Asymmetry - Lisa Halliday Page 0,20

sheepishly, as if entering confessionals right there on the street. At Sixty-Eighth and Seventy-Second shuffling throngs pushed onto buses already sagging from the load. At Seventy-Eighth World of Nuts and Ice Cream was giving cones away. Another block up, the neon harp outside the Dublin House appeared drained of all its color, and heat that was only average began to feel, under these mysterious circumstances, extraordinary: seeping and sinister and ineludible, like gas filling a cell. Outside Filene’s Basement two women with four bags and five children between them haggled with the driver of a limousine pointed uptown. On the opposite corner, looking more hunchbacked than ever under his hundred coats, the homeless man rested his elbows on a newspaper dispenser and, taking it all in, yawned.

At Anna’s door there was no answer. Inside her own apartment Alice shed her shoes, her blouse, her three-hundred-dollar skirt, poured herself a glass of Luxardo, and slept. When she awoke it was to a fathomless blackness and the plaintive beeping of her phone. Immediately outside her front door a fifth flight of stairs led up to the roof, or rather to a door bearing warning of an alarm that in two years she’d never heard go off; ignoring it now she ascended through the purple rhomboid of sky and in the relief of a feeble breeze walked across the ceiling of her own apartment to stand at the building’s prow and look down into the street. A car turning off Amsterdam accelerated west, its headlights pushing through the dark with a new and precious intensity. Candlelight flickered on a fire escape two facades away. To the right, beyond the ribbon of river black as ink, the shore of New Jersey was illuminated as sparsely as if by campfires in the wild. “Cold beer here,” a man’s voice floated up from Broadway. “Still got some cold beer here. Three dollars.”

Her phone sounded another dire beep. Without the subway rumbling, without trains hurtling up the Hudson and the hum of air conditioners and refrigerators and Laundromats three to a block, it was as though a mammoth heartbeat had ceased. Alice sat down and a moment later looked up to confront the stars. They seemed much brighter without the usual competition from below—brighter and more triumphant now, their supremacy in the cosmos reaffirmed. From the direction of the flickering fire escape came a few noncommittal chords on a guitar. The beer seller gave up or ran out. The moon, too, looked sharper and more luminous than usual, such that all at once it was no longer Céline’s moon, nor Hemingway’s, nor Genet’s, but Alice’s, which she vowed to describe one day as all it really was: the received light of the sun. A fire engine Dopplered north. A helicopter changed its direction like a locust shooed by giant fingers slicing through the sky. In her own hand Alice’s phone sounded three final exasperated beeps and died.

• • •

. . . there comes to light the existence of two particularly well differentiated categories among men—the saved and the drowned. Other pairs of opposites (the good and the bad, the wise and the foolish, the cowards and the courageous, the unlucky and the fortunate) are considerably less distinct, they seem less essential, and above all they allow for more numerous and complex intermediary gradations.

This division is much less evident in ordinary life; for there it rarely happens that a man loses himself. A man is normally not alone, and in his rise or fall is tied to the destinies of his neighbors; so that it is exceptional for anyone to acquire unlimited power, or to fall by a succession of defeats into utter ruin. Moreover, everyone is normally in possession of such spiritual, physical and even financial resources that the probabilities of a shipwreck, of total inadequacy in the face of life, are relatively small. And one must take into account a definite cushioning effect exercised both by the law, and by the moral sense which constitutes a self-imposed law; for a country is considered the more civilized the more the wisdom and efficiency of its laws hinder a weak man from becoming too weak or a powerful one too powerful.

• • •

“The Nobel Prize in Literature for 2003 has been awarded to the South African writer John Maxwell Coetzee, who, in the committee’s words, ‘in innumerable guises portrays the surprising involvement of the outsider.’ ”

Alice turned off the radio and went back to bed.

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