Thus the lover of universal life moves into the crowd as though into an enormous reservoir of electricity.
Charles Baudelaire, “The Painter of Modern Life” (1863)
“I’ve already walked two miles this morning and I’m sweating by the time I cross the threshold into Times Square. My purpose here is ‘to be away from home and yet to feel at home anywhere’ while observing the throng before me. I grin at the clever spin I’ve put on the famous quote; I’m at home now as I study the crowd in its environment.
The young blonde woman to the left in my line of vision, the one sporting the black windbreaker, black leggings, and black sneakers stands with her feet planted shoulder-width apart. She clutches both a shopping bag and an iPhone in her raised left hand. Her right forefinger hovers over her phone’s screen. The new yellow pages: Why walk when both her own digits and her phone’s can do the walking for her.
Behind the woman and to her right, two couples sit eight feet apart upon the raised, black granite seating separating the pedestrian thoroughfare from the bleacher overlooking Broadway and West 47th Street. They seem unaware that they form mirror images of each other. The men wear jeans, t-shirts, windbreakers, and sneakers; the women wear tights, sweatshirts, and sneakers. The men hold their iPhones at arms length and the women lean forward, gesturing as they contemplate the screens before them. I wonder what, exactly, these unrelated yet strikingly similar couples are looking at: The menu for the Blue Fin restaurant displayed on the building’s facade twenty feet in front of them? Digital simulation of their very surroundings?
The balding, middle-aged man in front of me defies convention, using his phone as a phone, holding it to his ear while his eyes drink in his environment. He’s dressed casually. His gray, long-sleeved jersey stretches across his paunch, drapes over the front of his black track pants, which, in turn, drape over the front of his shoes. An electronic billboard hawking Hyundai automobiles looms behind him: “Happy drivers make better drivers,” a paradox caught in mid-blink above a sea of pedestrians. And this pedestrian is in his element. What could be more romantic than strolling through Time Square while talking with, and into, a loved one?
I press onward, quiet as a mouse, noting that most of the people frequenting this bustling strip of shops and restaurants consult their electronic devices, augmenting their surrounding reality: A reality where Pikachu and Donald Duck, cartoon characters from different eras and cultures, rub costumed shoulders; where Batman and Captain America, having departed their separate universes, now meet over coffees and cigarettes at a patio table; where the Stetson-topped ‘Naked Cowboy’ (identified as such by the incongruous moniker stencilled on the back of his briefs) croons to a cashier from Delaware; and where a topless woman, with the stars and stripes painted on her torso, and a grinning farm boy from Nebraska pose shoulder to shoulder at the business end of an iPhone attached to a three-foot selfie stick. In a metaphorical sense, I feel as if I were travelling the twisted, evolutionary end-result of those 19th century Parisian glass-and-metal consumer corridors.
I continue to navigate my way through the masses. At the corners of 46th Street and 7th Avenue, I see a photographer crouching curbside in a bicycle lane. On the sidewalk to his left, a man perched on a make-shift chair holds up a sign: “Need money 4 weed bitches and pizza.” In the bicycle lane five yards south stands the photographer’s true subject, a buxom blonde, legs splayed and arms akimbo, wearing thigh-high suede boots and a glossy leather body suit struggling to contain her ample flesh. On the sidewalk next to her, parents and their children, oblivious to their surroundings, line up at the entrance to a Disney Store. Cardboard cut-outs of Sheriff Woody, Bo Peep, and Bunny, wholesome characters from the Toy Story franchise grace the store window. I study this scenario, pondering what seems like a bizarre juxtaposition of images for a moment before thinking: If Time Square is sometimes referred to as "the heart of the world," it is irreparably clogged with the tacky residue of fetid commerce.
The gravity of the crowd pulls me onward in my investigation, compressing time; before I know it, I’m observing the crush at 43rd Street and 7th Avenue. Here, on opposing corners, a dozen police officers, six per side, congregate casually in pairs amidst the pedestrian flow. Behind them, on those same corners, two squat buildings faced each other: The U.S Armed Forces Recruiting Station and The New York Police Department. The intersection of lost souls, where, for one reason or another, desperate people find themselves when few options remain in life.
Yet the people I view on this sunny summer afternoon are not desperate. They’re rubberneckers and gawkers. A man driving his BMW convertible south on 7th Avenue ignores the traffic congestion in front of him. With his head on a swivel, he ogles the three summer-dressed women on the street corner who wait for the lights to change. A sight-seeing bus pulls through the same intersection two lanes over, reminding me of a quote attributed to Victor Hugo that I’d read somewhere. “He enjoyed riding through Paris on the upper level of omnibuses. He loved looking down, from this eminence, on the bustle of the streets.” But the sightseers on this omnibus aren’t looking down at the busy street while forming thoughts of its inhabitants with Hugo’s depth of insight; with heads raised, they drink in the wall of billboards parallel to their lines of vision atop the bus. A lone woman sits with her head bowed, as if in prayer, to her iPhone. The pink neon T-Mobile billboard rising behind her reads: “Love your true self.”
