They parted company in midtown, surrounded on all sides by panting joggers, and arranged to meet again later. In attempting to visualize the man, Sorger, who had not had enough sleep, saw only a half-eaten apple in the man's handâseeds glistened on the core.
As a rule, Sorger had to “work” himself into a new place; it was some time before he felt at home there. But in the megalopolitan hotel he immediately felt sheltered. His corner room in the tapering tower-like edifice had two windows, one facing west, the other south. Westward, the eye flew to the reservoir in the great mid-city park and rested thereâsouthward, it passed over an intricate pattern of rooftops, below which the network of streets remained invisible, and leapt straight to the horizon, which was barred from end to end by giant office buildings, and it was as though the true metropolis began only with this distant blue. The varicolored area of flat-roofed apartment houses between Sorger and the barrier seemed a region apart, from which the cars, honking their horns but hidden in the chasm-like streets, seemed much farther removed than the numerous planes roaring overhead. Turning away from the west window and the reservoir, Sorger, in an instantaneous dream, saw this self-contained system as a shut-down factory. Gulls
skimmed the light-gray surface of the reservoir; in the other window appeared the two spires of a cathedral, not nearly as high as the surrounding high-rise buildings, and Sorger felt his fatigue, which only a moment before had bordered on exhaustion, metamorphosed into self-mastery and strength. He saw the stranger's face distinctly: the cheeks looked as if all their muscles had been knotted together, a strand of hair cut across his forehead and seemed prolonged by the notch of his lower lip; he heard his voice abruptly rising and falling as though he were looking for the right pitch. The severe lines of the high-rise buildings, the glitter of the planes, the wailing of the police sirensâSorger had the impression that a lasso had been thrown: the whole city was being hoisted into his room.
He was staying at a so-called residential hotel. Many of the guests lived there for a quite a while, often with their families. Forgetting his need for sleep, he rode down to the lobby under the auspices of an elevator man in a braided uniform. At every floor, grownups got in, accompanied by children (with flexed knees), all talking at once in different languages. By the end of the protracted descent Sorger had become “one of the elevator crowd” and as such he bounced out into the street.
He had time for detours. As he made his way in the sunlight, his sleepy grogginess turned to erotic self-assurance. Was it his fatigue which, more intensely at each detour, made many places seem like repetitions, separated by wide, flashing expanses?
By way of getting ready for the stranger, he walked slowly into the park and stopped, facing one of the granite boulders which jut out of the grass like the wing tips of buried airplanes. Looking up, he saw people passing through a wide, still-shady hollow between two hills, like Indians
in the Far North; here and there in this unbroken procession he saw reminders of his dead. Not because of similarities; it sufficed to immerse himself in the big-city crowds as they moved this way and that, to dwell on an insignificant gesture, the outline of a cheek, a rapid glance, a headband, and quite naturally, without dream or evocation, the departed would enter into the picture, but without obstructing the general movement (as often happens in dreams); on the contrary, giving it new life. Unlike any other landscape, the Big City swept “his people” along in its movement, not only the living, but the resurrected dead as well.
Seeing his dead walking sprightly in the crowd, the survivor involuntarily rubbed his hands against the grooves in the granite, for joy at his new understanding of time, which until then he had thought of as purely and simply hostile. Here time no longer meant loneliness and death, but reunion and shelter; and, for the length of one lucid moment (when would it slip away?), he conceived of time as a “God” who was “good.”
Yes, he had the word, and time became a light in the middle of the city, shining in the glass globe of a park lamp lit up by the morning sun. The thick, cloudy, dusty glass, containing the shadow of an electric light bulb enlarged by the sun, flared up in the city mist and led his gaze onward to running dogs, from these to a bright-colored pile of clothes in the fork of a tree, and from these to the children playing ball down below and the still shadowy-dark ball at their feet.
Like primeval man, he moved on to partake elsewhere of the daylight that was beginning anew on every object. The eyeball of a man coming toward him, a shimmering metal box, and the pale moon seemed joined into a triangle. Too much light. Alone and released from his
ties with the disciplined gravity of natural forms, how was he to avoid the folly and incoherence of ecstasy?
He went into a coffee shop and read the paper. It had a weather map on which the various regions were indicated only by “Bitter cold,” “Snow showers,” “Mild,” “Foggy, then sunny.” As he immersed himself in the map, amid the clatter of china and the soft radio music, these coalesced to form a cozy late-autumn continent in whose biggest city he was “drinking coffee” and “reading the paper” like a citizen of long standing. And here, as he glanced at the sunlit buses outside (the passengers sitting on benches placed lengthwise were visible only from behind as glossy hairdos in different colors), Sorger, more confident of the future, experienced his second return to the Western world. And with that the place in which he then happened to be began to take on importance.
The coffee shop was very narrow, with a single row of seats, which led deep into a kind of tunnel. (At the end of the tunnel a luminous sign read: “Women/Water.”) The subway entrance was directly outside the front window, and some of the people passing horizontally on the street would suddenly vanish down the stairs, moving obliquely out of the picture, while others rose head first into the rectangle of the window.
Behind Sorger were Big City voices, not always free from accent, but even when there was an accent, so very self-assured. He was struck by the number of children, which here, of all places, seemed surprising. A child came in and wanted to buy something they didn't have. Sorger heard the child sigh. At that moment someone at the cash desk behind Sorger was making out a check in a loud voice. As he said the date (all sounds died away, only the radio music went softly on and the steam from
the coffee machine seemed to move through the date), a general breathlessness set in and time became increasingly active (for a brief instant Sorger saw an enormous silhouette over a river landscape) and irradiated the room with a warming wave of light.
