City of God (30 page)

and never forget to thank God for the blessing of this coherent family.

Meanwhile the sky had grown dark, bad weather loomed.

Slowly, the pilot gained needed altitude

not knowing at what moment of his urging the craft would no longer fly.

The British called their airplanes machines

a locution too quaint for a Flying Fortress in my brother's opinion

But with every tremor of the wings every sputtering choke of the engines

the accuracy of it came home to him.

Now I don't know when or exactly how it happened that Ronald was ordered to bail out.

The sky was black by then, the storm had hit,

Perhaps lightning shorted the instrument panel.

They were flying blind, the compass spinning,

The turbulence was fierce, knocking them about,

And I think he said the far starboard engine was on fire.

In the light of the flames he saw the wing beginning to pull away.

The pilot shouting at whoever was alive to get out, the plane yawing, bouncing, cracking up,

Ronald staggering aft and finding his chute,

A door was open, the rain hitting their faces, men tumbling out ahead of him

And with one glance back at the pilot
rising from his chair
giving the plane up to its dive

Ronald leapt into the raging thundering darkness.

Bartender, another beer for these brothers and sisters gone dry in the mouth, and for me.

Immunity to murderous loudspoken storytelling is storytelling, isn't that so?

A story on the page is like a printed circuit for our lives to flow through,

A story told invokes our dim capacity to be alive in bodies not our own.

You would want the whole planet in voice

and the totality of intimate human narrations

composing a hymn to enlightenment if that were possible.

In any event, here is this young airman, age twenty-two

falling to earth in the harness of a parachute

His arms wrenched and shoulders about to desocket

as he bumps up on the crests and drops in the sloughs of the turbulent storm of black air.

He descends through cloud undergoing momentary silent fullnesses of illumination

before going black in vituperous thunder.

He is not able to hear his plane crash.

In this great resounding sea of lightning-lit darkness,

Deeper than any darkness he has known

And with a continent of bone wrack rising to meet him

He can remember nothing of Miss Manderleigh

Not her words, not her cries, not her intimate bodily facts

not her shape or size or form or smile or touch

But only the genderless soul staring from her love-dulled eyes

erasing from his memory their color, as
he shouts into the sky

Good-bye, Miss Manderleigh, good-bye!

He really thought it was the end of him.

But the parachutist who meets neither land nor water invokes a realm of mythic prophecy

As when impossibly the woods of Dunsinane begin to stir though there is no wind, uproot, grow feet, and move out

to take the measure of that poor dumb bastard Macbeth.

My brother thought first he had come down on seashells. because of the jarring crackle under his boots,

But dragged some distance, twisting and rolling until he spilled the wind out of his chute,

he was whacked and pummeled with what seemed to be staffs or rake handles.

He thought it was some peasant reception committee showing their patriotism.

Only when he came to rest, one ankle twisted under an immovable bough,

did the xylophonic sound track of the action play in his ears

And in the ensuing silence he realized he held in one hand an ulna a tibia in the other.

He'd arrived in a field of the war before, reopened by an errant shell of this war.

It was the improvised graveyard of ancient bones and skulls

still helmeted in the stylish French couture and phallic German,

the skeletal warriors of his father Ben's generation hastily shoveled under as the Great War moved on.

He had reason to hope he was in France But at first too stunned to move and then in too much pain

he lay there in that boneyard all the night.

He learned that bones of a certain age are hollow, weightless, and rise with the breeze like flutes of straw or bamboo.

They play, they ripple, they gently bongo among themselves,

They clack like train tracks, shiver and shir like cards being shuffled,

They clink like wind chimes, hoot soft as owls.

He imagined a badinage of ghosts past protest, past outrage, gibbering.

But in the morning a real French peasant found him.

He was hidden in a farmhouse, nursed, bone set, and brought back to health.

During this time he put together some working radios for the local Resistance

and achieved the affection of an entire family this intrepid American boy from the Bronx with a shock of hair fallen over his forehead

and a taste for fresh unpasteurized milk still warm in the pail.

They embraced him, bid him good-bye and he rode hidden in haywagons, carts, and trucks

From one safe house to another for weeks until a fishing boat smuggled him across the Channel.

He'd been the only one of his crew to survive.

But soon enough was back in the air again, at war in the fire-cracked nights of Europe

Unable at times to know if the machine he rode

was flying level or diving toward the earth

If the screaming he heard was the engine's or his own.

And that's how I choose to leave him—

In the war after the war. . . before the war

Before his tour was over and he came home.

