prose fiction

In relative terms - and those are the only terms there are - New York City can very efficiently swamp a person’s innate sense of isolation and being at the center of all things perceived, by way of crowding crowds, refuse in the streets, and rackets, whether it is the last few months of the 1760s or the last few months of the 1860s or the last few months of the 1960s. Arthur Polk was a contemplative man, who, though but a function in an office space behind a back office on Wall Street, felt that he might have actually, beneath it all, been aspiring, in twilight hours or when dead asleep, to better things. Arthur did not know if the medium of these things was artistic, or religious, or in some undesignated way metamystical, but he allowed himself to feel fairly certain that it was in that general vicinity of the process that mingles the restless heart and the wandering mind without regard to lucre.

Several misfortunes constellated upon, or around, or above, or within him one humid August Wednesday afternoon, among them an inevitable but nonetheless stomach-dropping amatory collapse, his insight that his manager, Simon Legree, would for many years to come retard Arthur’s any advancement in the firm, and a certain vague presentiment of broadly generalized, and lethal, hopeless desperation. These tribulations in very short order had built themselves into a vision of what he could only assume would be the signal catastrophe of his entire lived-out life. He had then, in that obscure state of numb intoxication, barely known what was the reason he fetched from beneath his cot the rucksack that had gone entirely unused since he had departed Richmond, Virginia for New York City four years before, and that four years before that, wandering the Blue Ridge Mountains, had delivered to him what he did not know then were to be his last feelings of exultation and true Arthurness. Into the pack he placed implements of personal hygiene, a book, and stuffs of clothing. He wore canvas-and-leather shoes, and these he rode north like a hawk on a zephyr, hard by the Hudson. As the moon began to rise and the sun began to set, he glimpsed behind him the physical location of the grand bubbling hub of the New York political and neighborhood jurisdictions, and ahead of him his eyes and blood and heart embraced several million trees.

In a way, his goal was Port Oswego, on the southern shore of Lake Ontario, for there his dear sister had gone to reside as the superintendent of an orphanage. Arthur presumed that his skill at living off the land was off-form, and that a week or ten days of forage and sleeping in hayricks or on piles of grass would tire him onto vexatious exhaustion, and repose with Sister Sissy was bound to be necessary. He foresaw there staring out at the watery horizon towards where Canada lay, and confecting out of the free blown clouds, the useful plots and rollicks that would compose the next spell of his life.

This walk then, this pilgrimage, was a time for foraging in the wide open spaces of his mind and soul, for personally clarifying the messes he disliked calling values, and on the first three days following streams and hollows into the Catskills, as a tethered bird freed, he daydreamed riotously, becoming dizzy with liberty and drunk on chlorophyll. The widest expanses of possibility and self raged and sang, the sun and stars above offered him the keys to the Arthurian kingdom and realm. This reign, he realized, was mapped out as the whole State of New York.

Across the meadows, brambling through the woodstands, hopping little chops of creeks. Before he had decided for himself conclusively that it was a broad and penetrating sound, the force that lay itself upon him like a fog, and wrapped him in a subtle counterpane of the most delicate form of pressure, had put him in mind of something from the city. So vague - it might have been an aroma; the highly sensitive taste buds at the tip of his tongue, and some technically imperceptible sway of the follicles. If he was not mistaken, the topsoil and the leaves of yesteryear were conveying to some of his internal nerves, a distant disturbance, one that might have resembled a thousand Apache hooves gathering far out of hearing.

And so he paused for contemplation and consideration, perhaps too aware that he hadna time for such conditional reveries in the city, where moving hurriedly from spot to spot was compelled by gritty white men unknown. South of the city of New York, there is a beach that looks out over the ocean, and on Sundays men and women and children made weary and mean by Capital’s cheese-grating of Labor, imagine that the long horizon of the sea has in some way caused them to elude their mortal fate as dust. If a person possesses a fabulous and monumental courage, or idiopathic recklessness, or has fallen under the swoon of opium or the sort of nervous mad herding that impelled the characters of the monstrous dying called the Children’s Crusade (1212 AD, legendary version), he may as Polk, eschevvie himself to that plage, and Wednesday noontime sink into the warm sun’s sleep of distant dreaming make-believe. Of such a mind Arthur now partook, assaying the distant clues of that impression, and that weakened force of substance he had not yet been able to identify.

