Eagle Eye
Authors: Hortense Calisher
A Novel
Hortense Calisher
D
ID WEATHER EXIST, WHEN
nobody looked at it? Did it know? At dawn, say, on a summer Sunday in the financial district, in a suite on the forty-first floor? Whose only occupants were the owner, minimally sleeping in his windowless private eyrie at the center of it, and his son here in the outer office, lying naked and face down on a rug in front of a computer panel, not yet cracking an eye.
He lay doggo. Waking alone, he had wondered this in many far places, open fields and hostels, monasteries with a total glare of the sea, and one country divan some fifty miles out of New Delhi, where he had been fanned back to a consciousness that others too were supporting the weather, by a small child, with brows knitted in concern, and a Raphael mouth. But this day was the farthest of all.
Today we begin sweating out the world. Bronstein.
On the floor near his head lay all he possessed in it, boots and buckskins, a duffel-bag, and a jacket that by now was both tent and skin.
He reached out and patted the computer wall. The one at school, grubbed with handprints, was never like this. Morning, Batface. Remember a guy named Betts? He named you. Or the likes of you. We three worked together once. Please remember him.
And remember Bronstein. Both of you.
He pressed his face into the rug again. He still had the kind of red hair that made him a fact in other peoples’ eyes, and the kind of stutter nobody notices. But his own eyes saw so much of late there must be something wrong with them.
Yesterday he’d had a twenty-first birthday party. A year late, but it should last him a lifetime. Both his parents, who gave it, were still around. Though since yesterday, his father, whom he’ll see shortly, has the look of a man recently dead. And his mother, whom he suspects he will not see, already the nimbus of the far-distant but recently alive. Beyond that, archives of girls since he was thirteen, but no permanent one. They float through his time like tough ghosts. One in particular, trawling the catchwords he used to grab her for. Pastimes. Past time.
Tell me something, Batface. Are there still gentle friends to go to? Or must I put in more time learning what’s worth murdering for?
Where do the people go, when there’s nobody looking at them?
A leg cramp seized him, in the long water-muscles he’d kept to training-pitch in all the canals of the Low Countries, and the lochs of Britain too. He got up from the floor, hobbling it out. Emplaning did it every time—hours with his knees locked like a jumping jack’s. He was too tall ever to be a top swimmer anyway. Schlomping bonily down the hall to the commissary he’d spotted last night, he flipped a quart of milk into himself from the one of the fridges, feeling very American for still liking milk, then ducked into a Women’s, the only can he could find, and padded back. One flaw here—no pool. If that was the real flaw.
The wall lured like a lotus-pond.
Ten years back, in a boarding school—one, like his swimming, of second rank—he and Betts, both from homes where people were silent except when in company, had vowed each to talk aloud to himself when alone, as a form of mind-expansion. His friend reporting success in it, but he never. Contrarily he admired the swimming team’s best, a Norfolk boy who got through the extracurricular world on the one word. “Hahyadoin’?” In the mornin’ and the evenin’.
Night before last, in London, he had caught an old samurai flick, locally dubbed, Elizabethan-style.
Hahyadoin’, Bronstein … Well-met! How now?
He touched the wall, piano delicate. One shouldn’t have to touch.
Suddenly—he was standing close—he stretched himself against the glum metal, arms wide. Laid his head on it.
How—in what way—could you ask the computer to give you back your life? If properly fed, it could put into motion—what you already were. It could give back only the impulses one gave it—as if God could become a mechanical bore, with a Horatio Alger countenance that wouldn’t necessarily shine, but harbored information like a grudge. Wasn’t a god of course, anymore than your own brain was—which it fearfully resembled. But if one day you fed it all the clues of meditation that you had with you, the little blurts and jargons that kept you going but hidden, and meant you to yourself like your own vibration in the dark—what could happen? What would come back to you? A bad poem to which you could claim authorship? A mumbo-jumbo music in which anybody could hear his own multiples, according to his own programming? Indian warcries, made by American boys on an Italian lake. Or the whooping-cough summer when you ranged back and forth like a monkey put out to sun, the smallest dictator in the world, staring down on the people below, the gray west wall of Central Park, and the viaduct entrance that cut east from the Elba of his own fire-escape.
That kid, himself in the first habitat he knew, had later on taken a primary course in computers in the tenth grade. No mystery, except of knowing. No rocks changed into feathers, except in the nature of things. About the same ethic too; you could confuddle the other boys or out-equate them, but ended up cheated—as in the best bibles—if you cheated on yourself. It had been one of the phases of his boyhood that he had passed through, tired of and yet kept a romance of—as if he had once owned a bike with a seventh speed on it that went to Samarkand, or had trained on a punching-bag that talked back.
This set-up belonged to his father. The family computer, though he had never seen it before—why shouldn’t it serve him in the person as the other household machines would have: washing his shorts, microwaving a steak for his gut, or massaging the inch of maturity that must have fattened on him since last night? Or like all the new maids of the last few years, who had started up like robots when he walked in on them.
It looked like as good a home as any. Jazzy light on the facade and inside, a hoard of secrets you would expect to pay for, in exchange for entering the only orifice where you felt temporarily permanent. Like a cross between a woman and a bank, and inspiring about the same clichés. When he’d been living in it long enough, it might tell him whether he ought to have called up a girl called Jasmin, or should wait for the stewardess due in on Friday next.
