City of God

by E. L. Doctorow

  The ballroom, softly lit, chandeliered, all aglitter. A big-time black-tie evening. I am fortunate enough to attract the wine waiter just before the lights go down for the showing of the famous scenes. . .

  When movies began they were shown in storefronts, dumps, you paid a nickel and sat down on a bench. They were silents, of course, one-reelers, and everyone made them, they were cheap to make, people made them about their own lives. They told the stories of their lives, how they lived in hovels, tenements, how they worked for pittances, how they were fired from their jobs by bosses in suits and ties, how when they were old they were fired, how when they spoke up they were fired. They showed themselves at street corners talking to one another, going to one another’s houses, they showed themselves in public meetings electing from among themselves their union leaders, they showed themselves going on strike, marching in the streets, carrying placards, getting run down and trampled by mounted police. Blacks showed themselves getting lynched, women showed themselves molested and pushed down on the floors of their kitchens, girls showed themselves giving birth in alleyways, drunks showed themselves dying with the delirium tremens, babies showed themselves dying of starvation, old people showed themselves being stuffed into pine boxes and dropped into graves. They all loved these movies about themselves and the truth of their lives. Sometimes a pianist played to go along with the action. But the audiences talked back to the films, stood to give advice, screamed warnings at the dangerous moments, cheered at the triumphs over villainy, cried when the lovers stood before the altar, and in all ways carried on to the extent that some poets in the audiences thought if they could only record the audiences talking back to the films, new films could be made about audiences watching themselves in films and talking back to them. And then films about those films, and so on into infinity. Obviously, some ontological order had to be established and this came about naturally as the competition among films created a demand for longer, more complex films. That meant filmmakers could no longer afford the cost of their films and so they went to banks and insurance companies for the money. This money was duly tendered, thus making banks and insurance companies the solemn judges of just what films were to be made. These judgments were made and a business class of professional filmmakers arose to effect them. The banks and insurance companies liked films showing peace between the unequal races, and happy workers and smiling shop foremen and well-dressed well-fed children and monogamous husbands and wives and hyperfunctional families as smoothly running as if on ball bearings going to church and being greeted and blessed by kindly gray-haired pastors. These films showed people driving in their motorcars, marveling at the heroism of cowboys, they showed villains as rough-hewn sociopaths standing apart from normal God-fearing human beings, and they showed love as the driving force of all life. They found loose-limbed, acrobatic little fellows to take pratfalls and show the comedy of life, and they showed pompous fat ladies getting their comeuppance, and self-impressed fat men getting taken down a peg or two, and they showed cross-eyed cops falling over each other in their efforts to apprehend kids with peashooters and they showed darling children with chocolate cake smeared over their faces and comedy teams pushing pies into one another’s faces, and gradually evolved a system of social archetypes into which they fitted physically appropriate persons they renamed as actors and found a place in the California sun to generate on an orderly industrial basis these corporate movies, which, whatever their period, contemporary or historical or futuristic, demonstrated to the audience watching them, now sitting in dark, palatial theaters built just for the purpose, that movies were a form of life to which life must aspire, as it has now shown every sign of doing.

  —This past Sunday, Pem and Sarah and Sarah’s boys walk over to Central Park to meet me and a new friend of mine, Miss Warren, at the specified tree near the western edge of the Sheep Meadow.

  Miss Warren is a freelance magazine writer born and raised in New Orleans. In certain journalistic circles she is something of a celebrity. I met her at a publishing party and have known her for a week and I can’t imagine what beautifully maladept instinct of mine has persuaded me to bring her here.

  All New York is out this afternoon. We stroll around, watch some softball, find a grassy spot for ourselves, unwrap the deli heros, uncork the Snapples, and prepare to have one of those balmy, ritually relaxing Sundays when the sense of loss is in every heart and a nonspecific melancholy seems to permeate the air.

