Winter's Tale Part 23

"Nothing."

"Still nothing?"

"I checked and rechecked."

Hardesty returned."The Ghost says, and I quote, *Mr. Binky is away for the weekend, researching an article on political pleurisy.'

"The FAA claims that Craig Binky filed a flight plan for Brownsville, Texas, but that his planes veered out to sea and ducked below the radar. They're furious, but they're always furious," Virginia added as she came in from the lobby.

Just then, the very last piece of sun disappeared behind the dark hill, and all the pleasant and enticing tunnels under the trees turned into a single threatening ma.s.s unrelieved by any light. Deep in thought, Harry Penn didn't even look. They all began to eat the smoked salmon and black bread (Martin grilled his), and to speculate, in evening shadow, about the news that they suspected they were missing.

"Patience," said Harry Penn."Binky might have heard that the President lost a golf ball in the rough. And if it is a real story, he'slikely to misinterpret or ignore it. I remember, a long time ago, when t.i.to died, and The Ghost headline read, *Pope Finally Hits the Road.' And I'll never forget the front page of The Ghost when a Brazilian mental patient a.s.sa.s.sinated the President of Ecuador: *Brazil Nut Zips Ecuador Biggie.' Besides, there's nothing more that we can do."

They ate silently, and the dusk came in from the east like an ocean tide. Dozens of thick halibut filets, basted with soy and retsina until they burst into flame, were lifted off the grills and delivered to the table. The vegetables steaming in seawater had a way of filling the air. And the smell of fresh fish sizzling over hickory was spread throughout the darkening neighborhood on clouds of white flashing smoke.

After the children had been instructed in what they were eating and how to eat it, and after candles had been lit, Christiana looked up, and was suddenly startled. She dropped her fork on her plate, and it rang like a bell. They followed her gaze to the wrought-iron garden fence. A derelict was leaning against it, looking at them with a strange, powerful, slightly irritated expression. One and all, they stopped eating.

His was not the imploring stare of someone who wants something (although it was likely that he was hungry and had been drawn there by the aromatic smoke). Nor was there any hostility in it. Nor did he act like one of the many men of the street who were caught up in hopeless lunacy. To the contrary, raggedly dressed, sun- and windburned, both gaunt and strong, he looked at them without a blink, in the chilling fashion of a man who is trying to place familiar and haunting faces that he knows he cannot identify. Rising and falling in intensity like pulsating stars, his eyes fixed precisely on Jessica Penn, and seemed to be sweeping over her like harrows. She, who had been onstage a thousand times in the high pressure of strong lights and unforgiving stares, who was used to crowds on the street turning almost in unison as she went by, was reduced almost to breathlessness by the intensity of Peter Lake's searing examination.

They were so stunned by him that they couldn't move. He looked at Virginia for a moment, but then returned immediately to Jessica, who thought she might faint. Though frail with age, Harry Penn stood to meet the derelict's gaze, and managed to return it. But for the differences in age, weather-beatenness, and fortune, they looked almost like mirror images. Harry Penn methodically scanned every detail of the man opposite him, and this seemed to dampen the strange fire in the interloper's face. The smoke wound through the wrought iron that he gripped in his fists, and wrapped about him. Harry Penn felt a terrible sadness, and was sorry that he had taken it upon himself to rise. He felt as if he were being dragged back through time to a moment in childhood when he had had no learning or wisdom, when there was only the future, and his own vulnerability.

No one knew how to break the stalemate. They thought that the impa.s.se would hold them forever.

While they were transfixed by the sight of Peter Lake straining to make sense of what he saw, Abby wandered to the fence and stepped right through it. She slipped easily between the bars of a forged gate that would have contained a dozen of the world's strongest men even had their lives depended upon breaking it. When her parents saw that she was on the other side, they called to her. But she didn't hear, and they were reduced once again to racking pa.s.sivity. Now the tables were turned. Theirs was the world of silence; they were the lost ones looking in; Abby had crossed over, and was with Peter Lake.

In slow strides that lifted her from the ground ever so lightly and allowed her to sail toward him in slow motion, she skipped to Peter Lake as if she had known him for an eternity. And then she seemed to fly through the air (though perhaps it was a trick of the light), her arms outspread, until she rose into his arms. He embraced her, and when she was settled, she put her hands on his shoulders, rested her head against his chest, and quickly fell asleep.

