Philadelphia Fire. John Edgar Wideman
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voices trilling behind it shine like silver, shine like gold.
Could you bring down a city with trumpets? Could a song lay waste skyscrapers? Scour the hills, cleanse the rivers, wipe the sky? Everything in creation had been listening to the music. Now sirens and jets and horns and trolleys, dogs howling, babies screaming had started up again. Thump of Cudjoe’s heart again. That shield of filth the city flings up at the sky in place again. Stars spatter against it like rain on a tin roof trying to get in. Hushed for a moment but now a river of noise again and the tune from a tape deck is a twig drifting along with everything else caught in the current. Waters above and waters below the firmament, and earth a wafer in those wet lips that are light-years thick. He tastes earth as he drains a can of beer. O.T. smoking a cigarette. Darnell sucking on a joint. Or was it the other way round? Too dark to tell. If the lips opened to sing, to kiss, to tell a story. If they opened, and the earth wafer slipped out. Wouldn’t there be a long time when nobody’d know what was happening? Centuries out of kilter, askew, but no one understanding the problem. Just this queasiness, this uneasiness. This tilt and slow falling. You are in a city. You look up and can’t see the stars and that doesn’t bother you as much as it should. You don’t know what’s wrong but maybe more’s wrong than you want to know.
* * *
Cudjoe doesn’t know why he piled into the car going to Papa Joe’s. Why he drank six more drafts with the fellas when the first one cooled him out. Doesn’t know why he’s decided to walk back to West Philly when his legs already wobbly and stupid. He’s at the top of many broad steps, near the entrance of the art museum, whose stones on a good day are golden in the sun. A neat ingot enthroned on a hill. He is sighting down a line of lighted fountains that guide his eye to City Hall. This is how the city was meant to be viewed. Broad avenues bright spokes of a wheel radiating from a glowing center. No buildings higher than Billy Penn’s hat atop City Hall. Scale and pattern fixed forever. Clarity, balance, a perfect understanding between the parts. Night air thick and bad but he’s standing where he should and the city hums this dream of itself into his ear and he doesn’t believe it for an instant but wonders how he managed to stay away so long.
I belong to you, the city says. This is what I was meant to be. You can grasp the pattern. Make sense of me. Connect the dots. I was constructed for you. like a field of stars I need you to bring me to life. My names, my gods poised on the tip of your tongue. All you have to do is speak and you reveal me, complete me.
The city could fool you easy. And he wonders if that’s why he is back. To be caught up in the old trick bag again. Love you. Love you not. Who’s zooming who? Is someone in charge? From this vantage point in the museum’s deep shadow in the greater darkness of night it seems an iron will has imposed itself on the shape of the city. If you could climb high enough, higher than the hill on which the museum perches, would you believe in the magic pinwheel of lights, straight lines, exact proportions, symmetry of spheres within spheres, gears meshing, turning, spinning to the perpetual music of their motion? Cudjoe fine-tunes for a moment the possibility that someone, somehow, had conceived the city that way. A miraculous design. A prodigy that was comprehensible. He can see a hand drawing the city. An architect’s tilted drafting board, instruments for measuring, for inscribing right angles, arcs, circles. The city is a faint tracery of blue, barely visible blood lines in a newborn’s skull. No one has used the city yet. No one has pushed a button to start the heart pumping.
He can tell thought had gone into the design. And a person must have stood here, on this hill, imagining this perspective. Dreaming the vast emptiness into the shape of a city. In the beginning it hadn’t just happened, pell-mell. People had planned to live and prosper here. Wear the city like robe and crown.
The founders were dead now. Buried in their wigs, waistcoats, swallowtail coats, silk hose clinging to their plump calves. A foolish old man flying a kite in a storm.
Cudjoe decides he will think of himself as a reporter covering a story in a foreign country. Stay on his toes, take nothing for granted. Not the customs nor the language. What he sees is not what the natives see. The movie has been running for years, long before he was born, and will sputter on about its business long after he is dead and gone. At best he can write the story of someone in his shoes passing through.
He is not alone. At this late hour museum busy as an anthill. Steady traffic of cars up and down driveways curving around its flanks. If you swept the night visitors together they’d form a crowd, but the museum’s spacious grounds—terraced, grottoed, thickly planted with trees and shrubs—offer privacy to anyone who wishes it. Most of the young people wish it, play hide-and-seek in couples or small groups. Here comes some fool bounding up the hundred stairs from Logan Circle. Rocky Balboa, arms raised in triumph, claiming the city.
Patrol cars take leisurely passes up and down the circular drive. No one pays attention. The mood is mellow, cops and kids ignoring each other. As long as everybody follows the rules, there wouldn’t seem to be any rules. Music and dope in moderation. Little tidbits of sound, of hashish smoke reach Cudjoe. These white kids had been granted a zone. Everybody had zones. Addicts, prostitutes, porn merchants, derelicts. Even people who were black and poor had a zone. Everybody granted the right to lie in the bed they’d made for themselves. As long as they didn’t contaminate good citizens who disapproved. As long as the beds available to good citizens who wished to profit or climb in occasionally. As long as everybody knew they had to give up their zone, scurry down off this hill, no questions asked, when the cops blow the whistle.
Maybe this is a detective story, Cudjoe says to himself. Out there the fabled city of hard knocks and exciting possibilities. You could get wasted out there and lots did. His job sleaze control. Bright lights, beautiful people, intrigue, romance. The city couldn’t offer those rushes without toilets, sewers, head busters and garbage dumps. Needed folks on the other side of the fast track and needed a tough cookie to keep them scared and keep them where they belong. The fast movers would pay well for that service. Let you sample the goodies once in a while. Just enough to spoil you. Not enough to dull the edge you required to do their spadework, to get down where it was down and dirty.
Limousines out there. And sleek women in dresses slit up to their assholes. Everything bought and sold. You could buy day or buy night. This circus of lights enticing him could be turned off or on at someone’s command.
He remembers waterfalls framing the broad museum stairs. At night the pumps rested but during summer days twin stair-stepped cascades of water turned the wells at the end of each landing into swimming holes. City kids in their underwear played in the pools. Colonies of little brown monkeys splashing and squealing and sliding down green sheets of water. Beating the heat. Shirts and shorts discarded where they were peeled off sweaty bodies. Shoes were what got to him. Piles of sneakers all colors, shapes, low-rent versions of adult styles, beat to shit the way kids’ shoes always are, but these, scattered around on the wet steps, these were worse, gaping holes in the bottoms, shredded uppers, laces missing, shoes taped, patched, lined with cardboard. Cheapest concoctions of glue and foam and canvas that money could buy.
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