The Long Take: A noir narrative

Also by Robin Robertson

POETRY

A Painted Field

Slow Air

Swithering

The Wrecking Light

Hill of Doors

Sailing the Forest: Selected Poems

LIMITED EDITIONS

Camera Obscura

Actaeon: The Early Years

TRANSLATION

The Deleted World

Medea

Bacchae

AS EDITOR

32 Counties

Mortification

Love Poet, Carpenter

MUSIC

Hirta Songs

(with Alasdair Roberts)

THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK

PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

Copyright © 2018 by Robin Robertson

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York. Originally published in hardcover in Great Britain by Picador, an imprint of Pan Macmillan, London, in 2018.

www.aaknopf.com

Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of

Penguin Random House LLC.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Robertson, Robin, [date] author.

Title: The long take, or a way to lose more slowly / Robin Robertson.

Description: First American edition. | New York : Alfred A. Knopf, 2019.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018008737 (print) | LCCN 2018014292 (ebook) | ISBN 9780525655220 (ebook) | ISBN 9780525655213 (alk. paper)

Classification: LCC PR6068.O1925 (ebook) | LCC PR6068.O1925 L66 2018 (print) | DDC 821/.914—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018008737

Cover photograph: Hill Street Tunnels in the Fog by Howard Maxwell/Los Angeles Times

Cover design by Tyler Comrie

Ebook ISBN 9780525655220

v5.4

a

In memory of

Alistair MacLeod

Jason Molina

Jean Stein

cos cheum nach gabh tilleadh

CONTENTS

Cover

Also by Robin Robertson

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Map

1946

1948

1951

1953

CREDITS

Notes

Epilogue

Acknowledgements

A Note About the Author

1946

And there it was: the swell

and glitter of it like a standing wave –

the fabled, smoking ruin, the new towers rising

through the blue,

the ranked array of ivory and gold, the glint,

the glamour of buried light

as the world turned round it

very slowly

this autumn morning, all amazed.

And it stayed there, watching,

as they made toward it,

the truck-driver and the young man,

under pylons, wires, utility poles,

past warehouses, container parks,

deserted lots, between the long

oily marshes, landfill sites and swamps,

before slipping down

under the Hudson, and coming up

on the other side

to find a black wetness

of streets trashed and empty

and the city gone.

‘Try the docks. They can always use men.’

It was in me, burning like a coal-seam fire. The road.

Back there in Broad Cove, on the island, it was just working the mines or the boats. Taking on the habit of the old ones – the long stare out to sea – becoming like a thorn tree, twisted hard to the shape of the wind, its grain following the grain of the weather; cloth caps and tweed, ruddy, raw-boned faces, wet eyes, silences that lasted weeks; the women wringing red hands or dishcloths or the necks of chickens just to make more silence.

He walks. That is his name and nature.

Rows of buildings, all alike,

doors and windows, people going in, looking out;

inside – halls and stairs, halls and stairs,

and more doors, opening and closing.

Street after street of buildings, all the same.

People, all the same.

The clutter and color: everything

moving on the street, and across it, straight lines

and diagonals. Drugstores, grocery stores,

snack joints, diners. Missions. Bars.

Blocks. Corners. Intersections.

A dropped crate or a child’s shout, or car

backfiring, and he’s in France again,

that taste in his mouth. Coins. Cordite. Blood.

So loud. And bright. No place to ease the eyes. To hide. So this is what happens between one night and the next: this is day. A never-ending rehearsal with a cast that changes all the time but never gets it right. Dropping things. Walking into each other. Tripping on the curb. Every door, every window, opening and closing, automobiles sliding past, the calls of the vendors, shrieks of children, horses and carts, trolley-cars and delivery trucks. People in a hurry, in every direction, wired to some kind of a grid. Maybe from up high you could see a plan for it all, like a model-train layout. Not down here though. Everything’s going too fast and there are too many people and cars and I’m holding on to this stop-sign because I’m frightened and I know I’m going to die.

