Racing in Place: Collages, Fragments, Postcards, Ruins

Going Up

I

I am a gawker. A bumpkin, a hayseed from the Midwest, I stand on the wide sidewalks of cities to look up at the tall buildings. The pedestrians stream grudgingly by, parting into channels on either side of my shoal-like stillness. The walls launch from the same concrete on which I am standing. They vault into the air. This looking creates pleasant illusions. My vision, as it swipes along the lithic or glass facades, recreates the sped-up record of the tower's construction, brick on brick furiously morphing into a solid sheet, raining upward. It is that cinematic technique of vertigo, that pulled focus of the camera lens, the simultaneous clarity of the very close and the brilliant detail of distance itself stretching, stretching even further away. I am looking straight up! All that is square to the solid deck beneath my feet, all these truly true vertical lines, diminishing as they go (and they do go), vector toward that very center of the endless sky. All lines point to the vanishing point. I am looking straight up! I can see the point of vanishing. This perfect lesson of perspective. This gawking is, perhaps, a function of my midwestern-ness, an expression of my eyes' evolution on a flat plain. The horizon is all periphery, one endless sentence. The horizon is not this concentrated speck of attention up there, not this black pinprick of convergence, not this dot at the end of seeing seeing, not this infinite period.

2

They are called cars. The first one I remember was piloted, its operator uniformed identically to the then contemporary, early '60s stewardess. The white gloves. The fitted flannel suit. The military buttons. The raked hat with affixed winged device and contrasting piping edging its many folds. Now elevators are selfservice, and we forget because they are designed to make us forget, that they are vehicles moving through space. The hobbled acceleration of that motion, today, is so damped, disguised. You enter. The doors close. The doors open. And you are somewhere else. It's as if the building rearranged itself outside while you waited in the closed box, or burly work crews struck the lobby like a stage set behind the sliding curtain. Sure, the numbers flash as you pass from floor to floor but that is simple distraction, the only real movement this awkward analog one. My first trip? The first one I remember. I traveled from the ground to the third floor of a small department store. The operator manipulated levers, turned wheels guiding our vehicle. She stopped at the intervening floors, the stool she leaned on springing back up against the wall as she reached across the car to open the first set of double doors. "Going up. Mezzanine. Going up. First floor." The landings were never exact, the floor of the car and the floor of the floor misaligned like a square of sidewalk dislodged by a tree root. She inched the two floors together, the nudge teasing the tension in the cables to sing, covering her operations with recitation of the floor's merchandise, a kind of tour guide. "Watch your step." Later, I waited on the third floor. I was in another world, the world of underwear, husky pants, school shoes, brownie uniforms, belts, handkerchiefs, flatware, china, lunch pails, luggage, and travel alarms. But I lingered at the landing. I watched the cars arrive from below, depart. There were two shafts, the cars' alternating rise and fall, a kind of breathing. A distinct shadow filled the squares of light in the opaque windows of the outer doors. The bell struck flat, the tinny ceremony of arrival. "Watch your step." I made no move for the empty car. "Going down." The doors slid shut. The muffled announcement of the next destination filtered through. I watched the shadow sink, compress into a line at the lip of the floor. Going, then gone.

3

Z is the other axis of travel. When we travel, we think in terms of going north, going south, even thinking of that as going up or down, the three dimensions of our world constantly flattened to the two of our maps. We laugh at the flat earth notion but we operate happily within it. Altitude, the forgotten coordinate of place, escapes us when latitude and longitude will suffice as we roam our vast world and report on our extended movements around it. Even when a journey considers ascent, to climb a mountain, say, there is the usual flat travel to that place. The scramble to the summit is always described as a sprint, the last burst of energy, an afterthought, really, to the sea-level preparations and the establishment of base camps. The destination of "up" is often too foreign, too strange to be considered travel. The mountains we want to climb could be near Kathmandu, on a spine of granite in the middle of Patagonia, but even these ends of the earth can begin to seem familiar in the way the roofs of the world never do. And that strange and final frontier overhead is not even that far away. A handful of miles, the distance of a daily horizontal commute, takes you to the edge of space. A few hundred feet and you are easily on your way out of this earthbound world.