Hardesty approached the fence, and looked into Peter Lake's eyes. There was nothing to fear. The man's distress and dereliction were of little meaning in a world in which other worlds were always looking in. And as Peter Lake handed the sleeping child through the bars to her father, Hardesty felt a strong desire to see what Peter Lake had seen, to go where he had gone. Hardesty Marratta, a prosperous family man, a man with all the proper joys and privileges, was nearly about to pledge himself to a lost derelict. It made nosense, unless one were to consider an eternity of things that fly in the face of the proper joys and privileges. Though Peter Lake was of the world of shadows, and Hardesty was of the solid world, they were in need of one another. The child had brought them together for an instant, but then Peter Lake stepped back into the darkness, and disappeared, as if he had never really been there.

They let the food get cold. Virginia held Abby on her lap, and Hardesty vacantly tapped a knife against the table. When ten minutes pa.s.sed during which no one said anything, Harry Penn took the responsibility for breaking the silence."All right," he said, as if rea.s.suring not only them but himself as well,"things like that happen sometimes, and the world remains the same after all."

They looked about. Ordinary and familiar sights were a great comfort."The world remains the same after all," repeated Harry Penn."It isn't yet due for any miraculous changes. I imagine that the man we just met was ahead of his time, as are, perhaps, all men like that."

Marko Chestnut smiled. Though they had hardly known it, the tension had been immense. Now they found relief in the fire's white smoke and glowing coals, the dark cliffs beyond the river now silvery blue, the ramparts of high buildings that had become translucent with evening and seemed to be releasing pent-up inner light, and even in the expression of Tommy the waiter, who, because no one was eating or talking, feared that the chef was drunk again and had put something awful in the food. These things told them that the world was the same after all.

But they were not to finish the broiled halibut, steamed vegetables, and retsina, and that night they were to remain hungry, although they would hardly noticea"because the world, in fact, was not the same.

Sitting calmly and thinking that she had recovered, Virginia saw it first. The hair on her neck stood up, and she shuddered."Oh G.o.d," she said. They raised their heads and saw what she had apprehended.

Half in light and half in shadow, the land across the river had the look of farmland, fields, and orchards. Because a power plant in New Jersey had failed, they could see neither buildings nor lights onthe riverbank opposite them. Though most of New Jersey had had to watch the sunset from pastoral darkness, the power failure was merely a coincidental backdrop to what they witnessed from the garden at Petipas. For the illusion of fields and orchards across the water and the light western sky itself, were slowly and steadily obliterated by a wall that traveled sideways, the prow of a ship that moved slowly up the Hudson, a ma.s.sive guillotine, the lid of the world closing from south to north.

They were a quarter of a mile away from it, or more, and they had to bend their necks and lean back in their chairs to see the top deck. It was centered in the channel, as well it had to be, for it took up the whole thing, and was so big that it seemed like a part of the landscape itself.

This ship which glided up from the south and seemed to emerge from a garden wall that cut off the southern view, was among the largest structures they had ever seen, rivaling the new giant towers that recently had been built to overshadow the old skysc.r.a.persa"and only its prow had cleared the wall: the rest was yet to come. The ship moved on, curling great volumes of water gently before it, shaping them into slow whitened coils that unwound in exhaustion. Then the superstructure came in sight. Ten thousand pure lights rode parallel to the long lean city they resembled, and lit the blackened water into an icy glare. Slanting towers and castled walls rose twice as high as the prow. The Sun staff at Petipas leaned farther and farther back, in awe of the marvelous conspiracies of size and complexity which are the elements of cities themselves, and which lead the spirit in a chase that the eye can seldom follow.

The midsection kept on coming, rolling out from behind the wall in a surprise that was sustained by unprecedented ma.s.s and height, leaving the onlookers speechless. Just as they thought that the stern would appear to make a proper end of the fine and long proportions, the ship burst into yet another fanfare of sparkling towers and terraced white decks, as if whoever built it had wanted it to be so lean and sleek that its staggering height would seem entirely reasonable.

Then, at last, after several thousand feet of it had paraded before them, the superstructure and the hull ended abruptly, not in a flowing curve, but in a steel cliff that dropped straight to the water. Closely following, connected in a dozen places by struts so large that trucks could have been driven over them, was an enormous rectangular barge the same height as the main deck of the ship itself. This glided after the mother ship, and was followed by two identical siblings.

