by McSweeney's
They were in Martin’s neighborhood now. “That’s where I live,” he said, pointing at his building. “On the third floor. There’s seven of us.” He would have told her more—about how his father wanted to look for a better place but never had time, about how he had to share his room with a four-year-old and a five-year-old—but the stone in his chest was dragging on his words, making them heavy and hard to say. He fought against the desire to sit down on the sidewalk and curl up into a ball.
“Then there’s the worst ones,” said Mrs. D after a quick glance at his building. They turned the corner onto 18th Street. “That’s when you find people being cruel to their dogs. Now this I can’t stand.”
Martin put his free hand over his other ear. He didn’t want to hear about it. The sadness coming at him over the phone was almost more than he could stand. The stone in his chest felt like a load of bricks now, attached by a chain to his heart.
They turned up Carter Street, and went by the Chinese grocery and the noodle shop and the dry cleaners. Every now and then, Mrs. D took the phone from him and listened herself to make sure he was doing it right. “This is a real heavy one for your first time,” she said. “Sorry about that.”
Past the used bookstore they went, past the ice cream place. Martin’s knees wanted to crumple. His feet weighed ten pounds apiece.
“But it isn’t all bad, I want you to know,” Mrs. D went on. “I can’t tell you how many lost dogs I’ve returned to their families.”
Martin wasn’t listening. He was afraid he couldn’t stand it any more. He thought he might collapse onto the curb and start sobbing. “I can’t do this.” He gasped out the words, and at first she didn’t hear him. “I can’t—” he said again, but he kept going anyhow, and in a minute he realized something odd. He’d come to a spot where, no matter what direction he took, the feeling grew just a tiny bit weaker. If he stood still, it was horribly strong. He told her so.
“Then we’re here,” she said. “This is it.”
They’d come to a big apartment building—350 Lincoln Avenue—with wide steps leading up to a double door. The door was open, because two men carrying a table between them were coming out.
“Grab the door,” Mrs. D whispered to Martin. He did, and they slipped inside.
“Awright. Now listen again. You should hear that one voice all by itself now.”
He listened. The doleful feeling led him up the first flight of stairs and down a hall. At the end was an open door. It was clear that whoever lived here had moved out. Big taped-up cardboard boxes stood in the hall.
“You want me to take over now?” said Mrs. D.
Martin shook his head. He wasn’t going to go through all this just to quit at the end.
“Then go in there and find out what’s going on,” she said. “I’ll wait for you out here.”
Martin turned off the phone and handed it to Mrs. D. He stepped into the apartment. It was nearly empty, except for a rolled-up carpet. He smelled paint. The only noise was a faint scraping sound coming from another room. He followed the sound.
In the living room, which overlooked the street, stood a man facing the windows, with his back to Martin. He was taping a piece of paper to the glass.
“Excuse me,” Martin said.
The man turned around. “Who are you, kid?”
Martin said his name. “Is there a dog here?” he asked.
“Sure is,” said the man. “In there, in the kitchen.” He pointed across the hall. “Darned people left him behind, can you believe it? Just left him, without a word.” He turned back to his taping. “So I gotta take him to the pound, unless you want him.”
Martin went into the kitchen. There, under the kitchen table, tied to a table leg with a piece of rope, was a curled-up heap of sorrow—a small dog, white with brown patches and triangle ears. Without raising his head, he swiveled his eyes to look up at Martin. His tail was tucked down around his rump. He was trembling.
Martin squatted down and put his hand on the dog’s back. “Hey, dog,” he said quietly. “Hey, good dog, I’m here now.” He untied the rope from the table leg and coaxed the dog to his feet. Slowly, he led him out of the kitchen.
The man was sweeping the floor of the living room now. Martin looked at the piece of paper taped to the window. It said:
“How much?” he asked.
The man told him. Martin’s heart sped up. “How many bedrooms?”
“Four,” the man said.
Martin’s heart beat so hard it made his voice shake. “I know a family that might like it,” he said. “Nice people. My family. Will you hold it till I can get my father to come look?”
“Okay,” said the man. “But you better get him right now. This place is gonna go fast.”
When Martin came out, Mrs. D (who’d been listening by the door) cast a glance at the little dog and told Martin her hunch had been right: she was turning over the ACES job to him. “Meant to be,” she said. “Meant to be, no doubt about it. Just in time, too, my feet are too old for this.” She frowned at him, and her purple hat fell down over her eyebrows. “Now, you won’t get sick of this and quit, will you?”
“No,” said Martin.
“And if you do ever want to quit, you’ll find someone to take over, won’t you?”
“Yes,” said Martin.
She nodded once and handed him the phone. Then she reached out and snatched it back again. She hit the 5 button and held the phone to her ear. “Just want to listen one more time,” she said. She stood there for a minute or so. Then she turned and stumped away.