4

A few steps take you around the observation deck of the Lincoln Tower. It is a kind of trench, this little walkway of a few yards circling the building's ultimate structure, the housing for the revolving searchlight topped by the flagpole and its snapping flag. The solid wall is shoulder-high to an adult. Kids would need to be hoisted up to the shoulders of adults to see out over the wall. The tower is nineteen stories, and was once, when it was built in 1930, the tallest building in the state. It was a scale model of the Empire State Building, finished about the same time. Everything appeared quarter-sized. You can't see down. Seeing down is one of the reasons for traveling up. The looking down is a rare perspective. But the construction of the Lincoln Tower's observation deck makes it impossible to look down on the people walking below, the cars inching along the street. Instead, you must look out from the lookout. See the flat horizon, all 360 degrees of it. I used to walk the trench around the top of the Lincoln Tower gazing in all directions. Such venues often label the vantage points with the number of states, counties, miles your vision can collect. There, the sign reads, is Ohio, but it looks all the same. The green carpet of the canopy of trees, the ground fog of haze, the descending blue sky turning white. Is there a hint of the curve of the earth? Today, the Lincoln Tower is hemmed in by newer, taller buildings. The Fort Wayne Bank Building. The gas company's skyscraper. The phone company's microwave tower. The Lincoln Tower management has tilted up the searchlight's angle so the beam won't paint the windows of the offices yards away. You can see people in those adjacent structures, moving between offices, talking on the phone, eating lunch. They ignore the view mostly, or they have grown used to it. When it gets crowded in the sky, it seems as if everyone is floating. The towers are glass, transparent. You can't see the roots of the buildings. Occasionally, someone will be looking out. A man sitting at his desk, wearing a white shirt and tie, will be looking out at you, on the deck below, looking back at him. Even more rarely, several people will be looking at you simultaneously. They are all on different floors, on different parts of their different floors, a tic-tac-toe pattern. You wave, and they all wave back.

5

For a while there, Hyatt Hotels were notorious for hollowing out their buildings' center, creating the atrium lobbies that reached all the way up to the skylit roofs. The guest rooms emptied out onto terraces of balconies, suspended bridges, floating walkways with transparent floors looking down to the lobby levels, the bar there floating on an island in the middle of a pool. Often, trailing plants, bred to thrive on the filtered light and thin air, planted in the crannies and crags of the canyon wall, launched their viney tendrils into space in cascading falls of pale green foliage. The greenery softened the Escher-like angles of the vaulting geometry, aged the scalloped setbacks into ancient hanging gardens, Mayan ruins uncovered in a jungle. The elevators for reaching the upper floors became kinetic sculpture. The architects removed three walls of the elevators' shafts and walled the cars in glass outlined in strings of tiny lights. The effect, from a distance, was of these opalescent limpid creatures inching up and down a matte black aquarium wall or of these dewy drops of light scaling a slender ascending central pier of gliding gilded cables. These hotels were fortresses, blockhouses turned away from the decaying host cities outside. They were designed as refuges, as destinations in and of themselves. They packaged space. That was the most valuable part of the real estate, after all, not the footprint but the air rights. You bought the absence, the hollow, the nothing, the endless up. For this reason, their entryways were hidden, guarded, disguised. From the streets outside the facades of these cored castles were curtain walls of solid red brick, their outer windows, if they had them, were mere slits. The guest, arriving, made his way past the baffles and tunnels of the entry, finally out into these airy atriums. The heart leaped up. Here, at last, was a city of the future, a city under glass. Here, even gravity was revoked. You floated up to your room, a room wedged onto its own tier of drifting clouds.

6

My father worked as a switchman for the phone company. There was a five-story turret on the roof of the main office building downtown. The turret was the microwave tower. He would sneak me up there. The tower wasn't the familiar lacy truss of criss-crossing struts. This tower had been sheathed, for some reason, with sheets of corrugated metal painted the gray of battleships. Near the top were two decks for the white microwave collectors and transmitters. They looked like ears, of course, listening to the buzz in the air. Housed in this unusual structure they also looked, when I thought about it, like gigantic fungi, mushrooms scalloped on the bark of a tree. They hummed below us when my father took me to the top. In every direction, off in the distance, I could see the other microwave towers, the next nodes of the network. On each the white sails of its antennae cocked back toward our tower. I did think of it as a net, this invisible grid of electromagnetic impulse stitching the distance together. Off to the north, the high ground of my town, was the forest of transmission towers. The television and radio stations, a baker's dozen of the slender spires, were arranged on the horizon. All of them had the pulsing red warning lights, all on their own sequence. The tallest, because it was the tallest, also had a white strobe light. Every few seconds this explosion of light, like the radiation emanating from the tower on the old RKO Radio Picture logo, flashed out its bright bubble of energy. I think we mostly forget about these towers the way we forget about all the wires that circulate above our heads. Electric. Telephonic. The pipelines of data. We are so earthbound. We forget to notice this strata of travel. We actually go places on this plane. There, our voices carry. There, our images stream like choirs of angels on a bright ring of this elevated ether. It is only when you do physically get above this above that you see the airy layer of connection. The towers talk to one another, winking back and forth over the distance, over and over.

