Anna Ursyn, From Village to Big City
Four
(For Robert)
Joel Page
Part 1 Letter of the Witness, Available Portion
Handwritten
Bearing a 2 on the top right corner, presumably a page number
. . . OK, so I came back on the second day after the crowd had started to form around him at the intersection. Right, so, he’d been at the same intersection talking and carrying on before, but I don’t remember him being at that corner, which is south of 16th, west of the northbound feeder road, and sort of up against the railing. I didn’t come back in the morning because I had to work, but I got cut after the breakfast rush and went back and the crowd was still there and growing. The night before, I couldn’t hear him that well over the cars; this time there were more cars and noise, but someone had given him a bullhorn. That’s theoretically what drew the cops, like a ban on amplified sound with a permit, which is obviously bullshit. Like, “traffic hazard” I’d buy, because, yeah, we were sort of spilling into the road, but this was fucking ridiculous. It was obvious they didn’t like him building a following. I’m sure he’d been arrested before, and he didn’t have kind words for the cops.
So I was just heading home, not even thinking about going back to listen because it did not occur to me that he could possibly still be speaking. I’d say he was amped on something, but honestly, I don’t think even a very serious stimulant would keep him going as fierce as I saw him. I’m trying to go home and the traffic slows, and I’m pissed off because I want to get home and take a nap but I’m still not even thinking it’s him. And then I get there and he’s still fucking going, now with, what, a few hundred people? A thousand? I park in the gas station at the corner and get up on the car and can hear him pretty well
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actually.
Ok, so the first part of what I heard that day, honestly, I didn’t completely follow. Or I followed but didn’t get. Something about gas and homeless people. Then he starts saying that he’s both the gas and the car and the road and the traffic. And he says that he will become traffic and that all of them are traffic, that people are traffic. “I watch from this corner, and I look down at the jam at rush hour. And I see you yell at each other, and I see you curse the traffic, and you can’t see that you’re cursing yourselves, motherfuckers. And the people laugh, but he scolds them and that’s kind of a change in the mood, because the mood had been sort of light before that, like he was a spectacle and people were with him but there was still a sense of comedy, insult comedy, but still that kind of relationship between comic and audience. And then he scolded them, and it changed. People who were standing sat for him and got really attentive.
So then the cops show and one of them is sort of cut off from him by the hedge of people behind them, and I think he starts worrying people will stop him from getting to the guy, so instead of walking up and arresting him, he sits in his car and says “there’s no amplified sound allowed” through a bullhorn, and I mean, and the crowd explodes in laughter, I mean, just absolutely explodes at the irony of the cop using a bullhorn to say “there’s no amplified sound.” God, you should have been there, the sense of just immense release and freedom that we all had laughing at the cop. And the guy on the corner grins and blows the cop a kiss, and he gestures the crowd to settle down and says, you know, something to the effect of, “hey, don’t be too hard on him,” which
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surprises me, and probably lots of others too, because the day before, he’s been calling cops hyenas and poison, but not this time, this time, he says, “hey don’t be too hard on him, he isn’t doing anything that we don’t all do everyday, which is not recognizing himself; he forgot that he was a guy with a bullhorn when he said ‘no bullhorns’; you all forget that you are traffic when you curse the traffic; you forget that you are cops, all of you are cops when you laugh at the cops, but if you follow them, you are them; you forget that you are the beggar when you walk by him.” And at this, the cop is paralyzed, just completely paralyzed, cannot approach, basically because he’s just floored by this guy preaching, all of them are.
He keeps on like that and he says, you know, the city is a really sick place because it can’t see itself, and it needs a mirror, but sicknesses heal, and the place is going to heal, and when that happens, we’re not going to let people live on the streets, that’s going to be unthinkable; people will just not even think that it’s possible to leave someone out suffering like that any more than we would just walk by someone about to jump off a bridge. And when he says, “jump off a bridge,” a chill runs through the crowd, because they realize where he’s talking. And the cops suddenly lurch into action and start approaching. Some of the crowd tries to get in their way and others start yelling to let the cops through because maybe he’s going to jump. Well, the guy says, “now you see, you see, they’re not bad, they’re just people, I called them monsters yesterday, but we’re all monsters,” but still, he says, “don’t let them through, this has to happen, this has to happen; I am going to rejoin the traffic; it’s going to be harder
Reverse side of page
to hear me then, but you can still do it; come out where I am and listen to the traffic; you can hear it like a choir, like everyone humming together.” He started humming, and he tried to get the crowd to hum with him, and some of them did, and some of them didn’t because they were trying to get the cops to him to stop him from jumping.