The ship reduced speed and slowly came to a halt. Now that the sky was dark and the city lights had come into their own, it was possible to see that its hull and the barges were light blue. And, like most great things, it had attracted swarms of lesser attendants. Helicopters and private planes circled like gnats and dragonflies, turning circles and figure-eights in astonishing tours between the great masts and pylons. A fireboat from the Fire Department's maritime headquarters on the Battery had belatedly rushed upriver, and was shooting plumes of whitewater into the night as its crew pulled on their pants and wondered why no one had informed them that this... whatever it was... was going to arrive. The great ship itself lowered yacht-sized launches that prowled about it jealously, and those of its crew who could be seen at all were seen only momentarilya" like soldiers who rise for an instant above a parapet but dare not linger.

Everyone at Petipas had come to his feet, electrified. It was as if they had won a great victory merely in seeing a wonderful thing. They were so excited that they hardly knew what to do, and they were content for a while just to share their amazement.

To a city dweller high on a hill, amid the trees, or on a busy street, ships always seemed to creep into a harbor with unnecessary hesitation. But to a sailor who had been racing for weeks or months between s.p.a.cious horizons, his ship's speed was dizzying in view of the insanely narrow confines into which it had to come, and he was happy only when it reached a full stop. When a great ship entered New York Harbor, it realigned the city's notion of itself, its place, and its purpose: the ship proclaimed that there was a wide world beyond the Narrows."I have been there," it said."I have seen it. Now do your best to imagine the wonderful things that lie beyond, for I will not tell you exactly."

Harry Penn climbed onto a chair and began, as usual, to directhis staff."Craig Binky probably missed it," he said."Who knows, he might have turned north and flown to Canada. I wouldn't put it past him to scout for a ship on land.

"All right. Asbury, get the launch ready so we can have a good look when we want to, close up. We have time, if we can get some information, to have a special edition of The Whale. Praeger, there has never been a ship like this. I think it may be bringing us a great gift."

"Which is... ?"

"The future."

They left the restaurant almost at a run. Even Harry Penn raced up the cobblestone streets that led to Printing House Square, tapping now and then with his cane to remind himself that he was not young anymore.

That night no one on The Sun got any sleep, and although it did not know it, the city began to come alive.

THE MACHINE AGE.

SPRING in New York is often rough and dirty, when enticing stretches of near-summer weather are followed by ten-day sleet storms. For derelicts it is by far the most difficult season, if only for its frequent showers and rebellious winds. After the desperate battles of winter, when one can die in less than an hour if one is in the wrong place, the prospect of slow death in April, while the plants are greening, is like the prospect of dying on the last day of a war. Much the same as those who are in school, the men of the street graduate in June, and then the summer takes good care of them.

Not until June was Peter Lake able to reflect upon his dilemma. After his release from the hospital, he had to struggle just to stay alive during the winter. For several months he lived in subway tunnels, sleeping near heat pipes, burrowing in next to people with whom he never exchanged a word. Most of them were mad, and all were scareda"that a train would cut them in half, that dog-sized rats would attack, or that they would run afoul of some lunatic with an easily inflammable grudge. Eating was neither difficult nor pleasant since restaurant garbage cans always held enough to feed more than just cats and dogs. Sometimes, on subzero days when he couldn't get a meal either by washing dishes or by experiencing sudden rushes of piety in front of religious inst.i.tutions with soup kitchens, Peter Lake turned to this source. He quickly discovered that kitchen workers and truck loaders at commercial bakeries, were always willing to give him a carrot or a roll, if he would take his intense and disturbing presence somewhere else. Pigeons were not healthful to eat, but they could be roasted over a fire in a trash barrel, and there were charitable trusts here and there which sometimes offered a shower, a turkey dinner, and a bed for the night.

Holding a job would have been possible, but he hadn't the time. He was extremely busy doing absolutely nothing, and had he been comfortable for just an instant, he would immediately have been captured by his obsession and defeated. He neither liked nor felt at ease with the idea of work, and decided that he would not take a job until he had some idea of who he was, or until some pa.s.sion seized him and he did not even need to know.

No longer desperate, at the end of May and in early June he began to walk the city, to see what he might remember, and to note the changes. It was almost all gla.s.s and steel. The buildings seemed to him more like coffins than buildings. The windows didn't open. Some of the buildings had no windows. And their graceless and exaggerated height made the streets into wispy little threads strung together in a dark labyrinth. Only at night did they redeem themselves, and only at a distancea"when their secretiveness, their inaccessibility, and their arrogance disappeared, and they bathed the city in light and shone like stained-gla.s.s cathedrals turned inside out. Oppressed by the size and power of the city's architecture, he found for himself a string of holy places (only one of which was a church) to which he could and did return time after time. He sensed there what seemed to him to be the remnants of the truth, and he returnedto certain rooftops and alleys the way that lightning repeatedly strikes high steel towers in an argument between tenacity and speed.

