The Waterworks (26 page)

The nurses … or nurse-cyprians … waltzed slowly around. Their faces were immeasurably sad. I thought their cheeks were wet with their tears, but as I looked more closely I saw this was the humid atmosphere on their skin, as it was on my own when I touched my face … the atmosphere that was produced from the vents in the slate floors … a suspension of droplets that adhered to the skin like an oil.

I felt the oppression of a universe of water, inside and out, over the dead and the living.

The old men were shrunken, unnaturally darkened and sunken in on themselves, like vegetable husks. I looked at each face carefully, but I did not find one I recognized as Augustus Pemberton.

We searched the suites where the old men had slept and the rooms where they had been ministered to … doctor’s surgery, treatment rooms, dispensary. All unoccupied.

I said to Donne that on the floor below I had seen a man reading in what looked like a library.

Donne’s expression was puzzled. It was not that the music had drowned out my voice but that my voice itself, which I could hear, had a peculiar, gargled quality to it. I repeated what I knew as he bent his head to listen. A moment later he was rushing back down the stairs. Halfway down the corridor that door was still ajar. Donne’s policeman flung it open, slamming it against the wall.

Sartorius looked up from his reading. He closed his book,
stood, adjusted his tie, tugged the points of his vest…. A slender figure, not tall, but military in bearing, unhurried, with a supreme authority about him. He wore a black frock coat, a fashionably wide, loosely tied cravat with stickpin. The dark hair was close-cropped, the gaunt face clean-shaven, but for black burnsides framing his jaw and continuing under the chin to cover the neck and throat like a fur collar. The dark implacable eyes with a kind of desolation of knowledge in them … the thin-lipped, abstemious mouth … He regarded us … with his rigorous impersonality … and removed his watch from his fob pocket and glanced at it … as if to see if we had arrived more or less at the time he thought we would.

Why hadn’t he tried to run? I have thought about this for many years. Society, as I’ve said, made no impression on him. He did not see himself in any relation to it. Certainly not to its laws. He had marched and ridden through the worst of our Civil War unscathed … either by its cannon and shot or by its issues. The seemingly endless carnage ended upon the table before him in his field surgery … as one continuously fascinating … wonderfully torn and broken and dying body … with endless things to be fixed…. He may have thought that whoever in the city had backed him would protect him now and see to it that he was restored to his work … so that, though his experiments had been disrupted, they would be … resumed. Or he may not have thought that at all.

But I’ll tell you here … it is the nature of villainy to absent itself, even as it stands before you. You reach for it and close on nothing. You smash your hand on the mirror. Who is this looking back at you? Perhaps you’re aware by now of the elusiveness of my villains. This is a story of invisible men, dead men or men indeterminately alive … of men hidden, barricaded, in their own created realm behind the thick walls of the
brownstones of New York…. You have not seen them, except in the shadows, or heard them speak, except in the voices of others…. They’ve been hiding in my language … men who are only names in your newspapers … powerful, absent men.

I remember as we drove away from the waterworks I was the one who turned and peered through the oval window of the brougham … streaming with rain … for a last glimpse of this hideous industrial monument … so utilitarian, and yet pent-housed for a voluptuary consciousness. A few policemen had been left on watch. We made a parade of our wet, plodding departure, one of the Black Marias behind us filled with the cyprian-nurses and odd attendants and personnel of the waterworks, and the other … now a kind of hearse … policemen ahead of and behind us in their carriages … a procession in the name of crime and punishment… except that Sartorius, sitting between Donne and myself, might have been talking to friends and admirers at a dinner party.

“When young Pemberton first arrived at my laboratories he was outraged … whether because I had kept his father alive or had not kept him alive enough, I couldn’t determine. In either case, he was blinded by his own moralism. But after a while he began to understand. There was no integrity in the lives of my patients, they were self-submitted to me for my use. They are notable for proving to me so far only how terribly membranous the mind is, so easily breached, with a drug, with a kind of light, or a degree of heat or cold…. They did not agree to give themselves to my care in a uniform condition, you understand. The illnesses varied, the ages, the prognoses. Though all the illnesses were fatal. Yet I had them conformed to a degree of existence I could lower or raise by my application, as you quicken or dampen a gas flame with a turn of the wrist. I reached only this early stage, that I could keep them biomotive,
that is, where they did not stop breathing, to the extent that I did not overendow them with self-sustaining energies. This, of course, was not what they had dreamed of for themselves. On the other hand, they had, in this state, all the time in the world, didn’t they? All the time in the world …”

Donne said: “We did not find Augustus Pemberton.”

“I think Mr. Simmons must have taken him away … when it became apparent that… the experiment could not continue. Apart from my vitalizations,” he said in his surprisingly boyish voice, “the interesting truth is in the great losses that human life can sustain—its individuation of character, its speecli, its volition—without becoming death. You learn this first as a surgeon in terms of what can be cut away. It is possible that a working familiarity with the mechanics of the human body engenders cynicism. More likely it cleanses the natural scientist of ennobling sentiments, pieties which teach us nothing. The old categories, the old words, for what is, after all, a physically very modest creature, though self-impressed …”

I was sitting shoulder to shoulder with Sartorius … and felt his own physical modesty through the cloth of my coat.

“He is alive, then?” Donne said.

“Who?”

“Mr. Pemberton.”

“I can’t tell you if at this moment he is alive or not alive…. Without treatment his time is limited. I find your concern amusing.”

“What does it matter, after all?” I said to Donne.