And he says then, “but if you can’t hear me, if you listen to the voice of the traffic and you can’t hear me in it, my voice in all the voices, don’t worry because I will come back up from the underpass and rejoin you up here; I will go down into the traffic, and I will come back up; that’s how traffic is, it is cycles, if it falls it rises, if it rises, it falls, like the sun or the seasons, and I am the traffic. I will drop from this point, and I will rise back up.”
There was a moment of chaos then; I could see it perfectly, I saw everything that happened, but I can’t tell you what it was. I remember arms rising and noise, some kind of cop lights, brighter lights, but not sirens because the sirens were on the cars. I can’t tell you what. It died down, and then the guy started talking again, or maybe he was talking and now I could pay attention. He says, “I better go over now because they are coming close to stop me. Please thank them for me. You’ll hear me again at this corner. I will be traffic; I am traffic now; all of us are the traffic, and the traffic comes and goes endlessly, swells and falls; it’s never gone, it only pauses.”
And then just as the police broke through the line of people protecting him, he dropped the bullhorn, extended his arm straight into the railing, and swung down to fall into the over–
End of Available Portion of Letter of the Witness
Part 2
Narrative of the Northeast Vigil upon Seeing a Ladder
The flashes relay around the intersection. First, the Vigil of the Southeast Corner in his tiny tenement apartment overlooking the underpass; the sunlight ricochets between his mirrors and out to all of us; second, the Southwest Vigil, wielding her piercing flashlight–she is slow in intellect, kept by her caretakers in a windowed motel supply closet; third, the Northwest vigil, flicking a torch-lighter from the disused garage payment booth into which his caretakers hoist him food by pulley; fourth, to me in the room above the gas station, just large enough to contain a bed for an average-sized male, a sink and a tiny fridge, with space in the ceiling tile for the letters. I use a flashlight, because I am instinctively afraid to light a fire at a gas station, notwithstanding the distance from my quarters to the gas pumps. Once I dreamed of a fireball that erupted at Jumper’s corner during a relay and swallowed the Four of us; in the dream, we floated with it and rose over the City, watching its traffic patterns through the blaze.
So far as I know, the relay of flashes doesn’t usually mean anything, except maybe “hello,” or maybe “a letter is forthcoming.” But they bind us. We have used them since my arrival, now 20 years gone. Together, the Four of us look down on the Northeast corner of 16th Street and the Highway. The intersection is an underpass, and on the top level there is a tiny piece of sidewalk where Jumper gathered the crowd unto himself with a bullhorn. There he told the people that they were the traffic; there he cursed the people for cursing it; there he exhorted them to submit to the traffic, to become it and so become themselves. There, at the approach of the crowdbreaking police officers, Jumper leapt over the railing, declaring either that he would join the traffic below, or that he would bounce from the floor of the underpass and rejoin us at the corner, the traditions varying in their constructions of the Letter of the Witness.
The Northern vigils, myself and NW, believe that Jumper will return to his corner and again bring a mirror to the City, perhaps to greater effect this time. We wait for this, though our training has stressed that we are more likely to turn our post over to another–by death, surrender, or removal–than to see this day. The Letter of the Witness, handed down to us from an anonymous author through a succession of phantom hands, supports us clearly enough. The Letter quotes him thus just before he leaps:
You’ll hear me again at this corner. I will be traffic; I am traffic now; all of us are the traffic, and the traffic comes and goes endlessly, swells and falls; it’s never gone, it only pauses.
This reads clearly enough to me as a promise of return, but the Southern vigils, SW and SE, have maintained otherwise since before my training. In their view, Jumper cannot return because he became the traffic, and as the traffic is never absent, he never left. They watch the corner, therefore, only to attest to his failure to return. Their letters meditate at length on the flow of traffic at the intersection, and dispute the meaning of the Letter of the Witness with us in relatively good humor.