And in the months and years that followed, people in the neighborhoods around the 14th Street Park became accustomed to seeing a tall boy on his inline skates every afternoon, gliding along the streets with a cell phone pressed to his ear. They figured he was a delivery boy of some kind. He never told anyone what his job really was. To his family and friends, he said he was out practicing his skating. It was true that he got a lot of practice. Some days he skated for miles, answering dozens of urgent calls. Other days there might be only two calls, or only one. And now and then came a day when the feelings pouring through the phone contained not a single thread of distress, when all the dogs in all the twenty blocks were well-fed and contented, either safe at home or romping happily with their people. On those afternoons, Martin left his skates in the apartment (at 350 Lincoln Avenue), went to the 14th Street Park, and played ball with his own dog, who was no longer sad.
THE SIXTH BOROUGH
BY JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER
Illustrated by Barry Blitt
Once upon a time, New York City had a Sixth Borough. You won’t read about it in any of the history books, because there’s nothing—save for the circumstantial evidence in Central Park—to prove that it was there at all. Which makes its existence very easy to dismiss. Especially in a time like this one, when the world is so unpredictable, and it takes all of one’s resources just to get by in the present tense. But even though most people will say they have no time or reason to believe in the Sixth Borough, and don’t believe in the Sixth Borough, they will still use the word believe.
The Sixth Borough was an island, separated from Manhattan by a thin body of water, whose narrowest crossing corresponded to that year’s long-jump record, such that exactly one person on Earth could go from Manhattan to the Sixth Borough without touching the ground. A huge party was made of the yearly leap. Bagels were strung from island to island on special spaghetti, samosas were bowled at baguettes, Greek salads were thrown like confetti. The children of New York captured fireflies in glass jars, which they floated between the boroughs. The bugs would slowly asphyxiate, flickering rapidly for their last few minutes of life. If it was timed right, the river shimmered as the jumper crossed it.
When the time finally came, the long jumper would begin his approach from the East River. He would run the entire width of Manhattan, as New Yorkers rooted him on from opposite sides of the street, from the windows of their apartments and offi
ces, from the branches of the trees. And when he leapt, New Yorkers cheered from the banks of both Manhattan and the Sixth Borough, cheering on the jumper, and cheering on each other. For those few moments that the jumper was in the air, every New Yorker felt capable of flight.
Or perhaps “suspension” is a better word. Because what was so inspiring about the leap was not how the jumper got from one borough to the other, but how he stayed between them for so long.
One year—many, many years ago—the end of the jumper’s big toe touched the surface of the water and caused a little ripple. People gasped, as the ripple traveled out from the Sixth Borough back toward Manhattan, knocking the jars against each other like wind chimes.
“You must have gotten a bad start!” a Manhattan councilman hollered from across the water.
The jumper nodded no, more confused than ashamed.
“There was wind in your face,” a Sixth Borough councilman suggested, offering a towel for the jumper’s foot.
The jumper shook his head.
“Perhaps he ate too much for lunch,” said one onlooker to another.
“Or maybe he’s past his prime,” said another, who’d brought his kids to watch the leap.
“I bet his heart wasn’t in it,” said another. “You just can’t expect to jump that far without some serious feeling.”
“No,” the jumper said to all of the speculation. “None of that’s right. I jumped just fine.”
The revelation traveled across the onlookers like the ripple caused by the toe, and when the mayor of New York City spoke it aloud, everyone sighed in agreement: “The Sixth Borough is moving.”
Each year after, a few inches at a time, the Sixth Borough receded from New York. One year, the long jumper’s entire foot got wet, and after a number of years, his shin, and after many, many years—so many years that no one could even remember what it was like to celebrate without anxiety—the jumper had to reach out his arms and grab at the Sixth Borough fully extended, and then, sadly, he couldn’t touch it at all. The eight bridges between Manhattan and the Sixth Borough strained and then crumbled, one at a time, into the water. The tunnels were pulled too thin to hold anything at all.
The phone and electrical lines snapped, requiring Sixth Boroughers to revert to archaic technologies, most of which resembled children’s toys: they used magnifying glasses to reheat their carry-out; they folded important documents into paper airplanes and threw them out of one office building window and into another; those fireflies in glass jars, which had once been used merely for decorative purposes during the festivals of the leap, were now found in every room of every apartment, taking the place of artificial light.
The very same engineers who dealt with the Leaning Tower of Pisa were brought over to assess the situation.
“It wants to go,” they said.
“Well, what can you say about that?” the mayor of New York asked.
To which they replied: “There’s nothing to say about that.”
Of course they tried to save it. Although “save” might not be the right word, as it did seem to want to go. Maybe “detain” is the right word. Chains were moored to the banks of the islands, but the links soon snapped, one at a time. Concrete foundations were poured around the perimeter of the Sixth Borough, but they, too, failed. Harnesses failed, magnets failed, even prayer failed.
Young friends, whose string-and-tin-can phone extended from island to island, had to feed more and more string, as if letting kites go higher and higher.
“It’s getting almost impossible to hear you,” said one young girl from her bedroom in Manhattan, as she squinted through a pair of her father’s binoculars, trying to find her friend’s window.
“I’ll holler if I have to,” said her friend from his bedroom in the Sixth Borough, aiming last birthday’s telescope at her apartment.