  Pem points out to Sarah’s boys how they can track the movement of the sun as it flashes in the windows of the residential towers of Fifth Avenue. They respond politely, but they are wearing their baseball mitts and, having seen the big guys, are ready for action. Pem rolls up his sleeves. Okay, he says, let’s hustle. The boys run out to their imaginary positions. Pem keeps up the palaver, each successful catch or throw draws his praise, each dropped ball his encouragement. Sarah watches. The older boy, Jake, now nine, has filled out since I last saw him, his hair is his mother’s light brown, and he has her fair skin and wide-set blue eyes. He’s reached the age when he can pick the ball out of the air with his glove hand and whip it back to Pem on a line in a somberly casual exhibit of skill. Pem, catching the softball without a glove, is hard-pressed to keep smiling. The younger kid, Davey, about five, is dark-haired, wiry, a dead ringer for his father. His tosses sometimes arc backward and land in the grass behind him, and on the catch his outstretched glove doesn’t quite meet the ball as it arrives. He is undeterred in his ineptitude, then suddenly angry, slamming his glove down and going to sit sulkingly in Sarah’s cross-legged lap for consolation.

  Now, through all of this, Miss Warren is talking away in what seems to me an attempt to establish her sisterhood with a woman scholar of her own generation, though she is not naturally curious as a journalist is supposed to be. This is not a conversation of questions and answers but more like a monologue: The New Yorker has just accepted her piece about the Muslim extremists in Afghanistan. She will use the money to pay off part of her debt to a divorce lawyer, who has not done all that well by her. The divorce lawyer actually offered to let her pay off her bill with sex? Her ex-husband, and what a mistake that was, is a famous philologist who teaches at Princeton, one of those obsessively neat and tight-assed, basically fag types, who expected her to be the perfect little academic wife. “Doesn’t that beat all?” she says.

  “Davey,” Sarah says gently, lifting her son to his feet, “they’re calling you. Go on back and play, you’ll get the hang of it if you keep trying.”

  Miss Warren, with numerous tendrils of her red-blond pile of hair escaped from her comb, wears her one and only outfit, day and night and for all continents, her khaki multipocketed bush jacket, soft shirt, fatigue trousers, lace-up boots. Around her neck, a blue railroad man’s kerchief, carelessly tied. She chain-smokes long, thin cigarettes. She is tall and blowzy and sits hunched over with her legs in the full lotus, her jacket pockets bulging with her cell phone, beeper, cigarettes, pads, Palm III organizer, and, for all I know, a couple of grenades.

  In Peru to write about the Shining Path guerrillas, Miss Warren fell in love with one of their leaders? He was killed in a skirmish and the Nationalistas cut off his dick and sent it to her in a box at the school in Lima where she had gone to lecture.. . . In Sicily, to do a piece on the culture of poverty there, she lost her way and was picked up by three farmhands, who dragged her into a barn and took turns fucking her. She somehow got away? She found a village and told an old woman what happened, who told the local mafia chief, who invited Miss Warren to watch the men being executed the next morning in the town square. Which she did?

  Every once in a while, Sarah Blumenthal glances at me with what I read as the inevitable question: Is this woman really the mythomaniac I think she is? I have to admit Miss Warren’s tales of adventure are a touch exotic for a Sunday in Central Park. But having heard them before, I am of the opinion they may really have happened. Part of the trouble is in the style of narration,
the diction of the locker room and the breeziness of tone together suggesting the utter inconsequence of the horrific events being reported. So the truth or falsity of these tales really isn’t the point, Miss Warren sets off alarms in either case.

  She is saying now the superintendent of her building in Soho is a fat old slob of a lecher who likes to walk into her loft unannounced hoping to see her in her underwear. As soon as her application for a gun license comes through, she will take out the piece and scare the shit out of him, and if that doesn’t work she’ll shoot the fucker.

