again to the yellow bath of neon in the street I step to the curb, raise my arm, and hail a cab to take me home.
I say ''take me home,'' but where I live isn't a home at all but a ''space.'' That was the way it was described in the full-page ad that ran in one of the weeklies soon after the building was rezoned for residential use from its former function as a textile warehouse: COME AND DEVELOP YOUR OWN WAY OF LIVING IN ONE OF OUR SPACES. Not ''condos'' or ''units,'' not even ''lofts.'' Vacant, off-white, ahistorical, prepersonalized space. I was immediately drawn. Down I went to the block of rust-dirtied brick at the south end of Chinatown and bought a space of my very own the same afternoon.
Up in the freight elevator to the top floor and down the wide industrial hall. It's late, I'm tired, there's plenty of work to do tomorrow before heading up into the barrens. But I'm starving for another line, and as the door swings open I head for my stash nestled among the ceramic nectarines in the fruit bowl without turning on the lights. Spill out a serving and up it goes. Only then do I turn on the lights and think:
There's one photograph, though. Unenlarged, tucked into a dollar-store black plastic frame. There, on the bare coffee table, facing the corner so that an observer must stoop to make out the details: my parents, caught in a balance between posed smile and laughter, arms around each other's waists, standing before a setting sun the color of a Singapore Sling. I keep meaning to put it away, tuck it on a shelf in the closet or maybe just turn it even farther to the wall to lessen the directness of the angle, but then I forget, so that I'm always surprised by their faces shining back at me. A happy couple moving into the middle years of accomplishment without visible hints of regret, baring to the camera the familiar faces of strangers. No strain behind the smile, neither spine stiffened by the other's touch. The sort of picture that comes with the frame when you buy it.
I walk over to the window and open one of the glass panels wide enough to let me stick my head and shoulders through. Below, the street is a river of headlight and brakelight crosscurrents, the air swirling up in warm gushes sharpened by the rotten fish and vegetables piled high in boxes in front of the Chinese markets a couple blocks north. Close my eyes and inhale. It used to make my stomach turn, but now it's almost welcome. A signal in the atmosphere to let you know that you're home, back in your proper space.
part 2
chapter 4
I can move fast when I want to. Lift myself up to the heroic heights at which my working life takes place. This state of being goes by a name that carries the resonance of a philosophical concept or historical epoch: Billable Time.
But this transition requires a little help. Most opt for the coffee-and-doughnut approach, but as coffee holds some antagonisms toward my bladder and doughnuts leave a suspicious film over tonsils and gums, I prefer a line or two of reasonably priced but honorably cut cocaine. This involves some embarrassment to admit even to myself, as more than a few years have passed since this particular narcotic was the hippest in town. Call me old-fashioned, but coke just suits my go-get-'em, eighties temperament. And in the end the entire matter of which drug is coolest is ultimately beyond rational criticism or debate. Who can argue with tried-and-true physiological addictions?
With me, I never have to wait for a birthday or anniversary--it's breakfast in bed every morning. Two lines taken off the bedside table and the day opens up before me, burns through every vessel in my head, and washes cool bleach down the back of my throat. Everything at once electric and numb, a sense of purpose pulsing through tissue and tickling over skin. And along with all this a yearning to sing. Don't even hum in the shower (and fake it every time I have to stand for the national anthem) but there it is, a balloon of song rising up in my chest. Sometimes, if I happen to pass a mirror at times like these, I can see myself as one of those grinning lunatics from a Technicolor musical who're always on the verge of abandoning speech in favor of expressing themselves through rollicking chorus numbers instead. Not joy but a feeling that's somehow suggestive of the word: the fishhook
I'm up. Pull back the bedsheet, peer down the neglected but so far--praise God!--still flat expanse of stomach and slouch over to the nectarines for another line. Then another. And then (only after a moment's balanced consideration) one more for the road.
I pack, pick a few things up at the office (Dictaphone, tapes, laptop, color markers, yellow pads--lawyers' friends all) and swing down to the car rental place near Union Station to set myself up with some wheels. Normally, it is advisable practice to confirm the price of such items with one's client, because in the end he's the one who faces the numbers under ''Disbursements'' on the fee statement. But seeing as Mr. Tripp is unavailable at the moment, I don't see the need to be nitpicky with the professional procedure on this particular morning.
''Compact, Mid, or Full?'' the guy at the counter asks once he's got my essentials tapped in.
''Anything bigger than Full?''
''You want a limo?''
''No, although I suppose I
No smile from the guy. Then I remember: for the rest of the world the coffee and doughnut is already wearing off.
''Whatever you have in the Full will be fine.''
''We got a Lincoln Continental that's clean.''
''A clean Lincoln. Splendid.''
The sign at the side of Highway 400 appears for 69 North and I steer the big car onto the off-ramp, jelly around the curve that sets it on a new course. The way of the weekend pioneers heading up to their vacation properties, rich but preferring to go by the name of middle class, overleveraged, under stress, a family. And today an entire generation of children moving into adulthood sharing little but the memory of blazing Friday afternoons, carsickness, the view from the flip-up backseats of station wagons. Peeling off at the exits marked by signs for lodges alternately named after long-gone species of trees and Indian tribes. But not today. Everything clamped shut the morning after Labor Day as though from annual news of approaching plague.
For the first while I share the highway with pickup trucks, occasional semis hauling gravel, farm machinery lumbering along the shoulder. But as the organized fields of corn and dozing cattle yield to outcroppings of rock, bogs coated green with algae, and undisciplined acres of thorny underbrush, the road thins of even this traffic, narrows to two lanes, and leaves me alone. I push the speedometer up to seventy mph with the idea that increased velocity might move the land behind me more efficiently, but it makes no difference. The deeper I press the gas pedal the less I'm passing through the landscape and the more I'm moving into it, sinking with every curve into its ragged texture.
Something's different up here.
The brush creeps up to the orange line that marks the boundary of the road and reaches across as a territorial challenge. Lone fence posts push up from the earth like bent thumbs. Occasional signs give directions to marinas, campgrounds, and private side roads that are no longer there. Then even the signs become difficult to see as bugs begin to kamikaze the windshield, obscuring my view with their yellow guts. On go the windshield wipers and I squeeze off a couple good sprays of washer fluid, but there's something in the insects' blood that resists easy removal and I'm left to peer ahead through a smudgy haze of horsefly, dragonfly, and moth.
Of course on a map it all looks the same: a vast white space marked by a couple of rail lines, watercolor dabs of small blue lakes, jagged veins for rivers throughout. But when you get here the map might as well be a child's crayon drawing. The lines are imaginary, nothing relates.
