the trick was to keep right on moving.
I dreamed that night that I read Mercy’s novel. The gorgeous saga she’d always intended to write from the day she finished
The Hunchback of Notre-Dame
. Three hundred pages of cotton-soft parchment, bound up with a green ribbon. Her writing gushed in watery ripples over the pages, penmanship that called to mind the maddest intricate Belgian lace. Wrought on a pin’s head but stretching for miles if unraveled. The sort that leaves its creators blind.
On August first at six in the morning, having visited a slop shop with more of Val’s funds and purchased a good secondhand set of clothing including black trousers and hose, a simple black frock coat over a blue waistcoat and white neckerchief, and a revolutionary-hued scarlet kerchief at my breast as a temporary nod to politics, I presented myself at the Halls of Justice in Centre Street. I also wore a round-brimmed hat, wider than had been my habit. The moment I put it on, eye-catching as it was, somehow I felt very pleasurably invisible.
The air surrounding the newly assigned police headquarters was spun from a sandstorm that early morning, just pervasive grit and sharply slanting heat until a man couldn’t think straight—which was at least appropriate to the architecture. It had taken all of a fortnight,from what I understand, for the combined prison and courthouse to be nicknamed the Tombs when completed. The slabs of charcoal granite weigh on a man the instant he sets eyes on them, pulling the breath from his chest. All the blank windows stretch two stories high, but are themselves imprisoned by iron frames, each big enough to serve as a fire grate to a giant. Carved in morbid lead-colored rock above each window is a globe wearing a pair of delirious wings and a set of serpents trying to wrestle the planet back into orbit.
If their goal was to make it look like a place to be buried alive, they did a pretty spruce job on a quarter of a million dollars.
A little knot of ten or twelve protesters came into focus as I approached the entrance, all men whose cravats were hideously colorful and carefully knotted, and whose noses had been broken on at least one occasion. Several wore mourning bands but no actual mourning attire, which I took to be an act of symbolic protest, and one held a sign reading DOWN WITH PIG TEERANNY/POLICE YOUR DAYS ARE NUMBERED . That flint-eyed fellow spat just in front of my feet as I passed them.
“What’s the mourning for?” I asked, curious.
“Liberty, freedom, justice, and the spirit of the American patriot,” drawled a bruiser with half an ear.
“I’d go so far as a black neckerchief, then,” I suggested as I walked into the prison.
All that can be seen from the outside of the Tombs is a thick wall lined with the double-height windows clapped in irons. But I learned after walking up the eight steps leading under those unrelenting pillars that the interior is a quadrangle, and already I was intrigued in spite of myself. There are open spaces, and four-story cell blocks separated by gender, and a profusion of courtrooms for deciding the length of the prisoners’ entombment. A pox-scarred brute with a dirty white cravat directed me to the largest of the courtrooms,where I gathered the police would be addressed regarding their duties.
As I walked through the open air where the gallows stood on hanging days, a queer creature fell into step beside me. I couldn’t help but stare at him. He was dressed very shabbily, with a dribble of egg staining his threadbare black sack coat, and his gait was slightly bowlegged. Downright crablike. The mad walk impaired his height to the point that he was almost as short as I am. From his face, pinched and chinless with pale hazel eyes staring out, I was sure he’d crawled from the ocean that morning. I’d have guessed his age at sixty. But his boots were square and Dutch and of a style older still, and his wispy grey hair flew wildly about in a wind
I dreamed that night that I read Mercy’s novel. The gorgeous saga she’d always intended to write from the day she finished
The Hunchback of Notre-Dame
. Three hundred pages of cotton-soft parchment, bound up with a green ribbon. Her writing gushed in watery ripples over the pages, penmanship that called to mind the maddest intricate Belgian lace. Wrought on a pin’s head but stretching for miles if unraveled. The sort that leaves its creators blind.
On August first at six in the morning, having visited a slop shop with more of Val’s funds and purchased a good secondhand set of clothing including black trousers and hose, a simple black frock coat over a blue waistcoat and white neckerchief, and a revolutionary-hued scarlet kerchief at my breast as a temporary nod to politics, I presented myself at the Halls of Justice in Centre Street. I also wore a round-brimmed hat, wider than had been my habit. The moment I put it on, eye-catching as it was, somehow I felt very pleasurably invisible.
The air surrounding the newly assigned police headquarters was spun from a sandstorm that early morning, just pervasive grit and sharply slanting heat until a man couldn’t think straight—which was at least appropriate to the architecture. It had taken all of a fortnight,from what I understand, for the combined prison and courthouse to be nicknamed the Tombs when completed. The slabs of charcoal granite weigh on a man the instant he sets eyes on them, pulling the breath from his chest. All the blank windows stretch two stories high, but are themselves imprisoned by iron frames, each big enough to serve as a fire grate to a giant. Carved in morbid lead-colored rock above each window is a globe wearing a pair of delirious wings and a set of serpents trying to wrestle the planet back into orbit.
If their goal was to make it look like a place to be buried alive, they did a pretty spruce job on a quarter of a million dollars.
A little knot of ten or twelve protesters came into focus as I approached the entrance, all men whose cravats were hideously colorful and carefully knotted, and whose noses had been broken on at least one occasion. Several wore mourning bands but no actual mourning attire, which I took to be an act of symbolic protest, and one held a sign reading DOWN WITH PIG TEERANNY/POLICE YOUR DAYS ARE NUMBERED . That flint-eyed fellow spat just in front of my feet as I passed them.
“What’s the mourning for?” I asked, curious.
“Liberty, freedom, justice, and the spirit of the American patriot,” drawled a bruiser with half an ear.
“I’d go so far as a black neckerchief, then,” I suggested as I walked into the prison.
All that can be seen from the outside of the Tombs is a thick wall lined with the double-height windows clapped in irons. But I learned after walking up the eight steps leading under those unrelenting pillars that the interior is a quadrangle, and already I was intrigued in spite of myself. There are open spaces, and four-story cell blocks separated by gender, and a profusion of courtrooms for deciding the length of the prisoners’ entombment. A pox-scarred brute with a dirty white cravat directed me to the largest of the courtrooms,where I gathered the police would be addressed regarding their duties.
As I walked through the open air where the gallows stood on hanging days, a queer creature fell into step beside me. I couldn’t help but stare at him. He was dressed very shabbily, with a dribble of egg staining his threadbare black sack coat, and his gait was slightly bowlegged. Downright crablike. The mad walk impaired his height to the point that he was almost as short as I am. From his face, pinched and chinless with pale hazel eyes staring out, I was sure he’d crawled from the ocean that morning. I’d have guessed his age at sixty. But his boots were square and Dutch and of a style older still, and his wispy grey hair flew wildly about in a wind
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