Sarah Hall - The Electric Michelangelo

— For the dead before you here, bless this place. For the lock, turn the key against good sense.

He unpacked his suitcase, it contained five shirts, two pairs of breeches, some shaving soap and his tattoo equipment and he took several long walks around the vicinity. He had a little money left over from the work on the ship, but he would need to find employment soon. And so he set out to explore the options. There were fish markets along the wharf and grocery stores that sold the foods of many nations, shore diners, chop and chow mein restaurants, barbershops and tackle huts. Bridges were being built and cobblestones were being uprooted to widen roads. When he looked into other dwellings in the neighbourhood he could see economical furnishings and delightful attempts to bend possessions into art, normalcy into creativity. Or perhaps there was in this country a new, incidental aesthetic to a coat hanging on a stand, a hat hung on a peg, the mosaic made against the wall from shadows of items on a table reaching too far, which he had not been aware of previously. The big houses on Lundy’s Row contained beautiful stained-glass fixtures that warmed the faces of their inhabitants. He enjoyed looking in people’s windows, he liked it even better than the infectious, inclusive conversations of neighbours on their stoops and in their gardens across the borough. It gave him a sense of serendipity, that here after all were other humans living in proximity, coincidentally and fully, and so for a time he was able to borrow the density of their lives to fill in his whittled-out own.

The building where he lived was old by local standards, not as old as the brownstones further into the district, but it was already shambolic, as if used thoroughly by its successive residents. Its bricks were crumbling and spreading apart, and there were several long fissures in the dull marble of the foyer floor. The structure seemed as if it had once been quite grand and rather than keep up with the times it had gone gently the way of a stubborn aristocratic decline. Harder times had come its way with the influx of more and more immigrants, lowlier tenants with menial occupations had moved in as nicer buildings along Voorhies went up. It had been divided further into smaller units, as a government under pressure, and yet the building held on to a proud grace, and its tenacity did not go unnoticed by Cy. It was built five stories high in the shape of the letter H and at night there was cinema in each corner of the structure made from the light of lamps projected on to the wing walls and the casters of people, revealing the contents and dramas of each living quarter opposite. Cy was granted access into the lives of strangers as they went about their evening business, before they drew the curtains. A kiss as two silhouettes met, a soup tureen placed in front of an elderly man, an ironing board pulled out, fastened, and a bottle of starch set upright as laundry was attended to.

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.