Polk slept. Dusk was coming, and he believed that he would not spend the night in this copse. He rose himself and gathered his leather shoulder satchel, and pulled his felt cap around hard down his ears and brows, and would leave the distant bass drums behind, forever a movement of beef hooves or slipping of techtonic plates, or perhaps the overflowing of a far river ‘pon a swamp unknown. Had it been starlings to make this thrush of beating noise, he reckoned that there would have had to be two million wings.

Hardtack is made by bakers accidentally, in the course of their daily toil, and in the city he often had fairly sustained himself on the giveaways breadman Pieta left inside a vase for his seizing and a fashion of delectation. A last obdurate biscuit warmed in his closed palm, and sweat and creekwater in a cup made for him the repast that would carry him quite cheerfully to sunrise, to a robin’s egg, perhaps, or – these events were not uncommon – a egg of a chicken.

He located blackberries, and thought his path through clamor and woe had been finally justified, when his lips made a little skipping into a smile as he recognized the “wild cherries.”

When Polk crested a certain hilltop, leaving behind him the queer distant tumult became impossible, as he placed in the fixed point of his internal compass’ walking track for a very distant horizon, what he should have called the source of the afternoon’s gentle obscurity. It was a cloud of dust he saw, half-lit in resolution, half-banked ‘gainst rainclouds, but it could portend nothing else but a community of persons, of an unprecedented scale for such sylvan vales and pasture fields as these.

The most efficacious objective correlative for depicting the will-crushed aftermath of those persons surviving the Civil War remains the scene of the straggle of worn and tattered soldiers broken apart from and trailing a group that may have formed to head back together horseless to their hometown. These soldiers of woe were often either exhausted from despoliation or injury, or so mentally advanced onto ruination, that all that remained of their conscious mind was the half-ability to drag along behind the path of their fellows. Upon such Polk came: the dusty and the muddy, ill-shod for earth mid the wildlife, and arrived too late for the whole playing of the bands. And when eighteen souls in pairs or small groups had grown into fifty or more of what he realized were now not soldiers but variegated mountebanks on their way to some strangeness-jamboree or fiesta (Morris Dancers, maybe?) Polk realized consequentially and simultaneously that exactly half these col porteurs were women; girls, rather.

In an act of quite unusual independence, Mary had followed Polk to New York from Richmond, and though they had taken separate rooms, and she had found a position serving food in a middle-earth establishment in the Bowerij, off Houston Street, she was as attached to him as an electron. Her devotion and attraction to Polk were quite conventional, and in a nervous, religious way she had concluded that she just couldn’t live without him, but as the days turned into weeks turned into months turned into years, she began to achieve relations with certain of the people who are correctly and habitually best described as “denizens”; relations that shifted like the seasons themselves truly past the joshing where it had naturally begun towards the affectionate and strangely mutually-dependent, she had found it necessary from a heathen and dark, yet humane place within her, to succor tramps and brothel workers with hours of port or sherry by a candle in the darkest corner of her rooms off Houston Street. And these relations drew the pale of the Ephysians down upon anything in Polk that she might have thought he had there to give. These fondnesses and succursuses for the bowered bums evolved into intimacies which neither frightened nor surprised her, in ways no magic of her mind may have before conceived, and thus made confident by being for the first time in her life a “natural,” (than which there is in most estimations no grander soaring of the blood) she gripped to her midnight-to-dawn hours with the falling angels, noticing but not troubled by the realization that her representative communion by way of her friends’ customs had become for her juice and kef, more properly perceived as alcoholism and opiate-addiction. Her relief was also free, and she pictured and much-loved herself as an otter hoopling through the thickets and brambles of Richmond, but gliding and slithering into the ponds of New York and swimming gracefully and silently out of sight.

Otherwise was it seen by Arthur Polk, whose imagination in the stars of his dreaming bore more than similar traces to his culture’s general approval of piety and churchy decency. But this difference of opinion about Mary’s habit (and expressions of this were sometimes convivial and concupiscent) had not occurred to him for two years, that is, until he one day espied an exchange of greasy bills between her and a friend he otherwise had occasion to know was a trollop-for-hire. Thereafter the gulf between them was broadened by suspicion and doubt, daily, until in wrenching and grievous pain, in his jaws and brain he burst in exasperation, as she dispassionately and coolly said the equivalent of “Okay then, well, take care of yourself, Arthur” turned away and found his visage and patterns of behavior wholly vanquished and, apparently forever, vacated from her mind.