For all this the eyewitness had only the words “century” and “peacetime”; he saw calendar leaves falling as in a silent film. The goddess Time did not remove the coffee shop, which suddenly began to glitter along with the tin ashtrays and sugar bowls (which became gold and silver), from that day's date, but connected it with the dates of past days, until the room (becoming not strange but more and more homelike) encompassed all those inventions, discoveries, sounds, images, and forms down through the centuries which make for a possibility of humanity.
All those present breathed as one. Light became matter, and the present became history; at first painfully convulsed (for this moment there was no language), then calm and matter-of-fact, Sorger wrote, to give the force of law to what he had seen, before it vanished: “What I am here experiencing must not pass away. This is a law-giving moment; absolving me of my transgression, for which I alone was responsible and which has weighed on me ever since, it puts me, as an individual capable of participating only by chance, under obligation to intervene as consistently as possible. At the same time, it is my historic moment: I have learned (yes, I am still capable of learning) that history is not a mere sequence of evils, which someone like me can do nothing but despiseâbut has also, from time immemorial, been a peace-fostering
form
that can be perpetuated by anyone (including me). I have just found out that I, hitherto a mere witness (though sometimes thinking myself completely into others), belonged to this history of forms,
and that, along with the people in this coffee shop and those passing by outside, I, inspired with new life, am actually playing a part in it. Thus the night of this century, during which I searched my face obsessively for the features of a despot or a conqueror, has ended for me. My history (our history, friends) shall become bright, just as this moment has been brightâup until now, it could not even begin; conscious of our guilt, yet giving allegiance to no one, not even to others conscious of their guilt, we were unable to vibrate in harmony with the peaceful history of mankind; our formlessness only engendered new guilt. For the first time I have just seen my century in the light of day, open to other centuries, and I had no objection to living at the present time. I was even glad to be the contemporary of you contemporaries, and to be a citizen of the earth among others; and I was sustained (beyond all hope) by an exultant feeling not of my immortality but of man's. I believe in this moment; in writing it down;
I make it my law.
I declare myself responsible for my future, I long for eternal reason and will never again be alone. So be it.”
Sorger stared at himself in the coffee-shop mirror, empty, exhausted, petrified, as though emerging from the depth of the centuries; on that day he was moved by his own face.
Looking up, he was not at all surprised to see, in the throng of people outside, the two women he had met in Earthquake Park on the West Coast. He smiled, and after gracefully giving him their sign, the two women vanished into the subway: they would often meet again.
Then a strange transformation occurred: the crowd outside the window began to move faster and faster, became more dense, face pressed against face, and at lengthâeach individual in hurrying past almost frighteningly
showing all his characteristicsâfilled the whole street. Thousands of eyes came glowing toward him. The image reeled and he knew that he had once again slept for a few moments. He felt the warm blood in his arms as a bond with his forebears, and looked forward to seeing the man from the plane: “Shall I recognize you? And what will you tell me?”
Still in the coffee shop, Sorger, in observing the scratched tabletop, found his way back to “his” earth forms. As he sat there in the low, dark, ground-floor room as though walled off from the towering Big City on all sides of him, a shimmer of the frozen river emerged from the wintry night; the shuttle buses crossed the newly regenerated West Coast pass and drove into the eastern morning light as over a continental divide, and behind them, clearly visible in the rising mist, the ocean waves rose and fell. Not only the bruised tabletop but also the floor of the coffee shop imitated the surface of the earth. Near the cash desk it formed a slight hollow, and for a terrifying moment Sorger felt that the ground was gone from under his feet, as though the floorboards had been laid on the bare, unleveled earth; and through this irregularity of the room the city became, in its very depths, a living and powerful natural organism. Going out into the street, where the humped sidewalk extended the coffee-shop floor, Sorger seemed to inhale the whole rocky island in one breath. Moving on the concrete slabs of the sidewalk intensified his conquest of space and gave it permanence. He experienced the subsoil of the city, which only a short while before had risen into the air from lifeless pavement. Now the buildings no longer seemed to have been plunked down in the landscape, they had become an integral part of it, as though the skyscrapers were really at home on this rocky island. Indeed, the city
gradually became a village-like settlement in which small houses with bay windows stood side by side with high-rise buildings. A woman with a polka-dot scarf on her head, carrying a loaf of bread in a string bag, was waiting for the bus, holding by the hand a child with a school bag. The summer lived on in a brick sunk deep into the tar, and the rain-filled holes in the asphalt foreshadowed the rural winter with its vast expanses of ice.
At one point Sorger stopped among towering buildings in the awareness of being at the geographical summit of New York. There he saw a locust tree, losing not only its leaves but whole branches as well in the mountain wind.
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In the city on the West Coast, Sorger had never been on his way to see anyone; now he had this man from the plane, and he was going to see him. The stranger's name was Esch, and again he looked at Sorger as unswervingly as that morning in the cab, as if he had had Sorger's face before him throughout his absence.
They sat in a spacious restaurant, at first almost alone, with many empty tables around them, but these were soon occupied by the swarm of diners who swept into the restaurant with the coming of night. All evening the subway shook the ground under them. They were sitting in a corner booth, and when they raised their heads, they came into contact with the leaves of a potted rubber tree. The far end of the room was white with steam from the kitchen; sometimes the dishes moved like paddle wheels.
At first sight, the stranger's lips were very pale, but after a while Sorger stopped noticing them. Much of the time, even in speaking, eating, and drinking, the stranger held his head propped on one hand. He said (repeatedly
sticking his tongue out): “You mustn't imagine that I want to ask you questions. I don't want to get acquainted with you. When I thought about our appointment during the day, I regretted my impulse. I toyed with the thought of not showing upâand I'm certain it was the same with you.”