THE THIN MAN

276. THE THIN MAN:

It was the thin man hiding between buildings who so haunted the streets to the extent that there was nowhere people did not look for him - gabardine and leather corduroy and silk long black coat and high-top boots as he went around to each street seeking things from the past like looking for old glass windows with the ripply and bubbled scar'd look of age with the ever-so-slightly yellowed view from them where the modern world descended from presence and became lost in a haze of steam and smoke and sail with the rich smell of clams and shellfish roiling in the air and the frothing mouths of fish piled high atop one another as they were heaved from nets and wriggled to death on the concrete floor and lobsters tried to run in endless circles nowhere as the fish-monger with his great hook ripped and tore flesh to move each crate of fish to be weighed and thrown and sold and piled high atop wet metal trays and the thin light of the outside world pressed through the narrow windows of the huge fish market as men's voices yelled back and forth and screamed weights at each other and sought truck departure times and loaded crates and boxes of fish for destination past the endless meadows and roadways leading out to the strangled and dry world beyond a world where in some places fish were strange as strange as the aroma of the sea and the salt-air of the freshness and the smell and the odor of kelp and seaweed and tide and sand and wet rock jetties running out for hundreds of feet along soaked and sprayed wooden quays where sloppy boats tied at anchor rocked slowly back and forth and where the distant lights from the shoreline cast lonely fish lines of their own to the small men atop the rocks silently and with true loneliness fishing for dreams and regrets all tied together and there there the dead men walking the doomed old men stalking the bay staring out in their loneliness to the lights of the nearing sea but unable as they were to speak they all remained silent with their regrets and hatreds and sorrow and loss for there was nowhere nothing left to give them back from the great world around them as the last beyond was over and the end of all things had arisen for one and each and every so they remained alone and aloof as old men do silent in their beyond and they sat near where the great old wood was piled up high and yet they forsake'd it all the past and their memory and the glowing ember of experience as they missed everything around them and only sought the modern but even that with regret they missed the old brick ignored the crooked chimneys ignored the old smokestacks ignored the rippled glass of countless windows ignored they missed all all all of their own experiences in a stupidity of raiment and mind which was as poverty-stricken as the poor days they once came out of claiming now to only want all things new senseless but new so that the thin man passed and sought instead the Pearl Street Station where once was generated the power and the stability of that power to light at first a small entire city filled with wonder and glory in time and place lit with Heaven's own glow as if a great and Christian light had arisen to enrapture in the hearts of men a Christmas sublime one filled with promise and the new light of all things and the small squat station stood silent set in concrete and brick with no noise but the nineteenth century hum leftover of noises never heard before the click and swoops of power passing pulling powering everything new in a wondrous flash of something no one knew the building quietly in its own fey mist stood there and the bricked roadway around it led down to the water's edge and the wharf where men loitered and smoked and the wet shine of wires and metal and click click of horse hooves on paving stones with the round clang of wheels turning and the long slow creak of the massive door opening and the broad look into a generating station of Hell an industrial pit of new design covered in smoke and sweat and levers and handles and the black web of wires and insulation knitted like Lucifer's sweater itself and the idle men groaning in the flashing light as they reviewed their tasks and watched the next man attempt what they could not and this all still called for brawn and strength a strength which groaned and broke so many men those reluctant to enter the Hell of time and energy and work and light light which was supposed to be so heavenly and good and glorious light enough to end all time but which in time turned out instead to be the light of slavery and work labor's paltry wages and darkness the very light of darkness from dark Satanic mills to black basements of the nineteen tens and twenties wherein people died struggling with work for wages thrown for pennies and dimes while masters lurked behind locked doors smirking with glee the smirk of lucre's vast lust for more the irreducible point past which there is no more to be made for the point arises when the money itself begins to make the money and the need for mankind is gone and thus the great servitude of labor and wage begins and those down are kept down by being given just enough and no more for it is the manager and the owner who seek to make the riches needed for nothing except more more more always more and so the great vast wiry city grew upward and the denizens of dead in five points and Chinatown and Chelsea and West End died and continued to die in their sadness and poverty blessed are the poor in spirit for they shall inherit the hate and they shall inherit the earth and take with them all it has to offer the dirt and soil of death the pit of regret the old and sorry excuses of the lame and the crippled the crowded and those with cough and gurgle and bad lungs and eyesight made rotten by darkness and heat all of that which started before the light but which was then carried by the light and embraced by the light as only later did the great mass of Union Square men demand and the huge rafts of people sought power and wages together in packs and mobs and labor riots and fires which burned brighter than light itself and beckoned men back to a time of mobs and packs of crazed and hungry wolves and there only there the thin man fled and moved away to walk himself the fabled water's edges along the varied river beneath the Roebling Bridge undone by time and essay and legend and fault and upward looking he watched the feet of all mankind divest itself across the span and walk through all its doubts and marvels and leave behind the last of everything and seek only that open future into which they thought they walked but chimera and illusion and hoax and even the fiddle-faddle of broken promises and horrid laughter at their expense they walked to nothing and left it too in their breached silence they clutched at bags and handles in the blindness they sought to walk with hope alone and were betrayed by those whose good eyes saw enough to trip them up and he watched man after man woman after woman descending as they fell from the bridge to the cruel and icy waters below and they cast off along the way everything they had as if to lessen the splash the crack the hit of their body upon the cruel hard water so cold the blood itself did not bleed as they hit they just floated until death took them in and still still the fishmongers were yelling and heaving their crates and jabbing their hooks into soft and soiled flesh the great flesh of all things in all time forever and what was lost was but the skyline view above the brazen shape of Brooklyn the tall enamel towers of Manhattan the basic lights of Pearl and Water and Wall and Maiden Lane the hanging man from the buttonwood tree.