'Yes.'
'They come and they don't want to leave. The phone rings, it's the family-where is he? This is the fraternity of missing men.'
'I understand.'
'What's your name?'
'Brian Classic.'
'Nice to meet you,' Marvin said.
Brian asked about a way back to Manhattan that did not include the George Washington Bridge. There was a tunnel here and a tunnel there and Marvin gave both sets of directions with a number of choices attached to each. Brian the fool narrowed his eyes and nodded yes although he knew he would retain none of this once he was in the car.
He drove along turnpikes and skyways, seeing Manhattan come and go in a valium sunset, smoky and golden. The car wobbled in the sound booms of highballing trucks, drivers perched in tall cabs with food, drink, dope and pornography, and the rigs seemed to draw the little car down the pike in their sheering wind. He drove past enormous tank farms, squat white cylinders arrayed across the swampland, and he saw white dome tanks in smaller groupings and long lines of tank cars rolling down the tracks. He went past power pylons with their spindly arms akimbo. He drove into the spewing smoke of acres of burning truck tires and the planes descended and the transit cranes stood in rows at the marine terminal and he saw billboards for Hertz and Avis and Chevy Blazer, for Marlboro, Continental and Goodyear, and he realized that all the things around him, the planes taking off and landing, the streaking cars, the tires on the cars, the cigarettes that the drivers of the cars were dousing in their ashtrays-all these were on the billboards around him, systematically linked in some self-referring relationship that had a kind of neurotic tightness, an inescapability, as if the billboards were generating reality, and of course he thought of Marvin.
When he went past Newark Airport he realized he'd overshot all the turnoffs and their related options. He looked for a friendly exit, untrucked and rural, and found himself some time later on a two-lane blacktop that wended uncertainly through cattail mires. He felt a bitey edge of brine in the air and the road bent and then ended in gravel and weeds.
He got out of the car and climbed an earthen bank. The wind was stiff enough to make his eyes go moist and he looked across a narrow body of water to a terraced elevation on the other side. It was reddish brown, flat- topped, monumental, sunset burning in the heights, and Brian thought he was hallucinating an Arizona butte. But it was real and it was man-made, swept by wheeling gulls, and he knew it could be only one thing-the Fresh Kills landfill on Staten Island.
This was the reason for his trip to New York and he was scheduled to meet there with surveyors and engineers in the morning. Three thousand acres of mountained garbage, contoured and road-graded, with bulldozers pushing waves of refuse onto the active face. Brian felt invigorated, looking at this scene. Barges unloading, sweeper boats poking through the kills to pick up stray waste. He saw a maintenance crew working on drainpipes high on the angled setbacks that were designed to control the runoff of rainwater. Other figures in masks and butylene suits were gathered at the base of the structure to inspect isolated material for toxic content. It was science fiction and prehistory, garbage arriving twenty-four hours a day, hundreds of workers, vehicles with metal rollers compacting the trash, bucket augers digging vents for methane gas, the gulls diving and crying, a line of snouted trucks sucking in loose litter.
He imagined he was watching the construction of the Great Pyramid at Giza-only this was twenty-five times bigger, with tanker trucks spraying perfumed water on the approach roads. He found the sight inspiring. All this ingenuity and labor, this delicate effort to fit maximum waste into diminishing space. The towers of the World Trade Center were visible in the distance and he sensed a poetic balance between that idea and this one. Bridges, tunnels, scows, tugs, graving docks, container ships, all the great works of transport, trade and linkage were directed in the end to this culminating structure. And the thing was organic, ever growing and shifting, its shape computer-plotted by the day and the hour. In a few years this would be the highest mountain on the Atlantic Coast between Boston and Miami. Brian felt a sting of enlightenment. He looked at all that soaring garbage and knew for the first time what his job was all about. Not engineering or transportation or source reduction. He dealt in human behavior, people's habits and impulses, their uncontrollable needs and innocent wishes, maybe their passions, certainly their excesses and indulgences but their kindness too, their generosity, and the question was how to keep this mass metabolism from overwhelming us.
The landfill showed him smack-on how the waste stream ended, where all the appetites and hankerings, the sodden second thoughts came runneling out, the things you wanted ardently and then did not. He'd seen a hundred landfills but none so vast as this. Yes, impressive and distressing. He knew the stench must ride the wind into every dining room for miles around. When people heard a noise at night, did they think the heap was coming down around them, sliding toward their homes, an omnivorous movie terror filling their doorways and windows?
The wind carried the stink across the kill.
Brian took a deep breath, he filled his lungs. This was the challenge he craved, the assault on his complacency and vague shame. To understand all this. To penetrate this secret. The mountain was here, unconcealed, but no one saw it or thought about it, no one knew it existed except the engineers and teamsters and local residents, a unique cultural deposit, fifty million tons by the time they top it off, carved and modeled, and no one talked about it but the men and women who tried to manage it, and he saw himself for the first time as a member of an esoteric order, they were adepts and seers, crafting the future, the city planners, the waste managers, the compost technicians, the land-scapers who would build hanging gardens here, make a park one day out of every kind of used and lost and eroded object of desire.
The biggest secrets are the ones spread open before us. This was Marvin Lundy talking, filling Brian's head with that dry staticky voice that seemed to come out of a surgical slit in his throat.
The wind carried the stink from the mountain of wrack.
Specks and glints, ragtails of color appeared in the stratified mass of covering soil, fabric scraps from the garment center, stirred by the wind, or maybe that teal thing is a bikini brief that belonged to a secretary from Queens, and Brian found he could create a flash infatuation, she is dark-eyed and reads the tabloids and paints her nails and eats lunch out of molded styrofoam, and he gives her gifts and she gives him condoms, and it all ends up here, newsprint, emery boards, sexy underwear, coaxed into high relief by the rumbling dozers-think of his multitudinous spermlings with their history of high family fore-heads, Stranded in a Ramses body bag and rollered snug in the deep-down waste.
He watched several gulls veering near and saw a hundred other gulls positioned on a slope, all facing the same way, motionless, regardful, joined in consciousness, in beautiful empty birdness, waiting for the signal to fly.
4
Marvin was out of his basement, wincing in the light. He steered his car tenaciously, choosing a lane and sticking to it. He wore a tan windbreaker with a plaid lining because this is what he always wore when the leaves began to turn. It was the faithful change of apparel, an adjustment to the cosmos that made his life seem regular. He wore the jacket through the decades, giving the old one to the Salvation Army and buying another just like it, the everyman tan that he could spot on a store hanger from fifty yards in one of those vast hushed areas just before closing time where ranks of suits are arrayed like executives in hell.
He also wore a pair of latex gloves, a precaution he took whenever he went to the city.
When he got to the Lower East Side he drove through the streets a number of times before he found a space that looked okay, where he wouldn't get towed and he wouldn't get broken in, and he locked the car and then stood back and studied the parking job he'd done and the street in general, old furniture sold cheap and a truck lot in which every inch of every truck was covered with graffiti. The humans walked by looking touchy and unbeloved. He saw two men in wheelchairs who scooted after cars stopped at the light to scrounge a little change.
Marvin walked in his sliding step, his sort of explanatory shuffle, it was a comment on the literature of
