“No standing,” the driver said.
“I have to see this.”
“No standing till the bus stops.”
Morty sat down in the front seat, over the wheel, and leaned far forward. He stared past the green-tinted glass, looking for light. Through the open window he heard the subaqueous roar. Under the water the bus hissed through the tiled tunnel. And then light. And then ramps. They spiraled toward a passageway. The bus went up and through and stopped.
“What is this place?” Morty asked.
“It’s the Port of New York Authority,” the driver said.
“Ah,” Morty said, “authority.”
In a phone booth, with a tool he took from his knapsack, he severed the chain that held the Yellow Pages to the narrow shelf. He buried the thick book in the depths of the knapsack.
He was exhausted from his journey.
“Where are rooms?” he asked the woman in the Travelers’ Aid booth. “I require a bed, a chair, a desk and light-housekeeping privileges. I can pay one hundred dollars a month for a good central location.”
“This isn’t that kind of agency,” the woman said.
“But you know a good deal about this city?”
“Yes,” the woman said, “we have to.”
Morty reached inside his shirt and slyly palmed the Haitian Sleep Stone he wore on a chain around his neck. He brought it out and hypnotized the woman. She said she’d call a friend who had a place on West 70th Street.
“I’m done with all that,” Morty said. “East 70th Street.”
“Not…for…a…hundred doll…ars,” the woman spoke soddenly from her trance.
Morty sat propped up in bed. Behind his head was the bulging knapsack he used for a pillow. He read the Yellow Pages until two in the morning and had just finished TAXIS when he had the inspiration. He went to Eighth Avenue and 164th Street, to the Manhattan garage of the largest cab company in the city. He chose one ramp and followed it down until he came to an enormous room where there were more cabs than he had ever seen. I could have used one of these in the jungle, he thought absently.
Despite the vastness of the room and the dim light, the yellow machinery lent a kind of brightness to the place. Everywhere there were drivers, alone or in groups, writing up log sheets or talking together. Men stood in line in front of the coffee machines along the wall. Inside some of the cabs, the doors open wide on their hinges, Morty could see drivers reading newspapers. He heard the steadily registering bells on the gas pumps. It was three-thirty in the morning.
Morty walked toward the center of the cavernous room and climbed up on top of a cab.
“Hey, what’s the matter with you? Get down from there,” a man yelled.
“New York cab drivers are world famous,” Morty shouted from the roof of the cab, “for their compassion and their oracular wisdom. I am Morty Perlmutter, fifty-seven years old, fifty-seven-time loser of the Nobel Prize for Everything, and I’m here to find out what you know.” They stared up at him, astonished. “I got the idea from the Yellow Pages,” he added sweetly.
“That’s my cab that nut is up on,” a driver said. “Come on, nut, off and out.”
“I challenge you to a debate, sir,” Morty shouted. “I challenge all of you to a debate. Let’s go, every man on his taxicab.” He watched them carefully. Someone moved forward threateningly but stopped, still several feet away from the taxi on which Morty stood. It was the Perlmutter Dipsy Doodle, the dependable mock madness, one of his most useful techniques. He told them that frankly. He told them to their faces. He didn’t hold back a thing.
“It’s a known fact,” he said. “People have a lot of respect for insanity. Madmen are among the least persecuted members of any society. It’s because they’re not a part of society. They’re strangers. The Greco-Persian ethic of hospitality lies behind that. Listen, I didn’t read Hamlet until I was forty-two years old, but I learned the lesson. When does Hamlet die? During the single moment in the play he’s completely sane, that’s when! Figure it out.” He folded his arms and hugged himself and did a little dance on the roof. He was completely safe. “Come on, up on your cabs. Everybody.”
A man laughed and put a knee on his fender. “What the hell,” he said, “I’m a sport. A sport’s a sport.” He scrambled onto the hood and made his way over the windshield to the roof of the cab and stood up uncertainly. “Hey,” he said, “you guys look goofy down there.”
Morty applauded, and below him the drivers were grinning and pointing up at the two of them. Soon others were climbing over their cabs, and in a few minutes only the man whose roof Morty had taken was without a cab to stand on. He seemed disappointed. Morty shrugged.
Perlmutter waited until the others stopped giggling and became accustomed to their strange positions. “All right,” he said. “You men have lived in this city all your lives, most of you. What do you know? Tell me.” He pointed to a fat driver on a taxicab across from him, but the man looked back blankly and smiled helplessly. Morty waited for one of the others to speak. At last a tall driver in a green cap started to say something.
“Louder, sir,” Morty shouted. “It’s hard to hear pronouncements in this cave.”
“I was just saying that if you want I could talk about what’s wrong with the traffic in this town.”
The drivers groaned. Morty joined them. “Small-time,” he said, “but that’s an interesting demonstration of the limited world view. Thank you.”
“I’ll tell you how I give up smoking,” another driver said.
“Why did you?”
“I went out and bought a whole carton and dipped them in the old lady’s chicken soup and let them dry out on the radiator overnight. Then when I’d go for a smoke—”
“Why did you give it up?” Morty interrupted him.