  Sarah’s eyes are lowered and I imagine that she’s thinking no longer of the woman I have brought this afternoon to the park but of what possibly could have possessed me to do so. It is a good question. Pem and the boys are engaged in the game of running bases, lots of shouting and laughing as he huffs back and forth between the two of them to avoid being tagged.. . . In this shining arcadian New York scene Sarah has to be coming to terms with the fact that I have a life beyond following Pem around, and that it is likely to include a weakness for the profane mysteries. I feel a distinct hollowing spasm in the solar plexus. I am not serious about Miss Warren, though she is quite an armful, and her appetite is honorably congruent with her sexual self-advertising. But in what is left of the afternoon, I will make a point of showing my pleasure in her company, especially in view of the ambiguous politeness she will have inspired in these clerical folk. In fact I am grateful to her. She has served to establish me in some new and distinctive filial relationship with Thomas Pemberton and Sarah Blumenthal. . . as if they are the long-married couple and I am the younger sibling or son who has brought his date around. Though they have not said anything to me, I am anticipating that they will soon marry. Pem said some time ago that I should keep my distance. And that is what by these self-revealing, self-degrading means I am apparently intent on doing.

  —We know of the Earthly City and the City of God, but there is a third city, the City of Birds, at Valdemingomez, an enormous garbage dump north of Madrid. After you do the Prado, do Valdemingomez, it is a great urban aviary, its population of storks, hawks, egrets, linnets, kites, jackdaws, ravens, condors, and turkey buzzards, when aroused, can circle Valdemingomez and, with a boost from the trade winds, wing-whiff its miasma of sulfurous gases as far east as Rome. The birds of Valdemingomez don’t migrate, why would they? Summer and winter, here they stay, over a hundred thirty species of them, even a few accidentals from the tropics—the albatross, the blue-footed booby—have come to look things over. Eggs are laid in old Big Mac containers, nests are lined with cassette tape, the songbirds flitter in and out of rusty cans, grackles huddle in TV cabinets, gulls bomb old sofas with the clamshells of paella, and when flocks of rock doves go cooing and pecking over fields of chicken bones, the bones clack like train tracks, clink like wind chimes, shiver and shirr like shuffled cards, bongo and bop, and chickuh-chick-chick like a hot marimba band. Special rates for ornithologists.

  —Of the Sunday in Central Park, I remember too that the boys found a brown ant population in a patch of dirt under a tree and I hunkered down with them to watch these infinitesimal creatures, each not an eighth of an inch long, go about their business building an underground city. Two or three different trails of them radiated from the mound, and ants coming and going got in each other’s way, sometimes bumping. They waved their antennae about as if they’d never seen another one such as themselves before, though that was clearly not the case, the case being that some sort of chemical messages were being synapsed back and forth before each continued on its way or, sometimes, reversed itself and went back the way it had come. Ants don’t look for that much out of life. They may be brainless, but nothing alive is more purposive, disciplined, and with a stronger work ethic, their lives are all work, even the queen’s, perhaps especially, down there under the mound where we couldn’t see her. Lacking brains, ants make do with genetically programmed little nervous sym-pathies that allow them to contribute to the general welfare. Whatever their role in the society, as egg tenders, warriors, guards, food gatherers, they are all working for the queen, preserving and protecting her as an egg-laying monarch whose fecundity determines the future of the society. Yet any given ant in its life probably never sees the queen, or more than its immediate confreres, although if it circulates more widely than that, certainly with no memory of having met any specific fellow ant before. Yet ant by ant, body by body, and without any visible central decision-making mechanism, they seem to take instruction from one another, antenna to antenna, and are unified in their responses. . . almost like parallel processors, or in fact our own cortical structure of neurons. They each comprise one cell of a group brain, unlike our own in being unlocatable, somewhere above and around them, an invisible organ of thought that is beyond the capacity of any one of them to understand.

  And these are the simplest, most modest kinds of ants, as I explained to the kids, these are domesticated Central Park ants, the house sparrows of the ant species. There are others in the jungles and rain forests and veldts of the world, big ones, that build leaf bridges in trees, cultivate crops, float across rivers on rafts of their own devising, march, make war, eat meat, bite like hell. They are ants that have a patriotic sense of their anthood, if not a degree of self-esteem.