Once in the first year of my vigil, I left my quarters to deliver a letter to the NW corner, intending it for circulation around the intersection. The woman who owns the gas station acts as my caretaker, handing up supplies and letters onto the floor of my dwelling through an opening just big enough for the human body, though I see her usually only as a hand, or at a distance coming into the front of the station–on the day I left my quarters for a moment, this woman never came to work and nobody entered the station to give me the noises of errant of humanity, coughing and shuffling and terse words of exchange with the customers. Loneliness suffocated. So in spite of ample warning by my trainers, I decided to come down and cross the freeway to give NW the letter myself. On the way back, I saw a woman, attractive, maybe 40, dressed for the summer, struggling with the machine that airs motorists’ car tires. I rendered assistance. We chatted briefly, and I demurred when she asked what I did for a living. Upon my return to the room above the station, the corners around me flashed in intense and unusual numeric patterns, reprimands against my exit, or against my conversation with the attractive woman at the airhose, or both. In any case, I have not left the gas station attic again in the 20 years since.
Today, the relay of the flashes repeats. SE began them, but when they return to him, he flashes again. The flashes relay back to him and he begins a third round, then a fourth, whereupon he stops. If this has been given a specific meaning, I don’t know it, but it is more than greetings. Something. This is something. No sooner have the flashes ceased to relay around the intersection than they reappear within my veins and heart, jolting, a fear that will not suffer to be named, an imminence that will not take form.
Then come the letters. NW’s letter to SW, and impliedly all of us, wrapped in a letter from SW to SE, and impliedly to all of us, wrapped in a letter from SE to me, and impliedly back around the square. I take them from my caretaker, whose face I do not see, but in whose footfalls I feel I can hear knowledge of the imminence. I do not want to look at the letters because I am not prepared yet to confront the imminence.
I breathe and place the letters from the other Vigils unread into the ceiling tile with the other accumulated correspondence of my service. Without looking, I grasp around for my copy of the Letter of the Witness, which I can identify now by feel. Whatever there is to know in today’s letters, I tell myself, it will grow from the Letter of the Witness. The world can only elaborate on this text, never contradict it. Reading the text, I think, will ground me and slow my breath and heartrate; the world may shake, it may change its meaning, or its meaning may remain numinous and unclear, different to the Northside vigils than to the South, but the text of the Letter will be the same: its words, their order, their appearance on the page, they are stable. I can stand on these words and listen to the world shifting around me.
It works and I am able to sleep. Then I dream.
I dream that I am SE, staring down at the floor of the underpass from the tenement. A gleam appears on this surface, a light, something piercing, hiding its form behind the lattice of its sharpened rays. I stare until I am blind and then I wake.
Awake, I return to the Letter of the Witness and reread the critical passage, the ambiguity from which our division with the Southern vigils has grown. I am calm now, and I recite this passage to myself, aware now that it doesn’t matter whether it means what I have taken it to mean, prepared entirely to believe what it says, not what it means. So prepared, I am ready to read the letters newly arrived from the other vigils. I absorb them quickly and understand what has moved them to flashing and writing: a ladder has appeared from the floor of the underpass to the railing of the street above. It stands precisely at Jumper’s corner. The NW vigil regards this as a sign of Jumper’s return from the traffic; he exhorts the Southern vigils to acknowledge it as such, and thus to recant their denials that such would ever occur. SW sees this as a sign merely equating Jumper to the traffic, momentous and sacred, but nothing in the nature of prophecy. SE recites the dogma, that Jumper is traffic and cannot return. Again, she may be slow.
I return to the window and see the ladder, peeking over the railing, just visible. I stare at it and I allow it to swallow my attention. Then I open the window to hear better the sound of traffic, precisely so that I may tune it out. The traffic and I climb the ladder in my mind, descending and ascending between the sacred and profane. Then, when I am no longer certain whether the sacred lies below ground or above it, the sound of the traffic overtakes its filter. It comes and goes endlessly, swells and falls; it’s never gone, it only pauses.
