Mick, you’re twenty years older than the rest of us. You could run through a waterfall without getting wet. We’ll defer to your judgment.”

  “I judge we stay here and drink our asses off. We’ll worry about what comes next later.”

  Drink they did. They ordered dinner, each re
questing a steak of some sort. With a basket of bread came their first pitcher of beer. They drank it quickly and ignored the bread. When the waiter returned with their salads he brought the second pitcher. The race was on.

  Finnegan became conscious of the rich, pungent smell of the place. Although one thick blanketing aroma hung over them all, Finnegan could pick out individual odors, and they pleased him. He could smell, of course, the deep juices of the meat before him, and the bitter tangy air of the beer. He caught scent of his own cologne. Vaguely he could smell the cologne of his roommate who sat next to him. The six of them, jammed into that close space, created the healthy, acrid odor of perspiration. The leather itself on which they sat emitted the rugged gruffness of old rooms. It was a man’s world in which they sat and dined and drank tonight; there could be no mistaking it. Every smell that penetrated Finnegan’s nostrils confirmed the uniquely masculine nature of this night. In it he felt quietly strong, a champion at rest taking his pleasure, surrounded by his new friends whose growing bonds of loyalty were becoming apparent. It was, above all else, a sense of belonging.

  As the empty pitchers of beer accumulated, the conversation became more animated. “The problem with Rutgers,” Lanny O’Hanlon was holding forth, “Jesus, did I say ’problem’? Let me modify that. One of the problems with Rutgers is that nobody gives a damn what you do there. You’ve got administrators who don’t give a rap what you’re up to as long as you don’t break anything and your bills are paid, counselors who don’t even know your name, who counsel by reading a list of courses and say ’You decide’, and worst of all you’ve got professors who stand up in front of a class of 500 kids and say ’I’m gonna come in here three times a week and teach, and I don’t give a damn if you learn anything or not.’ To them we’re all the same. They lump us all together, everybody. Can you imagine what we’re going to be like after four years of this? We won’t even know who the hell we are. We might not even know our own names.”

  “Ah, Christ, Lanny, you’re exaggerating,” countered Rick Murdoch, unusually assertive. “You were a hot-shot in prep school and you expect college to be the same. You expect the world to eat out of Lanny O’Hanlon’s fine young hand. It doesn’t work that way. We’re in a class of 1,600, all types and varieties, but all of them damn good or they wouldn’t be here. You’ve got to earn your distinction all over again.”

  “That’s not what I’m talking about,” responded O’Hanlon. “I’m not talking about being a frickin’ all-star. I’m talking about having any identity whatsoever. We’re in a class of 1,600 all right, but I don’t think it’s too many for a supposedly major college to handle on a more personal level.”

  “What do you want, Mick? A housemother to tuck you in at night?”

  “No, you moron, and there’s no point in exaggerating. But you know how they had my schedule screwed up so badly at the beginning of the year? They had me enrolled in eight courses, for Christ’s sake, including Discrete Mathematical Structures. There’s a guy who’s a junior now named Larry Hanlon and they gave me four of his courses, just for laughs. I can imagine how confused that poor guy must have been when they had him signed up for Freshman Composition and French 101. Anyway, it took me three weeks to get that cleared up. The idiots in the Registrar’s Office couldn’t get it straight. They kept telling me that I had no business taking freshman-level courses and I could only drop them with the professor’s permission, and I needed their signatures in triplicate. Three weeks it took for them to convince themselves that I am only a humble freshman. And then this past week I get a note in my mailbox telling me I got a B-plus on my Engineering Physics hourly exam. They’re getting confused again, and I know it’s going to continue until Larry Hanlon graduates or Lanny O’Hanlon throws himself in front of a bus.”

  “Don’t you see, roomie, that’s just the challenge,” said Finnegan excitedly. He put his hand on his roommate’s shoulder. O’Hanlon looked down at it in surprise, regarding it as if it were a dead fish. “All along there’s going to be snares and pitfalls and foul-ups and confusions. That’s the nature of this place. Hell, that’s the nature of every place. But you’ll find a way to get by it all. We’ve been thrown together with hundreds of other people who are just as talented as we are, and it’s clear that we’re not going to be getting much help. It’s up to us to do everything we have to do to make it work. We’ve got to make our own friends, take our own tests, fight our own battles with the registrar, everything. That’s a pretty radical change, but we’ll come out okay. It’s not just Rutgers, roomie. It’s like that everywhere, and we’re always going to have to face it.”

