Atlantis: Three Tales Read online

  Hubert was asking her if everything were all right. She was saying, in subdued tones, in an accent that put her well to the west of Raleigh: “Why, thank ya—thank ya, young gen’l’man. Ah’m Mrs. Callista Arkady and Ah’m goin’ to the funeral of mah son. It’s so kind of y’all to help a bereaved mother. Thank ya—God’ll thank y’all. Thank y’all so much!”

  Before turning off, the porter leaned over to Sam, to explain softly, sullenly, snappishly: “She didn’t tip me none! When she first got on the JC, yesterday, I took as much time with her as with anybody else—I did!” John Brown’s accent was considerably to the north. “But she didn’t tip me. You don’t got enough to pay your tips, you don’t ride the train! Even niggers got to know that!”

  “Yes, but she’s still a—” he was about to say “lady,” while he wondered should he give John Brown a nickel. (That’s what John D. Rockefeller tipped his train porter; it had said so in a northern magazine.) Of course the porter hadn’t touched Sam’s bags at all—and, as well, he’d swung back up into the car by now to help the other, white, and—certainly—better heeled passengers.

  The woman plowed—mournfully—up the platform through the packs of porters and debarkees, when Hubert turned back to him:

  “Well, now—Sam! And how are you there—” to clap him on both shoulders, then, with his blue bow tie and buttoned-up double breasted showing between tan coat flaps, to give Sam a bear-like, brotherly hug. “So you got here after all!” In almost the same gesture, Hubert hefted up the wicker trunk, leaving Sam with the leather case. “How’s everybody down at the school?”

  Sam followed Hubert up the platform, behind the uniformed Negro pushing the baggage cart—far enough ahead so that it would be difficult to catch up and get their bags on. “Mama’s fine, Papa’s fine. Papa says you should write him another letter like the last long one, tellin’ him about the boys in your class. He read that one out to all of us, at Thanksgiving dinner. It made Mama laugh so!”

  Hubert chuckled, as Mrs. Arkady vanished around passengers descending, like billows, from the train’s several doors. As he pushed after Hubert through the crowd, Sam looked aside two or three times, expecting to see a blue-eyed child staring at him over its mother’s knitted gray shoulder. But apparently the family for whom there’d been no room in the white cars had gotten off at some prior local stop, so that, Sam realized, with the myriad details that were his train trip north, they too had sunk into yesterday’s consuming sea.

  Now and again, Sam glanced at the black ceiling, crossed by pipes, girders, cables, and hung with incandescent bulbs in conical shades, insides enameled white. Train stations, Sam thought, even ones this central and this grand, should sit out under sky, with, yes, an indoor waiting room to one side. But as many times as he’d heard Grand Central Terminal mentioned, it had never occurred to him it would be a structure that wholly closed over . . . well (he looked through a dozen dark columns above how many trains), a dozen tracks at least! “Hubert,” Sam asked, “where is the sky . . . ?” thinking his brother, two steps ahead, would not even hear the—after all—ridiculous question.

  But at the ramp’s end, as, with the crowd, they pushed through a low entrance with a wrought metal transome above, sound around them became hollow and reverberant. They’d stepped into a vast space. With his free hand, Hubert pointed straight up. “They put that there—for folks like you.”

  Sam looked.

  The hall’s arched ceiling was watery blue—tile blue. Set here and there in it were lights. The whole was filigreed over with gold: a crab, the head and forelegs of a winged horse, a scorpion, a shaggy-haired warrior holding up a club in one hand and, on his other arm, hefting a shaggy pelt. A gilded line, the zodiacal circle, curved to cross another, the ecliptic. Sam stopped, set down his case. People with small bags jostled him. A flat of baggage rumbled by. Directly above was pictured a gilded bee, a pair of carpenter’s triangles beneath her. Awed, Sam pulled his cap from his pocket and, still gazing up, positioned it on his head.

  Beyond a central booth bearing above it its own multi-faced spherical time keeper, far bigger across than two tall men laid out foot to foot, a great clock hung between columns.