  And then everything was all right again, the adults having come over to see what we were looking at, and enjoying the rap.

  But now I speculate re the ants’ invisible organ of aggregate thought. . . if, in a city park of broad reaches, winding paths, roadways, and lakes, you can imagine seeing on a warm and sunny Sunday afternoon the random and unpredictable movement of great numbers of human beings in the same way. . . if you watch one person, one couple, one family, a child, you can assure yourself of the integrity of the individual will and not be able to divine what the next moment will bring. But when the masses are celebrating a beautiful day in the park in a prescribed circulation of activities, the wider lens of thought reveals nothing errant, nothing inconstant or unnatural to the occasion. And if someone acts in a mutant un-park manner, alarms go off, the unpredictable element, a purse snatcher, a gun wielder, is isolated, surrounded, ejected, carried off as waste. So that while we are individually and privately dyssynchronous, moving in different ways, for different purposes, in different directions, we may at the same time comprise, however blindly, the pulsing communicating cells of an urban over-brain. The intent of this organ is to enjoy an afternoon in the park, as each of us street-grimy urbanites loves to do. In the backs of our minds when we gather for such days, do we know this? How much of our desire to use the park depends on the desires of others to do the same? How much of the idea of a park is in the genetic invitation on nice days to reflect our massive neuromorphology? There is no central control mechanism telling us when and how to use the park. That is up to us. But when we do, our behavior there is reflective, we can see more of who we are because of the open space accorded to us, and it is possible that it takes such open space to realize in simple form the ordinary identity we have as one multicellular culture of thought that is always there, even when, in the comparative blindness of our personal selfhood, we are flowing through the streets at night or riding under them, simultaneously, as synaptic impulses in the metropolitan brain.

  Is this a stretch? But think of the contingent human mind, how fast it snaps onto the given subject, how easily it is introduced to an idea, an image that it had not dreamt of thinking of a millisecond before.. . . Think of how the first line of a story yokes the mind into a place, a time, in the time it takes to read it. How you can turn on the radio and suddenly be in the news, and hear it and know it as your own mind’s possession in the moment’s firing of a neuron. How when you hear a familiar song your mind adopts its attitudinal response to life before the end of the first bar. How the opening credits of a movie provide the parameters of your emotional life for its ensuing two hours.. . . How all experience is instantaneous and instantaneously felt, in the nature of ordinary mind
-filling revelation. The permeable mind, contingently disposed for invasion, can be totally overrun and occupied by all the characteristics of the world, by everything that is the case, and by the thoughts and propositions of all other minds considering everything that is the case. . . as instantly and involuntarily as the eye fills with the objects that pass into its line of vision.

  So we, too, are subjected to a kind of quantum weirdness, defined in our indeterminacy by how we are measured. . .

  —Sunday

  In my new vestments, blue blazer, charcoal slacks, and a gray turtleneck, I launch from the cement dock and high-wire it over the river on the Roosevelt Island Tramway. Windy day, rocks a bit. Are you up here, Lord?

  Nobody in the crowded car notices that I am no longer a priest.

  East River estuary, heavily tidal, inviting, aglitter with sunlight.

  Why am I doing this? Apparently Sunday is still subject to the old urges, the residual feelings. But mostly I wanted to see that one dying lunger, name of McIlvaine.

  Not that it was easy, deciding to come out as a layperson.

  The hospice, run by the city for indigent terminals, a low yellow-brick building on the south end of the island.

  Gulls in a line on the bulwark breasting the wind. The surging currents look unswimmable, suggestive of exile. Confirmed by the view across the river of the immense risen wall of Manhattan. At its foot, the FDR Drive traffic crawls along ant-file. And from this vantage the Fifty-ninth Street underbridge throws a broad shadow across the river as it soars past on its way to Queens.