and go home.
*
The windows were open, as always. The cold no longer
streamed in as it had the first few months when the windows
first had to stay open day and night: winter, fall, summer,
spring: wind, rain, ice, fire. Now the cold was a tired old resident, always there, bored and heavy, lazy and indifferently spinning webs tinged with ice, stagnant, ever so content to stay
put. Even when the wind was blowing through the apartment,
blowing like in some classic Hollywood storm, the cold just
sat there, not making a sound. It had permeated the plaster. It
had sunk into the splintered red floors. It was wedged into the
finest cracks in pipes, stone, and brick. It sat stupidly on the
linoleum. It rested impressively on my desk. It embraced my
books. It slept in my bed. It was like a great haze of light, a
spectacular aura, around the coffeepot. It lay like a corpse in
a bathtub. The cats hunched up in it, their coats wild and
thick and standing on end, their eyes a little prehistoric and
haunted. They tumbled together in it, touching it sometimes
gingerly with humbly uplifted paws to see if it was real.
Prowling or crouched and filled with disbelief, they sought to
stumble on a pocket of air slightly heated by breath or accidental friction. There was no refuge of more than a few seconds’ duration.
The fumes that polluted the apartment came through the
walls like death might, transparent, spreading out, persistent,
inescapable. A half mile down, five long flights, immigrants
cooked greasy hamburgers for junkies, native-born. Each
hamburger spit out particles of grease, smoke, oil, dirt, and
each particle sprang wings and flew up toward heaven, where
we tenement angels were. The carbon monoxide from incomplete combustion was a gaseous visitation that blurred vision, caused acute, incomprehensible pain inside the head,
and made the stomach cringe in waiting vomit. The gas could
pass through anything, and did: a clenched fist; layers of human
fat; the porous walls of this particular slum dwelling; the
human heart and brain and especially the abdomen, where it
turned spikelike and tore into the lower intestine with sharp
bitter thrusts. Molecules whirled in the wall: were the wall
100
itself whirling: wondrous: each molecule providing elaborate
occasion for generous invasion: dizzying space for wandering
stink and stench and poison. The wall simply ceased to be
solid and instead moved like atoms under a microscope. I
expected to be able to put my hand, gently, softly, kindly,
through it. It would fade and part like wisps of cotton candy,
not clinging even that much, or it would be like a film ghost: I
would be able to move through it, it not me being unreal. The
wall had become an illusion, a mere hallucination of the solid,
a phantom, a chimera, an oasis born of delirium for the poor
fool who thirsted for a home, shelter, a place inside not outside,
a place distinctly different from the cold streets of displacement
