40. New York is a town best seen from the street up...
The fortieth instalment of 'Oh, That More Such Flowers May Come Tomorrow' in which our hero takes a walk through a snowbound Central Park.
Welcome to 'Oh, That More Such Flowers May Come Tomorrow', a novel I’ve published as a serial. If you’re new here, you can start at the beginning, or use the links below to navigate to other chapters.
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New York is a town best seen from the street up, and I remember reminding myself, as I lay there feeling blue and hollow, but strangely sanguine in my blueness and hollowness, of how I’d always wanted to do just that…
To feel the pulse of this place. A desire that thoughts of my father’s errant emigration only served to increase. Once conscious of New York’s existence – usually through film and television – there’s no eradicating it from the mind. New York is everywhere. New York is everything. New York stands as archetype and apotheosis, maternity ward and mortuary, Tartarus and Tir Na Nog. Never has a city been so replete with absolute hope and absolute despair; never have mankind’s teleological delusions been so well wrought; never had I wanted a place to want me as much as I wanted it.
On that bright morning, I feared being cast out by the city, of having to leave on its terms, not my own, which I guess was exactly what happened to my father in the end. Chewed up, spat out, spewed back across the pond. Perhaps that was why he’d come back. Unfinished business. Ghosts, after all, don’t need passports or green cards. And almost as sure as I was that I’d been seeing things – hallucinations brought about by my delicate emotional state – another part of me was convinced that what I’d seen was utterly real. Despite my trepidation, the only thing to do, I reasoned, was get back out there to see if he’d reappear, to see if he’d speak, if there was some message he had to convey, from the dead to the living, from father to son.
An hour or so later, I was sat in the kitchen nursing a cup of coffee, swaddled in thick winter clothes, but unable to make that final move out of the apartment. Another hour after that, I was sliding uptown, along icy sidewalks, towards Central Park. By that point, the whole of Manhattan was covered in a thick mist, which hung low in the sky and obscured the tops of the buildings. Everything felt pressed together, condensed. When I reached the southern edge of the park, I could hear the playful screams of people skating. I stood by the edge of the ice rink and watched the happy chaos for a few minutes; bright figures haphazardly darting this way and that, some tottering, holding onto one another for balance, occasionally falling down, others gracefully arcing the perimeter with ease. Part of me wanted to join them, but even as a kid I could never keep my feet. Instead, I walked deeper into the park, until the noise of the skaters died away. Apart from the occasional dog walker, I was soon alone, caught amid the snow’s frolic architecture, conscious of a world closing around me, of my mind working overtime and yet incapable of stringing together coherent thoughts.
All the while, the mist fell still further, enshrouding everything, exacerbating this mental impotence. The city had disappeared entirely. I could see perhaps two or three feet ahead and no further, with only the dark shapes of trees emerging occasionally out of the grey pall. And then the snow started falling again, landing and fizzing on my shoulders and sleeves. I looked up and it repeated the trick on my face. I opened my mouth and let the icy flakes dissolve on my tongue. Within minutes, the snowfall had become even heavier, as the last traces of traffic noise died away, unable to penetrate the combined insulation of fog, fauna, and snow.
For a moment I considered turning back, but then reassured myself that civilisation was a quick walk away on either side; all I needed to do was turn left or right and I’d be back in the city in a matter of minutes. Then another thought interposed: what if, somehow, the city had truly disappeared? Gone for good? What if I’d inadvertently slipped through an invisible portal into another space or time? What if there was no way out and I was stuck in an endless Narnian winter? Trapped in a land without definition, with nothing but this indeterminate whiteness, caught in an unceasing battle against its brute inviolability, like Hans Castorp or the Pedersen Kid. Or what if I’d somehow been transported back to the old America, to the vast wilderness that once stretched for what must have felt like forever, before the Europeans came, before the great and terrible visions that brought forth this city into existence were ever conceived? And I thought of the people in this same place all those years ago, creeping through the dark winter forests; people who understood the power of their antecedents, who spoke a language of invocation, who called on the spirits to guide and protect them. Was their world a better and purer one than ours? Did they possess a knowledge we’d since lost? Was this loss at the root of our collective psychopathy? A distant cause of my own derangement? Was it to blame for the corruption and sickness that blighted our age?
I kept walking, further and further north, but soon a deep tiredness came over me, a profound weight that overwhelmed my legs, which seemed to sink into the ground. I wished I was back in bed, comfortable under the covers, content in my blueness and hollowness, rather than out here, disorientated, anxious, and cold. I realised that it wasn’t just the struggle through the weather sapping my energy, but the cumulative struggles of the past however-many-years-it-had-been, suddenly asserting themselves over my entire body. I understood that almost every day during this time had involved a strenuous mustering of the will, so that I might simply go on. Perhaps I could just find a bench and sit down, despite the chill, to rest and watch my breath seep out into the world, float upwards, and merge with the mist. It would be nice to stop struggling for a while. Maybe I’d fall asleep. Maybe more. In the circumstances, it didn’t seem like such a bad thing. He obviously wasn’t coming back.