“…you can imagine for yourself. They tasted—”
“I asked why. Why did you give it up?”
The driver stared at him. “Well, who needs the aggravation of a lung cancer?” he said. “I got a brother-in-law in Queens he’s got three dry-cleaning plants, a daughter away at school. Forty-eight years old he gets this cough he can’t get rid of it.”
“Self-preservation,” Morty said, bored. “Nothing. Nothing.” The man sat down on the roof of his cab. “Look,” Morty said, “I’m asking the meaning of life. This one says traffic congestion, that one lung congestion. I won’t be sidetracked.” Morty wiped his forehead. “New Yorkers, Cab Drivers, Big Mouths: I’m Morton Perlmutter from the world’s cities and jungles and seas and poles. I come, a genius, but humble, willing to learn, you understand, to the largest city in the world—that’s crap about London: they count everybody from Scotland to Surrey; Tokyo the same—the largest city in the world, a capstone of the planet, melting pot for the tired, the poor, the huddled masses, the not so huddled, the works. And if anyone should know, you should know. What’s the meaning of life?”
Morty watched a driver cup his hands against his mouth and he saw it coming.
“Life?” the driver shouted. “Life’s a fountain.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Morty said, getting down from the cab. “I know that one too.”
He had been disturbed by his experience with the cab drivers. He had meant, he supposed, to get the lay of the land, a maneuver familiar enough, but, finally, deflective. Science itself was deflective, he thought. What did he care, after all, about hypotheses, procedures, experiments? He needed answers. He was weary of his endless preparations. He reminded himself of someone forever adjusting his body in a bed, shifting, turning, raising, lifting, punching pillows, as though comfort was available only in some future displacement. He knew that his endless making ready would have to give way sometime to a final making do. But for all he seemed to the contrary, Morty was an essentially cautious man and he knew that before moving in on the truth he would have to make additional preparations. He would know where to look when he had to, but until then he needed to lay the groundwork.
He began his res
earches.
On successive weekends he attended representative churches and synagogues. He read the newspapers, including the Harlem papers and all forty-eight foreign-language weeklies and dailies. He read only the local news and the letters to the editor. In the New York Public Library he went through the newspaper files for the years 1947 through 1962, collating the subjects of these letters and classifying them according to their tones and literary styles. (By 1952 beautiful patterns began to emerge, though 1958 puzzled him until he saw how 1960 explained away the apparent discrepancy.) Once he spent a week in a branch library on Staten Island studying the loan rate of thirty-five key books on a list Morty had prepared himself. He walked through Central Park and studied the litter. (Also he went through the garbage dumps. What people threw away was frequently as significant as what they kept, he felt.) He haunted hospital corridors and waiting rooms, observing the attitudes of a sick man’s relatives and friends. He crashed weddings and bar mitzvahs and confirmations and baptisms and wakes. He watched the lines outside motion-picture houses and eavesdropped on the intermission conversations of theatergoers. He studied the menus in restaurants and spoke to salad men and short-order cooks to learn what New Yorkers were eating, and then used the information to work out interesting metabolic calculations. He observed the crowds at sporting events, deliberately inciting bets among the spectators. (You could tell a lot about human courage if you knew the odds men gave each other.) And he listened. Always he listened: to children, to hoodlums, to the old, the strong, to people in trouble and people who would never be in trouble.
In the second year something happened to interrupt Morty’s researches.
“I’m a scientist,” Morty explained suddenly to the woman next to him.
This was his third day underground. “I’m trying to get the feel of the earth,” he said. “Last night I was on the Broadway-7th Avenue local and I got out at 14th Street and walked along the tracks through the tunnel to 8th Street. Exhilarating, marvelous.” The train had broken from its tunnel and begun to climb The Bronx. He glanced casually along the woman’s bosom and down at Jerome Avenue. He looked back at the woman. She was a blue-haired lady of about fifty-three, heavy, probably powerful. He had seen the type before, in London, in Buenos Aires, in Paris, in Chicago. He saw in her a sort of bahlabustuh-cumduchess who would survive her husband by twenty years. Perlmutter was attracted to such women; something atavistic in him responded while his heart said no. He imagined them around bridge tables, or playing poker in their dining rooms. He saw them giving daughters away in hotel ballrooms, and ordering meat from the butcher over the telephone, and in girdles in the fitting rooms of department stores. He had seen thousands of these women since coming to New York, recognizing in them from the days of some Ur-Morty (as if he had known them in the sea) old, vital aunts. She troubled him. He was responding, he supposed, to the science in her, to the solid certainty she gave off like a scent, to what he guessed might be in her an almost Newtonian suspicion, and to what he knew would be her fierce loyalty. Recognizing what he really wanted—it was to seduce one of these women—he had to laugh. The Morty Perlmutter who had known African Amazons and snuggled beneath arctic skins with Eskimo girls, who had loved queens of the circus and lady pearl divers—was this a Morty Perlmutter who could be stymied in The Bronx? (Because he understood that he would probably never make it with her. He sighed.) A scientist tries, he told himself, and tried.
