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  The 59th Street Bridge, Manhattan, 1910.

  So the Golden Ratio—that’s the point in Debussy where you get that tipping feeling. A length, whether in space or in time (here, obviously, we mean time), is divided in two: the proportion of the smaller to the longer segment is the same as the relation of the longer segment to the whole. Algebraically the situation is expressed

  If you’ve studied math you can easily solve this equation. (I guess.) It’s an irrational number:

  which is pretty close to 1.618, but it’s irrational so the actual number would go on and on to infinity, just as irrational people do.

  Artists, sculptors, composers, architects have intuitively hit on this proportion for centuries. No one really knows why the relationship is so powerfully pleasing aesthetically, but it seems to transcend cultures, media, ages. It’s embedded in the Egyptian pyramids, in Japanese woodcuts, in the Acropolis in Athens, in Islamic mosques, in paintings by Leonardo, who called it the divina proportione, the divine proportion.

  Let’s say, for example—and this is what happened to me, this was how I found out—you feel a pulled muscle in your neck after lifting weights like a good young man of Midwestern stock does, and you ignore it and then you notice it again a few weeks later and you go to a doctor who tells you it’s a virus and it’s sure to go away, but for some reason you have a nagging feeling about it so you go see another guy who pushes a needle into your neck and tells you it’s probably just a virus but it could be a tumor but even if it is, it’s probably benign, and then he goes to Barbados for a week and comes back and says, tanner, that it is in fact a tumor and it is in fact malignant, and then you go see a third doctor, but the first doctor with a mustache (for that matter, a mustache and a bow tie, as if his office were in a building of cast iron and glass, with a skylight in the ceiling and a fountain at the bottom, as if he would sing with his friends in a tavern after work), and he says you should do chemotherapy twelve times at two-week intervals. The Golden Ratio would apply thusly:

  Just about where it happened, just about where it tipped: the weight seems to pile up behind you like a shadow lengthening millimeter by millimeter, until it alights upon an invisible point and the scale moves level—the peak of the roller coaster: where you are, compared to where you’re going, equals what you have left, compared to how much you’ve done. Does that make sense? For some reason it reminds me of that great scene in Steven Spielberg’s masterpiece of Jewish mysticism, Raiders of the Lost Ark, where Indiana Jones, in Cairo and in keffiyeh—Han Solo playing T. E. Lawrence—is standing in the secret “map room” the Nazis have discovered. It’s a room with a perfectly scaled three-dimensional model of ancient Cairo, very much like the three-dimensional model of Lower Manhattan I saw at Ground Zero, after September 11, showcasing the work of another Jewish mystic, Daniel Libeskind (MA, University of Essex). Professor Jones (PhD, University of Chicago) has already explained to two government Nazi-hunters (one fat, the other thin) that the map room will divulge the hiding place of Moses’s tablets inscribed with the Ten Commandments. If a prismatic medallion is stuck on the end of a staff and then fitted into a hole in the floor, a beam of sunlight, entering the chamber through a single fenestration, drawing its spotlight slowly along the room, will at a certain moment pass through the prism, focusing the sun’s rays, with a baleful intensity, into a kind of laser beam that points to the hiding place of Moses’s tablets. (Did Osama bin Laden, a man without a degree, have a model of my city in an underground map room?)

  The Acropolis, Athens, Greece.

  The Taj Mahal and the Yamuna River, Agra, India.

  I had been such a model patient up until that night, the night of the Golden Ratio, and stepping out from the hospital into the river’s breeze on York Avenue, I suddenly realized I was Indiana Jones disguised as an Arab, and it was time to tear off the keffiyeh (what is ethnicity, anyway, besides a keffiyeh?), throw it to the ground, and go find the Ark of the Covenant. The shadow cast by the toxicity of the chemo had reached the right length: the steroids were burning through the prism, creating a laser beam. I set out on foot, fast. No question of going home, downtown, by subway: no possibility of grabbing a cab: what was of utmost importance at this moment was the traction of concrete against my shoes, the physical movement of my deteriorating body, the aging fighter, the right hook of the disease and the left hook of treatment. What if Harrison Ford had played Jake LaMotta? George Lucas wanted somebody else for Indiana Jones: he didn’t want Harrison to be seen as his “De Niro.” It was late, and the sky seemed blacker and the lights of the buildings and the cars seemed brighter than normal. I recalled reading somewhere on one of those orange pamphlets that one of the side effects of one of the drugs was “changes in vision.” Everything seemed slightly crushed in, like I was viewing things through a narrow-angled lens. The city took on the magical aspect of a miniature model—tiny points of light applied with the skill and patience of some anonymous Persian artisan. New York, which I usually felt as a massive, comforting presence around me, had tightened into the knot of a Mediterranean city. The neighborhoods were flashing by: the east sixties, now the desolate east fifties, now the skyscrapers of east midtown and now—for those of you on the left side of the cabin—the sharply soft green jewel of the United Nations building, so lonely and lovely alone against the raging sea of the East River, like helpless Andromeda, ready to be sacrificed to the sea monster, chained to the rock, the Vermont marble, a rectangle of divine proportions, Stanley Kubrick’s lunar monolith patiently housing the Ark of the Covenant.