The string between them grew incredibly long, so long it had to be extended with many other strings tied together: the wind of his yo-yo, the pull from her talking doll, what had fastened his father’s diary, what had kept her grandmother’s pearls around her neck and off the floor, what had separated his great-uncle’s childhood quilt from a pile of rags. Contained within everything they shared with one another were the yoyo, the doll, the diary, the necklace, and the quilt. They had more and more to tell each other, and less and less string to add to the nearly taut phone.
The boy asked the girl to say “I love you” into her can, giving her no further explanation.
And she didn’t ask for any, or say, “That’s silly,” or, “We’re too young for love,” or even suggest that she was saying “I love you” because he asked her to. Her words traveled the yo-yo, the doll, the diary, the necklace, the quilt, the clothesline, the birthday present, the harp, the tea bag, the table lamp, the tennis racket, the hem of the skirt he one day should have pulled from her body … The boy covered his can with a lid, removed it from the string, and put her love from him on a shelf in his closet. Of course, he could never open the can, because then he would lose its contents. It was enough just to know that it was there.
Some, like that boy’s family, wouldn’t leave the Sixth Borough. Some said, “Why should we? It’s the rest of the world that’s moving. Our borough is fixed. Let them leave Manhattan.” How can you prove someone like that wrong? And who would want to?
For most Sixth Boroughers, though, there was no question of refusing to believe the obvious, just as there was no underlying stubbornness, or principle, or bravery. They just didn’t want to go. They liked their lives and didn’t want to change. So they floated away, one inch at a time.
All of which brings us to Central Park.
* * *
Central Park didn’t used to exist where it now does. It used to rest squarely in the center of the Sixth Borough; it was the joy of the Borough, its heart. But once it was clear that the Sixth Borough was receding for good, that it couldn’t be saved or detained, it was decided, by New York City referendum, to salvage the park. (The vote was unanimous. Even the most obdurate Sixth Boroughers acknowledged what had to be done.) Enormous hooks were driven through the easternmost grounds, and the park was pulled, by the people of New York, like a rug across a floor, from the Sixth Borough and onto Manhattan.
Children were allowed to lie down on the park as it was moved. This was considered a concession, although no one knew why a concession was necessary, or why it was children to whom this concession must be made. The biggest fireworks show in history lit the skies of New York City that night, and the Philharmonic played its heart out.
The children of New York lay on their backs, body to body, filling the park completely. (Amazingly, there was exactly as much space in the park as there were children, as if it had been designed for them and that moment.) The fireworks sprinkled down, dissolving in the air just before they reached the ground, and the children were pulled, one inch and one second at a time, into Manhattan and adulthood. By the time the Park found its current resting place, every single one of the children had fallen asleep, and the Park was a mosaic of their dreams. Some hollered out, some smiled unconsciously, some were perfectly still.
Was there really a Sixth Borough?
There’s no irrefutable evidence.
There’s nothing that could convince someone who doesn’t want to be convinced.
But there is an abundance of clues that would give the wanting believer something to hold on to: in the peculiar fossil record of Central Park, in the incongruous pH of the reservoir, in the placement of certain tanks at the zoo (which correspond to the holes left by the gigantic hooks that pulled the park from borough to borough).
There is a tree—just twenty-four paces due east from the entrance to the merry-go-round—into whose trunk is carved two names. There is no record of them in the phone books or censuses. They are absent from all hospital and tax and voting documentation. There is no evidence whatsoever of their existences, other than the proclamation on the tree.
Here’s a fact: No
less than 5% of the names carved into the trees of Central Park are of unknown origin.
As all of the Sixth Borough’s documents floated away with the Sixth Borough, we will never be able to prove that these names belonged to residents of the Sixth Borough, and were carved when Central Park still resided there, instead of in Manhattan. So some believe that they are made-up names, and, to take the doubt a step further, that the gestures of love were made-up gestures. Others believe that the names and gestures belonged to tourists, which is a reasonable enough belief. Others believe other things.
But it’s hard for anyone, even the most cynical of cynics, to spend more than a few minutes in Central Park without feeling that he or she is experiencing some tense in addition to just the present. Maybe it’s our own nostalgia for what’s past, or our own hopes for what’s to come. Or maybe it’s the residue of the dreams from that night the Park was moved, when all of the children of New York City exercised their subcon-sciouses at once. Maybe we miss what they lost, and yearn for what they wanted.
There’s a gigantic hole in the middle of the Sixth Borough, where Central Park used to be. As the island moves across the planet, it acts like a frame, displaying what lies beneath it.
The Sixth Borough is now in Antarctica. The sidewalks are covered in ice, the stained glass of the Public Library is straining under the weight of the snow. There are frozen fountains in frozen neighborhood parks, where frozen children are frozen at the peaks of their swings—the frozen ropes holding them in flight. The tzit-tzit of frozen little Jewish boys are frozen, as are the strands of their frozen mothers’ frozen wigs. Livery horses are frozen mid-trot, flea-market vendors are frozen mid-haggle, middle-aged women are frozen in the middle of their lives. On the ground are the crystals of the frozen first breaths of babies, and those of the last gasps of the dying. The gavels of frozen judges are frozen between guilty and innocent. On a frozen shelf, in a closest frozen shut, is a can with a voice inside of it.
