The Metropolis Case_ A Novel - Matthew Gallaway [53]
The more he listened, the more convinced Lucien became that this opera—as if it were a transcription of not only his unfolding fate but that of a new generation—was leading him through the backstage of an expanding, mutating city, where a nocturnal chaos reigned under the orderly rules of the day. He saw that if he wanted to fall in love—the one thing he missed in his life more than any other—he would have to embrace a similar disorder, to inhabit two or more very different and possibly conflicting roles. There was no point making distinctions between art and love; as with air and water, he needed both.
16
Je n’ai pas oublié, voisine de la ville
NEW YORK CITY, 2001. Martin got off the elevator and—already thinking about his conference call—sauntered through the glass doors at the entrance to his firm. He turned left into reception, where he was confronted by the unprecedented sight of at least a dozen secretaries and one or two attorneys—like him, most of the attorneys rarely arrived before ten unless they had some business reason for doing so—running into and out of the conference room on the southwest corner of the building.
“What is this?” he asked no one in particular as he stood in the hallway outside.
“We’re being attacked!” cried Darla Rodriguez, a nineteen-year-old from Riverdale who worked for one of the senior partners.
“Attacked?” Martin stuttered.
She nodded and brushed away tears from her cheeks. As best as he could gather from her halting explanation, someone had flown a plane into the World Trade Center.
“Holy shit—are you serious?” Martin replied as a few others rushed by and confirmed that something along these lines was indeed happening. A new series of shouts erupted; apparently there had been another hit.
“Oh my god!” Darla cried, looking up at him with eyes watery and trembling.
“It’s all right, Darla,” he offered, despite feeling that it was anything but. “Feel free to—uh, leave, okay? Go home.” He could not, he realized, bring himself to say “evacuate.” “Don’t worry about Karen,” he added, referring to her boss. “I’ll—I’ll talk to her tomorrow or something.”
She nodded and rushed away, at which point he descended a flight of stairs to his office, where a quick glance out his window confirmed that both towers had been hit by something. Stunned, he sat down at his desk, where he spent a few seconds staring at the walls. A few years earlier, he had painted them—or technically, had them painted—in thin, tremulous strips of green, ranging from a very flat, grayish hue to a bright lime, on which he had stenciled in a barely detectable cursive font the words Pseudoreality prevails. At the time, his intent was to pay sly tribute to Musil and the goings-on in his office at any given time, but as he now considered the prognostic impact of these words, he felt slightly nauseated, as if he were the one who had caused the disaster outside.
“Pseudoreality prevails,” he said heavily as he turned to again confront the scene, which the hard and artificial blue of the sky made seem less real, as if he really were just watching a movie.
HE SAT PARALYZED for a minute or so, until the logical part of his mind began to function. “I bet it’s a terrorist attack,” he muttered and could not resist a premonition about the political ramifications of some idiots flying planes into the Twin Towers, a thought followed by a thin hope that whoever had engineered this fiasco was an American. Then again, he reconsidered, did it really matter who had done it? He remembered the many times he had attempted to temper Jay’s pervasive pessimism in their political discussions with Hegelian dialectic, but how could he ever again argue that progress and evolution—in any kind of moral or political sense—was anything but a phantasm of propaganda meant to deceive stupid people everywhere?
Like me for forty-one years, he thought, with less bitterness than wonder, which for the first time led him to consider—given his location in a