Naked City: Tales of Urban Fantasy

And Go Like This BY JOHN CROWLEY

John Crowley was born in Maine, grew up in Vermont and Indiana, and ran off to New York City, where he worked on documentary films and began to write novels. He’s received three World Fantasy Awards (including a Life Achievement Award) and the Award in Literature of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. His novels include Little, Big and the Aegypt Cycle. Other works include The Translator and Lord Byron’s Novel: The Evening Land. His most recent novel is Four Freedoms (2009).

There is room enough indoors in New York City for the whole 1963 world’s population to enter, with room enough inside for all hands to dance the twist in average nightclub proximity.

—BUCKMINSTER FULLER

Day and night the jetliners come in to Idlewild fully packed, and fly out again empty. Then the arrivals have to get into the city from the airports—special trains and buses have been laid on, of course, day and night crossing into the city limits and returning, empty bean cans whose beans have been poured out, but the waits are long. The army of organizers and dispatchers, who have been recruited from around the world for this job—selfless, patient as saints, minds like adding machines, yet still liable to fainting fits or outbursts of rage, God bless them, only human after all—meet and meet and sort and sort the incomers into neighborhoods, into streets in those neighborhoods, addresses, floors, rooms. They have huge atlases and records supplied by the city government, exploded plans of every building. They pencil each room and then mark it in red when fully occupied.

Still there are far too many arriving to be funneled into town by that process, and thousands, maybe tens of thousands, finally set out walking from the airport. It’s easy enough to see which way to go. Especially people are walking who walk anyway in their home places, bare or sandaled feet on dusty roads, with children in colorful slings at their breasts or bundles on their heads—those are the pictures you see in the special editions of Life and Look, tall Watusis and small people from Indochina and Peru. Just walking, and the sunset towers they go toward. How beautiful they are, patient, unsmiling in their native dress, the Family of Man.

We have set out walking too, but from the west. We’ve calculated how long it will take from our home, and we’ve decided that it can’t take longer than the endless waits for trains and planes and buses, to say nothing of the trip by car. No matter how often we’ve all been warned not to do it, forbidden to do it (but who can turn them back once they’ve set out?), people have been piling into their station wagons and sedans, loading the trunks with coolers full of sandwiches and pop, a couple of extra jerricans of gas—about a dollar a gallon most places!—and setting out as though on some happy expedition to the national parks. Now those millions are coming to a halt, from New Jersey, north as far as Albany, and south to Philadelphia, a solid mass of them, like the white particles of precipitate forming in the beaker in chemistry class, drifting downward to solidify. Then you have to get out and walk anyway, the sandwiches long gone and the trucks with food and water far between.

No, we’ve left the Valiant in the carport and we’re walking, just our knapsacks and identification, living off the land and the kindness of strangers.

There was a story in my childhood, a paradox or a joke, which went like this: Suppose all the Chinamen have been ordered to commit suicide by jumping off a particular cliff into the sea. They are to line up single file and each take his or her turn, every man, woman, and child jumping off, one after the other. And the joke was that the line would never end. For the jumping-off of so many would take so long, even at a minute a person, that at the back of the line lives would have to be led by those waiting their turn, and children would be born, and more children, and children of those children even, so that the line would go on and people would keep jumping forever.

This, no, this wouldn’t take forever. There was an end and a terminus and a conclusion, there was a finite number to accommodate in a finite space—that was the point—though, of course, there would be additions to the number of us along the way; that was understood and accounted for, the hospital spaces of the city have been specially set aside for mothers-to-be nearing term, and, anyway, how much additional space can a tiny newborn use up? In those hospitals too are the old and the sick and, yes, the dying, it’s appalling how many will die in this city in this time, the entire mortality of Earth, a number not larger than in any comparable period, of course, maybe less, for that matter, because this city has some of the best medical care on Earth and doctors and nurses from around the world have also been assigned to spaces in clinics, hospitals, asylums, overwhelmed as they might be looking over the sea of incapacity, as though every patient who ever suffered there has been resurrected and brought back, hollow-eyed, gasping, unable to ambulate.