  Curlicued arrows at their tips, oar-long hands lay a diametric certainty across its face, a horizon ruled on the rising moon, on the setting sun. Short hand lower at the left and long hand higher at the right told Sam it was within seconds, one way or the other, of eleven past eight—a slant horizon forward of the dark prow of his trip, lifting and listing from spurious waters, if not the pointer on some turn and bank indicator of the sort Sperry had been putting into aeroplanes since the war’s close, an artificial horizon unknown to him a year ago, when he’d watched John, shirtless in the field, with his rusty hair and freckled skin the hue of a tobacco leaf, play at being a bomber, dancing like a deranged Indian over red earth, feet—blam! blam!—on the earth’s red flesh, running into waves of hip-high grass, holding one hand aloft, thumb and little finger spread from the others, swooping left, turning right, blood remembering some aeronautic invasion, crying Vrummmmmmmmmmmmm, while Sam and Lewy stood at the field’s edge, laughing, clapping, celebrating fantastic catastrophes.

  John borrowed a mule from the older boys down at the agi-barn and rode it up to the house, big boots flapping at its slate-colored flanks.

  Mama ran out to shake her apron at them. “Get him out of here! Get him out! Boy, what do you think you’re doing? He gets in my Swiss chard and I’ll skin you alive, so help me!”

  (Sam had heard her swear like that maybe twice in his life. That’s probably why he remembered it.)

  The mule jerked to the side—and John slipped right to the ground. Then Mama started laughing. Splayed on the grass, John was laughing too.

  “Get up . . . from there, John—” Mama called, between hysteric eruptions. “And get him . . . out of here!” while the mule wandered over to the porch steps and ate a hollyhock.

  The hands’ exact slant was repeated on the smaller, spherical clock’s four faces.

  Sam and Hubert made their way through waves of men and women. Again, Sam the Navigator gazed up at sky-tiles like an overturned sea.

  For a moment, not the distant lights of the Pegasus in their gilded starbursts—across from the balcony at the halls’ right side, across from Orion above squared pilasters practically without capitals—but the gold lines with which Pegasus was drawn, suggested a caricature of Callista Arkady’s broad, veiled face, but with an ecstatic smile, gazing down.

  With some gentleness, as people plunged in echo by, Hubert said: “Come on, Sam,” to bring his eyes down. “We have to get the train.”

  The train—this train—was a subway. They didn’t even step outside to get to it. Going down the stairs, Hubert asked him: “You got a nickel?”

  At the steps’ bottom, again Sam put his suitcase down, pushed into his pants pocket—feeling scrape his wrist the ten dollar bill Lucius had told Mama should be safety-pinned there, because Sam was going to New York, where things could happen—to pull out his coins. On his palm, Sam forefingered aside the fifty-cent piece, two dimes, two nickels, and five, six, seven, eight pennies: change from the Coca-Cola he’d bought on the train platform yesterday, which, there, had cost two cents more than at the colored grocery—

  “Come on,” Hubert said. “I’ll pay for you. I got two—come on, Sam! This is New York; you can’t dawdle here!”

  “I’m not dawdling; I’m looking after my money.” Only he glanced up to see people cascading down the steps, breaking to left and right of him, like water at a rock. Jamming coins back in his pocket, Sam snatched up his suitcase to follow Hubert, who pushed one nickel into the slot ahead, then another into the one beside that. As they hefted the cases over, they were practically pounded through shadowless stiles by the wooden paddles swinging round behind them. “What does it do?” Sam looked back, frowning. “Whack you in the butt every time you go in?”

  “That’s just to make sure people like y
ou go and get on with it.” Hubert hurried ahead. “This way!” he called over his shoulder. “Let’s get the first car!”

  Hubert was twenty-three. Last year Hubert had gone to Europe and traveled there four months. When he’d got back, he’d worked in the tobacco fields in Connecticut. This eagerness for the first car—something he’d imagine from John or Lewy—was not what you expected from a big brother about to start his second year in law school—all of which Hubert could claim. But with a sister in between, Hubert was his brother nearest Sam in age; perhaps that enthusiasm was what had kept them so close, in spite of it all.

  They didn’t make the first car, because the subway was already pulling in when they got down to it.