Sartorius apparently mistook my meaning. “Whatever their state of being, they were hardly more pathetic than people you will find strolling on Broadway, or shopping in Washington Market, all of them severely governed by tribal custom, and a structure of fantasies which they call civilization…. Civilization
does not fortify the membranous mind, or alter our subjection to the moment, the moment that has no memory…. The person who grows old, or halt, has no past in the eyes of others…. The gallant soldier on the battlefield one day is the next day the amputated beggar we would rather not look at on the streetcorner.

“We live subject to the moment according to cycles of light and dark, and weeks and months. Our bodies have tides, and flow with measurable impulses of electric magnetism. It may be that we live strung like our telegraph wires in fields of waves of all kinds and lengths, waves we can see and hear and waves we cannot, and the life we feel, the animacy, is what is shaken through us by these waves…. Sometimes I cannot understand how these demanding questions of truth do not impel everyone—why I and a few others are the exception to the mass of men so content with their epistemological limitations that some even make poetry of them.”

And so we made our way through the rain back to the city.

Twenty-four

H
ERE
is Sartorius as I dream of him….

I stand on the embankment of a reservoir, a vast squared body of water cratered in a high plain overlooking the city. The earthen embankment rises up from the ground at an angle that suggests the engineering of an ancient civilization, Egyptian, or perhaps Mayan. The light is bad, but it is not nighttime, it is storm light. The water is sea-like, I hear the violent chop, the insistent slap of the waves against the embankment. I’m watching Sartorius, I have followed him here. He stands out a ways in the darkening day, he is gazing at something on the water, my black-bearded captain, for I think of him as that, as a man of the sea, the master of a vessel. He holds his hatbrim. The wind takes the corner of his long coat and presses it against his leg.

He knows I’m watching him. He acts on the presumption of partnership, as if he were on watch for our mutual benefit. What directs his attention is a model boat under sail, rising and falling on heavy swells, disappearing and then reappearing at an alarming heel, water pouring off her deck. She rises on a crest, dives, and rises again. I am lulled by the rhythm of her shuddering rises and swift, pointed descents. Then it happens that I wait
for her to reappear and she does not. She’s gone. I am as struck in the chest by the catastrophe as if I were standing on a cliff and had watched the sea take a sailing vessel.

Now I am running after him across a wide moat of hardened earth that leads to the waterworks. Inside I feel the chill of entombed air and I hear the hissing and roaring of water in its fall. The walls are stone. There is no light. I follow the sound of his footsteps. I reach a flight of iron stairs rising circularly about a giant gearshaft. Around I go, rising to a dim light. I find myself on a catwalk suspended over an inner pool of churning water. The light drifts down from a translucent glass roof. And I am standing next to him! He is bent over the railing with a rapt expression of the most awful intensity….

Below, in the yellowing rush of spumed currents and water plunging into its mechanical harness, a small human body is pressed against the machinery of one of the sluicegates, its clothing caught as in some hinge, and the child, for it is a miniature, like the ship in the reservoir, slams about, first one way and then the next, as if in mute protest, trembling and shaking and animating by its revulsion the death that has already overtaken it.

I find myself shouting. Then I see three men poised on a lower ledge as if they have separated from the stone or made themselves from it. They are the water workers. They heave on a line strung from a pulley fixed in the far wall, and by this means advance a towline attached to the wall below my catwalk where I cannot see. But then into view comes another of the water workers, suspended from a sling by the ankles, his hands outstretched as he waits to be aligned so that he can free the flow of the obstruction.

And then he has him, raised from the water by his shirt—an urchin, anywhere from four to eight, I would say, drowned
blue—and then by the ankles and shoes, and so, suspended both, they swing back across the pouring currents, rhythmically, like performing aerialists, till they are out of sight below me.

Outside, at the entrance doors to the waterworks, I watch Sartorius load the wrapped corpse into a white city stage, leap onto the driver’s perch, and lay out over the team of horses a great rolling snap of the reins. He glances back at me over his shoulder as the carriage races off, the bright black wheel’s spokes brought to a blur. He smiles at me as at a complicitor. Above him the sky is a tumultuous rush of billowing black clouds shot through with rays of pink and gold….

Finally you suffer the story you tell. After all these years in my head, my story occupies me, it has grown into the physical dimensions of my brain … so … however the mind works … as reporter, as dreamer … that is the way the story gets told.

Here is the dream’s conclusion: The rain begins. I go back inside. It rains there too. The water workers are dividing some treasure among themselves. They wear the dark blue uniform of the municipal employee, but with sweaters under their tunics and their trousers tucked into their boots. I imagine in their lungs the same fungus that grows on the stone. Their faces are flushed, their blood urged to the skin by the chill, and their skin brought to a high glaze by the mist. They break out the whiskey for their tin cups. I understand there is such a cherishing of rituals too among firemen and gravediggers. They call out to me to come join them. I do….

Or else I began suffering this dream long ago, years before these matters I’ve been describing to you … before I knew there was a Sartorius … when … on the embankment of the Croton Reservoir … I think now … I imagine … I’m convinced—is it possible?—he rushed past me with the drowned boy in his
arms. There are moments of our life that are something like breaks or tears in moral consciousness, as caesuras break the chanted line, and the eye sees through the breach to a companion life, a life in all its aspects the same, running along parallel in time, but within a universe even more confounding than our own. It is this other disordered existence … that our ministers warn us against … that our dreams perceive.

Twenty-five