ALL PENANCE. HAVING seen the corpse that waited in the bottom of the pit, I feel as if I’ve consigned the remainder of my life to the awareness that I live on borrowed time. Certainly I feel, at least when I think about it, that it was my time to die when Argenziano led us to the grave at the end of that silent orchard. And so I tiptoe around the edges of things. The weather has begun to turn; I take my walks, visit the lunatic asylum. The cherry trees are in blossom. At the Dispensary Café, the Maori kid is gone, replaced by an older man who always seems to be reading Ayn Rand. Construction appears to have halted at 5 °Commons — a blow to one brand of progress, I suppose, although the city council has approved a measure to institute an annual film festival centered at the old State Theater, lately a shuttered evangelical church on a gamy stretch of Front Street. I haven’t been to the library in a long time.
At home, the phone never rings. Everything is on automatic: autopay, autodownload, autoupdate. Autoeat and autosleep. The e-mail in-box loads up with automated messages of its own, efficient bulletins urging me not to overlook events that will be taking place on distant streets whose sounds and smells I can barely conjure. Too bad. Instead of the provisional quiet of the library, I now yearn for the crush of the city, that anxious song of steel and glass, the edgy sense, when the heart quick-times it, of being alive.
But I know that the time hasn’t arrived for that yet, not for me. While lying in bed one recent morning, the predawn silence awesome and oppressive — almost with a weight to it — I remembered an ordinary day aboard the F train, maybe a year ago. A man getting on at Fourth Avenue tripped, and extended his arms to break his fall, lightly shoving the neatly groomed businessman in front of him. It was a quiet morning, bright on the elevated platform, and the train was moderately crowded, but the businessman had let out a whoop like a wounded turkey, a yawning sonic opening through which a hundred kinds of primal alarm surged. Everyone aboard the car fell into an alert silence. The businessman, flushed, his voice trembling, demanded of the other man, “What is the matter with you?” and then stalked off to one end of the car to leaf busily through his tabloid. I’d thought at the time that he was high-strung, or off his meds — fighting psychosis the way most people fight colds. But I wonder now if he was returning too soon from a long sojourn in the dark groves of some country where true cities — with their dead-eyed, ranging crowds, their gouts of steam and seared-meat smoke, their grating cries and echoes — exist only as rumors, misremembered curses; if he had mistimed his reentry so that his nervous system hadn’t yet acclimated to the shoves and missteps, all the ordinary discourtesies, so that the familiar pulse of that routine subway morning hadn’t resumed for him as quickly as it might have for the rest of us, the hardened veterans, hiding from our lives amid the fluorescent din of strangers; his sensibilities still marooned in the wilderness of his failed retreat.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The author would like to thank the Lannan Foundation and the New York Foundation for the Arts for their support during the composition of this book.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
© MINNA PROCTOR
Christopher Sorrentino is the author of five books, including the National Book Award finalist Trance. His work has appeared in Esquire, Granta, Harper’s, the New York Times, Tin House, and many other publications. He lives in New York City.
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