Personal Guide needed for West Virginia
Couple for recollection tour of Pittsburgh. Intimate
Knowledge of town, history, and neighborhoods
Necessary. Understanding of photographic principles
A plus. Successful candidates will read between
These lines. Call immediately.
Van’s fingers were stained gray as he felt the goodness of the advertisement. He cut short the thoughts on a newspaper’s spine being external; and how the spine could be a stick, and the stick could be a sword, and the sword could be more. He also stopped the recurring repression of the sometimes-recurring temptation to commit a crime right now. Because his fingers left lovely fingerprints. Van wrote on his hand shorthand on the ends of his thoughts: Do not commit crime. He put a comma at the knuckle: There is always more.
Van looked past the newspapers and saw three ladies with three feet arguing without shoes. Two seemed to be sisters, twins, and the third seemed to be a fraternal triple. But they were approaching that age when age is a cousin, first, and feet have a stale and sour smell. Van had seen these ladies before and called them Rosy, Roxy, and Theresa, but never with reply.
“What are you staring at jerk-bitch?!” Roxy or Rosy, twins, yelled at him. The sisters always spoke in periods.
“Nothing, Roxy. Nothing.” Van waved a yellow wave with simultaneous greeting and goodbye across the room. Van circled the advertisement in red, folded the newspaper along its organic fold and left.
To the right, Van saw the road bend and unfolded a folded piece of paper from his pocket. On one side was a note that he had found days before. Someone had written and lost a eulogy for a clock. Van had found, folded, and kept it deep in his pocket. On its back, Van wrote, “there are no straight lines in Pittsburgh.”
On its front, lay the unused eulogy:
The clock that stands atop Squirrel Hill is not aware of its own mortality. The Squirrel Hill clock does not know that it is being blocked. The Squirrel Hill clock is not aware of the obfuscating presence looming beside it. It does not know that its neighbor, innocuous as it is, is relegating it to irrelevance. The Squirrel Hill clock does not know that it is a symbol. The Squirrel Hill clock does not know that it will be a symbol.
Though it had hands that were in the shape of hands, and a face that looked kindly at the street below, and though some would swear it had a smile, it had no idea that it was more than just a timepiece. Though it stands at the intersection that intersects the neighborhood, it had no idea that it was the line that stands drawn between neighborhood and community.
Though each of us wears a wristwatch, and there is a clock in every car, and when the sun shines through in Pittsburgh one can tell time, the Hebrew clock tower will be missed. It had a presence that will be missed. Each second was a present, a tapping of the time with the finger of its hand. Each finger pointed unaccusingly at the Hebrew letter that spoke the second that everyone could see and all could understand.
The Hebrew clock tower that stands atop Squirrel Hill does not even know that it is dead. It does not know that it is giving its time silently, thwarted, without a passerby able to access its offering. And so it keeps giving, its hands in the forms still turning, its hands making hours making days making weeks through the years. It still stands still in position, and we know that it stands now alone. The Squirrel Hill clock has not stopped giving; we have simply stopped receiving. With a simple nod up, an acknowledgement, a gesture really, we could give purpose to an existence. But still it gives. It is a clock and it knows not what else to do. It will mark its days on arcs and revolutions. It will too marks ours, however deferred, in arcs and revolutions too.
Some would say that the stars are there to make us look up into the night and wonder; Squirrel Hill had that gift in the day too. And that clock tower--the one that stands atop Squirrel Hill--it is not aware of its own mortality. And yet it is dead. It will be missed by time.
* * *
Squirrel Hill stood out in black and white at Sunday twilight. The snow had fallen white several days before and the community had come together to add shade and depth. “Adumbrations,” Van said aloud. On his left forearm he wrote, slightly: Adumbrations everywhere. On the palm he added: The city of coal tends towards a charcoal drawing. He rubbed his palms together and watched the small black bits crumble to the ground.
The footprints showed the history and directions of the day, documenting the various footfalls and collapses. They related implied laughter by small shoeprints with profound implications.
Van stood in place for a while, knowing that every movement will make an impression without moment. In decision, there will be remainder, he thought. He thought it a nice thought and turned bodily to the man pacing beside him. “In decision, there will be remainder,” Van said to the man who had just spent forty years waiting for the bus.
“Yeah…okay…hey, how old is Dolly Parton? She’s twenty-six, isn’t she. Hey, you ever think about getting yourself a caravan, you know like a big one for all your kids? No, no.” The man laughed for the neighborhood. “You know, you remind me of a hug; but you know I need to get some mashed potatoes, because I’m dizzy. And they’re one ninety-eight.” The man held out a bare mitt filled with change. “Is this enough? Can you help me reach my dream?”