The first of these places was the Maritime Cathedral, which had endless fields of stained gla.s.s as blue as the sea. He could see into the light itself that made the illusion of waves and water, and into the light of the eyes and faces of the people depicted riding in the ships and boats. The power of the spectrum increased dangerously when it was woven into images of the broken and the redeemed, of those who were stubborn, of those who fought, of those who were unshakable, and of those who had seen a great thing. The rays of these delicate lights and pictures combined to splay upon the wide cathedral floor to make a representation of the sea under a line of miniature ships in gla.s.s cases. The ship models often drew Peter Lake into the cathedral, though he had no idea why. They seemed infinitely touching and full of meaning, as if the real life of ships had been concentrated and trapped to oscillate within the gla.s.s, waiting to be freed. Though the artful windows and little ships of the Maritime Cathedral were motionless, to Peter Lake they seemed always to move. The ships traveled across the gla.s.s, the whales rose into the air, the hearts of the sailors were beating and their brows were wet with spray.

The second was the alley outside Petipas, where the child had run into his arms. He appeared there often in the days that followed, hoping to encounter the same group of people. But the courtyard was either empty or filled with another party: usually they were raucous, they drank a lot, and they didn't notice him. The wroughtiron fence became something sacred to kiss or touch. To hold it made him feel better, and the first time he returned when the courtyard was empty he closed his eyes and hoped that everything was a dream, and that, when he awoke, he would find himself not looking in from the outside, but in their midst, slightly inebriated, tired, at dinner on a summer evening trapped somewhere in the amber of time. How nice it would have been to have discovered that he was, say, the owner of a clothing store, a railroad dispatcher, a lawyer, or an insurance man, and that he was at Petipasa"a century backa"with his wife and family. If only he could have returned to that, to a house of dark wood, with friendly fires and a city garden, to the sad wails of the ferryboats, and the sense that the future was going to be quiet, infinite, and green, rather than a pent-up thing of suffocating gla.s.s and steel. He would keep the dream in mind, and reform whatever bad habits had plunged him into it. Remembering how it had been to be lost in time, he would do good works and be forever grateful for his return. When he gripped the iron and shut his eyes, he hoped that he was going to cross over. Of course, he didn't.

There were small shrines and forgotten places that were for Peter Lake like the roadside altars of the Alpsa"an old doorway lost in shadow and peeling paint, a cemetery tucked between monstrous buildings (though a hundred thousand people might pa.s.s in a day, very likely not one turned his head to look in, or hesitated to read an inscription or a name), hidden gardens, house fronts, meaningful views down strangely crooked streets, places that seemed to harbor an invisible presence.

The last and best of these was an old-law tenement still standing in the Five Points. It was the kind of place the inside of which no decent, educated, perceptive member of the middle cla.s.ses has ever seen and been able to describe. For no decent, educated, perceptive member of the middle cla.s.ses has ever gone into such a place and come out alive. The people who lived there envied the rats in their tunnels. There was no light, heat, or water, and the hallway never lacked an angry man with a knife in his hand.

One day Peter Lake just walked into this place, climbed the stairs, and threw open the rickety door to the roof. He would come back a dozen times, and never know why. He went up the ramp that formed the roof of the stairwell, and inspected the chimneys. The round pipes that had once been oil flues had been out of use for a decade or more. Then what of the chimney, the real chimney? It had been sealed up for three-quarters of a century, and the mortar between the bricks was as loose as windblown sand. Looking into the abandoned shaft, he saw nothing. But he was almost overcome by the upwelling smell of sweet pine. As it rose from the hollow beam of darkness, the fragrant air carried the sense and stories of many winters long forgotten. This shaft with its cool unlikely air was a vault of memory. It comforted Peter Lake to know that the fires of the moment have blue and ghostly echoes that long outlast them to rise in another time. And it took him back so well that he had toembrace the disintegrating chimney so as not to lose himself and tumble off the roof. There were fewer buildings then, and much more forest and field. Morningside Heights was a farm, and Central park really a part of upstate that had been inserted into Manhattan like a drawer in a bureau. The buildings often had high echoing halls reminiscent of great open distances nearby and on the frontiers. Because they were constructions of s.p.a.ce, wood, and stone, they were portraits and parodies of the wilderness. It had been good to be alive then. You could leave your door unlocked. (Peter Lake had no way of knowing that he had been a thief, and no way of knowing that he had been, nevertheless, impeccably honest.) You could always smell a pine fire in winter, and the snow stayed white.