  “Tell me something, you two guys,” responded O’Hanlon, pointing at Finnegan and McIlweath. “You came clear across country to go through this nonsense. Do you honestly think you made the right decision?”

  “Absolutely” and “No doubt” were their replies.

  “Why?”

  “Just what Conor said, Lanny. We’re on our own here. We’ve got a chance to redefine ourselves, and that appeals to me a great deal. No preconceptions. We do it all for ourselves, and make ourselves what we want to be.”

  “Couldn’t you have done that a little closer to home?” asked Reg Coleman. “I mean, New Jersey, for Christ’s sake.”

  “Yeah, we could have,” answered Finnegan. “But I think we wanted to commit to something without being able to back out. No safety net, so let’s see what you really can do. I can’t speak for Mac, but I think that was one of my main reasons. To see if I could do well outside my comfort zone.”

  “Yeah,” said McIlweath. “Once I committed myself to going away I wanted to go as far away as possible. It added a dimension to what I was trying to do. It made it irreversible, at least over the short term, and all the more important that I do well.”

  “Besides,” added Finnegan, “I wanted to see what East Coast girls were like.”

  They continued to drink, vast amounts. The six of them finished their dinners quickly, each much hungrier than he had at first perceived. The drinking and the camaraderie sharpened their appetites. They ate the bread, asked for another basket, then another. And always the pitchers of beer kept coming. Finnegan, for all he had done with his young life, had never been drunk before, and he found that he liked the taste of beer. The simple act of drinking bonded him to his companions, made him a part of a heady brotherhood, and he saw his new friends as the brightest, bravest, finest men he could possibly know. Only Tom McIlweath, sensing the weakening limbs and slowing reactions of the other five, held back. Someone would have to drive back to campus that night. Someone would have to remain sober.

  Their conversations wove and spun random patterns, increasingly wider, dipping one way, darting another, never holding course long enough to have much meaning. Their voices grew louder, their gestures more animated.

  For Finnegan, the room started to shorten. All images beyond the booth in which he sat became blurred, then got lost altogether. He no longer noticed the servers hustling in and out of the kitchen or the diners at the tables standing free in the room’s middle. He no longer noticed them because they ceased to exist, their forms obliterated as his vision lost periphery. His world continued to contract; soon the outlines and features of his friends blurred, too. The sharp lines of their warm, active faces became fuzzy. The room itself, now that its walls had closed to just outside their booth, began to spin, very slowly at first, but as the evening drew on more and more rapidly.

  “Lissen,” slurred Dan Rosselli. “We’re all Rutgers men, an’ we godda sing a song. We godda sing the alma mater, right? ’On the Banks,’ right? We godda sing the damn thing.”

  “Yeah,” said Finnegan. “Danny’s right, we got to sing. Even you, roomie, even though you hate the goddamn place. Sing or I’ll kick your Boston ass.”

  “If you animals want to disgrace yourselves, who am I not to join in? Besides, it’s one of the best drinking songs I’ve ever heard.”

  And they sang, softly at first, r
everently, in slightly more than a whisper.

  My father sent me to old Rutgers

  And resolved that I should be a man,

  And so I settled down

  In the noisy college town

  On the banks of the Old Raritan.

  They grew louder throughout the verse. By the start of the final lines, their voices were full throated, slurring no more. They sang a statement of youth’s power, their pride in being strong and whole, and, for a few moments, free and released. The crescendo rose.

  So sing aloud to Alma Mater

  And keep the scarlet in the van.

  For with her motto high

  Rutgers’ name shall never die

  On the banks of the Old Raritan.

  On the banks of the Old Raritan, my boys,

  Where old Rutgers evermore shall stand,

  For has she not stood

  Since the time of the flood

  On the banks of the Old Raritan.

  As they repeated the last chorus the crescendo had swept them away. They sang now, not of their own accord, but of a joined spirit that stood them together, and, in so doing, stood them apart. They sang with the voices of love, of glory and, ultimately, of destiny. They sang not for themselves, but for each other and for the school that had stitched them together, wary and alone, to draw from one another. They had identities, Lanny O’Hanlon to the contrary, each growing more precise by the minute yet none different in substance than that which had led every young man to stand erect ever since he discovered he could stand at all. They sang with the growing confidence that they had each, at last, stepped outside the thin shell of childhood and were now running down the singular pathway that, in the end, would take each of them to their disparate fates.

  When they finished, the group in the booth behind them cheered.