Colson Whitehead - The Colossus of New York

EVEN OUT HERE still too close to neighbors. Horizontal tenement. Loathe neighbors and their loud boorish talk and unfortunate ditties. Envy neighbors on their well-equipped expedition. Yeah, they know how to do it right, with their everlasting cooler and state-of-the-art collapsible seating. What will they pull out next, a Grillmaster 9000 or merely a famous chef. Just when you get settled a breeze or hooligan ruins things. The insult that made a man out of Mack. Please adjust: parts squeezing out of bathing suits, parts having natural reactions to changing temperatures, the bashful edges of the towel, your attitude because it’s really getting on my nerves I go to all this trouble why can’t you just enjoy yourself for once. Probably not the right time for a sexual reverie but the view argues otherwise. All that stuff they hide when they dress up in civilization. Don’t blink or else you’ll miss it — that father’s annual display of affection toward his son. Seeing this is like looking at the sun. It can blind you.

OUT THERE slow barges cart away tires and exiles, black arrowheads sailing through blue air. Wooden contraptions provide sure footing. Along the top of the pier, fishermen skewer hope on hooks and drop this bait, wait for a little nibble. Along the sides of the pier, barnacles cling with telltale rent control tenacity. Up and down the boardwalk visitors establish their cruising speed. Underneath the boardwalk is where they store failed mayoral candidates. Improbable clam shacks. Hot dog vendor to the world. What was true for citizens a hundred years ago remains so. Generation after generation marvel over the salt air as if they are the first to remark upon it. They keep to themselves the odd feelings brought on by the novelty of a horizon after so many horizonless days. What to do with these notions. Old-timers have seen it all before. We’re the reruns they can’t help watching. Old-timers will tell ya that every plank on the boardwalk has a story to tell and a secret name. This is in fact untrue. It’s just dead wood after all.

OFF SEASON this place is dead. Don’t tell anyone but the Wonder Wheel is a gear in the great engine of the metropolis and when it stops moving systems fail. Amusement park rides are disguises for other things. Taken medicinally, periodic trips to the bumper cars can prevent road rage. Cherish the fear in loose bolts, statistical inevitabilities, the substance-abuse problem of the operator as suggested by his glassy stare. The ancient metal seats get repainted every season. Dark metal like a stain where people put their hands. They have yet to invent an amusement park paint that can withstand the corrosive agents in fear-sweat. There is no way to avoid it, all must ride the Cyclone. A loop of ribbon lifted by a breeze, sloping down here, twisting up there. Seems so rickety. Struts and girders, toothpicks and straws. The old scares are the best ones. Couples on dates queue up nervously. The country cousin in from the country is egged on by sadistic kin. They make up scary stories about the fatality rate to scare him but when the restraining bar slams shut are swayed by their own fictions.

TOO LATE to back out. Scream if you think it’ll help. Clutch my thigh according to plan. Citizens of this new vertiginous city. Up and down. Reel this way and the ocean is upon you in a wave, in beckoning gloom, reel the other way and slam into highrises, into broad brickfaces. A rollercoaster is your mind trying to reconcile two contradictory propositions. Earth and space, cement and air, city and sea. Life and death. Choose quickly. The city and the sea don’t get along, never have. Two trash-talking combatants, two old bitter foes. This ride is them throwing punches and you ride on their arms, dip and rise and coast and roll on shifting muscle and sinew. If only they would stop squabbling over us. Dizzy now. Punchdrunk on the view, tide-tossed and beaten, staggering between what is and what could be. Why doesn’t the ref do something. It’s a massacre. Close your eyes. Relax — it will all be over before you know it.

SO SQUINT. It’s over there, that striated island, cut up carved out and waiting. Pick your favorite cuts and gorge. You can always tell the hungry ones by how they move. Case in point, this one approaching the bridge. Her steps give her away: she has appetites. Her whole history hordes behind her with its unfashionable area code and immigrant spices. The names of her streets commemorate the city’s less famous heroes. Mayors and back-room fixers. None of the syllables that built this city, just seeing their names on her mail leaves her famished. Sometimes the wind shifts and ferries aroma across the river. You’re hungry, admit it. Grab your forks and knives to get your piece of it.

MULTIPLE BRIDGES but this is her favorite. Various anchors hold the island in place so it won’t drift away.

You’d try to flee, too, if everyone heaped their dreams upon you. Pack mule and palimpsest. It starts out slowly. At the entrance religious types hawk bean pies and religious literature to cars stalled at the light. Cars wait to enter the borough, she steps on the bridge to exit. Level at first, lulling her. A bridge takes a while to get to the heart of its argument and for a while she is seduced by honey talk, but then she looks to the side. Hardly noticed the gentle lift, but then she looks to the side and she’s waist level to buildings. Up in the air before she knew it. Admire the bridge for its exemplary rhetoric, necessary for this rather spectacular leap of faith.

FREE PASSAGE. The only toll is what you need to be rid of. Deposit it in conveniently placed receptacles. Respect the honor system. Refugees pass her going the other way and she wonders what they know that she doesn’t. Forsaking what she seeks. Concrete walkway becomes wooden slats and less assured. Going back in time. Farther on it becomes a rope bridge probably, how else to explain their swaying. American flags scare-crow atop the arches. What we’d give for an energetic ripple now and then, it would stir our souls. Nary a breeze this moment. Then she’s over water. After land, after industrial waterfront, peek through slats to see the river. Time it right and your spit will hit a tourist on the boat.

LET’S PAUSE a sec to be cowed by this magnificent skyline. So many arrogant edifices, it’s like walking into a jerk festival. Maybe you recognize it from posters and television. Looks like a movie set, a false front of industry. Behind those gleaming façades, plywood and paint cans. Against it we are all extras. Walkers add incremental wear and tear to footwear. Joggers speed past walkers, seeing nothing but their inner skylines, long indifferent to the miracles around them. Bicyclists speed past them all, spinning spokes, a different species. He makes up lyrics to his song, humming and snapping his fingers. People who whistle in public get rebuked by glances. Parents shield children with their bodies to protect them from passing crazies. Under her headphones her favorite music is ironic commentary on the spectacle around her. The chorus especially denouncing this panorama with witless enthusiasm. A different atmosphere up here, favoring alternate evolutionary paths. The birds do what they will, equipped with wings.

HER LAZY PROGRESS along the bridge is tracked for half an hour by a man in an apartment. Each time she stops, he tries to figure out what she is looking at, thinking of. To be with her, her companion across this thing. Unwitting prop in one man’s mania. One speck among many specks. At junctions emergency boxes offer aid but there’s no way help would arrive in time. Break down in the middle of the desert. Outlaw territory, between places. Need a tuneup, prescribe this walk. Pop a gasket here and you’re on your own. Broken police call boxes report to nowhere. Pick up the receiver to reach a precinct that burned down years ago. What is the nature of the emergency. Shrugs travel poorly through fiber optics. And no one to stop you from tracing a beam to the edge and leaping into space and water. No one could stop you. Traffic slows to rubberneck, other walkers cheer or dissuade, but no preventing hands. All will be revealed in those final seconds before you hit, but at that point no chance to act on those revelations or apologize. Keep moving forward. Please move it along. By making this journey making the case for life or weakness of conviction. Up here everything looks hazy.