Chapters (43)
“Did you know that in California they tried to rename them alligator pears?”
“Really?”
“On account of the skin. Didn’t catch on, though.”
“Yeah, dumb name.”
As soon as things quieted down on the street outside, he would turn on the voices in his apartment. Early morning in South Africa, a storm in Mexico, in Helsinki dead fish on the shore. He heard of a moderate northwesterly wind in Perth and catastrophic flooding along the Yellow River in China.
He was good at Morse code. The jaunty beep-beeping could be heard over anything, whether it was street noise or the neighbors’ shouting. In the beginning, he would sit there with pencil and paper to work out the sequences, but soon it would happen automatically in his head. He recognized some operators immediately from certain hesitations, drawn-out tones, or a particularly galloping rhythm. Everyone sounded a bit different; everyone had their own handwriting.
It took a whole year before he could bring himself to speak. To talk without seeing anyone. To build confidence. To just sit there and talk. To send something of himself out into the world and hope for the best. And then he discovered how freeing it was. No one could see him. No one knew anything about him. Not how tall or short he was, or whether he lived in a house with a yard in Brooklyn or a tenement in Harlem.
To be only a voice, everywhere, at any time. In the beginning, he tried to trick himself into believing that this precious state, like magic, was enough to shield him from misery. With the Depression, the universal rules grew clearer; there were forces stronger than his inner life.
Arthur had to shutter the print shop indefinitely. They sometimes met at the soup kitchen by Bryant Park. Josef found a poorly paying job delivering flyers for a large furniture store. A pretty big step down, considering he used to produce the flyers himself. But he liked the work. When he got into a rhythm, when he felt more like he was dreaming than working, he could lose all sense of time. Use his index finger to flip open the lid of the mailbox and slip in the piece of paper pinned between his thumb and middle finger, his other hand free to hold his cigarette. The city became an animal with countless hungry mouths, and it was his job to feed them. By the time the economic situation had eased a bit, he had hit almost every building at least once. But he still couldn’t send his mother any money; he could only send news of just scraping by. His mother asked if he didn’t want to come back: in Germany a new era had begun; Germany was reborn. No. Never. New York was his city, especially now that he’d fed it.