“Excuse me, my dear,” he said. “I’m very clumsy at this sort of thing, but I find myself extraordinarily attracted to you. Will you have a drink with me?”
The woman would have changed her seat right then, but she was by the window and Morty had her penned in.
“I’ll call the guard,” she said.
“Now, now,” Morty said. “What’s in the bag?” he said. “Some little pretty for yourself?” he asked brightly. “Or is it for your husband?”
“None of your business. Let me out, you pervert, or I’ll yell.”
Morty stood up quickly. She seemed genuinely frightened and he leaned down to reassure her. “I am no punk molester of women,” he said. “I speak from respectable need. Of course, if you insist on making a scene I’ll have to leave you alone, but yours is a rare type with a rarer appeal. It is precisely my perversion, as you call it, which makes you attractive to me. Don’t knock success, lady. When was the last time someone not your husband wanted to have a drink with you? I do not count the one time in the Catskills ten years ago when the guests waited on the waiters and the band played on. This I write off. Or when you danced with the college bus boy and he kissed you for the tip. This I write off.”
She stared at him for a moment with an astonished respect, and Morty sat down again. He contemplated using the Haitian Sleep Stone but decided it would be immoral. “All right, I’m Morton Perlmutter and I’m here in the final phase of my search for synthesis. More later over cocktails.”
“I’m married,” she said, out of breath.
“Of course you are. Don’t I know that? You think your kind of character is possible otherwise? It’s sacrifice and single-mindedness that does that. It’s years of love love love. You’ll have to tell me all about yourself. I’m dying to kiss you. Where does your boy intern?”
“We have no children,” she said shyly.
He wanted to take her hand. It was unscientific, but there it was. He wondered, too, if he might not make a cozy confidante of this woman. He knew what it meant, of course. Why not? He knew everything. All that was nonsense about the vital aunts. Morty was King Oedipus. He shrugged. I am what I am. Nothing bothers me, he thought lightly. This is my finest hour. One of them. It’s all been swell.
“Let me have your number,” he told her.
She shook her head.
“Let me have your phone number.”
“No,” she said, frightened again.
He used the Sleep Stone.
“I…am…Rose…Gold. You…can…usually…reach…me…at Klondike 5…6…7…4…3. Tuesdays I…play…mahjongg. Wednesdays I at…tend matinees.”
He brought her out of it quickly. “Now about that drink…” Morty said.
“No. Leave me alone. You’re a strange man.”
“I am what I am,” he said.
“This is my stop,” she said, getting up. “Don’t try to follow me. You’ll be arrested. I’m warning you.”
When she had called him a strange man, she had meant something unpleasant. His shock value had worn off. That often happened to him now. He equated it with the dying sense of wonder in the world. TV has done that, he thought absently, mass communication has. It made him angry. He followed her to the platform.
She turned quickly and faced him. “I meant what I said.”
“I’ve got your number, Rose Gold,” he said passionately. She started to walk away and Morty ran after her. “Listen to Perlmutter’s curse,” he commanded darkly. “May your neighborhood change!” She was running along the platform now. “May the fares to Miami be trebled! May your chicken soup freeze over!” She was going down the stairs now and he rushed after her. “May your fur coats explode!” he roared.
Just for the hell of it he went to the Chase Manhattan and asked to see the director. (He had to use the Sleep Stone on two tellers, one vice-president and three secretaries. This made him uneasy. You could wear it out—like anything else.)
“Been overseas,” Morty explained to the director. “I’m thinking of moving my plant to New York City.”
“That’s wonderful, Mr. Perlmutter, but you’ll have to forgive me—I don’t think I’m familiar with your operation. If you could fill me in and then explain what it is you require of us—”
“Not so fast,” Morty said, “not so very fast there. There are some things I need to know.”
“I don’t understand why our Mr. Johnson—” he said speculatively. And then cheerfully to Morty: “Of course, if I can help you.”
“How’s the water supply?” Morty demanded.
“The water supply. Plants need water.”
The director blinked and Morty went on. “I don’t expect you to have all this stuff at the tip of your fingertips, you understand, but what is your labor situation in the area? Are the workers organized?” He thought of the natives back in the Pragmatii jungle. “Would there be women for my men?” he asked slyly. “These lads haven’t seen white girls in years.”
The director moved his chair back.
“Is there any culture?” Morty asked. “What about transportation facilities? How are the hospitals? In short, Mr. Director, what has New York City to offer me?”
The director had not heard the last few questions. He was mumbling into an emergency intercom in his water carafe. Morty offered the Sleep Stone but the man wouldn’t look.
He sat down in the Russian Tea Room on West 57th Street and addressed the waiter in Russian. “We are a long way from Lubsk, hah, cousin?” he said.
The waiter didn’t answer and went immediately for the manager. The manager came over to Morty’s table.
“It is miles to Pinfh, is it not, little Russian brother?” Morty said.
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