Van looked down into the man’s hand and began gently separating the change with the kick of his index finger. Van made small discrete stacks of similar coins in the regions of the man’s hands. He worked conscientiously of the natural arcs and lines of the cupped hand. Once the piles were neatly placed, Van counted by shifting the coins around themselves in concentric circles. “There’s only a dollar fourteen. I don’t think that you’re getting those mashed potatoes.”
“That’s okay. That’s okay. You’re all right. Maybe next time? Cause you know, I love you like a cousin.”
“Next time.” Van said, pointing at the man while walking away, “I love you too.” And the pointing was not impressed upon the historical snow.
Van stepped lightly down onto Murray Avenue and headed down the hill by way of the Beacon Street peak. At the intersection where the neighborhood opens its legs there was a large clock with hands for hands and fingers bent accusingly. Van looked down at his wrist and realized an incongruity. Either his wrist or the tower lied to him. Van looked up at the clock face and muttered, “No one wants to hear it anymore.”
And the street extended on. As Van walked he squinted. Van reduced his eyes and lids to mere slits that could only host soft lines and four colors at once. Sharpness and the fifth color stayed in place, unable to affect. Van’s smile met his squint at the cheek, “Nineteen seventy-three, I found you.”
* * *
Jim and Chris Albaneze arrived by rail from West Virginia with ruddy fingers and a bag of bones. They bought chicken wings in Charleston and they spread them out across the border. They brought their own baby wipes and Jim told the porter to, please, call him Neezy.
On the train, the man reading the paper next to Chris rose his eyes upon seeing an Irish man walking from the Johnstown car to the toilet and remarked, “It’s a shame what Johnstown’s become.”
Beside the toilet someone tucked a pretty picture of a pretty lady in a perfect pose. Before Jim said, “Nothing,” he mumbled at Chris, “an angel by the dung.”
“Nothing,” he assured her.
* * *
“Parallel lines enter the city as far as Grant Street. Grant Street meets Liberty at a V and intersects Wood at a Y.” Van pointed forward in two contradictory directions. “Downtown City is like a grid in your dreams. You sense its perpendicular logic, even though it collapses on itself before its integrity is established.” Van ran his index fingers along the contours of the avenue and the street, lowering his fingers as perspective took hold. Van brought his fingers and hands down together. “We’re at the beginning here.” The three stood looking down. With buildings to the left of them and the Federal Reserve Branch to the right, the three stood standing.
“I think we should take a picture,” Jim said.
“Yes,” Chris asserted.
Van shifted the aperture to 3.5 and the shutter to 125. He breathed in and the camera shuttered.
* * *
“Is that one of those change-em-up-cameras?” Jim asked of the camera tucked between Van’s ribs.
“I think that it is, Jim,” Chris replied, pointing to the camera bag.
“I can move whatever I want on this camera,” Van held the camera up to downtown, “and the world will change as well. Do you see that building up there? It’s made of aluminum—like foil. Have you ever held foil up to your eyes during an eclipse? Solar. Both the foil and the sun are at their best. And there’s the sun. Remember this image in your mind, and then think back to 1973. It’s too much to hold at once in your mind. Because of the sun, I suspect. No matter how many times you see the sunset, you can never remember how it looks. It’s always an object of reference, and never more. And the only reason you stopped looking at the sun directly is not because you carry its impression with you. You just remember that it burns to look up at midday.
“But I can capture that.” Van lifted his hand towards the rivers of the city; and behind them, the sun. “I can capture it in a moment. Or I can change it and then capture it.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Chris released. “Because it hasn’t changed.”
“The angles are the same,” Jim added.
* * *
“Where is that glass castle?” Chris asked, her voice lowering and arm rising in evocation.
Van raised his eyes. “That’s the Pittsburgh Plate Glass Company. It--”
“PPG,” Jim added.
“Yes…yes. It’s over towards the Mon River. It’s a complex of glass castles and mini-fortresses. The symmetry is unbelievable, and it expresses itself from any point of orientation. There’s a point up ahead that stands at the top of a natural isosceles. If we stand at the point and stare at thirty degrees, then we will have a castle of glass on our right and a citadel of stone on our left.
“Through the lens, both will be within view, and each will tend towards the other. In the pictures they will appear to meet just beyond the border of the image. The light will be bouncing off one, as it has been for years—different light, same path.
“On the left, shadows—adumbrations—will trace the image of the city jail. Inside, modern prisoners sit inside a medieval building for having committed ancient crimes.
