Contre “Pyrography”
What will it be like to visit a sunken city?
As the submersible nears the site, a passenger sighs loudly. The pilot, presuming that a morose feeling has overtaken the group (common at this stage in the journey), turns on Debussy’s “La cathédrale engloutie.” She tells the story of Ys — the town off the coast of Bretagne that was swallowed by the ocean but, according to legend, still emerges on clear days — and as she does so, she gestures toward the city. Of course, they are in an altogether different place, as the tips of the skyscrapers proclaim, but the piano player, Walter Gieseking, is astonishing and a spell gets cast. Some of the passengers have great-grandparents who were born here. There are reams of photos and videos of the city from when it was vibrant, when it was the center of the universe, and yet it now has a mythical feel, how could it not, how could it not as they propel beneath the surface and put on their wetsuits and flippers and goggles and masks and step into the chamber and shove out into the heavy salt water.
The group is quiet. The pilot guides them down to street level. She shows them the buildings that the residents of one avenue decorated with bright tiles when they knew it would soon be time to leave — they didn’t want the ocean to dislodge their shared memories, and so they constructed a museum even as they were abandoning their city. An official museum would one day be built, they assumed, elsewhere, on dry land, but for any future generations who made the voyage down here, they wanted to explain what it felt like to live in the grime and bustle, in the city that defined the culture for hundreds of years, the city that was propped up by ordinary people shuffling around reading paper-cheap advertisements for papaya drinks that promised nothing short of everlasting life.
Sixteen crooked tile letters spell out: WELCOME TO NEW YORK.
The group swims away, toward the current of the East River, toward the series of bridges that once served as vasculature for the metropolitan area and now appear confused, shorn of purpose. In Midtown, they spiral up along the tallest buildings’ exteriors. The pilot points out the spires gulping down raw sunlight in the open air. The sunken cathedral, she says.
On the shared audio, one of the passengers snorts. Aren’t you moved? the pilot asks. Moved? the passenger repeats. He sounds annoyed. Moved — by God! We’re always going someplace new. We’re always leaving something behind. These streets are gorgeous. What’s there to be sad about? By God. Where are you from? she asks him. Warren, Ohio, he says. It’s a small town, not far from Cleveland. Someone wrote a poem about it. The page of dusk turns like a creaking revolving stage in Warren, Ohio. Right? It gets worse: How are we to inhabit this space from which the fourth wall is invariably missing? Such kooky nostalgia. So misguided. By God! Come to Warren, Ohio, spend a day there with me this summer, eat an ice cream in the gazebo. You’ll have the time of your life.
The sun passes behind a cloud, and the water turns dark. A century passes when the light changes like this, the pilot thinks. At length, the group swims past a library, past schools of gray fish darting about in synchrony, past a weathered sign that promises the world’s best cup of coffee. When the pilot starts to offer a comment, the passenger cuts her off, producing videos of New Yorkers drinking coffee at that diner a century ago. By God! he says. It looks like good coffee. Diner coffee: the best. And now it’s gone, and they’re all gone, and the whole world has moved on. Enough of this mawkishness, all of you. You’ve got to find a way to be happy in the here and now. Enough! Enough! The group retreats into silence as they near the submersible. By God, the passenger says, I’m sick of America.