(For Robert)
Joel Page
Part 1 Letter of the Witness, Available Portion
Handwritten
Bearing a 2 on the top right corner, presumably a page number
. . . OK, so I came back on the second day after the crowd had started to form around him at the intersection. Right, so, he’d been at the same intersection talking and carrying on before, but I don’t remember him being at that corner, which is south of 16th, west of the northbound feeder road, and sort of up against the railing. I didn’t come back in the morning because I had to work, but I got cut after the breakfast rush and went back and the crowd was still there and growing. The night before, I couldn’t hear him that well over the cars; this time there were more cars and noise, but someone had given him a bullhorn. That’s theoretically what drew the cops, like a ban on amplified sound with a permit, which is obviously bullshit. Like, “traffic hazard” I’d buy, because, yeah, we were sort of spilling into the road, but this was fucking ridiculous. It was obvious they didn’t like him building a following. I’m sure he’d been arrested before, and he didn’t have kind words for the cops.
So I was just heading home, not even thinking about going back to listen because it did not occur to me that he could possibly still be speaking. I’d say he was amped on something, but honestly, I don’t think even a very serious stimulant would keep him going as fierce as I saw him. I’m trying to go home and the traffic slows, and I’m pissed off because I want to get home and take a nap but I’m still not even thinking it’s him. And then I get there and he’s still fucking going, now with, what, a few hundred people? A thousand? I park in the gas station at the corner and get up on the car and can hear him pretty well
Reverse side of page
actually.
Ok, so the first part of what I heard that day, honestly, I didn’t completely follow. Or I followed but didn’t get. Something about gas and homeless people. Then he starts saying that he’s both the gas and the car and the road and the traffic. And he says that he will become traffic and that all of them are traffic, that people are traffic. “I watch from this corner, and I look down at the jam at rush hour. And I see you yell at each other, and I see you curse the traffic, and you can’t see that you’re cursing yourselves, motherfuckers. And the people laugh, but he scolds them and that’s kind of a change in the mood, because the mood had been sort of light before that, like he was a spectacle and people were with him but there was still a sense of comedy, insult comedy, but still that kind of relationship between comic and audience. And then he scolded them, and it changed. People who were standing sat for him and got really attentive.
So then the cops show and one of them is sort of cut off from him by the hedge of people behind them, and I think he starts worrying people will stop him from getting to the guy, so instead of walking up and arresting him, he sits in his car and says “there’s no amplified sound allowed” through a bullhorn, and I mean, and the crowd explodes in laughter, I mean, just absolutely explodes at the irony of the cop using a bullhorn to say “there’s no amplified sound.” God, you should have been there, the sense of just immense release and freedom that we all had laughing at the cop. And the guy on the corner grins and blows the cop a kiss, and he gestures the crowd to settle down and says, you know, something to the effect of, “hey, don’t be too hard on him,” which
Page marked with a 3
surprises me, and probably lots of others too, because the day before, he’s been calling cops hyenas and poison, but not this time, this time, he says, “hey don’t be too hard on him, he isn’t doing anything that we don’t all do everyday, which is not recognizing himself; he forgot that he was a guy with a bullhorn when he said ‘no bullhorns’; you all forget that you are traffic when you curse the traffic; you forget that you are cops, all of you are cops when you laugh at the cops, but if you follow them, you are them; you forget that you are the beggar when you walk by him.” And at this, the cop is paralyzed, just completely paralyzed, cannot approach, basically because he’s just floored by this guy preaching, all of them are.
He keeps on like that and he says, you know, the city is a really sick place because it can’t see itself, and it needs a mirror, but sicknesses heal, and the place is going to heal, and when that happens, we’re not going to let people live on the streets, that’s going to be unthinkable; people will just not even think that it’s possible to leave someone out suffering like that any more than we would just walk by someone about to jump off a bridge. And when he says, “jump off a bridge,” a chill runs through the crowd, because they realize where he’s talking. And the cops suddenly lurch into action and start approaching. Some of the crowd tries to get in their way and others start yelling to let the cops through because maybe he’s going to jump. Well, the guy says, “now you see, you see, they’re not bad, they’re just people, I called them monsters yesterday, but we’re all monsters,” but still, he says, “don’t let them through, this has to happen, this has to happen; I am going to rejoin the traffic; it’s going to be harder
Reverse side of page
to hear me then, but you can still do it; come out where I am and listen to the traffic; you can hear it like a choir, like everyone humming together.” He started humming, and he tried to get the crowd to hum with him, and some of them did, and some of them didn’t because they were trying to get the cops to him to stop him from jumping.
