AIR RIGHTS

The French Church—never much on looks, red brick leaningin the direction of Romanesque—settled into modest circumstanceshow many decades on West 16th?Nothing divine in the details,veneer peeling from doors nevermeant for here, never open. No light,evenings, through colored glass,though by day you could discern,twenty feet above the sidewalk,Christ stepping onto the waters of Galilee,sea and savior oiled by exhaust,nearly indistinguishable. Weeknights,downstairs, a dozen groups renouncedat length crystal or alcohol, skin or smoke,and what each circle resisted glowedat the center of their ring of chairs,nearly visible; there you could consecraterelinquishment, or find someone already ruinedto pursue whatever made you, for the night,unsinkable. The rent, collected each timethey passed the hat, kept the church afloat.Of the congregation eight souls remained,Haitian evangelicals. Only onceI saw someone mount the stairstoward those slapdash doors—who could have missed her?Under a plane tree clearly consideringgiving up all ambition, an idling towncar’srear door opened, she stepped out,and I knew at once that if she’d everbeen thwarted, she simply summonedmore of some alloy of metal and willshe drew up from beneath the pavement,maybe from Haiti itself, from generationsthat stood unbending in her.In her green hat, in the forgiving archwaysof her dress, her capacious black purse,she conquered the stairs, and raised her handto open the door. Just once.The meeting schedule disappearedfrom the basement entry’s wire-gridded glass,the rooms stayed dark, addicts no longersmoking and talking under the miserable tree.Twilights, before they were gone, I’d walkthrough a climate so thick I could almost taste it,meet the gaze of men whose eyes lockedinto mine. Was this the night they knewwas coming, the night they’d fall?I recognized them, I wantedto put my hand into the woundat their sides, that we might be realto one another. A barrier went uparound the entry, papered with signsand permits, and an ‘artist’s rendering’—fourteen stories clad in bluestone,suspended above the somehowfreshened brick of the church.A flyer in our vestibule said they’d soldthe space between their sanctuaryand heaven for a cool eight million,and units in what would bethe highest stepped-back Nineveh toweron our block: raise the faithful high,plunge the neighbors into shadow.Workers boxed the plane tree’s trunkin a cage of 2 × 4s, heavy equipment scoopeda new foundation, hammered the pilings in.How do they stand it, in Cairo or Rome,when any shaft in sand reaches downfive thousand years? Bad enough in New York:artifacts of quarantine and revolt,bullets that did or didn’t strike rioters,squatters or immigrants, Irish or black.Cemetery slabs etched with the hexof David’s star. Oyster middens,pipe-stems, crockery stamped with eaglesand shields. And in the Historical Society,dug from a site like this one,an object I can’t forget,nightmare thing, its plutonium half-lifestill ticking: brass shackles,superbly made, locked into placeby a brass bar, sized to fitthe wrists of a child.That sign the angel placed outsideof Eden, forbidding re-entry?No arrow, but these joined zeroesfetched up out of the mud,their poison seeping intothe groundwater. The backhoe clawed,rebar spiked its way up, and some daystraffic stopped while the concrete mixer’srotating drum poured into place moreof the solid substance of our block.The city stopped work more than once.I saw, where they’d poured the footinga little short, workers float a three-inch layeralong the top of the foundation: sure to crack,maybe one day bring the whole thing down?Though walking home, after hours,late winter, I found towering at midnight’s centera vertical representation of heaven,nine episodes of the exaltations of light:builders’ lamps diffused by silver ceiling joists,filtered through layers of tarps,an unfinished model of the spirit’s progress,a pilgrim ladder. Where did it lead?Each story occupied a rectangleof what once was formless,unglazed windows openingon a flecked and spattered galactic swirl …Up there above the streets,might not desire be articulated,spoken till seen through?Half-finished, swathed in black netting,translucent scrims veiling the lightsleft burning within, that buildingwould never be so beautiful again.Thank you, Haitian evangelicals, for that.Now the Bradford pears opendusty blooms against scaffoldingcrowning the new Barney’s down the block,and black girders sketch out more floorsabove a French Church cagedin spars of steel, wave-walking Jesusshadowed by the bristling supportsof a terrace just above. Do the faithfullook up toward a future in a world of light,more square feet? More power to them;who doesn’t want a privacy to fill with memoryor anticipation, room for the selfto billow out in dreaming?The shadow pooling the street’s grown cooler,gained in depth. Sometimes I walka city block and notice everyone’slooking at a screen, or talking to someonewho’s somewhere else, so that seemsto thin out, dispersed and characterless.I miss the addicts. I’ve done timein that school of longing and resistance,a sometime citizen of the knotI threaded nights on my way to anywhere,under what the builders have choppedto a lame, broken arm of a tree.Nearly everything we said beneath itconcerned our endless desires,