Orange Street
The Trouble With Apartment One — Chapter 20
More trouble!
Somewhere on Sixth Avenue, I think — 2021 — B. F. Späth.
ORANGE STREET
Among the manifold horrors of Apartment One is its immersion in a dank and brooding shadow.
For a quarter-century, I languished in the half-life of that sunless grotto. The debilitating effects upon my constitution were immeasurable. The pineal gland—that mysterious seat of the soul—succumbed to calcification, becoming little more than a vestige of itself.
Moreover, I spread the dismal ontology of Apartment One into the surrounding streets, establishing myself as an ambassador of All Things Disagreeable.
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It fills me with terror to realize that this awful habitation was already in operation, even as I wandered the blissful Lawns and Orchards of a boundless sunlit childhood.
Like the abandoned chrysalis of some hideous insect, it had waited with an infinite resolve, knowing that my fortunes would inexorably decline, until the final vestige of a privileged life had fallen away, and I was ready to be claimed by this counterfeit apartment. This dreary holding pen of rotting planks! This profound humiliation! The Cardinal Mistake!
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As I counted out the minutes of a mournful, sleepless night, my past ran by before me like some endless funeral train…
There crept upon me, by slow degrees, a strange compulsion to abandon the interior of the city and gravitate toward the perimeter of the island, as though the very edge of Manhattan promised sanctuary from the poisoned machinery at the center.
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And though the deadweight of the morning bore down upon me, and the tenement rumbled in its sleep, the outlines of A Phantastical System materialized in the half-light of that soggy chamber, that idiot excuse for a home that pinned a badge upon itself: the solemn Numeral One!
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With the dawn there lingered A Dream of Resurrection: an ordeal by way of iron—the blood surging pell-mell through my veins, then set ablaze beneath the ceremonial torch of Cannabis Afghani!
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Seized by A Wild Intoxication, I burst out of Apartment One and embrace the holy city under a shower of solar sparks—and before I realize what possesses me, I buy a mountain bike on Orange Street, and feel the pavement move beneath the wheels…
After twenty years estranged from the bicycle, I wobble into the pitiless traffic of Manhattan and feel myself borne away by the current…
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During the milky rise of a swollen summer moon, while under the sway of A Supernatural Plant, I had been passing alone, along the rotting piers that ring the waterfront, and at length found myself, after the roiling mob had fled the Battery, within view of the blistered walls of Castle Clinton.
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I cannot recall when last I beheld the Battery, I said. A long trail of sorrows separates me from the first time that I saw it…
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It is a known fact that evening descends more slowly down here at the bottom of the city—the park lies still and somber, and I find myself once again at that singular moment when day and night stand equidistant.
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At the edge of a damp and deserted Battery, I apprehend a ghostly electrical charge as it slowly threads its way around the periphery of the harbor, as if laboring beneath the oppression of some mortal fatigue—lighting the lamps one-by-one. From a paralytic bench I count out the long seconds—four—five—six—as the current struggles to bridge the distance between the lampposts. At last each bulb obliges with a hollow popping sound that registers at the brink of audibility—or maybe not at all…
This strand of vaporous lights festoons the edge of the park as if announcing the arrival of some blanched and bilious carnival. The lamps—those gloomy sentinels!—strung like mournful notes in the dense and motionless air…
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I awake with a lurid Recollection of Myself beneath a swollen summer moon…
★
The Battery!
Always a great read!