Not many of his neighbours were known to him, beyond what habits and transactions the echoing pipes and slamming doors conveyed, the calls to each other in the hallway — Hey, Larry, get me some coffee, dark, twelve sugars — and the nocturnal cinematography generously provided. There were intriguing pieces of evidence which hinted at who might live inside. Letters in the foyer mail slots told him their names. Bierdronski. Vellum. Mr and Mrs Berger. Odours came from under the doors, cooking, cigar smoke, even the rich smell of the English countryside was detectable some days outside one of the first floor residences, number 104, and every time he passed by Cy paused momentarily, confused, enchanted, perhaps even a touch homesick for God knew what bucolic portion of his nation. Once he had even stopped a few minutes in the corridor, determined to define the fragrance. He bent close to the apartment door, closer than he had been to it ever before, close enough to qualify as a rudeness. It was a sweet ripe smell, stronger for his attendance, that was redolent of the marshes and the moors and the outer lying land around the bay. The scent of newly turned fields and useful earth and livestock. Inside there was a faint shuffling sound, but as you could never rely on the building’s erratic acoustics for authenticity, he was unsure if the noise was actually coming from the chamber beyond his ear. Then he heard a masculine snort, as if somebody inside was very sick with a deep chest cold. There was the rasping sound of a person perhaps breathing with immense difficulty just on the other side of the door or perhaps rubbing a beard along the wall, almost next to his ear. But he did not knock and introduce himself.
He had been brought up in a hotel, where it was not necessary to form lasting relationships with the inhabitants of a place of residence, even though some had left lasting impressions on him, the consumptives with their wrung-out hope and Eva Brennan, who was the first girl to have drawn her name through his heart. Guests were no more than briefly fostered children, to be fed, washed, kept tolerably warm and entertained on funds provided. In truth, after the close-kept treachery of living with Eliot Riley, his inescapable, random tyranny, the perpetual evidence of his sickness and the availability of Cy as whipping boy, nursemaid and verbal punching bag to his landlord and boss, he was glad to be alone now and remote, with a simple new identity of his own choosing.
There was a moment after he first came to the continent when he began to question the truth of what his trustworthy eyes conveyed, America unravelled, and for a short time reality departed, threw up its hands and marched out of the room. The moment passed, but it may have weakened his grip on the ordinary, the way Eva had weakened his disposition for love, and if he thought back to it, it may have led to all the strangeness, the dreaming and the madness that would occur during his time in the new world. It was a moment that he assumed all newcomers to the city must have felt at some point or another, for who could sustain a calm pace of breath or look up with an unimpressed eye or speak with a blasé tone in unwavering consistency and unaffectedness in this place? Who could get used to the set and the stage of the ongoing play? Such banality was impossible even for a lifelong citizen of New York, for whenever it felt the urge, the city itself and all its boroughs could toss up a curiosity or a peculiarity, or kilter out a hitherto unnoticed detail, or create a marvel of fiction or of fact right before the eyes to remind its residents that this indeed was New York, lest that absurd fact be forgotten, crucible of miracles and violence and spectacular wonder. These were the moments that defined the city. They were the waking dreams of a never sleeping metropolis.
Cy’s first New York moment came only days after he had clutched the deck rail of the Adriatic as the tugs brought her in. He had been pouring water into the sink to wash his face one evening in his new apartment and on the brick wall opposite, slightly below his window, there was suddenly the magical shadow-house show of one of the lower apartments. A strong light at the back of the room was illustrating its contents, the shapes, and the occupants. The black profile of a woman walked past across the screen of bricks, her hips and breastplate and hair illustrating gender. She might have walked downstage but for being kept within the flat dimension. Her movements were restricted, lateral, and she was busy. She was carrying something soft that slipped in small pieces from her arms, clothing perhaps or gauze, like the filaments of an enormous blown dandelion head. In the vacuum of space all he had to go by, to differentiate by, were the textures, thickness and pronouncement of shadows. The woman dropped her load and disappeared into the black wings. And then she was followed by another puppet, something impossible, something from a pantomime. A horse moved onto the stage after her. Its cameo head tilted, paused. He could tell immediately what the shadow was from the length of muzzle, the triangular skull, the almost human brush of an eyelash. But it must have been some kind of accidental invention cast by debris and objects positioned one on top of the other, books, a vase, and something organic like coarse hair, a flower perhaps or a plant, lit from behind like a lie and moved. Just a trick of the light and a liaison between the contents of the room, or an illusion, the way children fake their hands into animal silhouettes when they find empty white pools of light or useful sunshine on the playground floor. There was equestrian stillness for a long minute so Cy could almost persuade himself that it must have been some kind of trick, simply chanced items stacked up on the shelf and misunderstood. But then the muzzle tipped up a fraction, the ear rotated half a degree, the animal bent its head to the floor and came up with the soft substance in its muzzle, which must have been hay.
— Well, I’ll be a monkey’s uncle! Less donkeys, more horses, Paddy Broadbent!
Any doubts Cy had, evaporated. There was a horse living with a woman in an apartment in his building and Brooklyn was as hopping crazy as a bucket of painted frogs.
The terrain altered. The lamp dimmed, and the horse was gone. The illusion vanished and any strange city secrets went with it. Next door’s shadow theatre concluded to no applause, just Cy’s slack jaw and his blinking grey eyes, the end of his first foray into the screwy possibilities of this realm. He brought water in his hands to his face, dampened his long hair where it met his neck. He would never again be sure that he could rely on his eyes, as he had relied on them for years in Morecambe Bay, give or take a picture of blood, a drop of drink, the odd little white lie. Because here, in this rubble-some, rimose city there were actual anomalies in life. Because below him lived a horse and a woman who blew around like a dandelion stalk in the breeze. He laughed out loud then and it sounded hollow in the sparse apartment. He had become for that moment a lunatic, delusive, he had become one of life’s apostolic madmen. In rural England, people concentrating hard on the paths over moorland as they drove carts and motor cars occasionally swore they had seen a black panther cross in front of them, or an Indian tiger. And they believed it ever after, blindly, and they would always search for spoors whenever they passed by that spot again. There was one supposedly roaming around by Moffat Ravine, a beast of the moor, sabre-toothed and with fur that was mottled exotically, living right alongside the native sheep and rabbits, though Cy had never seen it. He had come to a new city only to find that it contained all the indistinct chaos and divergence and eccentric myth of the old world he had left behind. The same batty behaviour of its citizens, the same colourful prankishness and thunderstruck chromosomes. He had been met with it convincingly. And then he knew it. He could expect no easier life here, no clean slate, no simpler version. There would be no more clarity or charity in this land of new beginnings than anywhere else he had known.