When he went past Newark Airport he realized he'd overshot all the turnoffs and their related options. He looked for a friendly exit, untrucked and rural, and found himself some time later on a two-lane blacktop that wended uncertainly through cattail mires. He felt a bitey edge of brine in the air and the road bent and then ended in gravel and weeds.
He got out of the car and climbed an earthen bank. The wind was stiff enough to make his eyes go moist and he looked across a narrow body of water to a terraced elevation on the other side. It was reddish brown, flat-topped, monumental, sunset burning in the heights, and Brian thought he was hallucinating an Arizona butte. But it was real and it was man-made, swept by wheeling gulls, and he knew it could be only one thing-the Fresh Kills landfill on Staten Island.
This was the reason for his trip to New York and he was scheduled to meet there with surveyors and engineers in the morning. Three thousand acres of mountained garbage, contoured and road-graded, with bulldozers pushing waves of refuse onto the active face. Brian felt invigorated, looking at this scene. Barges unloading, sweeper boats poking through the kills to pick up stray waste. He saw a maintenance crew working on drainpipes high on the angled setbacks that were designed to control the runoff of rainwater. Other figures in masks and butylene suits were gathered at the base of the structure to inspect isolated material for toxic content. It was science fiction and prehistory, garbage arriving twenty-four hours a day, hundreds of workers, vehicles with metal rollers compacting the trash, bucket augers digging vents for methane gas, the gulls diving and crying, a line of snouted trucks sucking in loose litter.
He imagined he was watching the construction of the Great Pyramid at Giza-only this was twenty-five times bigger, with tanker trucks spraying perfumed water on the approach roads. He found the sight inspiring. All this ingenuity and labor, this delicate effort to fit maximum waste into diminishing space. The towers of the World Trade Center were visible in the distance and he sensed a poetic balance between that idea and this one. Bridges, tunnels, scows, tugs, graving docks, container ships, all the great works of transport, trade and linkage were directed in the end to this culminating structure. And the thing was organic, ever growing and shifting, its shape computer-plotted by the day and the hour. In a few years this would be the highest mountain on the Atlantic Coast between Boston and Miami. Brian felt a sting of enlightenment. He looked at all that soaring garbage and knew for the first time what his job was all about. Not engineering or transportation or source reduction. He dealt in human behavior, people's habits and impulses, their uncontrollable needs and innocent wishes, maybe their passions, certainly their excesses and indulgences but their kindness too, their generosity, and the question was how to keep this mass metabolism from overwhelming us.
The landfill showed him smack-on how the waste stream ended, where all the appetites and hankerings, the sodden second thoughts came runneling out, the things you wanted ardently and then did not. He'd seen a hundred landfills but none so vast as this. Yes, impressive and distressing. He knew the stench must ride the wind into every dining room for miles around. When people heard a noise at night, did they think the heap was coming down around them, sliding toward their homes, an omnivorous movie terror filling their doorways and windows?
The wind carried the stink across the kill.
Brian took a deep breath, he filled his lungs. This was the challenge he craved, the assault on his complacency and vague shame. To understand all this. To penetrate this secret. The mountain was here, unconcealed, but no one saw it or thought about it, no one knew it existed except the engineers and teamsters and local residents, a unique cultural deposit, fifty million tons by the time they top it off, carved and modeled, and no one talked about it but the men and women who tried to manage it, and he saw himself for the first time as a member of an esoteric order, they were adepts and seers, crafting the future, the city planners, the waste managers, the compost technicians, the land-scapers who would build hanging gardens here, make a park one day out of every kind of used and lost and eroded object of desire.
The biggest secrets are the ones spread open before us. This was Marvin Lundy talking, filling Brian's head with that dry staticky voice that seemed to come out of a surgical slit in his throat.
The wind carried the stink from the mountain of wrack.
Specks and glints, ragtails of color appeared in the stratified mass of covering soil, fabric scraps from the garment center, stirred by the wind, or maybe that teal thing is a bikini brief that belonged to a secretary from Queens, and Brian found he could create a flash infatuation, she is dark-eyed and reads the tabloids and paints her nails and eats lunch out of molded styrofoam, and he gives her gifts and she gives him condoms, and it all ends up here, newsprint, emery boards, sexy underwear, coaxed into high relief by the rumbling dozers-think of his multitudinous spermlings with their history of high family fore-heads, Stranded in a Ramses body bag and rollered snug in the deep-down waste.
He watched several gulls veering near and saw a hundred other gulls positioned on a slope, all facing the same way, motionless, regardful, joined in consciousness, in beautiful empty birdness, waiting for the signal to fly.
4
Marvin was out of his basement, wincing in the light. He steered his car tenaciously, choosing a lane and sticking to it. He wore a tan windbreaker with a plaid lining because this is what he always wore when the leaves began to turn. It was the faithful change of apparel, an adjustment to the cosmos that made his life seem regular. He wore the jacket through the decades, giving the old one to the Salvation Army and buying another just like it, the everyman tan that he could spot on a store hanger from fifty yards in one of those vast hushed areas just before closing time where ranks of suits are arrayed like executives in hell.
He also wore a pair of latex gloves, a precaution he took whenever he went to the city.
When he got to the Lower East Side he drove through the streets a number of times before he found a space that looked okay, where he wouldn't get towed and he wouldn't get broken in, and he locked the car and then stood back and studied the parking job he'd done and the street in general, old furniture sold cheap and a truck lot in which every inch of every truck was covered with graffiti. The humans walked by looking touchy and unbeloved. He saw two men in wheelchairs who scooted after cars stopped at the light to scrounge a little change.
Marvin walked in his sliding step, his sort of explanatory shuffle, it was a comment on the literature of shuffles. He went down Orchard Street looking at the clothes in the windows and stalls, dry goods by the mile. He stopped to read the writing on a collection of what-do-you-call, T-shirts, a nasty remark on nearly every item, words unprint-able through history wearing shirts in a window. A young man stood next to him, thin-limbed and tattooed, a mustache that's half fin-ished, glaring at him. He felt the glare, a tapered look directed straight into the side of his head.
Marvin glanced over.
"What? I'm looking in the window," he said.
"I look means you gotta look?"
"I can't look? What? It's a window."
"You seen me looking. Means you gotta look?"
"What? So I can't look?"
"I'm looking."
"It's a public window," Marvin said.
"You want window? I give you window."
"All of a sudden, this?"
"You think you want to look? I show you look."
Marvin walked away because what else could he do, flexing his fin-gers inside the latex gloves. It was impossible to live. You couldn't walk down the street one foot follows another. Because what happens? They kill you. They come out of a door and stab you because you look at them. This is the latest word in death and menace. You look at them, they kill you. One look where you catch their eye, it gives them the right to end your life.