7

I like to call home from the tops of tall buildings. There always seem to be banks of pay phones on observation decks. "Guess where I am," I say. My parents never guess. I always say, "I think I can see your house," no matter where I am. I tell them what I can see. What states the sign says I can see. I tell them about the other tall buildings cropping up around me. I tell them about the radio stations on the observation deck. There are often radio stations. I tell them all the things I can see hidden-things hidden from below-on all the surrounding roofs. The water towers, the air conditioners with their slow-turning blades, the housings for the elevators, the skylights, the helipads. Phone calls from the tops of tall buildings are like postcards-compressed, tenuous, transmitted with a view. Thinking of you. And come to think of it, the brain is lodged on the observation floor of the body. Our thoughts peek out like so many tourists gazing from the windows in the Statue of Liberty's crown. Traveling up is a meditation. Being up is reflection. See your face reflected in the window through which you observe. What else to do but look. Look at the looking going on. Observation decks are most often hushed. If they are enclosed, there is no other sensation but sight. I begin to feel I am looking out of my body like I am looking out of the building. The world below begins to fit together as I gaze. I can see the way it fits together. That world becomes like a map; it begins to make sense like a map. To hover over it like this is to simulate the vantage of a map. Traveling up actually changes the scale of my vision. The people look like ants. Why go but to get this other angle on things? My head, yes, in the clouds.

8

There I was on the observation deck of the Sears Tower when it was the tallest building in the world. I was on the phone calling home. A cloudless day. The blue of the lake met the blue of the sky above like two swatches of paint sample, a minute modulation of the base tint separating them, blue one and blue two. A flock of crows launched from the green sward of Grant Park. As they rose the black birds transmuted, compressed and stretched into helicopters climbing. Four or five of them rising, rising up to my eye level where the two lead aircraft stalled and hovered in silence, their crew doors open and men inside looking back out at me. The tails of the hovering craft turned in circles as the others rushed past the windows, nose down, their blades pitched and biting in, the wash from their rotors beating the windows. Gone. Then those left, still levitating, drifted lazily straight up out of sight, gyring in the updraft of the building. A voice in my ear told me it was the president leaving town.

9

My little dictionary suggests that "story," the second meaning of the word-the complete horizontal division of a building constituting the area between two adjacent levels-comes to us from the Medieval Latin historia, "picture story." "Probably," the dictionary muses "from painted windows or sculpture on the front of buildings. See HISTORY." Indeed. I like this accident of history that abuts a synonym for floors in a building with "an account or recital of events or series of events, either true or fictitious." It conjectures a whole culture of gawkers staring up at the new buildings, getting the news from the stained glass, the has relief, the metopes tucked under the eves. The other story, the narrative one, is said to have a rising action, its pinnacle climax and its falling off. To travel vertically is to actually feel the feel of gravity, the rush of blood to your feet on a lift, the G in your seat in the airplane. And only then the hint of weightlessness at the peak when all that's solid vectors off as you descend. There is also the experience of the other weight we take for granted, the bearing down of all that's invisible, the mass of air that isn't there until you peel through its layers and its piercing registers in your ears. John Barth calls plot an incremental perturbation, a disturbance of gravity. Sure, the borders one crosses when one travels horizontally are real. They are cultural, national. You move from one dialect to the next, one language to another. But this journey is more picaresque perhaps, mere adventures. Traveling up and quickly, it is always quickly, one transgresses frontiers not of difference but of our very physical adaptation. The air thins. The blood boils. The story of Babel is the story of the invention of babble.

