The Electric Michelangelo (24 page)

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.

– 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.