The closest some of us will get to heaven
The plaza was bright and clear and empty, silent besides the roar of the fountain, the sound of the entire space rushing to its fate. People moved on the edges, lingered at the doors, like things pulled by gravity or a gradient slope, and caught. It was windy today, and cold, though maybe not for them. Down in Texas, the air around his house would be wet and warm, and the sun still high in the sky.
He did not look up. Though he wanted to, and had done so before, to see the state of the sky between them, clear and blue, or grey or dappled. His trespass here was already so great, and he would see the sky soon enough. It would flood in through his eyes, push everything out of his brain, and carry on, eternal, unending. Soon, he would know the weather for miles.
Through a revolving door that chopped and blended the gentle fountainsong with barks of bouncing speech into broken echoes. The local accents, which always sounded to his Houston cultivated ears like the speaker had some kind of hole in the top of their mouth, intensified as they broke apart in the marble beaten air. There were the harsh bricks of Russian-English, the curved crescents of the Romance tongues, and the honks of children, who always and everywhere seemed to share a common tone.
He looked none of them in the eye and they walked by him as if he wasn’t there, which, of course, really,
The lobby was open and bright, ready for a swift leap up into the air. Reaching metal fingers clutched the tall glass windows, churchlike, tuning forks implying the vibrations to come. Potted trees stood firm in their belief that the ceiling above was, honest to God, the sky, and the ceiling itself, with its shadowed gap between the exterior frame, gave the sensation that it was free floating, could drift right up to the very top, or float down to him, gently, with just a push, or a breath. The drop to the carpeted lobby below, just beyond the glass railing, prepared his stomach for greater heights.
An escalator down. A peopled roar rising off the echoed softness of the lobby. Dark carpet like the ground floor of the world. Marble walls and amber light. The winking gateways to the mall, the hotel, banks of revolving doors, polished metal everywhere. Lines of foot traffic stretching out to some vanishing point that he felt was safe from it all, and in fact was still out there somewhere even now, launching souls in trajectories that just missed it all, its supply endless, its aim careless.
The express elevator. Floor numbers fluttering in red LCD. Cabin rumbling like a go-kart engine hiding in the walls. Two minutes. Wondering how the stainless steel could hold you, this high up, without breaking into pieces. A rumble in the stomach, the activation of the flesh, the Spirit beginning to accept the illusion of a body, finally, then the ding.
Reception desk, right turn. He thought he could feel the hundred floors bounce beneath his feet, hear them echo up through the carpet, jitter in the frame, the combined voices and steps radiating through the walls, the empty spaces humming like lungs full of held breath.
Up a curved ramp to the double glass doors, a final ascent, a restaurant on a raised floor atop a wider floating space. They had built a special metal frame to support it, wanted a more intimate setting, lower ceilings, a terraced effect in relation to the surrounding restaurant space. Its name posed in white stenciled letters on the doors, a naïve playful font, like a kid playing cowboy, and twin shooting stars, falling, floating in the glass.
At the little desk, he waited, shifting. The dining area smoldered in a false warm light of burned pink and orange under curved wooden beams crossing overhead like a cathedral, while the seats at the edge shimmered before a wall of humming blue gray. The familiar drone of a lunch restaurant anywhere in the nation, here tuned as if through crystal, brighter, reverberating, light enough to float atop the sun and cloud.
The woman who’s face he wouldn’t even glance at led him to his table, past more faces and voices and little pieces of the noon sky light held in the curves of forks and stuck on the surfaces of the plates and glasses, her steps so sure, like she had forgotten the height, and him following behind, feeling that if she walked straight off the edge he would have no choice but to follow.
Monica’s cover of ‘Right Here Waiting’ drifted out of the speakers. Everything from the framed southwestish art to the little hammered metal ice bucket at one pillar screamed the year, the time, the age. Upscale American chophouse plucked from the plains and taken up on high like Ganymede.
The earth revealed itself below and beyond as they approached the window wall, steel colored ocean and shimmering concrete and bright green smeared out across a flat expanse that twinkled in places with the minute movements of barges and semis. The view turned his ankles to brittle things, made his lungs aware of the chill, lifted his stomach and throat and shook them, gently, swaying. The pillars on either side of the glass seemed to him like painted cardboard boxes that a good push would flatten, and against it all, a square table and chairs set on the floor like a joke.
He sat down with a sigh, his legs aching from standing, his body worn out from awaiting this very seat for half a mile, and the illusion was complete. He was a thing of flesh and blood sat at a table and chair which felt like lawn furniture balancing at the height of a plane ride, the sensation of leaning out into that expanse running through his body like a current though he sat half hunched over the empty placemat. He had arrived, which could only happen after going.
It was the journey that did it. Everything in this place was about the journey. He could’ve appeared at the table, just stepped right into the bar or out of the elevator, but that wouldn’t be the same. The Spirit craves the journey. It loves to be lied to.
He had done a taxi before, emerging just after the wheels had stopped, door handle already in hand, but the awning. He couldn’t help but imagine the sounds, the echoes. The Plaza, where the fountain roar left no room for other sounds. The Mall, with its clashing voices and shopnoise. Those were the best entrances, he had found, at the very edge of within.