A hard migraine of color-clash, daggering light,

and sun laid out everywhere in white flags.

Not a shadow in this world.

The road invisible under heavy snow: a clean and softened land, fluent and dazzling down to the ocean’s slate. The only color is the lichen clinging to twigs, bright as pollen, and back at the house, the berries of the rowan tree, one arm across the door.

Night.

The city’s gone.

In its place, this gray stone maze, this

locked geometry of shadows, blind and black,

and angles hurt into the sky, symmetries breaking

and snapping back into line.

The green Zs of fire-escapes; wires criss-

crossing what’s left of the light

to a tight mesh.

The buildings close

around a dead-end, then

spring open to the new future: repetition,

back-tracking, error, loss.

Father just stood at the door. ‘The war was one thing, but this is another. You’re the first of us to leave in a hundred and seventy years.’

He wanted to see this country, so he did:

the benches of Hanover Square at dawn,

Fanelli’s, the Spot, the White Horse,

the parks, the pawn shops, the 15-cent diners,

the Green Door, the Marathon, the Garden Bar,

a Beekman Street archway with a drink after dark.

He’d surprise his reflection in a store window:

see the curly-haired boy with his fishing pole;

the skinny white soldier with blank eyes,

getting thinner.

He walks among ghosts.

Never sees the same face twice.

He navigated by the sun

when he could find it between the buildings, the canyons.

The subways are rivers, underground,

flash-flooding every five minutes

in a pulse of people.

People from all over, all colors, a hundred languages:

Italian, Polish, Russian, German, Yiddish,

Spanish from the Mexicans, the Puerto Ricans,

that Chinese – like a tape running backward, at speed.

People; just like him.

Having given up the country for the city,

boredom for fear, the faces

gather here in these streets

like spectators in a dream.

They wanted to be anonymous

not swallowed whole, not to disappear.

Now they spend their days on South Street

or down at the Battery, their nights

in the Bowery flophouses, the cage-hotels,

tight packed like herrings in a creel.

Cold as Candlemas. A skin of ice

on the water-glass by the bed

is the only thing that doesn’t shake under the rails

of the 3rd Avenue El overhead.

Through the gray net curtain,

above the tenements outside, the sky

jitters awake like a loose connection;

lightning glows behind the walls of cloud.

Somewhere, up north of here,

is the Chrysler, and the Empire State.

Somewhere south there’s Liberty.

Going down into the subway by the same metaled stairs

as that troop ship in Southampton: the hot churn

and thundering of the machine,

riveted corridors and halls, darkness, sudden light, dead air,

the clattering echo of footsteps on steel.

The white, unseeing eyes.

It was all about timing. Waiting to jump from the scramble net down the side of the merchant ship to the LCA below. Trying to find the rhythm of it: the swell of the water, the boats colliding. Your best chance was just before the landing craft slammed against the ship’s hull. Mistiming the jump meant drowning or crushing. You got it right. Picked yourself up. The steel deck slippery with vomit.

Up on the El, trying to keep warm

near the old pot-bellied stove

by the change-booth and turnstiles,

he liked to lean over,

watch the people seething below:

a river of hats

following a current, streaming round obstacles

then re-forming: gray and brown and black.

It came to him then.

You can never step into the same city twice.

That was it.

Living here was like trying to cross a river in spate

and he’d just found his footing,

or at least a way of looking at it – from a distance.

Close up, nothing here was beautiful,

and so much now was a close-up shot.

He needed to re-calibrate, focus on all this

new geometry, light and shadow, black and white:

take the long view. Like staring out to sea.

Sea-sick from the gridded streets,

the brick towers and mirrors and

black-drop canyons

he fixed, queasily,

on the steady line of Brooklyn Bridge.

He found a room, a fifth-floor walk-up on Water Street

for six dollars a week, and no down-payment needed

for the de-mobbed

with his veteran pin.

He got hired the next day in the shape-up;

found himself a box-hook and a job on the docks.

