For three weeks, my composure rode an explosive rush. The novelty of Franklin saw me through; I could not have gone it alone. How did I accomplish those leaps, the terrible intervals of those days? All done cross-hands. Independent lines somehow crossing over. Pain and elation in a linkage group. Departure anxiety, the promise of new places intensifying the ache. Disasters stand out: an excursion Tuckwell and I made to Central Park Zoo. We'd planned the trip for one of our rare simultaneous days off. Once there, in front of the cages, we couldn't for the life of us recall why we'd come.
Committed to a formal outing, Keith and I made the rounds, although we knew in the first minute it was an awful mistake. The zoo was grayer, more decrepit than either of us remembered. As everyplace else, it had succumbed to creeping graffiti fungus, the surreal, urgently illegible signatures of the buried. Animals lay neglected in cages, sick, overfed, deflated. The few that moved traced out tight, psychotic circles. A pack of safety-pinned twenty-year-olds (although given our infatuation with extended adolescence, they could have been thirty) bounced marshmallows off the open mouth of a panting sea lion, ridiculing the beast for being too stupid to bite. "Sick, the whole lot," I whispered violently.
"It's your generation made us torturers," Tuckwell joked, steering me on. I couldn't keep from attaching myself to each pen, a mission of pointless distress. Why was the zoo still standing? Why this irrelevant park in the first place? Certainly not for solace. Gruesome ornament, tribute to the sadistic housebreaking of a force that long ago ceased to command fear. The cages proved that plumbing and shag were best, after all. The worst civilized annoyance was superior to the dead end of animals. I waved at the insults tailored to each genus. "What's the point? No beauty we can't humiliate?"
"Serves them right. Lower forms of evolution. They've had just as much geologic time to get evolved as we have. And look at them. Just look at them. Pitiful." But seeing that his patter only irritated me, Keith resorted to logical blundering. "You're mad, woman. So the place is on the decayed side. That's a problem with the tax base, not humanity." Pragmatics failing, he tried compassion. The animals did not know their suffering. And at least here they were kept alive.
We tried to salvage the afternoon by eating out, but fell into a fight over where to go. Keith had made reservations at the Chinese place in the 50s where we'd first had dinner together. He dropped the announcement on me with a now-for-what-you've-all-been-waiting-for flair. "Can't you hear the wontons calling?" I didn't even fake my usual diplomacy. "No? I was pretty sure I could hear a won-ton calling. Something was calling, anyway. High-pitched, squeaky. Maybe it was an egg roll that thought it was a___" Making no headway, he gave up. We began walking crosstown. After a grizzly block, he stopped and caught my arm. "I thought you liked the place."
"I like the place. I'm glad we're going there, OK?" But every concession was a refusal.
"We don't have to go there, you know. So they sue us for the canceled reservation. Take us for everything. I can get a second job—"I laughed, if through my teeth. Feeling the victory, Keith chose his cadence. "Is it those punks? Forget them. Beatniks. Greasers. Whooodlums."
"It's our generation made them torturers."
"Oh. That's it. Sorry. You're not old enough to be their mother. Maybe a very much older spinster sister—"
"Thanks, ass. That's not it."
"The animals, then? Look, you can't do anything about them. Lost cause. The least offensive of our sins. You want anxiety? Zoo animals are the last thing to get morally outraged over, at this late a date." I was still refusing to incriminate myself when we drew up outside the restaurant. Keith was near distraction. "Listen. It's obvious, even to me, that you're trying to tell me something. What's the secret word this time, Jan? I've got to guess, evidently. One assumes it's bigger than the proverbial breadbox, or we wouldn't have killed a decent day over it. Damn it, woman. Look around. We're standing in front of a fine establishment; we can saunter in and make them wait on us hand and foot. The best goddamn mu shu this side of Confucius Plaza. We're more than reasonably well off, given world per capita___" Feeling himself on dangerous ground, he dropped a decibel. "We're both doing exactly what we want in life. You realize the odds against that? Look around, woman. It's your day off. We can do anything you want. Get a room uptown tonight, if you like. Anything. Condemned to freedom, as the Frogs like to say. A perfect day, if you make it. Unlike any other that has ever happened."
Ridiculous, I thought, even as he got the sentence out. Seven August, one of an endless series. Ten days earlier, I had passed over, without ripple, that landscape with conflagration, the 1976 quake in Tangshan, China, 8.2 on the Richter, killing a surreal 655,235. I'd passed it by for the Event Calendar for no other reason than my deciding that history had to serve some other cause than ungraspable tragedy. In contrast, two days before this outing, I'd posted the Mayflower and Speedwell setting sail for the New World. Honesty compelled me to add how the Pilgrims were forced to return to England and ditch the Speedwell as unseaworthy. Yet the abortive first run seemed the one needing commemorating. The uncelebrated cost of leaving. My own life was about to modulate to exploration, and it made me morose. Had I known the first thing about being alive, I would have made my last weeks with Keith affectionate, funny. But I've never known anything. I didn't even know what he knew: I was already gone.
After dinner, I lifted again. The sides of the absurd Woolworth Building, in low light, grew oppressively beautiful. I wanted to save all those horrid skyboxes, paint and carve them. We walked back east, and the stone and glass took on the dusk-shades of Morandi bottles glowing subtly in a chalk-and-sand rainbow. We skirted the panorama of Wall Street, the Battery, Chinatown. We walked back over the bridge, taut cables pulling the span up in the middle, a woman arching her back in animal ecstasy as her mate bit her gently by the neck. The city sat in the ocean, practically drifted out, afloat on the water. I could smell the brine and hear the surf above the traffic, as if this were not the densest collection of refugees in the world but only a summer resort, breakers and gradations of late-summer light visible from every window of the great beachfront hotel.
Night had dropped over the buildingscape, but every structure burned — cubist crystal palaces, technological Oz of local urgencies, with nobody manning the controls. I turned in mid-bridge and looked back where we had walked, saw the miles of fossil-fuel blazing, the millennia of buried plant beds going up in smoke in an endless point-tapestry of yellows and fire-blue greens and incandescent whites — a rush of unstoppable, jarring intervals. No matter how I moved or where I stood, I seemed plunged dead-set in the middle of the known world.
Today in History
Cyfer is not what it advertises itself to be. The four senior scientists and three apprentices form not so much a real research team as a loose specialist confederation. Each member pursues a personal line aside from the coding question. A cross section of disparate disciplines, they have been brought together by Ulrich for communication that could produce the hoped-for experimental avenue, give them a bead on the big picture.