But they are there! That’s what we’re not to forget, they are all there with us, taking up their allotted spaces—or maybe a little more because of having to lie down, but never mind, they’ll all be back home soon enough, they need to hang on just a little longer. And every one who passes away before the termination, the all clear, whatever it’s to be called—will be replaced, very likely, by a newborn in the ward next door.

And what about the great ones of the world, the leaders and the presidents-for-life and the field marshals and the members of parliaments and presidiums, have they really all come? If they have, we haven’t been informed of it—of course, there are some coming with their nations, but the chance of being swallowed up amid their subjects or constituents, suffering who-knows-what indignities and maybe worse, has perhaps pushed a lot of them to slip into the city unobserved on special flights of unmarked helicopters and so on, to be put up at their embassies or at the Plaza or the Americana or in the vast apartments of bankers and arms dealers on Park Avenue. Surely they have left behind cohorts of devoted followers, henchmen, whatever, men who can keep their fingers on the red button or their eyes on the skies, just in case it has all been a trap, but we have to be realistic: Not every goatherd in Macedonia, every bushman in the Kalahari is going to be rounded up, and they don’t need to be for this to work—you can call your floor thoroughly swept even if a few twists of dust persist under the couch, a lost button beneath the radiator. The best is the enemy of the good. He’s an engineer, he must know that.

And it is working. They are filling, from top to bottom, all the great buildings, the Graybar Building, the Pan Am Building, Cyanamid, American Metal Climax, the Empire State—a crowd of Dutch men and women and children fill the souvenir shop at the top of the Empire State Building, milling, handling the small models, glass, metal, plastic, of the building they are in. The Metropolitan Museum is filling as though for a smash-hit opening, Van Gogh, Rembrandt; the Modern as for a Pollack retrospective or Op Art show; there is even champagne! How is it that certain people have managed to gather with people like themselves, as on Fifth Avenue, at the Catholic diocesan headquarters, Scribner’s bookshop, the University Club, whereas old St. Patrick’s is crowded with just everybodies, as though they had all come together to pray for rain in a drought or to be safe from an invading army? They are the invading army!

We know so little, really, plodding along footsore and amazed and yet strangely elated among the millions, the river of humanity, as Ed Sullivan said in his last column in the Daily News before publishing was suspended for the duration. The broad streets (Broadway!) just filled all the way across with persons, a river breaking against the fronts of the dispatcher stations, streams diverted uptown, which is north more or less, downtown, which is south. And now the flood is at last beginning to lessen, to loosen, a vortex draining away into the shops and the apartments, the theaters and the restaurants.

She and I have received our assignment. The building is in Manhattan, below Houston Street, which we have learned divides the newer parts of the city from the older parts. Though old Greenwich Village is mostly above it and all of Wall Street is below it. We would like to have been ushered down that far, to find a space for ourselves in one of those titans of steel and glass, where perhaps we could look out at the Statue of Liberty and the emptied world. We were surprised to find we both wished for that! I’d have thought she’d want a small brownstone townhouse on a shady street. Anyway, it’s neither of those, it’s a little loft on the corner of Spring Street and Lafayette Street, an old triangular building just five stories tall. Looking down on us from the windows on the east side of the street as we walk that way are Italian men and women, not people just arrived from Italy but the families who live in those places, for that’s Little Italy there, and the plump women in housedresses, black hair severely pulled back, and the young men with razor-cut hair and big wristwatches are the tenants there. They’re waving and shouting comments down to the crowd endlessly passing, friendly comments or maybe not so friendly, hostile even maybe, their turf invaded, not the right attitude for now.

But here we are, number 370, we wait our turn to go in and up. Stairs to the third floor. It seems artists now live in the building, they are allowed to, painters, we smell linseed oil and canvas sizing. Our artist is lean, scrawny almost, his space nearly empty, canvases leaning against the wall, their faces turned away. We look down—maybe shy—and can see in the cracks of the old floorboards what she says are metal snaps, snaps for clothing, from the days when clothes were made here by immigrants. Our artist is either happy to see us or not happy, excited and irritated; that’s probably universal. We are all cautious about saying anything much to him or to one another, after all he didn’t invite us. Okay, okay he keeps saying. Is that dark brooding resentful girl in the black leotard and Capezios his girlfriend?

