He had a name.
2
The city was beginning to come awake.
It was Saturday morning, and she was a little slow rising, a little tardy in shaking the sleep from her bones. Here and there, as Buddwing walked along Central Park South, a window shade went up slowly and reluctantly. This was Saturday morning, and there was no place to go, no hurry to get anywhere. This was Saturday, and the city came up out of sleep a little too early, through force of habit perhaps, and then heaved an enormous shrug that you could feel clear down to her bowels. Up and down the wide street, steam hissed up from manhole covers. A lone cruising taxicab slowed as the driver spotted Buddwing, but it was too early; the city was still restlessly stirring in a warm bed smelling of Friday night’s musk and Friday night’s liquor and Friday night’s copulation. The cab picked up speed and passed him by; it was too early.
He could hear the sound of birds in the park, a sound you rarely heard in this city. He could hear them chirping in a hundred different voices, could hear their calls echoing among the trees beginning to bud in the first sweet rush of spring, and then re-echoing across the balmy air, touching the bright yellow forsythia blooms ranged like golden asterisks against the park’s stone walls, trilling across the red and pink cornelian cherry shrubs, dissipating on the air, seeming to vanish, and then suddenly replenished and replaced by another bird voice, another sharp trilling chirp, the chirps multiplied and magnified until it seemed a thousand birds, a million birds, were calling to the city, urging her to rise, willing her to rise.
In this enormous city, which had a name but was nonetheless anonymous, in this sprawling New York stirring now to test her early morning muscle, he walked anonymously, a man with a name who was anonymous to himself. And in this anonymity (Christ, how sweet the birds sounded) he felt a sudden joy that was somehow contained within a brittle shell of sympathy for every other anonymous son of a bitch who lived here. He knew this city was his. Whatever else he knew about himself, and he knew precious little, he knew that he had been born in this city, that he belonged in this city, that he felt this city’s pulse as his own pulse, that she held an irrevocable and lifelong claim to his love and his hate, and that she would never let him go as long as he could breathe.
He could not count the number of times he had walked along Central Park South in his life. He tried now to remember other times on this wide street, tried to remember if there had been bird sounds then, tried to remember if he could see the haze slowly burning away over the roof of the Coliseum in the distance, could remember none of it, and yet knew with certainty he had walked this street in winter and summer, spring and fall, that it was as much a part of him as his liver or his heart. The city called to him that Saturday morning. He had found a new face by confronting himself in a mirror at the Plaza, he had stolen a first name from an unknown woman on a telephone, and then requisitioned a surname from a beer and an airplane: Sam Buddwing. And now Sam Buddwing — clean, new, somehow filled with joy and sadness — walked into a city he loved and hated, clean and new, and heard her calling to him.
Deep in her gut, he could feel the rumble of infrequent subway trains growling along subterranean tracks, clattering into nearly deserted station stops. He could visualize, he could hear, a drunk mumbling in his sleep on the platform, a young couple whispering to each other behind one of the pillars, her lipstick smeared, his hair tousled. He could roam this city in his mind, he could turn over every corner of her, inspect her armpits and her crotch, kiss her navel and her throat, plunge his hands deep into the hot spongy interior of her, and come out stinking of honey and blood, loving her, hating her. He could hear the tugs hooting their cry on the Hudson, thousands of miles crosstown, could feel the haze rising from the river, hanging in a veil beneath the George Washington Bridge, rising, rising; you could see the Palisades across the river. How many times had he shrieked on that roller coaster? How many times had he seen the posters for the amusement park, the young girl in her swimsuit standing beside the swimming pool, and known this was the real beginning of summer? How many times had he climbed those mysterious steps, the steps of Aztecs or Mayans or Apaches, leading up to Washington Heights? How many girls had he kissed in Poe Park near the band shell in the summer when Bobby Sherwood was playing “Elks’ Parade” and the lights of Fordham Road danced in the distance? How many skirts had he raised by the banks of the Bronx River where the willows hung suspended over the water and light reflected eerily in blackness? Oh, he knew this city; he loved this city, and he hated her.
He could remember.
He could remember — and he delicately nourished the memory, delicately nurtured it for fear it would vanish completely, leaving him lost again — bicycles, bicycles along a silent summer path; the path wound alongside the river. He could remember her plaid skirt flapping as she pedaled the bicycle, dark hair blowing back and free from her face, a boy’s bicycle, her brother’s, and the flash of thigh and her laugh high and melodious on the still hot air under the viaduct arching overhead, the sudden trees, they parked the bicycles in deep shade. They took them off the path and lay them flat, crushing the new young grass. He explored her mouth, her black hair hung in a curtain over his face, he touched the warm inner softness of her thighs, he could remember.
Who?
A boy, so young.
A girl.
He did not know her name.
He remembered a vague Sam Buddwing, a boy wearing bicycle clips; the bike was black with white trim, he could remember that, but the boy he remembered was unclear and indistinctly formed. He could not see his face, only a thin angular body, and a head held somewhat the way the man in the mirror at the Plaza had held his head, but nothing more than that, and then even that was gone.
The empty city surrounded him.
He could hear the clatter of his own shoes on the pavement. The street was deserted now. He had a sudden desire to step off the curb and into the middle of the street, and run up the white line to Sixth Avenue. The desire paused. The city seemed more silent than ever. Even the birds were hushed. He wondered how he had expected to get into the subway when he had no money, and then an audacious idea came into his head, and he knew instantly that he would try it, and quickened his step to the kiosk. He was grinning broadly now, outraged by the audacity of his plan, knowing he would never have conceived it, never hoped to execute it, if he knew who he really was, if he had a real identity and a real name. But he was Sam Buddwing, and he didn’t know a goddamn soul, and so he hurried down the steps, his eyes searching the ground as he walked.
He would need a piece of cardboard, or a slip of paper, no, cardboard would be better. He could see the change booth up ahead. There was only one man in it at this hour of the morning, and he was probably half asleep. Yes, it would work; he felt certain it would work. He found what he was looking for swept against one of the walls, a piece of white cardboard that had undoubtedly served as the inside backing for a candy bar. He picked it up and looked at it. It seemed wide enough, but perhaps it was a trifle too long. Carefully, he folded three-quarters of an inch from one end, and then cautiously tore the cardboard along the fold. Lifting his head confidently, he walked toward the change booth and then past it. He ignored the turnstiles and walked directly to the gate alongside them. He turned only casually toward the change booth, raised his hand palm outward with the white piece of cardboard cupped in his palm like a transportation pass of some kind, holding it for the change-booth attendant to see. The attendant looked through his bars, gave a brief nod, and went back to whatever he was doing. Buddwing opened the gate and walked on through. He kept walking without looking back, going down the steps to the Uptown platform.