When all he wanted was for it to take him by the hand like an infallible nurse, and lead him to where his future was indissoluble from his past, friends passing and repassing in a guild he knew. As much ask that geode on the desk there to float in the downtown harbor—which now that he looked, was checkered with the astral light of all the money around here that was so different from dollarbills.
Hit it—maybe it would give him a dime.
He squatted on his heels. Stayed there sweating, until he heard something. Bald sighs, absent bumpings, from a long way back. Shannon the doorman’s all-day minstrel shuffle, their twin orange heads meeting in the elevator shill-game. Dropped me a coin, boyo, can you find it? Found it—your young eyes are sharp. Crafty pink face above his own, as Shannon palmed it. On bad days the quarter became a penny—thief are you; on good days the penny became a dime. And a pat-on-the-back, Eagle Eye, for being half-Irish.
He hadn’t had to touch the wall, really.
“How now?” he said.
There was a terrible fragility about the Bronsteins. That they didn’t know of. Their kid did his best to act accordingly. In all the Boy’s Lives of famous men he had ever read, there was this simple beginning, in which the boy was held transparent in the vial of family, to grow. While the life put one foot after another, scattering little grenades of bread that even in the city would one day lead out of the forest, in single file.
They all three thought they were leading a linear life.
Until Bronstein was eleven, he and his mother and father had been living “almost forever”—five years—in what his mother also described to whomever hadn’t been there yet, as “a nice old-fashioned apartment-house, one of the oldies off Madison.” Many such people did get there, to one of the Bronstein cocktail parties—snagged by his mother at the PTA or even the supermarket, and once on a Saturday afternoon in the aisles of Charles & Co., over a basket of what his mother called “Gormay.”
Whenever Maeve felt sad over her age (which was thirty-six in her conversation and two years more on her driver’s license), or because the three of them were without a family circle in the neighborhood, or perhaps if a broken promise from a tailor or a maid had left her standing in the kitchen—“high-heeled and pretty as a rose” as old Shannon had once said to her—but realizing once again how alone one could be here—she went shopping. Whirling on the hat, shoes and bag she had bought last time—one had to impress the salesclerks—she would leave in a rush for some cooked-up something she had to have.
Until a few years back, Bunty had been part of it, either on those short forays—when she returned, larky and undisappointed, to tell his father “there was nothing in the stores, nothing”—or those long days when she and he left “before they open” to get his school-clothes, and ended up in the salons, the housefurnishings, the modern-design corners, the bathshops, the accessories—in any part of the huge, growing storehouse of his mother’s alarming but fascinating needs. Nowadays when she left like that, casting back at him mournfully, “Ah Bunty, we used to have nice times then, didn’t we?” he saw the dead image of those two, plodding down the aisles. Whole hunks of his childhood had been spent tagging at her hot, absent hand, peeing in ladies’ washrooms, sitting tall at table between packages his mother counted and fondled, while she ordered his creamcheese-and-nut. He already understood though, that a purchase was the
most,
and innately serious. His first erotic feeling was that he had been born of such a time, in just such a conjunction.
“Imaginary errands, Maeve, you live on them,” his father said. Indeed her closets were full of them. If so, could they still be considered imaginary? Bunty decided against asking. He already knew he was expected to get his brains from his father, and his looks from her. Both seemed satisfied with the arrangement. He was still uneasy with it.
“Maeve MacNeil, secretary, married Buddy Bronstein, her boss,” his father would say, twinkling. “An old New York story.”
“He means ‘Abie’s Irish Rose’,” she answered, smiling. Both of them explained this to him with zest.
“But you’re both
white,
” Bunty said.
Sometime after this, they moved east to the Madison Avenue place.
He liked them both okay. Loved them apparently, as when the doctor they had begun to call their “family” one, after explaining sex to him, which Bunty kindly tolerated, looked up sharp over his really too-much black rims, and said, “Love your folks, Bunty lad?”, and he had answered surprised, “Why not?” Pressed, he had said “Sure,” and was released. Telling the last of his West Side cronies—Ike Israelson, who in homework visits clearly had folks who suffered from too much neighborhood family—Ike had said, wisenheimer, “He only wanted to know whether you’d had it yet.” Neither he nor Ike had. “Aren’t they something?” Ike said. The Bronsteins had a new doctor now, on the East Side.
He still couldn’t believe, though, that all these successive people could disappear out of a life. Because that was connected with the possibility of people, being lost altogether, to themselves as well. The world rested, an up-side down pyramid, on himself, a reverse Atlas, at the small end. He couldn’t disappear, because the world would go with him. A fraction. But he in turn was diminished, as those he knew—small daily cornerstones—went away from him. Didn’t he vanish, crumb by crumb of him, as they were sucked into the unoccupied space around us, which is wherever we are not? And ultimately this connected with the disappearance of all the people who ever had been, who were presumed to be waiting for resurrection somewhere. He didn’t really believe that either; when you thought of the numbers, of the amount of earth it would take to hold them,—was there enough even if one took in the Tibetan mountains, the Serengeti, the world of ice above Alaska, the Faroe islands—all that? He went to the American Museum of Natural History, studied the fossil stones, and saw how unnatural it would be to expect anything—as if souls were like eggs, to be storaged somewhere.