Sarah Hall - The Electric Michelangelo

When the Adriatic slid in past Manhattan to Ellis Island Cy might never have been more malleable in his life, never more able to dictate self, and Riley’s ghost might have been exorcized then and there, put asunder, had his apprentice concentrated on that possibility instead of surrendering to incredulity. New York was a dream of architecture and vertical economy, of uncompromising coexistence. Suddenly everybody at the ship’s rail had offered one another cigarettes, needing some kind of filter, some kind of method to take it all in, compressed tobacco was the easiest and only filtration tool available so they sucked away at smoke, though some drew out cameras to put a lens between them and what was too much. Cy would never know the city, he thought that moment as the boat blasted her arrival, not the way he knew the back streets and districts and the tides of Morecambe Bay. It was a squall of urban settlement, a storm of existence coming closer on the horizon, and he gripped the deck rail tighter, dizzy with what he saw. He would have to find some corner of it to huddle down in, it was all he would be able to do. Compared to the impending city, the water on which they were afloat seemed to be the only stable thing. Suddenly he wanted that old-timey’s hold and fast written on his own fingers so that he could keep himself from going overboard, tumbling back-to-front and headlong up the tall buildings with the glass reflections telling him he was falling in many ways, up past windows and spires and skyscrapers and up past height itself, up through the sky and out into space. New York was the sacred centre of all pilgrimages, the big catcher’s mitt for every nation’s Diaspora. And Cyril Parks did not even know why he had come!

The Polish man next to him at the rail, on whose shoulder he had tattooed a heart not three days before, was laughing with tears in his eyes, like a child tipped too far into uncontrollable hysteria and his laughter had become something else, another emotion, unstoppable and debilitating. Cy put a hand on the newly decorated shoulder and the Pole placed in turn a hand over Cy’s stained fingers, his laughter finally tapering. And the two of them held on.

But where had Europe been when New York went up? What had Europe been doing? Hunting for old-fashioned ideals like a shell on a beach while behind its back something enormous was happening? Fighting wars and remembering old grudges while abroad a fairytale land was being fashioned? Who had sold the Americans those magic beans that when planted would grow a city overnight, crushing myopic imagination upwards as it grew so that visions elongated and defied limit? Or what old peasant had boarded which creaking wooden clipper with those beans in his tatty coat pocket centuries ago, stolen from the garden belonging to the last mad emperor of some tiny dying country, to create this impossible new world?

The stretch of seaside carnival on the southern lip of Brooklyn was the biggest amusement park on earth and for several asylum-spun years Cyril Parks would be one of the cogs of its summer machinery. It dedicated itself to invention and intrigue, hedonistic indulgence, freakery. Unlike Morecambe’s pervasive tipsiness, its summer loosening of national character, the gently crude insight into gross anatomy, Coney Island offered up inebriation with startling dexterity and precision and for a time it could predict the vulgar thoughts of the masses like a mind-reader, responding with tailor-made surrealities and rides which were pure stimulant. Like Eliot Riley, who could unlock a sense of humour in a customer, and play on it to make his money, Coney could hypnotize the crowds with their own sensual fantasies and squeamishness made external. If they feared the dark they would be inserted into a pitch-black chamber and shaken. If they feared perversion some cage or dank oubliette would produce it. Specialization was everywhere, from the sculptor who carved out wax moulds of famous people and painted their wet eyeballs living then destroyed them over a fiery grill, to the variform deformities of the abnormals once imported from every nation in the world by the legendary Gumpertz, now limping about the parks and breeding with each other. Sword-swallowers guzzled blades, fire-breathers spat flaming rings, twisted females were pierced on beds of nails, shrunken heads hung from walls and adorned pikes, wrongly made people were revealed behind curtains of shame. The sick and the sinister abounded. The crowds could choose their indelicate pleasure or poison. They came, they paid, they saw, and they were entertained.

In England there had been the sense that if a man found two sticks on the beach he could incorporate them into a magic trick, children would laugh at Shakespearean fools, jokes were repeated and eventually formulized, the striped tents on the beach grew dirtier each year and their tears flapped in the breeze, but it was what you did come summer, it was tradition. It was as if the funfair carnival business itself was a deliberate step behind the collective British humour or that humour was a happy caricature of itself, belonging best in cheap hotels and prom pavilions at the seaside. Cy’s hometown was, for the workers of the north, a harmless, farcical, if slightly uncouth associate, that was met with once a year and who could be relied upon to get merry and fall down, providing a laugh or two, but doing no lasting harm. Perversities were hinted at, nudge-nudged about with an elbow in the side. Things never went too far.

The Island on the other hand was absolute consumer-driven modernism, it was in-vogue anthropomorphism, a swim through the guts and entrails of the world. By the start of every season the repulsive and the breathtaking had regenerated itself. New monsters were found, new tracks spiralled. Money would come from somewhere, some mysterious new location, even after rainy summers or failed business endeavours or massive fires. Paint was fresh and the sideshows were ready to excrete their freakish wares, new rides appeared annually, at the cost of tens of thousands of dollars and bought from the World’s Fair, to take people to the moon or to the bottom of the sea, to give them artificial magic environments. And the place revelled in near-perfect macabre entertainment, as if the juice of wacky Victorian society had been stewed up and injected into a Promethean American creation, a new world Moulin Rouge, a blaring creature that was concentrated along a two-mile strip of beachfront on the tip of the hipbone of that most fantastic city ever conceived. Coney could have outdone the rest of America’s oddest finds had she pried them out of her vast corners and put them together in a room. Cy could stand at the entrance of Luna Park and forget which direction his booth was seven years after first squeezing his business in. He could walk the corridors and never become accustomed to what he witnessed within, the boggling acts, the sickest tracts, the mucus and prolapse and fistula afflicted.

What was the essence of Coney Island, he often wondered, sitting on the train approaching the station. What was it exactly? Horrific proof that the Victorian era could not invoke and conjure the black soul of the Gothic and eternally suppress its darker energy with mere cages of ornament and primness and order. Proof that it could not tinker around with salivating, mechanical wolf-heads, musical skulls and pictures made from human hair and not be opening a terminal crack in Pandora’s Box, a vile vessel containing utter subversion of good behaviour, bodily curiosity, the peculiar viscera of Adam, Eve and all their deformed, stump-legged children. Proof that when the Victorian age collapsed under its own weighty ideals and detail, the dark varnish peeled off and stood up on its own, ghoulishly, and that weird spectre did a clatterbone jig right into the next century.