“On the left there are no new crimes, and on the right the old ideas come together: castle and glass have met to form a glass castle.”
“It forms a shadow,” Chris observed. “Even though it’s glass.”
“It’s like a solar clock,” Jim said.
“Yes,” Van assented. “And the face of downtown is the face of a clock. Our movements are obscured by the shadow’s rotation. And so the sun tries not to shine too much, so we can feel important. If we go to the top of the natural triangle now, then the clock will be at nine; the base of the triangle and the arm of the clock being coincident upon the face of downtown. Let’s walk forward and look on downtown’s moustache.”
“I swear that last time it smiled,” Jim mumbled.
* * *
“There’s also another point that we can go to,” Van confessed, his fingers repeatingly clicking the unwilling advance of the camera.
“The Point?” Chris Ventured.
“Yeah. The Point. It’s the point where the city ends and the three rivers converge. It’s the point where the Ohio ends and two new rivers run at half its girth and maybe a quarter its glory.”
“Which rivers?” Chris asked.
“The Allegheny is what separates us from the Mexican War Streets of the North Side.” Van bodily turned left. “The bridges fan along the embankment past Washington’s Landing. Those bridges are old—with ornamentation and detail that belie their structure and underscore their crumble.”
“So that one is the Mon?” Jim pointed right.
“The Ohio begets the Allegheny and the Monongahela,” Van explained, running his fingers along Pittsburgh’s gentle cartography. “And the Allegheny affects the Fort Duquesne Bridge, the 16th Street Bridge, the 31st Street Bridge, the Highland Park Bridge, and several others that peek out from the river valley. The Monongahela affects the 10th Street Bridge, the Smithfield Street Overpass, the Fort Pitt Bridge, The Liberty Bridge, and the Old and the New Hot Metal Street Bridge, with veins of railroad tracks that delimit its borders.
“The rivers meet where they begin, at The Point. Everything is capitalized when we speak of rivers and their affects.
“As we stand here at The Point, I want you to feel its inherent capitalization. This is both the ad hoc dot on the i and the de facto capital of capital Downtown City.” Van began to point in emphatic rotation. “Forget the lowercase and picture the capitals: O…A…M…T…P…D…C. And then we and you and I become capitals by proximity and association.”
“Can we capture that?” Chris asked in excitement.
“We can certainly try.” Van reached to his side.
* * *
“I once read a poem about this spot,” Jim confessed as they stood above the city on Duquesne Hill.
“Do you remember the words?” Van asked.
“I don’t even remember the meter.”
“How do you know that it was about this point?” Van asked.
“Maybe I don’t,” Jim said.
“What are you saying?” Chris looked at Jim, her stare betraying her voice’s irritation.
“I don’t know. I think I just remember this place.”
“Perhaps you’ve been here before,” Van suggested.
“No. No. That’s not how I remember it. I remember it as a background, as a narrative of someone else’s telling. I don’t remember the words and I don’t remember the meter, but I distinctly remember hearing.”
“Perhaps you’ve been here before,” Van suggested.
* * *
“Across the way is Mount Washington,” Van accused.
“Oh, we’ve been there,” Chris said.
“Everyone has been there. Even people who have never been to Pittsburgh have been to Mount Washington. It’s the only spot in Pittsburgh that transcends Pittsburgh.”
“What do you mean?” Jim asked.
“Look at it. Do you feel them looking back?”
“Who?” Jim and Chris said in unison.
Van stopped himself. His immediate reaction, if unrestrained, would be to reply, “doorknob!” He imagined himself holding Chris’ arm at the joint, as he punched her in the shoulder. Though he would serve playful punches, they would sting, and she would hold on to Jim. Jim bounded would receive inaccurately tough left-handed punches. Jim bounded, he would look around furtively for a doorknob, and would spy Mother Mary’s grotto above the highway in short distance. Jim would see the candles and the ornaments that leave supplication’s remainder, and he would open his mouth as if to scream or cry. Instead, Ave Maria would be heard, above the highway and above the river, in the calm alto of a man not being punched in the shoulder for having said a word in unison with another in the absence of a doorknob.
Van looked at Jim and Chris and offered them mercy and pardon in a glance. “They are.” Van pointed to the heights and eventual plateau of Mount Washington. “Every person up there is looking at us. That’s all they do all the time. To go to Mount Washington, as a tourist or a resident, is to take on the life of a voyeur. And we make it okay through envy and imitation. We are all sinners in the eyes of Mount Washington.”
Jim and Chris stood watching Mount Washington with the guilt of a man who spends his days behind a keyhole. “You know, it’s not even a mountain,” Jim said accusingly. “It’s not a mountain or a mount. It’s a hill at best—maybe a mound.”
