If this visit is part of the complication, if it is a detail courtesy of Turk’s grand plan for me, it is a generous gift.
My father points at the TV and says, I’ve never paid much attention to this sport. What an oversight! Once, not long after I moved up here, Charles Quail was going to take me to see some jumping up around Amenia, but when we got there, the ramp had turned to slush. I remember the structure had a certain utilitarian elegance—you can imagine, like the underside of a long pier—but nothing to recommend that it was capable of facilitating anything so sublime as this, he said, waving at the TV. Charles would go on endlessly about the sport, you know, with great passion, but to be confronted by that brown, dripping, wooden thing about as elegant as a shipwreck … We ate at a Wendy’s and drove home. If only I could have seen them flying, I would have been a lifelong fan. How right he was. If anything, he undersold the whole enterprise. Imagine! All these years I could have been an enthusiast, if not for one too-warm day in February.
It suits you, I say.
Yes, speaks to my boundless appetite for danger, doesn’t it?
Through the window I see a raven land in the field to the side of the house, stately, its feathers iridescent across the shoulders. In better weather they were always battling with the gulls, executing twisting dives to escape the larger birds. If a single raven was under pursuit, others would show up to harry the gulls. They’re smart, ravens, but something about their intelligence, devoid of compassion, makes me dislike them. They are neither brave nor curious, merely efficient hunters equipped with bodies large enough to allow them to fend for themselves. The gulls attacked only because the ravens raided their nests. William Push had been a fan, and had lobbied to have the building named not the Apelles but the Raven.
Push was the guiding spirit behind the Apelles, and the reason I have come to visit my father. When the Apelles opened in 1915, Push intended it to be the most technologically advanced building in the city. He was an automat mogul, an engineer of renown, and his considerable wealth bought him a position as consultant to Black and Simms, the architects of record, who assigned him the responsibility of designing the pneumatic tube, waste disposal, ventilation, heating, and dumbwaiter systems, all of which, as he would eventually prove, enabled a resident to close the door of his apartment behind him and abandon the world to its self-destructive urges. Push died in 1938, having spent the last nine years of his life sequestered in his apartment. Why he did so can be chalked up to that distinctly human tendency to define oneself by the depth and breadth of one’s discontent.
He considered the human organism to be inefficient and alarmingly fragile. According to his personal taxonomy of the world’s beings, wild animals were far more advanced than Homo sapiens. Take, for example, the lion, which operated at maximum efficiency, lying at rest unless seized by a biological imperative. A lion, Push argued, had no desire to be anything other than what it was. If an un-lionlike thought ever put into the harbor of a lion’s brain, it would be raided, burned, and sunk on the spot. If, by a perversion of nature, there should ever be a lion given to lolling about in the dirt thinking up poems, it would be quickly set upon by marauding elephants, tusked and trampled and left to dissolve into the savanna floor. Lions never looked at birds and wished for wings. They couldn’t have spent years musing on the beauty of a tree if they wanted to. They were pure, the elegant result of evolution’s dispassionate murder of any trait that didn’t increase the lion’s ability to hunt and reproduce. Likewise the raven, whose very image spoke to Push of ecological efficiency.
The note card my father had written on that night in 1978 when Turk’s Christmas tree had blocked his way had itself been designed by Push. His pneumatic tube system once carried hundreds of them an hour all over the Apelles, and the job of sorting the cylinders fell to young women who worked twelve-hour shifts in a basement room. The job was notorious for inducing nervous diseases, in no small part because of the elevated swivel chairs designed by Push according to his interpretation of ergonomics, which dictated that the female’s delicate anatomy required a wicker seat and a low wooden backrest that, in practice, crushed the kidneys and liver, threw the sacrum into disorder, and bit into the lower spine. No matter how the workers complained, he insisted they use the chairs, even though no sorter lasted more than a month, most leaving the building’s employ for less physically debilitating occupations in sweatshops. As a consequence, few of the girls became competent in the job, and with forty containers a minute sluicing through the tubes at times of peak activity, messages rarely reached their intended recipients on the first try. For Push, these setbacks only confirmed his assessment of Homo sapiens as infuriating creatures whose utility had been weakened by centuries of miscegenation, inbreeding, and the insistence on caring for and even cultivating the weak and sick.
Over the decades, use of the pneumatic tubes dwindled, and by the time I was a girl, the system had been shut down. Hence the cards in the elevator lobbies.
Is it any surprise that Push’s design included a set of tubes that allowed him to divert any branch of the system to a delivery bay