And he says then, “but if you can’t hear me, if you listen to the voice of the traffic and you can’t hear me in it, my voice in all the voices, don’t worry because I will come back up from the underpass and rejoin you up here; I will go down into the traffic, and I will come back up; that’s how traffic is, it is cycles, if it falls it rises, if it rises, it falls, like the sun or the seasons, and I am the traffic. I will drop from this point, and I will rise back up.”
There was a moment of chaos then; I could see it perfectly, I saw everything that happened, but I can’t tell you what it was. I remember arms rising and noise, some kind of cop lights, brighter lights, but not sirens because the sirens were on the cars. I can’t tell you what. It died down, and then the guy started talking again, or maybe he was talking and now I could pay attention. He says, “I better go over now because they are coming close to stop me. Please thank them for me. You’ll hear me again at this corner. I will be traffic; I am traffic now; all of us are the traffic, and the traffic comes and goes endlessly, swells and falls; it’s never gone, it only pauses.”
And then just as the police broke through the line of people protecting him, he dropped the bullhorn, extended his arm straight into the railing, and swung down to fall into the over–
End of Available Portion of Letter of the Witness
Part 2
Narrative of the Northeast Vigil upon Seeing a Ladder
The flashes relay around the intersection. First, the Vigil of the Southeast Corner in his tiny tenement apartment overlooking the underpass; the sunlight ricochets between his mirrors and out to all of us; second, the Southwest Vigil, wielding her piercing flashlight–she is slow in intellect, kept by her caretakers in a windowed motel supply closet; third, the Northwest vigil, flicking a torch-lighter from the disused garage payment booth into which his caretakers hoist him food by pulley; fourth, to me in the room above the gas station, just large enough to contain a bed for an average-sized male, a sink and a tiny fridge, with space in the ceiling tile for the letters. I use a flashlight, because I am instinctively afraid to light a fire at a gas station, notwithstanding the distance from my quarters to the gas pumps. Once I dreamed of a fireball that erupted at Jumper’s corner during a relay and swallowed the Four of us; in the dream, we floated with it and rose over the City, watching its traffic patterns through the blaze.
So far as I know, the relay of flashes doesn’t usually mean anything, except maybe “hello,” or maybe “a letter is forthcoming.” But they bind us. We have used them since my arrival, now 20 years gone. Together, the Four of us look down on the Northeast corner of 16th Street and the Highway. The intersection is an underpass, and on the top level there is a tiny piece of sidewalk where Jumper gathered the crowd unto himself with a bullhorn. There he told the people that they were the traffic; there he cursed the people for cursing it; there he exhorted them to submit to the traffic, to become it and so become themselves. There, at the approach of the crowdbreaking police officers, Jumper leapt over the railing, declaring either that he would join the traffic below, or that he would bounce from the floor of the underpass and rejoin us at the corner, the traditions varying in their constructions of the Letter of the Witness.
The Northern vigils, myself and NW, believe that Jumper will return to his corner and again bring a mirror to the City, perhaps to greater effect this time. We wait for this, though our training has stressed that we are more likely to turn our post over to another–by death, surrender, or removal–than to see this day. The Letter of the Witness, handed down to us from an anonymous author through a succession of phantom hands, supports us clearly enough. The Letter quotes him thus just before he leaps:
You’ll hear me again at this corner. I will be traffic; I am traffic now; all of us are the traffic, and the traffic comes and goes endlessly, swells and falls; it’s never gone, it only pauses.
This reads clearly enough to me as a promise of return, but the Southern vigils, SW and SE, have maintained otherwise since before my training. In their view, Jumper cannot return because he became the traffic, and as the traffic is never absent, he never left. They watch the corner, therefore, only to attest to his failure to return. Their letters meditate at length on the flow of traffic at the intersection, and dispute the meaning of the Letter of the Witness with us in relatively good humor.
