I waited at the bus stop in front of the elaborate ironwork façade of the Musée des Instruments de Musique, and the bus, when it arrived, was nearly full. It was warm and damp inside, and everyone found it hard to breathe. We went through the city in that fogged-up interior, looking out with difficulty at the windy streets. I disembarked at Flagey. My umbrella was useless by then, and I threw it away. As I came onto rue Philippe, I found myself walking behind a woman pushing a pram. We were walking in single file between the buildings and some temporary barriers, flat panels of sturdy plastic anchored in concrete blocks that had been set up for a construction project. A sudden gust of wind lifted the panels, which were all tied to each other, and tipped them over, toward us. Immediately I sprang forward and broke their fall with my hands and my body. I staggered, but did not lose my balance. The woman, who was young and Mediterranean-looking, in too-tight jeans, was able to swerve her pram out of harm’s way. I caught no sight of the child, who was swaddled and shielded from the rain with a translucent plastic sheet. The young mother thanked me, again and again, gasping. She seemed stunned at how quickly it had all happened. I waved it off, proud.
The wind persisted in its howling fury. The little street we were walking on had, a hundred years ago, been a stream, not a street. It had been covered over by city planners, and waterside houses suddenly found themselves looking out on traffic. But the water still coursed underground, along the entire length of the street, and that water was returning now, in the form of rain, heavy waters above and flowing waters below.
Instinctively saving a baby, a little happiness; spending time with Rwandans, the ones who survived, a little sadness; the idea of our final anonymity, a little more sadness; sexual desire fulfilled without complication, a little more happiness: and it went on like that, as thought succeeded thought. How petty seemed to me the human condition, that we were subject to this constant struggle to modulate the internal environment, this endless being tossed about like a cloud. Predictably, the mind noted that judgment, too, and assigned it its place: a little sadness. The water that had once flowed along the street we were walking on had run into an artificial pond in the middle of Flagey, a pond that had then been obliterated to create a traffic island, echoing the creation of land in the oldest myths, as a division between the waters.
Night had fallen. I entered the apartment and threw off my clothes and lay in bed in the darkened room, naked. Heavy drops tapped on the window. The weather report was right: in ever widening circles from where I stood, rain was lashing the land. It fell heavily all over the Portuguese district, on the shrine to Pessoa and on Casa Botelho. It fell on Khalil’s phone shop, where Farouq had perhaps just begun his shift. It fell on the bronze head of Leopold II at his monument, on Claudel at his, on the flagstones of the Palais Royal. The rain kept coming down, on the battlefield of Waterloo at the outskirts of the city, the Lion’s Mound, the Ardennes, the implacable valleys full of young men’s bones grown old, on the preserved cities farther out west, on Ypres and the huddled white crosses dotting Flanders fields, the turbulent channel, the impossibly cold sea to the north, on Denmark, France, and Germany.
PART 2. I have searched myself
TWELVE
I made an effort to develop a mind of winter. Late last year, I actually said to myself audibly, as I do when I swear these oaths, that I would have to embrace winter as part of the natural cycle of seasons. Ever since I left Nigeria, I’d had a bad attitude about cold weather, and I wanted to put an end to that. The effort was surprisingly successful, and through October, November, and December, I was properly braced for winds and snow. One thing that helped was that I made a habit of overdressing. Without checking the daily weather, I would wear long johns, doubled socks, a scarf, woolen gloves, a long, thick, dark blue coat, and heavy shoes. But it was to be a year without a real winter. The blizzards for which I braced never came. There were a few days of cold rain, and one or two cold snaps, but heavy snow stayed away. We had a series of sunny days in the middle of December, and I was unnerved by that mildness, and when the season’s first snow did eventually fall, it was while I was in Brussels, getting drenched by the rain there. The snow was in any case short-lived, melted away by the time I returned to New York in mid-January, and thus did the impression of unseasonal, somewhat uncanny, warmth persist in my mind, keeping the world, as I experienced it, on edge.
Those thoughts had returned even before I was properly back in the city. The pilot’s voice crackling through the system—We are now making our final approach for landing—added to the anxiety of return because those ordinary and, by now, banal words seemed to carry some ghostly portent. My thoughts quickly became entangled with one another, so that, in addition to the usual morbid thoughts one normally has on a plane, I was saddled with strange mental transpositions: that the plane was a coffin, that the city below was a vast graveyard with white marble and stone blocks of various heights and sizes. But as we broke through the last layer of clouds and the city in its true form suddenly appeared a thousand feet below us, the impression I had was not at all morbid. What I experienced was the unsettling feeling that I had had precisely this view of the city before, accompanied by the equally strong feeling that it had not been from the point of view of a plane.
Then it came to me: I was remembering something I had seen about a year earlier: the sprawling scale model of the city that was kept at the Queens Museum of Art. The model had been built for the World’s Fair in 1964, at great cost, and afterward had been periodically updated to keep up with the changing topography and built environment of the city. It showed, in impressive detail, with almost a million tiny buildings, and with bridges, parks, rivers, and architectural landmarks, the true form of the city. The attention to detail was so meticulous that one could not help but think of Borges’s cartographers, who, obsessed with accuracy, had made a map so large and so finely detailed that it matched the empire’s scale on a ratio of one to one, a map in which each thing coincided with its spot on the map. The map proved so unwieldy that it was eventually folded up and left to rot in the desert. Our view from the plane, as we banked over Queens itself, brought all of that back to mind, and in this case it was the real city that seemed to be matching, point for point, my memory of the model, which I had stared at for a long time from a ramp in the museum. Even the raking evening light falling across the city evoked the spotlighting used at the museum.
On the day I had seen the Panorama, I had been impressed by the many fine details it presented: the rivulets of roads snaking across a velvety Central Park, the boomerang of the Bronx curving up to the north, the elegant beige spire of the Empire State Building, the white tablets of the Brooklyn piers, and the pair of gray blocks on the southern tip of Manhattan, each about a foot high, representing the persistence, in the model, of the World Trade Center towers, which, in reality, had already been destroyed.