“Jim!” Chris said. “It’s beautiful, whatever it is.”
“Yes,” Van agreed in the tone of a blank stare.
“But,” Jim injected, “I thought that we agreed about Mount Washington. I thought that we decided that it was not all that it seems.”
“Beauty is never all that it seems,” Chris said, looking down at Pittsburgh beneath her and Mary’s Grotto beside her.
Jim looked about himself. “An angel by the dung,” he muttered.
Van looked by himself and then down river. “Look. You can see Ohio from here.”
“Really?” Jim and Chris said in unison.
A beat.
“I’d like to think so.”
* * *
“We should walk along the Crosstown Boulevard; it will take us into Oakland,” Van suggested. “All the cars will be driving in one direction, opposite us, and though we’ll be together, you’ll feel alone. More alone than you’ve felt in years. Together you’ll be alone. Everyone is alone on the Crosstown Boulevard.”
“Is that what you think of the seventies?” Chris asked. “That everyone was alone?”
“Hey, do you think that in the future everyone will have big feet?” Jim asked, uncomfortable with the current conversation.
“I suppose so,” Van said to no one in particular.
“Why? Why do you think that we were so lonely?” Chris asked.
“Because the future held so much promise, if only you’d forget the past and its premise. And a person without memory is lonely.”
Jim looked longingly at his feet.
“Let’s take the Crosstown Boulevard.” Van pointed. “It’s also quite dark.”
* * *
Napoleon checked his pulse under his breast pocket.
* * *
Entering Oakland from Downtown is sparse. One rounds Alexander’s corridor and bypasses the Shakespeare streets, stepping lightly into Oakland Town.
“The Carnegie Mellon University was built as a ship, with its Crow’s Nest looking always towards Pittsburgh. Oakland is the only neighborhood that is laid out upon a compass, with people speaking freely of extremes.
“And that is Pittsburgh’s elephant.” Van motioned over his shoulder. “It’s our secular cathedral—no capitals—our idol to ideas, and it’s visible from every point. As we stand here, you can look up with satisfaction knowing that we’ve out-elephanted Europe. We stand in the most ornate piazza, surrounded by the blackest cathedrals, in the midst of crowds that speak a cacophony of languages. But our flying buttresses are tamer and our designs more in line with geometry.
“The strangest thing is that the building tends to fade away under all the moderate lights. Except at sunrise, sunset, and at night when the head is awash in its own brilliance, the edifice stands down. It knows when it’s not looked at.
“I think that it’s too mundane in its intentions for us to photograph it. We should move on.”
As Van walked, Jim stood in place, transfixed by the size of the cathedral, staring at its details.
“Jim,” Chris called.
“The gargoyles are bent squares jutting violently out of the building, just,” Jim said, pointing at a secret spot.
“Do you want me to photograph it, Jim?” Van said.
“Call me Neezy.”
* * *
Chris patted Jim’s behind as if to imply that he was incorrigible.
* * *
When Roberto Clemente rounded third, he was probably thinking in Spanish.
* * *
Jim touched Chris’s neck as if it were the newest part of her body.
* * *
Between Oakland and Squirrel Hill Van said nothing to Chris said nothing to Jim said nothing to Van said nothing to Jim said nothing to Chris said nothing to Van. The ways between Oakland and Squirrel Hill are always uphill, and the walk tends to encourage contemplation. Since nothing was said, each thought the other was thinking. The walk between Oakland and Squirrel Hill takes sixteen minutes briskly or twenty-three minutes leisurely.
The first thing said after short periods of silence that feel long because silence keeps a false time always has an external air of complexity.
The first thing said after short periods of silence is always the hardest.
“Do you think about memory?” Van asked.
“All the time,” Chris snapped.
“And you’ve come to this conclusion? You know about the pictures.”
“After thirty years, yes.”
“Thirty-one,” Jim injected.
“What took so long?”
“Well, it wasn’t the only thing we were thinking about.”
“Still. Thirty-one years is a long time.”
“That’s actually what took so long. We had to realize that thirty-one years is not a long time. And that thought is elusive.”
“What?”
Jim assumed the explanation. “We probably lost the film about a year after we visited Pittsburgh last. Now picture this all on a timeline. We didn’t realize it for a few years; that’s why I can only say that it was probably a year after. We never developed the film, so we can only guess what it would look like, and could only try to remember each picture. But since we took the pictures and entrusted the memory to the camera, we found that we didn’t pay attention to the details of the images. But this realization took years to develop. By that time it was a new decade, so we deferred the thought for fear that it would lead us to a dead end. And we still kept the hope alive that maybe we’d find the film. It seemed so real that it couldn’t be lost. We continued to defer the thought because it seemed like such a long time, and every day added one more reason to postpone the impossible. Hope led to hope, deferred. Hope led to hope deferred, deferred.