  And then I was in the east twenties and I went into a bar and downed a martini. That’s what we do, I remember thinking: we break things up and shatter them so we can put them back together, otherwise what would we do? Because we need something to do. And the pieces don’t quite fit back together, forming something new and that’s called growth, like the same furniture in a new apartment. The glass of the fourth martini was a glinting lens, through which I could see for the first time what I had in fact been feeling, which might be described as terror. But terror now was the image of a frozen explosion that could no longer cause harm and was therefore safe to view, to touch even, like a child’s finger against the surprisingly velvety skin of an Egyptian cobra, safely held by its trainer; the child had been squealing in fear, partly real and partly feigned: a benefit performance for her young parents, and now the child is silent, utterly absorbed, tracing patterns on the snake-scales, gauging the differences in skin.

  The United Nations Secretariat Building Façade, New York.

  Children have these famously brief attention spans. I left the bar. It was chilly now. I walked through Union Square, empty, through ghosts. I was walking down the same street a relative of mine, Will Cody, had rode down on a white horse on September 4, 1884. It was a lavish parade welcoming his circus, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West and Congress of Rough Riders of the World, to New York. Triumphant arches spanned the street, strewn with ribbons. Marksmen on horses; wagon trains; white scouts; Pawnee actors. The whole city watched, wearing top hats and mustaches. A five-year-old building—Madison Square Garden—housed the circus. Will would make a thrilling entrance onstage, on horseback. The spectacle ended with the destruction of an entire mining colony by a cyclone, like the one in The Wizard of Oz. Incredible special effects for the time: a tunnel was drilled under the Garden, through city blocks, to a state-of-the-art mechanical ventilator. When the tornado hit, the ventilator was switched on, spewing specially assembled dry leaves and newspapers into the Garden, spilling into the first few front rows of thrilled spectators. The only member of my family I knew who remembered Will was my Aunt Edna: she had sat on his lap when she was six or seven. We all know ghosts, it’s the sensation when one revisits a place one hasn’t visited in a long time: my grandparents’ home, a playground, a movie theater that’s been converted into a restaurant. I walked past the apartment of a woman I had slept with, once, shortly after I’d moved to New York. That hadn’t been th
at long ago. But it seemed closer to the time of Will’s triumphant night. Again, the diseased are highly suspicious animals. Why was the recent past so telescoped? Because, perhaps, I was ready to die? Fight the telescoping, I told myself. Bring that night with the girl back, close. Put it closer, make it yesterday. Connect it to this moment with a hydraulic wind tunnel: let it be a bridge, not an exit: let the dry leaves and newspapers simulate the destruction of a model mining colony.

  I entered my neighborhood bar. It was hot inside, moist from the kitchen and from the proximity of so many people, most of whom I know. I had been a frequent habitué; I would stop by almost every evening for a beer or two, as would many in the neighborhood. A cross section of my neighborhood, TriBeCa: older artists who’d never really made it as big as their old friends who now lived in Rome or South Africa or who had died, and had paintings at the Whitney or the Met. But these guys were doing fine, they’d bought lofts for no money at all in the early 1970s and were millionaires, at least on paper. I sat down next to a friend of mine, an employee of Con Edison, a big man, tattooed, military haircut, whose machismo was tempered by his choice of drink, a tiny glass of Dewar’s and soda with a cherry. He was a devoted father of two daughters, unhappily married, who was having an affair with a bright young waitress from somewhere in Ontario, who herself was living with a high-level cocaine dealer in a luxury three-bedroom apartment on Greenwich Avenue. He dealt to the movie stars and famous musicians and sons of presidents who lived in the area, and whom we rarely saw. I was in his apartment once, when I was sleeping with the waitress’s best friend. The place was spotless, and, yes, there were sugar bowls with the finest stuff I’d ever had; a luxury condo with luxury cocaine.

  Our local homeless schizophrenic sat down at the bar next to me; he’s a jazz aficionado who had tried, one night, to convince me that Thelonious Monk was still alive, that he’d just seen him play the night before, uptown: or rather, he didn’t play. The trio—bass, drums, guitar—played a piece as a warmup and then, to applause, Monk made his thrilling entrance, as if on horseback. He sat down in front of the piano and raised his hands straight up into the air. “Like yoga!” my friend said. “Fucking nigger’s doing yoga!” Monk lowered his hands toward the keyboard, a descent stretched over fifteen silent minutes, the audience rapt. His fingers, those incredible hands from which had emanated a chapter of music history, a millimeter above the keys. Then in an instant they rose slightly, slammed the lid over the keyboard with a brittle clash, and he ran offstage. The trio paused, then started another number. Monk never returned.