10

The story goes that a camera was found in the rubble of the collapsed World Trade Center. The disc inside the camera has miraculously survived and the image that arrives via e-mail, you are told, is only the most remarkable of the many recovered. From that image, you can imagine the story behind its taking. The camera's owner and a friend are on the tower's observation deck. "Stand over there and let me get a shot of you and the city below." You see a young man, smiling broadly in the foreground. Spread out behind him and below him is the grand canyon of the metropolis, the buttes and plateaus of lower Manhattan, the glinting river, and the escarpment of New Jersey. In the near background you can see the lip of the tower itself, the observation platform elevated and set back on the roof of the building. There, a few stories below, captured digitally, is the silver fuselage of the first plane a few meters away, it seems, from that morning's first catastrophe. The picture stands for the moment before the moment things all changed. It's a hoax, of course. The debunkers point out that even if you could believe the survival of the camera within the destruction, the deck hadn't yet opened that morning. I suppose too that an electronic camera would have time-coded the image and the real moment of its composition would have been recoverable. Still. It is the stillness of the shot that transfixes the viewer. Strangely, I want it to be real. Here would be Zeno's paradox. That airplane can never transverse the infinite and infinite regressing distances between points A and B. It never happened. The subject of the photograph, the smiling young man, is looking up at the camera. He looks like he doesn't know what is about to happen. How could he? When this picture was really taken, the one that was photoshopped into the fake, it was days or weeks before the events of September 11. His innocence is so convincing. What would be the other shots on that disk? The routine record of observing. The panoramic view of the island. The river widening out to the sea. The minute Statue of Liberty, a paperweight, on its slip of an island. The crowd of tourists on the observation deck, many of them taking pictures of what they had seen, proof they had been there stunned by this ordinary, this uneventful day.

11

Actors say they "go up" when they forget their lines during a performance. "He is going up." I suppose it derives from the unconscious gesture of rolling one's eyes heavenward looking for the lost words or cue. My first memory is of being on my father's shoulders. We are looking up at a tall building. In a window near the top, I see my mother. She is waving. My brother has just been born, and my mother is in the hospital. I am three. To write this essay, to write anything, I search through my memories. I like to think of them, my memories, arranged in library fashion on ascending stacks of stacks. In my imagination, there is one of those open ladders, rollers at its top running in channels and wheels wearing grooves on the floor. The ladder glides along the shelving. What I need to remember has always been kept on the upmost spot, the hardest part to reach. A place has these hidden coordinates: time and memory. We travel there. Through time and within memory. We return to the time when… When we tour, we want our destinations to remain timeless or, at least, to remain stuck in the time we first experienced them. In Athens, at the Acropolis, literarily the Summit City, they are restoring the ruins of the Parthenon, deteriorating from the city's pollution, to a state of pristine ruin: the moment the temple was blown up in the nineteenth century. I grew up in Fort Wayne, Indiana, called the Summit City for its location along a long-gone canal system. When I go back, I experience that distortion of scale that comes with travel through time, with the animation of memory. Things grow smaller as you go up. Things grow smaller as you go back in time.

12

I walked up the Washington Monument, the stairs winding around the one central elevator shaft fenced off by a wire screen. The occasional stone on the inside wall was inscribed by the donating charity, municipality, regiment. Here and there were scrubbed graffiti of the countless class trips. The windows on the cramped observation deck were miniscule, hard to get to as the current schoolchildren pressed in for a look. What I did see was the strange skyline of Washington, whose buildings are legislated to rise only so high as not to obscure the dome. It looked like about thirteen stories to me. An unlucky city, I thought. Off in the distance, I could glimpse the highrises of Virginia's Crystal City and the other taller obelisk dedicated to Washington by the Masons in Alexandria. The elevator delivered load after load of schoolchildren who rushed ten deep to the tiny windows. What had they come to see? What could they see? They were in a kind of space capsule not unlike the Apollo module that they had just seen at the Smithsonian. But now they were at the top of the rocket. A quick check out all the windows assured them of that. "Look!" they shouted. "Look how high up we are." And then it was time to go.

14

In the literature of elevators (Coover, Dahl, Whitehead), there is the moment when the car keeps going up. It is an extension of the initial wonder. Gravity has been resisted. The sky can now be scraped. The apparatus is so simple, so transparent, a parlor suspended by a thread. It is a daydream of elevator travel. The dream has you traveling in an elevator, pushing the button for the top floor, but as the vehicle arrives it rises above that, breaks through the ceiling, the roof, and keeps going on, up and up. As with all travel, it is the journey and not the destination. The protocol of elevator travel demands a silence among its occupants. No time here in the flight between floors for the dissertations of train travel, the memoirs of an ocean voyage, or even the interviews of the air. We become the center of gravity. We talk to ourselves. We dream our dreams. We contemplate claustrophobia, acceleration, even death. You have your excuse, this booth. For many it is a routine routine, a daily affirmation. This is a mechanized meditation. This is a special species of stillness at the heart of our teaming urban hives. We enter. We arrange ourselves. We face the closing doors. We suspend our animation. We go up.