It wasn't all easy, however, and this he understood when he realized that half of the reason he clung to the chimney was that just to look at the roof was inexplicably painful. Perhaps if he had read a history of the old-law tenements, he would have come across an offhand reference to the legions of consumptives that took refuge on the roofs, making a separate, higher city, and then he might have begun to know who he was. But perhaps not, for he had a long way to go. His existence was not without its compensations, and he had moments of elation and discovery that few of the settled ones he envied would ever know. Desperation is the lower half of something, which, in order to plunge, must climb. The streets of New York and some wards of its venerable inst.i.tutions were packed with people who, despite being entirely forsaken, had episodes of glory that made the career of Alexander the Great seem like a day in the life of a file clerk. Peter Lake was always coming alight, firecracker-style, with golden enthusiasms which made him dance in the street. No one noticed. No one cared. b.u.ms were always dancing in the street, singing, proclaiming, shouting that they had found the truth. And never, ever, had one spoken anything other than the incoherent sonnets of the insane."Chester Mackintosh! Chester Mackintosh! Chester Mackintosh bedid with flowers what Hilda did to the moon! Come ahead in the hive, and do with me what the crook who crawled slimmering into the cat neck did. Who?" one of these people might declairna"to a mailbox. The arguments and counterproclamations stimulated by posters were legendary, and the poster was always addressed as "you." Often the men of the street were lordly or threatening in regard to parking meters, treating them like indentured servants or boys in the lowest form. Sometimes, though, at the height of these mad ignitions, they struck gold. It happened to Peter Lake Not long after he had served as the apparition of Petipas, he was walking in a splendid evening, as fast and bright as a Roman candle, master of the world in shreds and tatters, elated, benevolent, even operatic. He came to the greenhouselike panels above which schoolchildren often stood on an off-sidewalk parapet to see the ancient machinery of The Sun shimmer and tingle in its ch.o.r.es. He leaned royally on the empty rail and looked inside. The sight of the humming self-contained machinery was nothing less than a booster rocket for his already flaring mania. But it was more than that, because it had turned his gratuitous euphoria into something real. At once he knew that his optimism had been illusory, and that nowa" by chancea"it had been substantiated. There, right in front of him, were the machines, spitting and coughing like babies, agitating like a hundred boiling kettles, turning and shuttling with devoted concentration. There, at last, was something he knew and was sure of.

Two harried and depressed mechanics walked through the gallery below, carrying a freshly oiled steel shaft between them and talking in frustrated grunts and curses that could be heard even above the noise of their engines. They approached a three-quarters disa.s.sembled contraption that stood between two other machines that wound up cables and then hissed and whistled as the cables unwound and spun several sets of Newtonian governors. Though their hands were covered with oil, they scratched their heads. That's a bad sign, thought Peter Lake. They probably don't know the workings of the double mutterer. They may not even know what it's for.

He rapped on the gla.s.s. They looked at him, and then turned away. He rapped again."What do you want?" they asked.

"I would like to explain the intricacies of the double mutterer," he screamed. They couldn't make out what he was saying.

"Go away," they said. But he wouldn't, and kept on pounding the gla.s.s, until one of them came over and opened a transom."What do you want?" Peter Lake was asked again.

Composing his words as carefully as a man who stands before ajudge, Peter Lake answered."I saw that you two fellas are working on that double mutterer there. You seemed puzzled. I'd be glad to help."

The mechanic looked at him with a skepticism tempered by thefact that Peter Lake, like the mechanic himself, was Irish."Double mutterer?" he repeated."Who said it was called a double mutterer? We don't even know what it's for. We were just trying to see if we could get it going and then find out."

"It's called a double mutterer," Peter Lake said,"and it's an important adjunct to the power train. If you haven't been using it, chances are that you've been getting power-train breakdowns about once every week."

"That's right," the mechanic said."But how the h.e.l.l do you know?"

Peter Lake smiled."I can take apart and put back together a double mutterer, or anything else you've got in there, with my eyes closed."

"That I'd like to see!" exclaimed the mechanic, who for years had been laboring on these machines that had outlived all others of their kind, and who was obsessed with the dozens of puzzles that were implicit in their mechanisms. Though he had spent half his life there, and had been taught by his own father, he was unable to understand most of what he tended, and incapable of taking a great deal of it aparta"much less of putting it back together again.