Ice webbed the wooden pilings,

the ice-spill opaque and raised

and slippery-smooth like dried glue.

Back home, the sea would be chipped granite,

shale, anthracite blue; terns sipping the waves,

cheeping low over a run of mackerel

before the whelming breach of a humpback, or a pilot whale.

The smell of stewed tea and wet clothes, smuts from the oil lamps, the valves in the radio like embers, glowing; the penetrating, never-ending rain – and winter, like a white door closing for six months. Skipping Mass at St Margaret’s. Gazing out over the gunmetal sea.

He would watch the river all day for that moment:

when the tide reaches slack

and the bottles afloat on the surface are completely still.

The slap of waves against the rocky shingle

like the distant crackle and crump

of small arms or mortars, or the flap of wet tarpaulin.

A block away, in the pearl dusk, some whore

worked-over for a dollar bill; dancing now,

face down, in the Hudson.

In the bath-house, where he went every week,

the usual hair and yellowed Kleenex in the shower-room’s gutter,

the Band-Aids in the pool; the usual chat

in the steam-room, sitting on the slatted wood,

no dog-tags now, just the St Christopher:

‘Hey, bud, what goes? Where you staying?’

‘The Mills. Flophouse on Bleecker – a real dump,

but it’ll do till I get things straightened out.

What about you?’

‘Got outta the joint last week. Gonna see a friend of mine.

Make a meet, y’know? Says he’s got a job for me.’

‘No kidding?

When the whole thing was over,

when we got back home,

I thought there’d be a job for me too.’

Then the slow retreat of winter. Spring’s advent and reprieve. You’d see drift ice from the Arctic, which sometimes passed so near you could hear the songs of the seals voyaging there on those gray shelves of ice.

At night, the river rolls and turns like oil

under the bridges,

in through the slips.

He walked for hours –

following the glow

in the sky uptown he’d been told

was the lights of Times Square –

his shadow moving with him

below the streetlamps: dense, tight,

very black and sharp, foreshortened, but already

starting to lengthen as he goes, attenuating

to a weak stain. Then back in

under another streetlight, shadow

darkening again, clean and hard.

Who he really is, or was,

lies somewhere in between.

Watching Ride the Pink Horse

then Out of the Past the same week at the Majestic:

New Mexico and Acapulco on the screen, with ice and rain outside.

The projector’s cone of light above their heads in the darkness,

the way the smoke from their cigarettes

went up into it, twisted and bloomed.

The hawthorn hangs like mist in the valleys. The gorse bright against the melting snow, with its smell of coconut on the high sea cliffs; the mayflower opening its sweetness in the black wood.

He moved to the fish market

where the work was easier, safer, the crates smaller,

and you could see those lovelies, from all down the coast:

Portland, Maine, to Cape Canaveral.

Late April, into May, was flounder, whiting, monkfish, hake,

striped bass and mackerel, and, briefly, Hudson River shad.

Shad fillet and roe from Carmine’s or Whyte’s:

the best fish he’d had in years.

One day he lifted some lobster boxes onto his barrow,

and stared at the stamp showing

MacLeod’s Point, Ingonish, N.S.

He saw the little harbor, the blue boats,

Star of the Sea, The Rover, Màire Bàn;

the old hand-woven pots.

The faces of the very fishermen.

The bay boiling with the capelin scull coming in, and the codfish after them – and after them the heave of whales. Like waves of black weed the small fish roll and beach, twining and flipping silver on the sand, where the women wait with their nets and baskets, on the same stretch of shore where the capelin come, each year, to spawn, to signal spring.

Central Park: a clearing

in this forest of stone;

a fire-gap among the ziggurats

that’s cut in living green.

In the stringency of early-morning light

he walked through a may-storm of petals,

the pink of cherry-blossom thick in the gutter

and filling every crack in the sidewalk.

He heard a sound like a slide whistle:

whoit whoit whoit whoit

and there, in that tree, unbelievably,

a