  And here comes into the bar the restaurant crowd from the swanky establishments in the neighborhood, among the finest in the city, in their black suits, Americans, Italians, Frenchmen. Sous-chefs, managers, sommeliers, maitre d’s, line cooks. All were surprised to see me. They were delighted. All of these restaurant guys were late-nighters, inveterate cokeheads. The familiar signal, no words. Not even a gesture. A look. Because the instant they discover you’re an aficionado, you’ve gained membership in a private club, a secret society, and at the beginning the initiation fees are waived, such is the delight the senior members share at recruiting a young pledge. The meetings are held in bathrooms of bars and clubs throughout the city, and usually one must wait and listen to an entirely uninteresting monologue by the friend while he goes through the ritual of carefully (or not so carefully, depending on the level of intoxication) dumping the white powder on the shelf in front of the bathroom mirror, crushing the clumps with the pressure of a MetroCard, the old ridged wood serving as the mortar, the flimsy yellow plastic the pestle. We grind away, in titillating anticipation. Oddly, and disappointingly, these monologues often focus on politics: another tirade against the Bush doctrine, a new senator’s tribulations in Albany, the pros and cons of a female in the White House, the virtues of a presidential candidate and whether he’s black or white. Depending on time—there’s always the added excitement of paranoia, waiting for a knock at the door—the instrument of inhalation might be the classic, tightly rolled twenty-dollar bill. Senior members of the club might carry a short, thick plastic straw with a diagonally shorn end like the forty-five-degree angle at the top of Citicorp Center on Fifty-Third and Lexington. If time is pressing, the end of a house key transports the clump of powder to the nostril. The bathroom setting adds a nice tawdriness to the atmosphere of self-congratulation, and if it’s a coed meeting, a celebratory erotic interlude is usually a foregone conclusion. The slight surge of adrenaline hits in about twenty seconds and if the powder has any degree of purity at all—which is not always the case—the clean, white thrust of pleasure is comparable to mountain air, the Rockies or even the Italian Alps. (I’ve never been to Nepal. Had plans to go, once.)

  I felt the drug relax into the bloodstream and that little tightening up and opening at the same time, and life’s pressures at last presented themselves individually, conscripted, with perfect upbringing before retiring with a bow. I thought of an old movie where the passage of time was conveyed by the pages of a daily calendar being manually pulled away. After the amount of poison I’d dumped into my body for the last few weeks, what on earth could be harmed by a half a gram of cocaine? And now it was the blissful refuge of a sudden rainstorm in the city, wherein everyone pretends to be inconvenienced, but they’re secretly relieved: they’re all on the phone, they look out through the office window, at the clouds, probably at about the same moment, probably looking at the same building with the diagonally shorn top. Beautiful dark blue, dark grey. Cocaine’s quiet, smug euphoria. The light that brings out the truly urban hues. For the moment—demand nothing.

  •

  Because you hate the disease, you hate yourself for having the disease. You don’t want to die: it’s the opposite of suicidal; the source of the rage and shame is in the will to live itself. You want to annihilate your diseased self in some kind of life-affirming self-immolation. You don’t want to be the sick one. The diseased are repulsive; you sequester yourself as the sick were sequestered in a medieval city. But it’s not suicidal. My college roommate was suicidal. He was profoundly sad; he had lost his mother at seven and never fully recovered from this. He was one of the most intelligent people I’d ever known but more than this he was curious. He was conservative, a fan of William F. Buckley and a Reaganite, but was never judgmental. When I say “sad,” such a banal word, I think it really is perhaps the best one, better than despairing or melancholic; he was always in good humor, always wry. I had just flown back from Paris—I’d been listening to Debussy on the plane, had a lay-over in New York, the plane tipped, and we descended, and the sun was going down, and the Empire State Building looked orange and it cast a little shadow as we came down, then we went up again and I landed in Chicago—and the front door to the tiny old farmhouse we rented in Evanston was open in spite of the cold. The television in the living room was on, and there were two empty bottles of scotch on the floor, one standing, the other on its side. I remember wondering when it had stopped rolling. My landlord was standing there, with a bunch of policemen. “So you’ve heard?” he said. “I can see, the way your face looks.” He’d figured I’d heard, I realized later, not because of my face, but because it was all over local TV. My roommate had finished up the two bottles of scotch sometime the previous night, left the house, and ran down Sheridan Road to the cemetery. He found a gravestone large enough to serve as a bed—a sarcophagus, really—and he took off his clothes and lay on it. His family was still trying to fly out of Denver so I had to identify the body at the morgue. It was the first time I’d seen a corpse. My roommate was somewhat disfigured by the frozen tissue but perfectly recognizable, and what was strange was not so much the traces of life in the corpse, but, retrospectively, how the traces of death, so definitive now, had been latent in the living self.