How can anybody take the skyscrapers seriously? Breavman wonders. And what if they lasted ten thousand years, and what if the world spoke American? Where was the comfort for today? And each day the father’s gift grows heavier – history, bricks, monuments, the names of streets – tomorrow was already crushed!
Where was the comfort? Where was the war to make him here and hero? Where was his legion? He had met people with numbers branded on their wrists, some of them wrecked, some shrewd and very quiet. Where was his ordeal?
Eat junk, join the enemies of the police, volunteer for crime? Correct America with violence? Suffer in the Village? But the concentration camps were vast, unthinkable. They seemed to descend on man from a great height. And America was so small, man-made.
In his room in the World Student House, Breavman leans elbows on the window-sill and watches the sun ignite the Hudson. It is no longer the garbage river, catch-all for safes, excrement, industrial poison, the route of strings of ponderous barges.
Can something do that to his body?
There must be something written on the fiery water. An affidavit from God. A detailed destiny chart. The address of his perfect wife. A message choosing him for glory or martyrdom.
His room is in the tower, beside the elevator shaft, and he listens to the heavy mechanism of cables and weights. The mechanism of his pumping hand is just as ponderous. The glare off the Hudson is monotonous. There is a pigeon on Grant’s Tomb. It’s cold with the window open.