Pete Hamill - Forever

That morning, as on other mornings, a foreman named Sullivan packed dynamite against the virgin face of the tunnel. He set the dynamite, then shouted for the men to clear the tunnel, and they retreated as far as they could go, to stand among the bobbing lanterns. Sullivan signaled for the blast, and they all plugged their ears with fingers. Even then the great ka-boom knocked some men down and a whoosh of sandy air sprayed all of them. Cormac heard falling rock, then silence, and all rose, to move forward to shovel the broken rock into mule-drawn carts.

Then came the second explosion.

The world blackened, and Cormac heard screams and the panicky bleats of the mules and rock falling in great heavy slabs and then silence.

When he looked up, there was a high jagged gash in the mine face. And from beyond the gash, he saw the emerald light.

And the figure of a man silhouetted against the light. Behind him, there was almost no passage back to the tunnel, but a man was groaning under one of the slabs. Cormac could hear muffled shouting too.

But he turned and moved forward, toward the dark figure. The light brightened, glowing, luminous, a radiating light that bathed all in its color.

It was his father.

Smiling.

“My son,” he said.

Cormac tried to hurry to him, but his legs felt encased in water.

“I’ll fetch your mother,” he said. “Wait…”

And then there was a rumble, and more slabs fell from the ceiling, and the emerald light vanished, and Cormac felt a thump, sharp cutting pain, and fell into a darkness.

In the hospital, his leg in a cast, his cuts and abrasions bandaged, he met the man who had been trapped. “Did you see it?” Cormac whispered. “Did you see the light? And the man standing in the light?”

“What light?” the man said.

At the building on Duane Street, he uses the elevator key that will let him out on the top floor. He passes the two first floors, occupied by his most recent tenants, two separate groups of young dotcommers who labor above a stationery store. He passes the first of his own two floors and steps out into what he calls the Studio. He doesn’t switch on the lights, for he could walk blindfolded through this space and never knock over a lamp. But more important, the long dark loft shimmers with the illumination of the city. He closes the door behind him and stands for a moment in the magical glow. This is where he always comes to sit on the leather couch and listen to music in the dark or to drowse into skittering images of the past. He knows every inch of the place, the chairs and the tables, the file cabinets, the stacks of art books, and the closets full of drawings. Even when he’s alone, the room is crowded with the faces and names of the past.

He takes off his coat and jacket and loosens his tie, drops all on a brocade armchair, and then goes to a small refrigerator for an icy bottle of Evian water. His back is to the skylight. He twists open the cap, takes a long sip, sloshing his mouth with the cold, clear water. To his left, he can see the silhouette of the easel, holding a canvas completed forty-three years earlier. A painting done from memory. The face of the Countess de Chardon, parts of it lifted from old drawings, but her clothes all different. She is wearing clothes that could have been worn by Lauren Bacall. Clothes worn in this studio by a fashion model who was all over Vogue that year before going off to Europe, never to return. “That’s not my face,” the model said, looking at the painting. “It’s not even close.” He promised to do a separate drawing of the model, a portrait. “But who is she? ” she said in an irritated way. Cormac smiled and said, “A woman I used to know.”

He sits down at the end of the couch, leans back, and looks up. The rain-streaked skylight is made of one hundred and twenty-six panes, nine across and fourteen down, often repaired and strengthened or replaced, but the grid as it was when Bill Tweed gave him the building. The skylight faces south, and he can see the green shimmering lights of the Woolworth Building to the left and the icy towers of the World Trade Center to the right. They give off a light that pulses through all of downtown, every night of the week. Down there, up there, over there, men and women are moving in a thousand offices, speaking eighty languages, working the markets from Tokyo to Geneva, making sales, making bets, creating the light. Capitalism in the midnight hour of its long triumph.

On this night, Cormac can’t see the tops of the towers. They’re shrouded in spring fog.

He thinks: I miss the sound of foghorns.

Remembering their mournful baritone voices as the great liners arrived before daylight from Europe. The way they crowded the harbor for the first sixty years of the last century and how they moved so majestically up the North River to the Midtown piers. And the next day the Daily News centerfold would show photographs of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor or Clara Bow or Douglas Fairbanks, all posing on deck, the actresses propped up on piled steamer trunks, showing their legs. And how he sometimes went to the river when the great liners were sailing, the decks crowded with people waving toward the piers as they went off to somewhere else, and how he wished he could go with them, make his escape from Tir-na-Nog, and waved farewell himself, although he did not know a soul.

“What about you?” said Delfina Cintron.

Can he tell her about the foghorns in the morning dark?

“What about you?”

He wishes he could tell her the whole long tale.

Once he understood that he would live for many years, Cormac had worked hard at placing his nostalgias in a mental jail. This was an act of will and a means of self-defense. For a long time, New York (which is to say, the world) was as people thought it always would be, and then suddenly it changed, and the present was shoved forever into the past. There was never a sense of cataclysmic collapse, no shared admission that Rome was now finished. New Yorkers took for granted that nothing would ever remain the same, and nostalgia was their permanent protest. And because most of them were immigrants, they had begun their New York lives with aching memories of the places left behind. The habit never went away. Even now, in this latest city, they prefaced many remarks in the same way. “In the old days…” Or, “When I was a kid…” Or, “This place has gone into the crapper….” Russians said such things, and Chinese, and Dominicans, and Palestinians. You lived in the present, but that present always contained a past, some image of a ruined paradise.

Cormac noticed as the years passed that New Yorkers shared a sense that whatever had changed, they could do nothing about it. A kind of optimistic fatalism. Reformers arrived with golden promises and left office in disgrace and impotence. Bill Tweed’s line was a kind of municipal motto: “What are you gonna do about it?” Some of the big changes were welcome. He never met anyone who yearned for the city before the arrival of the Croton water, the city that smelled of shit. Nor did anyone protest the triumph of electricity, except those Uptown women who longed for the softening glow of gaslight. If the past had been reasonably happy, as New York had been before the collapse of 1893, the new present was drowned in permanent mourning, a lot of it dishonest, driven by a longing to return to the lost past. Cormac had gone through all that too many times. He had seen reputations blaze and then end up as burnt offerings. Heroes too often turned into scoundrels. Banks and corporations and newspapers ruled the city, and ended up as a handful of dust. Even language had term limits. In long separate eras, Cormac heard people use words like “fiddlesticks” or “groovy,” and then one morning, as if a secret referendum had been passed, the words vanished. Nobody, of course, ever ran a referendum against the word “bullshit.” That was a word and an emotion as permanent as the rivers. But the past had tremendous power here for the very simple reason that it was an American city that actually had a past. In his strange way (Cormac thinks now, swallowing cold Evian water) he is its custodian, he had been there, had smelled it, touched it, argued in it, fucked in it, killed in it; but he knew the treacheries and dangers of nostalgia. He was, after all, Irish. And he had too much past in his life. His defense against it was will. But even then, as in Madison Square only an hour earlier, will was never enough.