It then took but the slightest looking-away during what had been conversation for Legree’s detachment to mirror the whole of Polk’s life in its future as barren and misguided, and the woes and griefs of any aspiration Arthur ever may have had, to gape out before and below him like the Grand Canyon he had never known towards which he had been walking. He relived this now in the darkling woods and fields of straw, and remembered that he had gathered his roughened-up valise in a sort of stupor, and had found himself four days awalk toward Lake Ontario, nearing Iroquois rivers and longhouses. His mind was racing with peace, if there is such a thing.

The faces of the road-girls glowed, mostly with sweat, and their countenances were brightening as they all together approached the din, which coalesced into what he finally recognized were tunes, each note of which was transfigured as through a bolt of lightning. As he topped a hillock he looked down upon the impossible, an encampment of legions; a pungency of smoking campfires; an harmonic sway waved across the headtops as over a field of grain. For Polk, apperception existed out of time, as it will indeed tend to do in catastrophic and instantaneous events, the exhilaration of sexual deliverance, and supernatural revelation. His arms stretched out into an open geometry of salutation and the relief aspects of discharge, opening as to commit ingestion.

Yet his head felt cleaved by that lightning, and unsensed by the thunder, and a moment of illumination receded as a pinprick of Venus at dawn. It was raining. He was, he realized, in a happy state of mind; and then his feet recommenced their familiar gait, and near the edges of the swarm he picked a jagged route across, until he slipped into the woods and, never looking back, let, behind him, the babel groan its peaceful way into the arms of its mother.

During that night, he might have said that he had dreamed about the large boulders and rocks on the southern shore of Lake Ontario, for he knew that sunsets there behaved in a way he had not known in the countryside around Richmond, or in the angled shades of the city of New York, with its tall buildings and smudge fires from the many rooftop coalstove-like modern devices. Rays came from the sinister side, the western expanse of gathering evening clouds, and something in this obliquity made the environment of dream feel like home at last gained. In two days time he broached across the salt flats outside Syracuse, and the next day’s traverse of drumlin and dale showed before him the lakeside browns of the village by which his sister had grown bored, but whose people had come to know her as among the core solids of the mass.

Four years of supporting finance in the hubbub had unfit him for the wood mill into which he slipped as a junior sawyer, yet even this much seeing and feeling filled him with as much inspiration as fatigue. September and October in a hovel seemed like grace, and though he would take a room at the inn for the maelstroms of snow time, the setting of the whole removed him from the unrest of the metropolis hard by the ocean and the Hudson River. It was, by contrast, another figure that roused him to the keenest peek, and he formed in his mind the conceit, if conceit it was, that it appeared to him that everyone in this town rode a horse. Polk in tremens saw the sloughing off of his skins of memory, and a book of history he had picked up seemed to suggest to him that the concept of the Renaissance may have felt tangible even to those who were experiencing it; and it was rather precisely this fashion that permitted nations of persons to imagine that persons had at about the same time briefly inhabited the moon above, in its cold, singular, and only-imagined majesty. Souls in a massive boogie, rustling the very air above them into sweeps and clouds of motion and harmony, emerged in his vision as he graded wood and ate venison jerky, as he crawled out of a burrow to greet the innkeeper’s raven-haired daughter with the most timid of futile chirps and cheeps. Around his memory of his tramping exodus, a glow of golden vibration had formed, which included a mighty chorus of approval and participation; and for the accident of egress he had developed the gratitude and fondness one might have for a departed benefactor’s unexpectedly generous testamentary bequeathment. It would even have been presumed that he was astonished by his own genial fellowship inside tavern windows that lit a patch of the ice and cold and black, black street out of doors.

In this town thereafter, he married, he fathered, he died, still a quite young man. If those who in peace and darling sweetness would have taken the measure of his soul’s passage, and could both reweave the carpet and see the figure in the design, and even beyond that play back the internal voice of his transcriptive and narrating inner recitation, they would revisit another day a year or two on, when he sat by the shore, and realized that he had heard sprechen between the swells of those cacophonous melodies in the meadow of clamor, and that a caller had been leading the people in a vast folk dance, a vernacular waltz of communion, and that the caller’s rasp had signaled a yasgur. By this iteration clarified, Polk would have been unfazed, for he knew of Iago’s brother Iazgu, nothing.