Once in the first year of my vigil, I left my quarters to deliver a letter to the NW corner, intending it for circulation around the intersection. The woman who owns the gas station acts as my caretaker, handing up supplies and letters onto the floor of my dwelling through an opening just big enough for the human body, though I see her usually only as a hand, or at a distance coming into the front of the station–on the day I left my quarters for a moment, this woman never came to work and nobody entered the station to give me the noises of errant of humanity, coughing and shuffling and terse words of exchange with the customers. Loneliness suffocated. So in spite of ample warning by my trainers, I decided to come down and cross the freeway to give NW the letter myself. On the way back, I saw a woman, attractive, maybe 40, dressed for the summer, struggling with the machine that airs motorists’ car tires. I rendered assistance. We chatted briefly, and I demurred when she asked what I did for a living. Upon my return to the room above the station, the corners around me flashed in intense and unusual numeric patterns, reprimands against my exit, or against my conversation with the attractive woman at the airhose, or both. In any case, I have not left the gas station attic again in the 20 years since.
Today, the relay of the flashes repeats. SE began them, but when they return to him, he flashes again. The flashes relay back to him and he begins a third round, then a fourth, whereupon he stops. If this has been given a specific meaning, I don’t know it, but it is more than greetings. Something. This is something. No sooner have the flashes ceased to relay around the intersection than they reappear within my veins and heart, jolting, a fear that will not suffer to be named, an imminence that will not take form.
Then come the letters. NW’s letter to SW, and impliedly all of us, wrapped in a letter from SW to SE, and impliedly to all of us, wrapped in a letter from SE to me, and impliedly back around the square. I take them from my caretaker, whose face I do not see, but in whose footfalls I feel I can hear knowledge of the imminence. I do not want to look at the letters because I am not prepared yet to confront the imminence.
I breathe and place the letters from the other Vigils unread into the ceiling tile with the other accumulated correspondence of my service. Without looking, I grasp around for my copy of the Letter of the Witness, which I can identify now by feel. Whatever there is to know in today’s letters, I tell myself, it will grow from the Letter of the Witness. The world can only elaborate on this text, never contradict it. Reading the text, I think, will ground me and slow my breath and heartrate; the world may shake, it may change its meaning, or its meaning may remain numinous and unclear, different to the Northside vigils than to the South, but the text of the Letter will be the same: its words, their order, their appearance on the page, they are stable. I can stand on these words and listen to the world shifting around me.
It works and I am able to sleep. Then I dream.
I dream that I am SE, staring down at the floor of the underpass from the tenement. A gleam appears on this surface, a light, something piercing, hiding its form behind the lattice of its sharpened rays. I stare until I am blind and then I wake.
Awake, I return to the Letter of the Witness and reread the critical passage, the ambiguity from which our division with the Southern vigils has grown. I am calm now, and I recite this passage to myself, aware now that it doesn’t matter whether it means what I have taken it to mean, prepared entirely to believe what it says, not what it means. So prepared, I am ready to read the letters newly arrived from the other vigils. I absorb them quickly and understand what has moved them to flashing and writing: a ladder has appeared from the floor of the underpass to the railing of the street above. It stands precisely at Jumper’s corner. The NW vigil regards this as a sign of Jumper’s return from the traffic; he exhorts the Southern vigils to acknowledge it as such, and thus to recant their denials that such would ever occur. SW sees this as a sign merely equating Jumper to the traffic, momentous and sacred, but nothing in the nature of prophecy. SE recites the dogma, that Jumper is traffic and cannot return. Again, she may be slow.
I return to the window and see the ladder, peeking over the railing, just visible. I stare at it and I allow it to swallow my attention. Then I open the window to hear better the sound of traffic, precisely so that I may tune it out. The traffic and I climb the ladder in my mind, descending and ascending between the sacred and profane. Then, when I am no longer certain whether the sacred lies below ground or above it, the sound of the traffic overtakes its filter. It comes and goes endlessly, swells and falls; it’s never gone, it only pauses.