Sarah Hall - The Electric Michelangelo

— Well, I’ll be a monkey’s uncle! Less donkeys, more horses, Paddy Broadbent!

Any doubts Cy had, evaporated. There was a horse living with a woman in an apartment in his building and Brooklyn was as hopping crazy as a bucket of painted frogs.

The terrain altered. The lamp dimmed, and the horse was gone. The illusion vanished and any strange city secrets went with it. Next door’s shadow theatre concluded to no applause, just Cy’s slack jaw and his blinking grey eyes, the end of his first foray into the screwy possibilities of this realm. He brought water in his hands to his face, dampened his long hair where it met his neck. He would never again be sure that he could rely on his eyes, as he had relied on them for years in Morecambe Bay, give or take a picture of blood, a drop of drink, the odd little white lie. Because here, in this rubble-some, rimose city there were actual anomalies in life. Because below him lived a horse and a woman who blew around like a dandelion stalk in the breeze. He laughed out loud then and it sounded hollow in the sparse apartment. He had become for that moment a lunatic, delusive, he had become one of life’s apostolic madmen. In rural England, people concentrating hard on the paths over moorland as they drove carts and motor cars occasionally swore they had seen a black panther cross in front of them, or an Indian tiger. And they believed it ever after, blindly, and they would always search for spoors whenever they passed by that spot again. There was one supposedly roaming around by Moffat Ravine, a beast of the moor, sabre-toothed and with fur that was mottled exotically, living right alongside the native sheep and rabbits, though Cy had never seen it. He had come to a new city only to find that it contained all the indistinct chaos and divergence and eccentric myth of the old world he had left behind. The same batty behaviour of its citizens, the same colourful prankishness and thunderstruck chromosomes. He had been met with it convincingly. And then he knew it. He could expect no easier life here, no clean slate, no simpler version. There would be no more clarity or charity in this land of new beginnings than anywhere else he had known.

For all the city’s obscure adaptations and unclear reveries, for all its urban confusion and impacted allegories, Brooklyn did have one uncomplicated feature. It had purity of light. The early morning and late afternoon light was appraisingly referred to as being like that found in a Dutch master’s painting. From the prehistoric-looking bridge and Williamsburg at twelve on the clock face, around the borough past the border with Queens, Canarsie and the residences along Jamaica Bay, to Coney Island at the half hour, Fort Hamilton and back to the mouth of the east river, and in all the neighbourhoods converging on the dial-pin of Flatbush, something radiant and luminous could wash over the streets and the great parks and the tall, tight-packed headstones of the cemeteries, enhancing the buildings and making shaded areas seem more profound. Or rather the light did not come from above, but Brooklyn seemed able to imbue itself, generating the energy of illumination from within. It was a quality as self-produced and collaborative as the smell of the cuisines that wafted through the streets, and for many it represented the very magic of the place. That distinctive, shining character. Brooklynites would disagree about the best month for this light, the way museum-goers argue about the best portrayals of the masters, more for mild academic exercise than from a necessity to produce the definitive answer. Some swore by November, those of a melancholy disposition who enjoyed the hue of opal along the pavements, the glimmering quality of it on the stoop railings like the glitter along the edges of carving knives and scissors after they had been brought out by residents and sharpened by the blade grinders who came round in carts ringing bells. For these people the late fall light reflected as sombrely as the atmosphere of mournful memories belonging to so many of Brooklyn’s residents. Some said the weeks in spring were most lovely when the light woke up and had newness, silver-air, and potential, making mirrors of the standing water in the roads — that period around which Cy had arrived first on the scene. For those, it was the light of amnesty and hope, complementing the eyes of free and living souls. In these early weeks Cy loved to walk through the district for this very reason, the reason of light, when it seemed he was travelling through an expansive, expressive painting. Upstairs, Eleven Pedder Street had also seemed painterly, but so devoid of joyful illumination. It was a still-life, a place of inanimate objects assembled with meticulous and menacing care, and washed over with tension. It held its breath.

Here Cy would walk through the market, a few blocks from his building, when it was winding down, with stray cabbage leaves blowing on the ground, the clink of glass going back into a crate and it was as a working studio, where artists and their renditions were juxtaposed. A last attempt being made from a persistent huckster at a sale, a discounted rate for the last of his fruit with its waxy, polished appearance.

— Ten cents for a dozen, nickel for five, sir? Sweet as honey, crisp as ice.

He liked the raucous and rarefied arena of Brooklyn, the glossy look of old women hanging their washing out in long jowls between buildings, and the quartz faces of children playing marbles and hopscotch in the mud roads, swapping baseball cards on the sidewalk. Brown paper bags in the gutter could seem purposeful as they drifted along and the fishing boats cast tussled shadows on the water like a breath of wind through wheat fields. More than the baseball and the cooking, more even than the religion that blessed the Judaist congregations, the light was the binding ingredient of the place, like water in bread dough. It was the spirit of Brooklyn.

He was procuring his first batch of ink from a pigeon-filled, paint-peeling warehouse in Gravesend when he met Arturas and Claudia Overas, husband and wife who made up one of the most famous partnerships in all of Coney Island. With his usual caution and subterfuge Cy was selecting his products when he noticed a large Teutonic looking man with hairy blond cheeks following his progress around the suppliers. The man was considerably larger than Cy and apparently quite comfortable with staring down the gaze of others for he made no bones about his optical inquisition. Uncomfortable, and unfamiliar with his surroundings, Cy finally went to pay for his goods and was reaching into his pocket for money when the fellow strode up to him and punched one fist into his other palm. He addressed the cashier in English, which seemed not to be his most comfortable language though it was still used emphatically and with speed, like a swing in a park too small for the backside of a grown child.

— This man must not pay these prices. Give this man my good prices.

Suddenly nervous, Cyril Parks attempted to extinguish the interference.

— No. I’ll pay what’s marked up, thank you for your concern. I’m sure that’s fair. Just ring me up as is, please, and I’ll be on my way.

He had no wish to draw attention to himself and the blond man was not assisting with his attempt to be discreet about who he was and what he needed the supplies for. He turned to the man accosting him with an economy of aggression, hoping not to further provoke a conflict with him but knowing that a vacuum of defence could potentially extend the exchange, may give the loud, uninhibited stranger licence to toy with him. Cy was tall and always had been thus, it was advantageous in his profession, but the man in question was another foot clear above him. There were more lashes around the eyes regarding him than he had ever seen on a person, man or woman, and the coiled mustard growth on his cheeks almost reached his nostrils. The open neck of his shirt revealed a great crop of chest hair. In complete contrast to the knots and whorls elsewhere on his body, the flax on the man’s head lay perfectly straight, without so much as a hint of a kink to it, giving the distinct impression that there had been a civil war of some variety on his anatomy and the hair had divorced into two opposing autarkies a long time ago.