He looked out, slowly. Drug his eyes from cradled lunchroom to the window with a quick bounce up to the ceiling, as if to make sure it was still there, and then a rush past the great shadow, towards the light. The sky was a cloudless grey blue, fading to a silver haze on the horizon, then returning, a ghost, reincarnated in the rippling water, a reflection on far buildings, haunting his tablecloth. Sticking out of the paper landscape, like someone who didn’t know what was going on and had just stumbled in, was the little statue of liberty. Facing away. Talking to someone else about other things. It was strange to him, a Texan, to think of these two figurine structures so close to each other, and so incomparable in scale.
Noon. Lunch. Today, he wanted stillness. Lunch was when they caught their breath before another plunge. When the sun waited. When the sky froze. When the light was everywhere and nowhere. Like a mirror to a moonless night.
He had done dinner, of course, in the main restaurant, the great city spread out below, traced his sight around every building outline, along every edge and seam, testing the detail of this creation. And he had done late nights at the bar, the unreal city like lights in deep water, constellation and haze, velvet shadows and glow. Or breakfast, with the private club, sunrise light, when he wanted the view to hurt, forcing him to look away from the windows, straight into the shining faces. Or late evening, when the molten sunset painted bars of red neon on the walls. Once, the city had been obscured by fog, the square space suspended above the clouds like a child’s view of heaven.
The observation deck was a different crowd. Primarily tourists, fleeting. The skydive bar on the 44
th
floor was almost exclusively employees, and he found the guilt of trespass too great. The mall, of course, lacked the view, and the Greenhouse café, down at the base, though possessing a skylight view of the rest of it, felt distant, orbital. The view up here was inescapable, but Greenhouse could easily, if he looked the right way, be just any other turn of the century café, décor and art and all summoning a nostalgia not at all the kind of thing he came here for.
“What do you come here for?”
Not now.
His server took his order, though he didn’t speak the words, and when the face above the notepad was done nodding at “Guinness”, he spoke their name in his mind as a prayer.
They turned and left, and he said the name of every member of staff he could see. Whispered them. Shouted them. It didn’t matter. He could have picked the table up and thrown it and not a single face would have turned, and the table would have snapped right back to where it was. They would never hear him. They would never see him.
He watched them eat, laugh, mutter, cough, drop off plates and clear tables, lean against the server station, and disappear and reappear from the kitchen, which gave him the same sinking panic as watching free divers vanish into the deep. He knew their names and shifts and routes and as much about their lives as any outsider ever could, and he noted when familiar faces floated off the edges and vanished, becoming scenery for the wider restaurant below, where another him sat at other times waiting for them. It was like the sickening feeling in a dream when a moment he had lived through was replayed with himself removed from it, watching from a vantage point floating above or even nestled in the wall opposite himself. It was a total sight, and he watched them not just from the present but from memory, and with the dull eyes of rote memorization.
Or so it was presented. Had to remember, they could be lying. No way to know, even with the sources he had dug out himself, if what he was seeing was even halfway to the truth. Did that make it more or less a blasphemy?
But the faces were real enough. Their smiles. They hurt him now. Became too much. So he looked out, finally, let the gravity of its form pull his eyes to the eastern side of the window wall, and there it was.
It, he knew for sure. With it there were no questions, no hearsay, no shadows of the soul, only raw math and measurements. He knew its structure as well as anyone else “one step below Heaven” as the Archs had put it. Fitting.
It floated out in the noon light, an apparition as unreal as anything in the Other. A reflection of the space in which he sat, transposed, viewed from outside and within simultaneously, like the incomprehensible sight of God. It’s silver lines and bars of shadow as sure as mortality, as straight as razors. Touchable, close, but impossibly still, as if suspended in its fall.
One of the lesser makers had said it loomed, and had been swiftly fired. It didn’t fucking loom. It soared. It beamed. It was defiant and straight like a man on a firing line, chin held high, smiling.
But the mind, of course, plays tricks on us. Especially when we pay for the privilege.
His server came back with his roast squab and steaming vegetables. The beer had appeared sometime outside his attention. The smells pushed through his nose and throat and whipped up his gut, salivated his mouth, clenched his hands around knife and fork. He tested the crackling skin and springy flesh, speared one squared root vegetable and smeared it across the plate, then stopped. The hunger faded. The smells withered, but didn’t vanish. For anyone else, he guessed, the experience would have been inescapably real life.
He released his stranglehold. Let the hunger reignite. Took a sip of the beer. A half bite of squab shish kabobed with an onion, and tried to find the flaws. There were none. Besides the fact that they had, yet again, made it all entirely too perfect.
As the plate sat there begging him to believe in it, he looked away, faced the window, tore his vision across the cold metal faces of the structure soaring out in the air, and fixed his sight on the silver glow in the southwestern sky. It was time to make an attempt at reflection, to remind himself that remembering, in the sense of not forgetting, was a conscious act.
The light itself was memory. As were its reflections. The light, the sky, this noon, all simpler reconstructions than this interior witnessed only by a few. The light had millions of sources. He could be nearly sure of its accuracy.
Out there in that western haze, in that foreshortened sea of light, somewhere, was another Philip. Out there, right now, in the real then this place was screaming it was, the sun was just a bit lower, eleven am, late summer, 2001, Texas…