“The more time that passed, the more that time plotted to seem irreversible. And every year seems further away from 1973 than the year before it. That’s a fact. Yet, secretly you hope that the year approaching will be a rerun, so you can repeat certain actions. That too is a fact.
“Eventually…eventually…eventually, you realize that you’ve been looking at it wrong. Yes time moves, but so do we. So it’s just a matter of catching up. And that is where the phrase comes from: Catching up. That too is a fact.”
“We’ve got eleven exposures left.”
“Are you sure?”
Van looked down into the lens of his camera and pushed the button. “I believe so.”
* * *
“Why don’t I take a picture of you two?”
“Yeah, okay, that sounds pretty alright.”
“Come together and back up.” Van pointed towards a handsome house with a linked fence and a fast car. “Stand in front of that car.”
Jim and Chris locked shoulders and backed up without looking.
“Further. Keep going back. Lean on the car.”
“It’s not ours,” Chris yelled.
“We’re just taking its picture. We’re not violating it.”
“It’s why the car’s here,” Jim whispered to her.
As Jim and Chris leaned lightly on the car, Van took an out of focus picture of them.
* * *
As Chris and Jim leaned on the car, something happened. In an instant cacophony ran rampant. The car began to ring loudly and menacingly. A dog barked and jumped bodily on the chain link fence. Any second, people would emerge from every corner and every alley to spy who was out of line. Jim and Chris launched from the car. Van had preset the shutter speed to 1000, but he knew that the image would still come out blurry.
* * *
“Why are there so many hills in this city?”
“I don’t know.”
* * *
Van checked his camera and how many pictures he had left as they entered Squirrel Hill. The little window showed both 16 and 17, and Van was beginning to grow tired, so he assumed 17. Van held the camera as far from his body that he could with arms outstretched, and the lens facing the neighborhood. He decided that he would use the last pictures in Squirrel Hill. Van pushed the button, advanced, and thought 6.
* * *
“Is Squirrel Hill called Squirrel Hill for the obvious reasons?” Jim asked.
“Because of the squirrels and the hills?”
“Yes.”
“I suppose so. I can’t imagine another reason,” Van admitted.
“Well, you know that Chicago is not called The Windy City because of the wind.”
“Really?”
“Yes. It has something to do with Lincoln and Douglas and their debates.”
“They were windy…or long winded?”
“I guess so, what with the house divided.”
“You don’t think that it has anything to do with all the wind in the city?”
“That’s not what I hear.”
“Can’t it be both?”
“No. I don’t think so,” Jim asserted.
“Well, then I suppose that Squirrel Hill may have nothing to do with the squirrels or the hills. But I’d like to believe that it does.”
“So would I.”
* * *
“Hey Van. Hey.” The man waiting always for the bus motioned towards Van. “How’s that caravan?” Van, Chris, and Jim began to walk across the street towards the man with the sewn lapels. “Dolly Parton’s dead, isn’t she?” he whispered solemnly to Van.
“I think that she is,” Jim replied in a replicated but sincere solemnity.
“Hey, hey, Van, is that a camera? Do you want to take my picture and then we can talk?”
Van held up his camera by the lens. “How about I take a picture of the three of you? How does that sound?”
“Oh…okay. And then we can talk?”
“Yeah.”
Jim and Chris intimately flanked the man for the moment. The man went awkwardly limp, and his smile covered the neighborhood. His wrinkles spelled a dignity that took years to acquire, as his eyes depressed and his mouth ascended. Van focused tightly on the three and depressed the button effortlessly.
Van and the man began to walk in a singular direction. “What do you want to talk about?”
“A five-dollar woman!” The man’s bellow belied their secrecy.
“Okay,” Van went into his pocket.
“And mashed potatoes.”
“Six ninety-eight.”
* * *
“I think that this roll’s just about finished,” Van said looking down at his camera window in order to avoid looking directly at Jim and Chris.
“Really? That was twenty-four?” Chris said, realizing the implications.
“Yes.”
“That doesn’t sound right,” Jim joined in.
“No, it doesn’t,” Van admitted. “But it is.”
“It seems off,” Chris began. “It seems like a little bit of a…a…”
Jim continued, “Betrayal.”
“Yes.” Chris closed.
Van assented.
