Plague in the Slope. A Glancing Blow
Worms are eating the kale. Little green ones that hatch into paper butterflies. He thought it was snails and almost instituted a gastropological pogrom; a thousand Catskills escargots ceased their munching at the sound of spray bottles being filled with brine, eyeballs widening at the tips of tentacles now trembling with fear. But turns out it’s worms. Bastards! He fed one to the spider in the crook of the window. It was delighted. Then he swaggered out onto the porch like Mussolini, turned to the fields and bellowed, “Let that be a lesson to you!” But nobody cheered back. Nobody spoke at all. His voice dissolved into the hawthorns like smoke.
He’d been in voluntary free-fall for half a decade. It might almost have been nice, if it hadn’t been for all his peers over there, still hoofing up the rock face like mountain goats, clinging to every scab of shrubbery by their teeth. They made him feel bad. The determination of their vertical endeavour as he hurtled past, these inching mountaineers, how could it not sow the seeds of doubt in his decision to let go? “Am I not Icarus after all?” he thought, his breasts flapping at his armpits. “Could it be that I’m Tosca?’
But now look. Pestilence, it seems, might just be putting paid to the collective illusion that humans can defy gravity. The letting go is upon them, and folk are peeling away from the cliff like gulls, keening, cawing as they drop. Only one ship is seeking them. It plies the green waters far below.
Somebody’s been shooting arrows at SoHo, now Broadway is strewn with feathers. Gone are the plywood boulevards, their battlefield grandeur peeled back to reveal the tramp orthodontics of gaping, drooling windows. ‘FOR RENT,’ they bark. Undead shoppers blow about like litter, picking through the ribcages of an armada of crippled flagships. Everything must go. Except what’s already gone. From Trafalgar to this in four months. Who knew the acres of gilt were so thin?
And stuff smells bad. The whole point of this place was that it functioned as a dynamo, everybody peddling in blind unison so the lights stayed on and the bike plunged forward, careening into lamp-posts and setting off alarms. You didn’t whine about the destination; such words were weakness, a limp that marked you as prey, to be snatched from the back of the pack and eaten. You lived a fever dream, coined from magazine fantasies you worked so hard to propagate: Barbancourt negronis: coniglio in porchetta: pirate wild edibles: and coils of slaves bent double beneath the fetishes of your winning. The works and days of hands that afforded you minds of teenagers and hearts that chattered like chimpanzees. And they’re still chattering. But those were shit dreams. And now they are done.
“That is no country for old men,” he thought, passing couples in freshly-lumbered booths looking as if they’ve got on the rollercoaster and might now be wondering why. Is this what they were straining at the bit for? These $15 sgroppini in plastic cups, these unmasked malfatti with brown butter and sage perched like evidence on a square meter of pressure-treated, as masked pedestrians weave through them with bags of groceries from Keyfood? Was this the new normal they huddled in apartments long-dreaming of: the head tossed back in laughter, the twinkling light on an alabaster throat? She forks down another cheesy ball, grins like an undertaker
They are reoccupying corners of lost freedom, our neighbours, perching like cats on paper bags or too small boxes. Freedom, once more, to consume. ‘Fish, flesh, or fowl … whatever is begotten, born and dies.’ Stranded in this shouldered fuselage, they worry hapless chunks around their plates, wait for the stewardess to fill their glasses. Cramped and joyless it may be, but they’re finally going somewhere (not down, they think) and with practice, booze and a movie they will unlearn what they learned these past few months – that joy cannot be bought – and get back to seeing this as a reward.
‘And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium.’
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