Posted by Atticus on August 26, 2004, at 13:04:41
Hungry Pavement, Part 1
by Atticus
It was at precisely 5:18 p.m. on an otherwise unremarkable August afternoon when I finally had to acknowledge the truth: the City of New York was trying its damnedest to kill me.
Oh, I don’t mean the human beings and human beasts who move through the City’s brick and concrete, glass and steel arteries and bowels like corpuscles and feces. I mean the City itself. This was premeditated murder in which all five boroughs were likely co-conspirators.
There was nothing random or capricious about it, like an errant I-beam at a construction site plummeting onto some poor schmuck who was trudging home from spending his day in a five-by-five cube upholstered in beige fabric, where he’d toiled urgently at some meaningless assignment that he’d never finish now.
And this cut to the heart of my problem with my realization about the City.
Since the age of 13, when I’d melodramatically renounced my Roman Catholicism, I’d always held a firm belief in a rudderless universe that careened forward pell-mell like a subway train with a conductor who’d just had a massive heart attack at the controls, drool and a tiny, glistening drop of blood flecked on his lips.
Life, I thought, consisted entirely of moments of brutal absurdity and absurd brutality, punctuated by the occasional but surpassingly rare moment of transcendent beauty.
All in no particular order and with no particular meaning. Except for the meaning that we assigned to it. Except for the way our brains labored to turn this mishmash of vignettes into a coherent narrative with ourselves as the protagonists.
Sure, it was all delusion, but, hell, if it helped give people some measure of comfort and sanity, I guess it wasn’t all bad. Sometimes, I’d always thought, you can get a lot further living a lie than living the truth. That lie is all that hangs between you and the abyss; it’s a tissue paper-thin floor that keeps you from plummeting into madness.
But this … this whole business with the City, was different. It shook to the core all my preconceptions about the human condition as being random and chaotic. I didn’t like the idea that powerful, unseen forces were – with pitiless deliberation and planning – shaping my life.
In any case, one thing was obvious. New York wanted me dead. And it was clearly ready to go to unprecedented lengths to whack me. The bast**d.
I was standing on the corner of Third Avenue and 46th Street, right outside the nondescript, boxy, modernist building where I cranked out advertising copy, when the City made its move.
Five minutes earlier, I had glanced out the window of my 18th-floor office. It faced south and featured a breathtaking view of the crown of the Chrysler Building four blocks away, one of an endless string of attempts to build the biggest phallic symbol in the world. A tiny drop of rain had struck my window, forming a broken liquid streak on the glass like a miniature crystalline spine.
“Fu**,” I’d thought. Rain. I hated New York’s uniquely nasty brand of umbrella-shredding, gusty summer downpours.
Now I found myself standing in the middle of one.
I was waiting to cross Third and head for the uptown bus on First. Three of those city buses with the black accordions joining the front and rear sections were laid nose to tail between me and the far side of the street, like a line of circus elephants adorned with gaudy ads for television shows. They grunted and huffed, their motors revving, but didn’t budge.
I peered up at the barely visible green traffic light swaying giddily on its post in the blasts of soaking rain.
Somewhere on the other side of the three behemoths in front of me, an unseen electric sign featuring a stick figure outlined in white light bulbs was urging me to “Walk,” but it knew damn well – I strongly suspected – that this line of metallic pachyderms insured that I couldn’t possibly do anything of the sort.
Walking around a barrier the length of six buses just wasn’t worth the effort. My only option was to remain where I was, battered by successive fists of water, wind, and random bits of newspaper. A heavyset man to my immediate right in a tweed cap and a tan London Fog trench coat unleashed a string of curses at The Great Wall of Buses.
And then, one minute later, at 5:18, the sidewalk ate him.
I remember the time because my sleeve slipped up my left wrist as I struggled to hold onto my umbrella against the gale-like flow of airborne water, and I flicked my eyes down momentarily at my watch to see how long I’d been frozen in place there.
The sidewalk just missed me. I was lucky. Damned lucky.
At that precise moment, the wind tore my umbrella, which by now consisted of bent aluminum rods and tattered, flapping bits of fabric, out of my hand. I instinctively lunged abruptly to my left to snatch it.
As my right foot left the ground, I felt the damp sidewalk turn oddly soft. I looked down and noticed a wave of ripples in the concrete – but not in the sheet of water covering it – arching out from where my shoe had pushed off.
The man in the trenchcoat, standing about a foot from where I’d been seconds earlier, suddenly sank into the sidewalk up to his knees, as if it were quicksand.
He let out a shriek and yanked at his left thigh, then his right, with both hands, trying to free himself. It didn’t work. He pushed against the sidewalk in an attempt to raise himself out of the slurry-like goo, but his hands and forearms sank to the elbows into the boggy substance that the once-solid ground had become. I stood about five feet away, entranced, my useless umbrella now back in my grasp and dangling from my left hand, forgotten.
His cap blew off and his comb-over began to wave wildly back and forth, adding a bizarre comical touch to the scene. He turned his head left to face me. I could barely make out his expression in the crushing torrent of rain, but I could see the dark black oval of his mouth formed into a scream. He cried out to me, “Jesus Christ, help me!”
I did nothing.
Because the one thing that I could make out clearly in the downpour were the huge triangular teeth, yellow as sun-baked newspapers and each as large as home plate on a baseball diamond, rising from the sidewalk around him in an almost perfect circle.
The teeth extended higher into the air to reveal the wrinkled, black, leathery gums in which they were embedded. Next came shiny wet skin, gray-green and pebbled in texture like a lizard’s, followed by a ring of iridescent blue-green eyes that ran in an unbroken ring around the thing’s worm-like head.
It paused for a moment, stretching its jaws still wider. Then the teeth snapped together and bit him in half at the chest. I heard a series of staccato pops – like firecrackers exploding in rapid sequence – as his ribs snapped. Blood sprayed out in all directions, splattering on the cuffs of my pants and my shoes. It mixed with the swirling rainwater to form brief, bright red psychedelic patterns that were almost immediately erased and washed into the gutter.
His eyes bulged wide, fixed on me with a mixture of shock and accusation, as if he knew I was the real target. He’d simply had the bad luck to be standing next to me when the assassin struck and missed. I just continued to watch through the dense curtain of rain. I felt like we were the only two people in the City, not two of more than eight million. Isolated. Castaways. Stranded in this surreal tableau.
The monster’s head reared still higher, and without further ado, it swallowed what was left of the man whole and dragged itself down into the sidewalk. The area immediately encircling the creature splashed like a small sludgy pond against the surrounding solid ground and then froze, the concrete still slightly rippled and misshapen.
For the first time, I glanced up from the pavement and around me. The rain was letting up, and as the miasma began to dissipate, I could see that a group of 30 to 40 people had gathered and observed most of the spectacle with me. A bicycle messenger, one elbow casually resting on the bike’s seat, spat once into the gutter and hopped back onto his vehicle to complete his rounds.
A short, affable-looking Hispanic man turned to me. “Huh. Sh**. My uncle went exactly the same way.”
To be continued …
poster:Atticus
thread:382571
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/write/20040729/msgs/382571.html