"I'd be happy to show you," responded Peter Lake, knowing that his challenge would be irresistible.

The mechanic went to his friend and spoke to him, looking around every now and then to make sure that Peter Lake hadn't vanished. Then both of them got a ladder, and put it up against the transom."Come right in this way," the other mechanic said.

Peter Lake climbed down into paradise. Walking through that place, he felt like Mohammed in Bismillah. Everything was shiny, sparkling, alert, and familiar. The machines seemed to greet him with the same ingenuous affection as a cla.s.s of kindergarten children receiving the mayor. And as they puffed and revolved and did their mad angular dances, Peter Lake realized that he was a mechanic. In each section of the half-acre of machinery, years of knowledge charged out from the interior dark ness and stood at attention like brigades and brigades of soldiers on parade. The realization was locked in place as if with strikes and bolts. At last, a victory.

They came to the double mutterer. The two mechanics leaned against a piece of long-inactive machinery and eyed Peter Lake with a powerful Irish skepticism that trembled and boiled and was as hot and smoky as a burning hearth."Now. You, sir," said one of themcruelly,"will show us how to bring to life thisa"what you call aa"double mutterer, or we, sir, will show you back to the Bowery."

Peter Lake was aware that he was unshaven, badly sunburnt filthy, and sapphire-eyed."What's a double mutterer?" he asked."I thought maybe you two gentlemen would like to purchase a ticket to the garbage-man's ball."

The mechanics were confuseda"until Peter Lake fixed his mad gaze on the machine, and began to work.

"Now look here," he said, after removing a large panel."You see this oscillating slotted bar that's rubbing up too close to the powl and ratchet of this here elliptic trammel? That, my friends, distorts the impact load on the second hobbing, up there, which is applied to that helical gear. But the trouble is, it isn't. Without that little helical gear, the antiparallel linkage on the friction drive won't disengage, and this wormwheeled pantograph can't come into play. Clear so far?" They nodded.

"And it's not only that, but you've got a jammed friction brake. See? It has to be lubricated with the finest spermacetti. And two cams on the periflex coupling are on backward.

"If one of you fellas will mill me a b.u.t.tress-threaded lug nut with a fifty-five-degree flank angle, I'll put the oscillating slotted bar back where it's supposed to be. Meanwhile, we'll rearrange the cams, and unfreeze the friction brake. Well? What are you waiting for?

In less than half an hour the double mutterer was muttering like crazy, and the power train had begun to run as smoothly and quietly as an owl's swoop, whereas, before, its belts had flapped about like the flesh of a sprinting fat man, making concussive leather slap against the cast-iron flywheels that it struggled to embrace.

"These belts will now last for six months to a year," Peter Lakeinformed his awed hosts."And the horsepower drain will be much less, as the slack in the power train is moderated by the double mutterer. It'll save you a lot of fuel. It's like a trumpet."

Though they didn't understand the part about the trumpet, they didn't care, and were eager to take Peter Lake on a tour of the many dormant machines that had puzzled them all their lives.

"What the h.e.l.l is this?" they asked him of a bell-like dome that sat on top of a working steam engine."We've been trying to figure it out since we were kids. Every once in a while, it rattles like crazya" as if there's a loose bolt insidea"but only now and then. We've tried to open it, but, no matter what we do, it doesn't move. You wouldn't happen to know what it's all about, would you?"

"Of course I would," Peter Lake replied, offended."You take your average stray dog out in Canarsie, and he could tell you. In fact, it's so simple that I think I'll explain it in Filipino."

"Oh no! Please don't!" they begged."You don't understand what torture it's been all these years. Suddenly it begins to jingle in the middle of the night, just like a baby calling for its ma, and we don't know what it wants."

"Right," said the other."And we try and try to take it apart, but it won't budge. You can't even make a dent in it. Look, I'll put it in as honest a fashion as I can. If you don't tell me what that G.o.dd.a.m.n thing is, I'm going to commit suicide by striking myself on the head with a clock mallet."

"Me too," offered his friend.

They were frozen with expectation.

"This," Peter Lake said, patting the much abused bell-like piece of metal,"is a perfection tattle."

Their mouths hung open. What in h.e.l.l was a perfection tattle?

"Look at this engine," he said, staring enthusiastically at thehuge and graceful piece of machinery under the perfection tattle.