Suddenly, there was a strange noise, a kind of low alien moan, somewhere ahead of me. I stared hard but could see nothing. I peered into the mist and thought I could make out an approaching figure, but couldn’t be sure. It was painfully cold now; the temperature had dropped another few degrees in a matter of seconds. I listened out for the sound again but was met with an icy silence. I kept listening, as if through an act of will, I could detect vibrations usually beyond human apprehension, striving to hear as compensation for this temporary inability to see. The rhythmic thud of rushing footsteps was my eventual reward, as a florid-faced runner emerged from the brume, arms and legs flailing, panting like a wounded animal. He raised his eyebrows and grinned at me, uttering the word ‘cold’ as he passed by. I nodded, smiled a reciprocal smile, then turned and watched him fold back into the mist, which eddied gracefully in his wake. The sudden presence of another person lifted me out of my delirium. I walked on until I found myself on a bridge. Peering over the side, I could just make out what looked like ice below. My fingers and toes hurt. I realised where I was and that it couldn’t be too much further to the Met, where I could sit and get warm. So, I kept going, steering myself through the mist and snow in what I thought was the right direction, conscious of an urgent need for further signs of life. Finally, the dark shape of the museum appeared up ahead. I staggered on toward it.
Inside, I found the heat and humanity I craved; the comfort of a hundred voices reverberating round the Great Hall; a welcome reassertion of society after the strange solitude of the park. Depositing my sodden coat in the cloakroom, I meandered around the galleries with no plan of where to go or what to see. I was just glad to be out of the cold. Eventually, I found myself standing in front of a picture by Vermeer of a woman in a blue dress. Surely things weren’t so bad for us if we could do things like this? If we could conjure such beauty from nowhere? I realise now that I’d been unconsciously drawn to the kind of blues I remembered from my father’s own youthful efforts, which had the magic that all blues have, ethereal but enduring, entirely of the world and yet somehow apart from it, as the sky is from the ocean. And I recalled the mural he’d created for the living room wall in our old house, a kind of abstract seascape, looking out over the water from the cliffs above, sailboats speckling the bay, a cocktail of green and blue and white. I hadn’t thought about this picture for years, but there it was, every detail writ large in my mind, almost as clear as the works hung on the walls around me, and at that moment as moving and majestic as the Vermeer, because it was made by him and given new life by my imagination.
And then, without warning, almost as if called back to take the acclaim for his artistry, I saw his face again on the far side of the room, staring directly at me. I answered his gaze, and we held each other’s eyes for a moment, but then he turned and left through the nearby doorway. I remained rooted to the spot for what felt like an age but was probably only a few seconds, then ran after him. With that, one of the attendants shouted at me to slow down. Flustered, I apologised in my best English accent. Walking, I turned into the corridor, which was thick with people. Up ahead, I could see the back of a head I thought might be his – but manoeuvring myself through the crowd proved difficult. A stream of further apologies spilled from my mouth as I squeezed sheepishly through the tightly packed bodies. But no matter how much I moved onward, the figure always seemed to be the same distance away, beyond reach, beyond certitude. I tried to picture the face I’d just seen. Was it really him? It wasn’t either of the faces I’d seen yesterday. I was sure of that. It was a younger, healthier face, closer to the way he’d looked before he’d left for New York, when I was a teenager and couldn’t bear the thought of him leaving. It had colour, definition.
Keeping my eye fixed firmly on that same head, I quickened my pace in an effort to catch up; but seconds later he’d turned yet another corner and was no longer visible. When I eventually reached what turned out to be a staircase leading downwards, he was gone. I made my was down the stairs, but he was nowhere to be seen. Dejected, I slumped to the ground. Why wouldn’t he stop? Why couldn’t I reach him? But then what would I do if I did? Say hello? Ask how he was? Ask what he wanted? I wasn’t sure whether ghosts could even speak. I mean, true, he’d started out as a voice, wholly incorporeal, but did possessing a body change things? Perhaps the power of manifestation diminished the power of speech. But Shakespeare’s ghosts speak, I reminded myself. ‘I am thy father’s spirit.’ Although maybe that was a condition of dramatic form rather than a point of metaphysical fact. Whatever this was, whatever was happening here, I felt a fresh wave of sadness come over me; a sadness for him and a sadness for me; a sadness that we were running these strange circles around each other, still unable to breach the divide between us in death as in life.
It wasn’t long before I was asked to move on by another equally diligent museum attendant who explained that sitting on the stairs wasn’t permitted. With great effort, I got to my feet and made my way back to the Great Hall, where I stood and scanned as many faces as I could. I was disappointed that none of them were his, but also relieved. In the end, I gave up, collected my coat, and walked back out onto Fifth Avenue. It was still snowing, but the mist had lifted a little and the world had lightened with its lifting. Two young boys in brightly coloured winter clothes were throwing handfuls of snow at one another, as their parents looked on, laughing. The sight prompted a surge of envy in my belly, as for the briefest moment I imagined myself a father, imagined one of the children was mine, imagined a different world entirely. I thought of the Scottish woman from the Burns Night party; I wished she was here with me, clutching my arm. I thought of the Travelling Companion. And I wished that I wasn’t always alone.
Then, in a flash of Proustian recollection, my mind skipped back to the old recreation ground, to those cold winters, and I remembered a pair of red wellington boots, bright against the snow under foot, and a bottle-green balaclava knitted by my grandmother, and the old tea trays we used as makeshift sleds, and my father and I stood together on the white plain, rolling up giant snowballs, so densely packed that they remained there for days after the thaw, resting atop the crisp green grass, and thus so awfully incongruous that I longed for them to melt and stop reminding me of the joy that had been so quickly snatched away by the mercury rising and the cruel winter sun.
Need to catch up on previous instalments? You can find links to all the previous chapters here.