and pressure of their stream of moving bodies pushed me along the platform, up the stairs, and into the light. At the top of the stairs the crowd dispersed, each person going his or her own way to private destinations. I wandered around the floor like a chunk of flotsam on the surface of the sea, knowing neither where I was nor where I was going. I was in an underground network of ornately carven stone and golden-veined marble. Currents of human traffic rushed in many different directions, the waves of people meshing here and there into cross-streams, forming interference patterns of coming and going, some people bustling this way and others bustling that. They dragged suitcases on rollers behind them on the floor. They sat still or slumped over on benches. They sat at tables sipping coffee, reading magazines splayed flat before them. Shops, restaurants, cafés, bars, and news vendors operated out of nooks set in the walls. I found a set of wide marble stairs and climbed them. When I emerged at the top of these stairs, I was in a huge, glittering, beautiful room, what looked like the grand ballroom of a palace, where people wearing powdered wigs and whalebone corsets and masks ought to be waltzing to “The Blue Danube.” Instead, people in modern dress scrambled across the floor in frenetic hordes. In the center of the room a circular booth stood sentinel, glowing from within, with a huge round clock on top of it, like a temple to the concept of time, an altar to Chronos. Then I looked up: the huge, high, vaulted ceiling of this spectacular room was painted blue, and decorated with stars, the whole night sky spangling the robin-egg blue ceiling of the room, with golden outlines of animals drawn over the points of light, some of which were represented by real electric lights embedded like jewels in the ceiling! I must have stood there for half an hour at least, drop-jawed at the sight of this. It looked just like the planetarium that Lydia used to take me to so long ago, in Chicago. All those beautiful zoomorphs, the shaggy lion frozen by the suggestion of his stars in midpounce, the ethereal, sexy nymphs and goddesses and gods stretching their bows taut and aiming their arrows, creatures with wings and horns and men whose torsos melted into the bodies of horses. I guessed that this huge and religious room was like a throbbing heart to this city, pulsing as it was with humanity, its valves taking people in through its arteries and pushing them out again through its veins, a big, bloody, pumping muscle of energy, of commute, of communication, of civilization, its ceiling painted with stars whose warm, audacious artifice dared to rival the more indifferent beauty of real nature. Indeed, I thought back on the sky at night over the Lawrences’ ranch in the wilderness of Colorado, with all its unfriendly and unhelpful and useless wonder, with its undercurrents of loneliness and fear, and wondered if this version wasn’t, in a way, an improvement.
I picked a direction and walked in it. I came to an escalator that lowered me into a chamber made of tile and concrete, which smelled of urine. At the bottom of the escalator turnstiles led into the catacomblike underground structure. I saw that it was an underground commuter train station, much like the stations they have in Chicago, except below the surface of the city. I squeezed myself beneath the turnstiles and waddled around in the big reeking concrete room awhile before descending some stairs, some more stairs, and hopping onboard the first train that whooshed, horn lowing and headlights glaring, into this dank and crowded oubliette of a train station, displacing the fetid air in the tunnel and blasting it in our faces like a hot wet wind. The train docked and hissed, the doors scrolled open, the boarding cluster of humanity stood aside to allow passage for the departing cluster of humanity, and I followed the people on.
Imagine: Here is Bruno. He is sitting on the subway. He is sitting on a seat on the train. Perhaps it is a southbound Lexington Avenue Local, which is grumbling like