She's gorgeous, isn't she, like a young girl come back from a Juneday at Coney Island. This is called a comely engine. When she approaches a hundred percent efficiency, superheated steam turns inward, and becomes so volatile that it pushes apart two rather heavy tandy pieces (the kind with calabrian underglides) and rises through secret flue into this chamber here, where it pushes around an eighteen-eighty-three silver dollar at near-musical speeds. I'm ashamed to say that I don't know why it has to be an eighteen-eighty-three dollar, but that, as I recall, is the custom."

The two mechanics were speechless. Peter Lake took it for disbelief.

"I'll prove it if you'd like," he said, guiding them into a far corner to a set of handles that seemed locked onto the floor.

"We've never known what these are, either," they admitted.

"These? These are the tattle release notchets. Look," he instructed, turning the handles."You set the tapered ends at this angle. Oh, I see, it's eighty-three degrees. That's why the silver dollar is an eighteen eighty-threea"it's a memory device. And it frees the perfection tattles."

"Tattles?"

"Sure, there are probably two dozen of them spread about, from the looks of the place. It's like that with machinery of this sort. You always have to go across the room to find the release for the part you're working on. When they designed it, they had more in mind than just power in and power out. The whole business is like a giant puzzle. It's sort of an equation. The pieces are interrelated, as if they were the instruments of an orchestra. To be the conductor," Peter Lake said with a grin,"you have to know every instrument. And you have to know the music."

He took them back to the perfection tattle, which he lifted quite easily from its position atop the comely engine. A silver dollar fell out and rolled across the floor with a ringing sound. One of the mechanics ran after it and slammed it down with his foot. He picked it up, examined it, and stared at his friend, goggle-eyed."Eighteen eighty-three," he said.

ORDINARILY, if The Sun had hired a new chief mechanic, he would have had dinner with Harry Penn either at home or at Petipas. June, however, The Sun was in turmoil as it devoted most of resources to the seemingly insoluble mystery of the great ship that had anch.o.r.ed in the Hudson and stayed in place ever since, unfathorned by either the general public or the press. Try as they might, none of The Sun's people could find out anything. A large portion of the staff had been rea.s.signed to this storya"to wait at dockside twenty-four hours a day, to hammer at the mayor (who had gone in the middle of the night to visit the ship, and stepped back on the dock doing a little dance), to take aerial photographs, to make infrared profiles, and to attempt to break the stalemate with information from serendipitous sources all around the world. In their frustration at discovering so little, they neglected everyday matters at the paper itself, including the customary welcoming of new employees.

By the time an overworked and exhausted Praeger de Pinto quickly interviewed Peter Lake, Peter Lake had transformed himself into what a good mechanic was supposed to look like, which was very close, in fact, to his appearance in the days he could not quite remember when he divided his time between various oyster houses, workshops, and burglaries. He rehandledbarred his mustache, got a haircut, and took half a dozen showers and baths. Then he bought himself a new linen suit which had an old-fashioned cut that was both pleasing to him and not out of place at The Sun, where Harry Penn and a large number of other geezers dressed in styles with more than a hint of the nineteenth century. When Peter Lake had been on the b.u.m, the scars on his face had been covered with soot and grease. Now they emerged, although some of the finer lines were already beginning to disappear. If Praeger had looked deep into his eyes, he might have seen that Peter Lake's soul was caught up in the storms of another place and time. But he didn't, and Peter Lake's face telegraphed only that he was a workingman who would always try to do his best. He looked neither like an intellectual, nor an artist, nor a lawyer, nor a banker. He looked, instead, like a man who lays down rails, builds buildings, and tends fires, forges, and machinery. He had strong arms, thick hands, a nonaquiline nose, and a deep voice. Praeger de Pinto liked him at first sight. He had no inkling of his complexity, didn't recognize him as the apparition of Petipas (nor did Peter Lake remember Praeger), and quickly forgot about him, although he was happy that his mechanics had promised far fewer breakdowns and delays now that this expert had been taken on, attheir urging, as their chiefa"even though he took only apprentice's shares, because Trumbull, the former chief, was willing to follow Peter Lake but not willing to retire.

Most of the time, Peter Lake stayed with the machinery, for there he was genuinely happy. He spent his free hours in a little rented room that looked upon an endless valley of empty roofs and wooden water tanks, and he quickly became like so many people in New York; that is, comfortable, forgotten, and alone.