Well, better here than in some vast factory floor in the borough of Queens or train shed in Long Island City, or out on Staten Island, not much different from where we come from. The ferries are leaving from Manhattan’s tip for Staten Island every few minutes, packed with people to the gunwales or the scuppers or whatever those outside edges are called. World’s cheapest ocean voyage, they say, just a nickel to cross the whitecapped bay; Lady Liberty, Ellis Island deserted and derelict over that way, where once before the millions came into New York City to be processed and checked and sent out into the streets. The teeming streets. I lift my lamp beside the golden door. For a moment, thinking of that, looking down at those little metal snaps that slipped from women’s fingers fifty, sixty years ago, it all seems to make sense, a human experiment, a proof of something finally and deeply good about us and about this city, though we don’t know what, not exactly.

It’s the last day, the last evening; we’re lucky to have arrived so late, there won’t be problems with food supplies or sleeping arrangements that others are having. The plan has worked so smoothly! All the populations are being accommodated, there are fights and resistance reported in various locations, but these are being handled by the large corps of specially trained, minimally armed persons—not police, not soldiers, for the police forces and the armies were the first to arrive and be distributed, for obvious reasons—because they could be ordered to, and because of what they might do if left behind till last. And now it’s done: Everywhere, in every land, palm and pine, the planners and directors and their staffs have taken off their headsets, removed the reels of tape from the ranks of computers huge as steel refrigerators, shut down their telephone banks and telex machines—a network of information tools reaching around the world, whose only goal has been this, this night. They have boarded the last 707s to leave Bombay, Leningrad, Johannesburg and been taken just like all the others to the airports in New Jersey and Long Island, and when they have deplaned, the crews, too, leave the airplanes parked and take the last buses into the city, checking their assignments with one another, joking—pilots and stewies; they’re used to bunking in strange cities. When the buses have been emptied, the drivers turn them off and leave them in the streets, head for the distribution centers for assignments. Last of all, the dispatchers, all done: They can hardly believe it, not an hour’s sleep in twenty-four, their ad hoc areas littered with coffee cups, telexes, phone slips, fanfold paper, cartons from the last Chinese restaurants. They gather themselves and go out into the bright streets—the grid is holding!—and they take themselves to wherever they have assigned themselves, not far, because they’re walking, all the trains and taxis have stopped, no one left to ride or drive them; they mount the stairs or take the elevators up to where they are to go.

It’s done. The streets now empty and silent. The city holds its breath, they will say later.

In our loft space we have been given our drinks and our canapés. It’s not silent here: We allow ourselves to joke about it, about our being here, we demand fancy cocktails or a floor show, but in a just-kidding way—actually it’s strangely hard to mingle. She and I stick together, but we often do that at parties. We stand at the windows; we think they look toward the southeast, in the direction of most of the world’s population, though we can’t see anything, not even the night sky. Every window everywhere is lit.

But think of the darkness now over all the nightside of Earth. The primeval darkness. For all the lights out there have been turned off, or not turned on, perhaps not all, but so many. The quiet of all that world, around the Earth and back again almost to here where we stand, this little group of islands, these buildings alight and humming, you can almost hear the murmur and the milling of the people.

He was right. It could be done; he knew it could be and it has been, we’ve done it. There’s a kind of giddy pride. Overpopulation is a myth! There are so few of us compared to Spaceship Earth’s vastness; we can feel it now for certain in our hearts, we hear it with our senses.

But—many, many others must just now be thinking it, too—there’s more. For now the whole process must be reversed, and they, we, have to go home again. To our home places, spacious or crowded. And won’t we all remember this, won’t we think of how for a moment we were all together, so close, a brief walk or a taxi ride all that separates any one of us from any other? And won’t that change us, in ways we can’t predict?

Did he expect that, did he think of it? Did he know it would happen? Moon-faced little man in his black horn-rims, had he known this from the start?

One final test, one final proof only remains. We’ve received our second drink. At the turntable our host places the 45 on the spindle and lets it drop. In every space in the city just at this moment, the same: on every record player, over every loudspeaker. The needle rasps in the groove—maybe there’s a universal silence for a moment, an expectant silence, maybe not—and then the startlement of music. That voice crying out, strangely urgent, almost pleading with us to take his hand, and go like this.

Alone together in the quiet world, the nations begin to twist.