—The rabbi has faxed me her father's file. Not much there. His letters to the Justice Department. Their bureaucratic replies. Two 1977 articles from the
Times
: deportation hearing, a finding. Blurry head shot, bald fellow with sickly thin face. Three people testify man in question is the ghetto commandant, Schmitz, but his lawyer shoots down their testimony. They were elderly, easily befuddled. Defendant testifies he is Helmut Preissen, an ex-corporal who only did guard duty in the ghetto for three months before he was shipped to fight on the Russian front. This is same ID he presented to the immigration authorities after the war. The judge finds in his favor.. . . Letters to and from the Simon Wiesenthal Center, the functionary there agreeing with Sarah's father that Preissen is almost certainly Schmitz, but short of convincing documentation, the ID cannot be made that will justify reopening the case, although their file is being kept open.

Less agreement from the Department of Justice, the lawyer there somewhat defensive about his handling of the case.

—a nest of three peregrine falcon chicks, on the ledge of an iron-front window, top floor across the street. Whoever lives there is sensitive to the brood and keeps his shades down. What a great privilege to have them in my binoculars. I can tell when the mother is returning, they are quiet balls of fur. Then all of a sudden, and she may be blocks away, they start squawking, their beaks opening like post diggers, their gullets aimed at the sky. And a moment later there she is winging down the canyon, she's got a city bird in her talons, a rock dove. Hovering, alights, wing stretched to a fluster of infant demands, holds the prey with one foot, a hail of breast feathers and then she is pecking it apart methodically, pulling off red hanks of flesh and dropping them in those gullets.

—Suppose this guy works for the
Times,
a middling career, never gets as high on the ladder as he feels he deserves, you can see it in the set of
his mouth. Others are given the plum foreign assignments, top editorships, and with the passing of years his nagging sense of having been badly used sinks into the hunch of his shoulders. Now an ordinary-looking gray-haired man in his late fifties, he has gotten no further than deputy editing one of the lesser sections.

What finally becomes intolerable is the nature of the corporate judgment, that he will never be a top-grade newspaperman: in unassuageable bitterness, he takes early retirement.

For the first month or so he is in deep funk, missing the routine, his secret sense of possessiveness of the newspaper, that it was his, and missing too the affronts to his sense of himself, the welter of gossip, the daily ups and downs of small triumphs and defeats. Above all, he misses the feeling of being on the inside.

But at the same time, the outside perspective reduces everything to reasonable proportion. The paper is not the world, it is a simulacrum of the life of the world, its wars, famines, business, weather, politics, crime, sports, arts, science categorized and worked into stories flattened on folded newsprint. And what he has now if he will only seize it is all of that—but raw, unformed, and unwritten! He is released into the dimensions of unmediated reality.

So now in the suspense of having done what in his years as a wage slave he has dreamt of, detaching from the institution he has lived by to confront himself in freedom, this man who has never gotten so much as a traffic ticket undertakes the practice of bold, uncharacteristic behavior. He stops shaving, lets his hair grow, pretends to be mad in the street, watching with pleasure as people get out of his way. He remarks rudely on the businessmen climbing out of their limos at the Park Avenue hotels, is boorish in stores and scornful in art galleries. Wandering the West Side piers at night, the dark streets under the sections of elevated railway that have not been torn down, he goes with the tight-skirt whores into the taxi garages, or screws them in fleabag rooms on West Street. He does everything he can think of to break down the unacknowledged presumptions of sixty years of living by the rules.

But these acts of will do not transform him. Hating himself, he still aches for assignments, servitude, for the small triumph of the Friday paycheck, the camaraderie of the saloon. In desperation he begins a novel but abandons it after a few thousand words. He cannot bring
himself to call his still working friends. He stares at his phone waiting for it to ring, knowing it won't. Mentally they've written his obit and set it in type, the actual day of death being no more than the signal to run it.

It is only when he finds himself considering the idea of phoning his ex-wife that he realizes his life hangs in the balance. He begins seriously to think. And his thought discovers a plan of action for himself the mere contemplation of which is enough to make him feel alive again.

Newspapers, he decides, tell stories that, with few exceptions, are never completed. There is no end to the stock market story or the story of the power struggle among nations. These stories are unending, bull and bear cycles, war and peace cycles. Elections may be held, someone wins or loses, and parties increase their majorities or lose their majorities, and all of it is in flux, quite temporary, and the lasting effects of legislation are weakened in time by administrations that ignore the law or flout it or revamp it. Games won or lost are succeeded by other games, championship seasons dissolved in free agency and last-place seasons, the cosmologists of the science pages define and redefine the nature of the universe, its size, its dynamics, geologists periodically increase the age of the earth, businesses are bought and sold, looted and resold, merged, spun off bankrupted, renamed, restored. Human enterprise goes on, pulsing with ambitions that can never be satisfied.