An hour into my journey, I arrive at police barricades blocking vehicular traffic south of 42nd Street and call off my exploration; my roaming has left me tired, hungry, and slightly dissatisfied. I’d have loved to have seen the faces in the crowd and the emotions they convey, but in this time of COVID I’ve become accustomed to partial visages. Still, I’ve accomplished my purpose, and once more a quote enters my mind: “to see the world, to be at the centre of the world, and yet to remain hidden from the world.” An apt statement. After lunch and two more miles on the treadmill, I’ll cross the Atlantic to sample the offerings of The Champs-Élysées.”
Ben placed his pen in his notebook’s gutter, palmed his computer’s mouse, and exited Google Street View with the click of a finger. He closed iTunes next, stopping “Miss Shapiro’s” droning, prescient lyrics, “Disappearing cocoa forests flash and die----” in mid-chorus, stood, and observed his property through the second-floor bay window beyond his desk. The thirty emerald-green and tightly packed Spartan Junipers that Ben kept trimmed to an even twelve feet in height ran for thirty meters along the grassy lot’s northern face. They ended at cliff’s edge, forming a perfect privacy screen and wind break. Farther out, Lake Huron’s calm, turquoise surface stretched to the horizon. Ten feet in front of the cliff sat an ornate gazebo. During winter solstice, the setting sun would cast a spear of light through its exit and entrance in geometry so neat the structure might be a place of pagan worship. It was mid-October and 32 degrees Celsius, summer’s last gasp.
Once more, Ben started replaying the confluence of circumstances that brought him and Ginny to the shores of this great lake: the series of tragic events that brought them here to what seemed like the beguiling edge of nowhere; and once more, he stopped himself. Life went on.
He stepped from the den, resisting the urge to take the elevator sitting across the hall, the one that Aunt Miriam had installed during Uncle Ted’s decline and Ginny had facetiously called the ‘deal sealer’ when they’d contemplated their move here. He took the stairs instead and entered the living room, expecting to hear the low drone of Ginny’s ambient music or the sound of some slight movement drifting from her desk. Nothing. He walked into the study and looked to her computer nook, certain he would find her there, but . . . nothing. Her favourite cane with its short, custom-grip handle stood by her empty ergonomic chair like a combination question mark/exclamation mark. A half-cup of cold tea rested by her keyboard. Her phone and journal with her Street-View observations were nowhere in sight. A picture of Evie, smiling and beautiful, stared at Ben from her screen. The computer had been inactive for at least half an hour.
He looked at his watch: 12:15 p.m.
“Ginny?”
He checked the dining room next then stepped out into the hallway. The front door was locked, just as he’d left it the night before, with Ginny’s house key hanging by its ring on a hook near the coat rack. The powder room by the elevator was unlit and unoccupied. The basement? Maybe she’d ventured downstairs for some chutney without telling him. But even though the door was only slightly ajar and the staircase dark, he could see the unoccupied stairlift parked in its customary position on the top step, its orange mode light blinking, C 6 . . . C 6.
“Ginny?”
With his stride lengthening and his pulse quickening, Ben crossed the kitchen and entered the sunroom. Empty. Ginny’s outdoor walker was parked in its usual place by the sliding patio doors. He pulled the door’s handle, tearing the tip of his middle finger’s nail from its fleshy mooring in the process. Locked. He thrust his throbbing finger into his mouth without looking at it, unlocked the door with his left hand, and swept it open.
Now he ran along the granite-slab walkway leading to the gazebo, arms pumping, yelling, “Ginny!” as he took the steps to its entrance in a stilted, pre-geriatric hurdler’s stretch. He felt a pop in the outside tendon of his left knee upon landing and ignored it. He was focused on his wife. But she wasn’t there, lounging on one of the leather benches behind its thick lattice work and reading a mystery novel with her second favorite cane resting beside her.
Ben registered this instantly, exiting the gazebo without breaking stride. He came to a lurching halt at the edge of the cliff, gasping for breath, his heart pounding. Fifteen feet beneath him, the thin strip of beach front held only white sand, scattered rocks, and assorted driftwood.
That Ginny was still missing tempered Ben’s relief, but now, at least, he could see beyond the worse-case-scenario of viewing her twisted and lifeless corpse lying on the desolate coastline below. He walked back through the gazebo, towards the house, thinking about his next course of action, and then it came to him: the phone. One of their basic means of communication in that big old house, an accessory they were never without. He should have thought of that first . . . except he just kept expecting her to show up in one of her regular roosts.
Still in stride, Ben fished his phone from the thigh pocket of his cargo shorts, smearing blood across its screen. Only then did he realize that he’d bent the top third of his fingernail back at a forty-five-degree angle. Pushing it back into place, he pressed Ginny’s pre-set number.
Three rings then voice mail.
With his panic re-escalating, he renewed his pace, drawing closer and closer to the house. An azure sky framed its gables and dormers; the sun sparkled off of its arched bay windows. Yet to Ben, it looked isolated and menacing, like some monstrous mansion gracing the cover of a Gothic Horror novel.
NEXT WEEK: “THE DRIFTER”.