  They made the second:

  “. . . tut-tut-tut . . .” Sam was surprised he could still hear it.

  Inside, posts went from the floor to the curved ceiling—green-painted metal up to about stomach height, then white enamel for the rest. In metal fittings, leather loops hung from a pipe just above head-height, in a row down each side of the car. Up by the ceiling, eight-inch-high cardboard strips told of Sloan’s Liniment and Ivory Soap (“ninety-nine and forty-four one hundredths percent pure”) and Pine Tar Honey—one (in color: red with yellow letters, a round face grinning beside them, in a bottle cap hat) was for Coca-Cola.

  It had never occurred to Sam they’d have Coca-Cola in New York.

  The subway seats were the same woven wicker as the trunk Hubert carried. Looking down at them, Sam saw their interstices were black—and realized it was dirt!

  “Come on,” Hubert repeated, as the train started more smoothly than Sam expected: had a day and a night on the locomotive from Raleigh gotten him his rail legs?

  Hefting up his bag, Sam followed Hubert to the car’s front. A doorway made a vestibule there—half the size of the one on the railway car in which he’d smoked with John Brown. Inside, a wheel hung against the wall; and pipes; and cables. To one side was a flat, green door.

  Over racketing wheels, Hubert said: “The engineer sits in there.”

  “This is the engine?”—for through the window in the door ahead he could see into the forward car, as it swung, intriguingly out of sync with theirs.

  Hubert laughed and opened the doors between, to lob the wicker through, then turned to explain over the noise (louder between the cars) how, on the subway, any car could be the engine. All you had to do was put it first.

  They went through the next car into the little booth at its head—this was the first car. Hubert told him to look out the front window; Sam stood, hands up beside his face to shade the light. Beyond the glass, with its inch-sized, hexagonal wire reinforcements between layered panes, darkness rushed him, cut by girders, punctured by lights—blue, red, green—a matutinal career through seas of shadow, past nocturnal carnivals.

  “Now when you ride on the subway by yourself—”

  Sam pulled back from the window. In the booth’s yellowish light, Hubert’s dark eyes were serious above his short mustache.

  “—in the morning,” Hubert went on, “when people are going to work, or in the evening, when they’re coming home—rush hour—you don’t come in here by yourself, now.”

  “Why not?” Sam turned to Hubert.

  “’Cause things can happen to you in here.”

  “What things?”

  “People can do things to you—like you can get your pocket picked, for one.”

  Sam was going to say, just to be silly, You been deflected, Hubert? But Hubert swung—suddenly—the back of his hand against Sam’s pants lap, which made him flinch:

  “Hey—!”

  “You got to watch out for yourself, that’s all.” The train was coming into the station. “That’s all I’m saying. Now come on.” Carrying both trunk and case now, Hubert strode into the car, grinning again over his shoulder.

  Parting black rubber rims, dark double doors rolled open, and Sam followed his brother onto still another wholly enclosed platform. “What sort of things, Hubert?”

  Hubert put the suitcase down for Sam to take. “You just have to remember,” Hubert repeated, “that this is New York,” and the gravity with which he spoke seemed—apparently to Hubert—to cover the situation.

  The subway station they were in, Times Square and Forty-second Street, was even bigger—and more crowded—than the one at Grand Central. They had to go up stairs and down. With their gilt signs, the plate glass windows indicated clothing stores, barber shops, bakeries. One store even sold magic tricks: through its window, when, with his case, Sam went over to look, a small man with a sharp beard turned to smile out at him—thick glasses made his eyes huge marbles—over red and blue boxes, through chains of metal rings, past cardboards with small figures attached to them, by black top hats, colored scarfs, oriental bird cages, and black wands with white tips. (Sam vowed he’d come back to that one.) The store windows were right in the ivory tiled wall, as if this were some outside street, so that he kept glancing up, expecting to see the sky above this buried city.

  Saturday morning not that many people were traveling. Still, most of the ones who were stood across the tracks, off between the girders on the other platform. Drones at work in sweet, rich New York.