Though at the beginning of that summer the perfect June weather always rea.s.serted itself, it was shattered many times by dramatic thunderstorms that swept in from the west. Gray clouds that did not know if they were mountains or snake nests of lightning would suddenly appear and ride over the city on a cushion of rain, wind, and hail. Lightning that coiled and tangled in plum-colored clouds loved to aim for Manhattan's high spires, loved to strike them with precision, and loved the magnification of the thunder as it rolled down the avenues from Washington Heights to the Battery. Its flashes and booms made every living being into a tenpin, and propelled otherwise imperturbable crowds into doorways and arcades to wait out the storm, necks bent and hearts stopping now and then when a big stroke decided to punish something nearby.

Peter Lake always stopped whatever he was doing to watch a thunderstorm. Sometimes he looked up through the gla.s.s plates over The Sun's machinery hall and watched the rain drumming and the lightning cracking the sky, and sometimes he witnessed the artillery strike from his room, as the wooden tanks in the water tower valley thundered in sympathy. He always felt like a fifth columnist for the wind and rain, hoping that they would be strong enough to flatten the structure of time and make him free. Everyone, he supposed, had his own particular view of the lightning.

Stalking about their suddenly darkened apartment thirty floors above the East River, Martin and Abby weathered one of these storms in primal fright. This was the first time either had seen such a performance and been old enough to appreciate it. Martin remembered a few small thunderstorms, but there is all the difference in the world' between a storm ten miles away and one right overhead. Hardestyand Virginia were at work, and Mrs. Solemnis was taking a typically unshakable nap. When the two children couldn't wake her, they thought that she had been killed by the storm, and they went into the kitchen to peep out the window toward h.e.l.l Gate.

After Martin told her that he was sure their parents were dead, Abby cried. In fact, now that Mrs. Solemnis was dead, they might be the only people left in the world. Though they were heartened when they saw a towboat charging through h.e.l.l Gate, it then disappeared, and the thunder grew so intense that it nearly broke the windows."Don't worry, Abby. I'll take care of you," Martin told her as she began to whimper. He then went over in his mind the various steps in cooking eggs. He had just been taught how to light the stove and make breakfast, and that, he reasoned, was a great stroke of luck now that he would have to feed himself and Abby. He was beginning to wrestle with the problem of what to do with Mrs. Solemnis' body (throw it off the terrace? put it in the refrigerator?) when the storm vanished, the sun came out, and Virginia called to ask how they were.

Time for them was much as it was for Peter Lake. He and they were not as sure of its workings as were those who had been deceived by clocks. Though people readily understood that a line was imaginary, and a point, too, they were true believers in seconds. Abby and Martin rested easily in the lateral infinities of timelessness, and lived in the Marrattas' apartment high over Yorkville like two young birds in a aerie.

Their capabilities were frequently surprising. For example,Hardesty and Virginia were delighted that their children apparently had a rich fantasy life. They had hundreds of invisible friends with names like "Fat Woman and Baldy," "The Dog People," "Lonely Dorian," "Snake Lady," "Underwear Man," "The High Plant People," "The Low Plant People," "The Smoke People," "Alfonse and Hoola," "Screecher and Tiptoes," "Crazy Ellen," "The Boxer," "Romeo,"The Garlic Boys," etc. The list was long, leading their parents to worry that (despite the fact that neither child had ever seen a television) their imaginations were overly fragmented, until, one night at dinner they overheard a peculiar conversation: "Catwoman from the moon was crying today," Martin told Abby, matter-of-factly."The cat Bonomo was turning backward somersaults. I think it doesn't feel well."

"Who?" asked Abby, frazzled after a nap that had gone on too long and taken her further than usual into the land of Morpheus and Belindaa"any Marratta arising from a nap was truly wicked.

"Catwoman from the moon," said Martin, annoyed that he had to repeat himself.

"Who?"

"Catwoman from the moon! Catwoman from the moon!" Martin screamed in five-year-old arrogance, freezing Hardesty's fork between plate and mouth."You know, fourteen down and seven over."

Only then did Hardesty and Virginia realize that the invisible companions were real, the inhabitants of a huge high-rise visible from the children's room, whom they had named according to observed idiosyncrasies and possessions. They had pegged almost a thousand people and animals, and were familiar with them on almost a day-to-day basis. Virginia was not surprised, for she had learned, early on, ten or twenty thousand of Mrs. Gamely's more common words so that she might know what was happening if Mrs. Gamely were to say, for example: "Marry! Le Blonde and his men are here, asking the village to divvy its piscaries among diglots holus-bolus." Virginia had been able to read the clouds so as to predict the weather days in advance, like a farmer, having grown up with land and sky her constant companions. In Yorkville there were just as many signs to read, though they seemed far less graceful than the raw and unspoiled nature of the Coheeries.