Through long practice, applied urban renewal, you fill in every surface of your former block. There you reprise your old existence, an invisible tourist, threading through the mass pageant. Incubus again, among the lives that you depended on for every particular, people that you fed off without even bothering to learn their names. What you liked to call a private person, a solitary one, all the dress-up terms for parasite. Now that you'd knock on their doors, enter their living rooms give yourself wholeheartedly to your bit part in the improvised script you can't. Your neighbors pass right through you on the street. You an the phantom you worked so hard to be.
They give you the keys to the city, abandon you to free excursion: deeper downtown. You make a left on Clark and head down past the Historical Society. Jog over to Dearborn or La Salle, depending upon barometric pressure. The weather is always spring. When you stop, a Gilded Age mansion or pretty brownstone façade slides into focus. But you don't often stop, short of your destination.
The approach to the Loop, always on Michigan, picks up definition. The Hancock, the Water Tower. On the bridge, the full panorama comes back. The newspaper buildings, Marina Towers. But bit by bit, even the throwaway filler solidifies, the tumbleweed concrete thrown up in the alleys and interstices. You start to remember buildings you can't ever have registered in all your years living in this town.
But this is still not what you've come to see. You click off the last mile, down the superb stretch that the two of you took at most six times, in all your two and a half thousand opportunities to walk it together. The line of the lake opens. Buildings to the left of you fall away, leaving on your right a sheer cliff face of masonry and glass. When the explosions issue from the direction of Navy Pier, you hold them at bay. Nothing human can harm a single pane of this illusion.
Twin carved lions enlarge in front of you, proving your forward motion. The sensation is uncanny, like sitting on a stationary train while another backs up on the next track. If you can mount the stone steps, get past the coat check, the bookstore, the ticket booth, if you can climb up the grand central staircase without some street detonation or strip assault by sadistic guard, you are home free.
Once you reach that second floor, nothing can harm you. Time lies crumpled in a heap, back downstairs at the coat check. Always a footrace; you can't enter the museum except through that long walk in from the North Side. The slightest tracer can defeat you, any block along the way. But once you're here, the soul-pithing dullness of existence has no more say.
The day still advances at its old rate, but you no longer feel it. Your heartbeat races or freezes, turns on a pin, floats on a seascape, jumps through a circus hoop, does whatever you tell it to do. It trawls in the afternoon light, downstream from an old mill. It ascends into heaven with the Virgin. It dawdles, designless, at a cafe full of boaters. It floats in a porcelain footbath full of water.
Hours may pass in your absence. Sometimes you come back, and the gaping wasteland between lunch and dinner has vanished. Sometimes the day has not budged since you set off, and all you have to show for your weekend away is swollen feet. But so long as you are here, you are safe from both hope and its opposite. There is no long, no short, no tedium, no delay. Only the dimension-free now.
Time here is caught in the thinnest frozen section, sliced off and held to the light. At every inhabited moment, someone has needed to make these plays of line, these shorthands for elsewhere, for ever. You came here too rarely to fix in your mind more than a few dozen of these trapped eternities. But how many eternities does one person really need? Any one will fill all the space you give it.
Surviving to find your way here, you're free to range at will. You lie back in a manicured green park on what seems a riverbank. You stand on a platform in a glass-roofed railroad station, filling up with steam. Who would have thought you'd have such a memory for color? You cannot remember the color of Gwen's eyes, but you can make out the girl at the half door's, down to their nearest wavelength.
Here, in these galleries of hypothetical, your Qur'an turns its true face to you. You've failed to grasp it until now, the flash point of all faith, the law against depiction. The men who have taken you still adhere to the same ban that the West started out with — its second commandment, for God's sake. You stroll through the banned images, the forbidden fruit, heaven's stolen fire. This is the war that steals your life. Its front stretches out before you, farther than you can see. You've strayed into a factional flare-up, fluke regional politics. But even yours is just a tiny salient in the global sacred conflict, the millennia-long showdown between those who would fabricate God, forever sculpting and perfecting, and those who would suffer Him unseen.
Even being here indicts you. You're guilty, aligned. You are graven image's man, hostage for a reason. You can hope for no sentence less than the general bonfire. Imagination may be worse than the thing it would save you from. But what you will not abandon, you must live in. A place past hope. A place past place. A now indifferent to what happens next.
You press through the jumble of rooms, searching for that picture that you can't picture, the view that would make even death livable. On this upper floor, the two of you once stood looking. The simplest arrangement imaginable. Nothing: an open shutter, a few sticks of furniture. You turned to Gwen, to see what she saw. And she was weeping. Staring through wet lenses at that painted taunt, timeless and still, sadistically refusing her entry.
You should be able to summon it up in your sleep. But no; you must thread your way to where it hangs and look on it. No other way. Must have it there, in front of you, stroke for stroke.
The galleries are too many, the catalogue of old urgencies too wide. They maze you. The halls loop back inside their own folds. You have trouble steering your mental proxy. The puppet is willing but the strings are weak. Paint's apartments disappear down receding corridors, a nightmare rococo palace that lengthens with each step, its chambers filled with nativities, crucifixions, state-sanctioned agitprop, flattering bourgeois makeovers, pretty pastel picnics, nostalgic landscapes sprinkled with faked-up ruins.
Days unfurl when it feels as if you are closing in. All but there. A glow issues from down the hall, three archways away. You pick up the pace, forgetting, in your excitement, the original goal of killing time. She'll be standing, stilled and well, across this last threshold, waiting for you in the southern light, on the smooth-planked, scarred varnish floors.
Holy War always tears you back. For weeks it can leave you rotting, only to choose its moment of maximum intrusion. Ali, yearning for his school days in the States, bounds into your cell to chat about the Final Four. Some argument among your overseers, tuning their crippled TV to the latest Arabic-dubbed Dallas or Knots Landing, escalates to signs of innocence, but he ignores you. No sin you might commit can
penetrate him.
His twisted lips spit out Amal. Arabic for "hope." Impossible. This assault force laying siege to the nest of Western hostages: Amal? Hope and God's Partisans are on the same side. You'd have sworn your sanity on it, if not your life.