  Following Hubert through resonant tunnels, considering his trajectory, like a bullet’s through a beehive, Sam wondered which of the enclosed images he’d recall in a day, in a decade. Then an idea came to rupture his contemplation of—even in the quick of excitement—the evanescence of time, that made him near break out laughing. Imagine writing a letter to Lewy and John (they were his best friends), with a page even for Mama and Papa, telling the wonders of his trip so far: he’d fold it, pack it into his cap so that the pages were fixed beneath the band. Then, by its visor, he’d sail the gray and brown tweed into the air, so that, as if become helmet, it shattered all these artificial ceilings, crashed out and up from under the flagpoles on the skyscrapers above, into liquid air, to go soaring south to Raleigh—really, about as sensible as putting a message into a jeweled box and floating it off on the water, in hopes somehow it would wend home. Still, the image stayed. What might John or Lewy say if they saw a cap falling at them, a dark disk, an eclipsed moon—that turned out stuffed with his adventures?

  John said, “They could figure it out on you.”

  But, chuckling, Lewy wandered away, barefoot over fallen blossoms, as if codes and journals and secrets and cyphers had ceased to interest him as he searched the spring night.

  “Is it all underground . . . ?” Sam asked, wonderingly—having just realized that the “sub” in the “subways” Hubert and Lucius and Lemuel and Corey and Hap and Elsie had all, in their turn, been talking about, whenever, over these last years, they’d come home for one vacation or another, was short for “subterranean”!

  “Some of them—on Third Avenue,” Hubert said, with mock seriousness, “or Sixth Avenue, or Ninth, run up above the streets, through the sky . . . !”

  Cities underground . . . ? Cities in the air . . . ? With subterranean and superterranean ways between? And all were among New York’s honied algebra of miracles? Hurrying after Hubert, a-grin at the marvel and mystery of it, Sam tried to fathom it and keep from laughing. All this—and skyscrapers?

  (Where were they . . . ?)

  They took another two trains—or was it three?

  “Where do we get out?”

  “A Hundred-twenty-fifth Street,” Hubert said. “This is us.”

  A Hundred-twenty-fifth Street sounded awfully far from Grand Central or Forty-second.

  They carried the cases upstairs—into another covered concourse.

  How long would it be, Sam wondered, before they got outside?

  He noticed now, with curiosity and relief: all the people in this station were black—heavyset ladies in dark or light stockings, men in straw hats with brown or red bands, sometimes even a bit of pheasant feather.

  Sam and Hubert pushed out the gates beside the row of stiles (where people we
re—ka-chunk, ka-chunk—hurrying in), turned left, and started up the steps between the off-white tiles. A winter wedge of blue widened above them. Then, diagonally across it, slid a sculpted cornice.

  At the steps’ head, Sam put his case on the sidewalk and looked down from the cloudless sky. (That empty air he’d recall for years.) The building—though it ran the length of the block—was two stories tall. Shops filled the ground floor. On the second, with tan Venetian blinds lowered to their several heights behind the glass, black or gold letters spoke of accountants, law firms, a billiards parlor—and the next was unreadable behind the sun’s reflected silver. Still, none of the names were very different from those in gold letters across the second story windows in the downtown building, back home, in which their older brother Lucius had his law practice.

  “Shoot . . . !” Sam said. “It ain’t as big as what we got in Raleigh! The biggest building there is six stories and got an elevator!” He looked at Hubert, the first presentiment of pain the city had ceded him nudging his features toward bewilderment.

  Hubert shook his head—to drawl in a voice that suddenly and surprisingly brought back sixteen-year-old Hubert from Carolina, making Sam electrically aware how different that was from the twenty-three-year-old law student he was to live with now: “Boy,” Hubert said, “you a real country nigger, ain’t you!”—the words carrying no interrogation at all, only their hugely playful, hopelessly damning, inescapable sibling judgment.

  b

  The leadership and conduct of the war were on the one side in the hands of our city, on the other in the hands of the kings of Atlantis. At the time, as we said, Atlantis was an island larger than Libya and Asia put together, though it was subsequently overwhelmed by earthquakes and is the source of the impenetrable mud which prevents free passage of those who sail out of the straights into the open sea.