The Sylphs Of The Chrysler Tower

The Sylphs of the Chrysler Tower

By Mick Hale


When Lovemore got off the ship he was in Brooklyn. Three months on the ocean made him want to kiss the ground. The fact he was in America made him want to kiss the ground. Lovemore wasn't a man who hid things. He got down on his knees and kissed the ground.

"Lovemore," another sailor said. "You like American germs?"

"I'll take them into my heart," Lovemore answered.

He collected his pay and made his way to Chinatown, where he rented a room. The landlord wasn't Chinese. He was a guy named Lucky.

"I got three buildings," Lucky said. "You meet a woman, you want to start a family, you come see me. I'll get you a bigger apartment."

Lucky stood there looking at the man.

"Where you from?" he asked.

"I am from Natal. In South Africa. I am Zulu."

"Zulu, huh? That's different. The girls will like that."

Lovemore had no time for girls. He had to find a job. Lovemore's mama gave him a big smile. Lovemore's papa taught him to respect hard work. He walked the city streets, looked at the cars and people, breathed in the buzz and thought, "This city is mine."

Eight million souls, each day a death match between ambition and desire, and Lovemore just took it in and smiled. "This city is mine."

The city had other ideas.

Two weeks went by, then three. Every morning Lovemore looked in his wallet. The city ate his cash.

After five weeks he finally got some work.

The Hudson Diner was owned by a guy named Gino.

"We're open twenty-four/seven," Gino said. "You work the night shift."

Breakfast at the Hudson was Wall Street ramping up for a day of gobble-gobble, let's make money. Lunch was cubicle mavens with thirty minutes and tuna on rye. The night shift? Cops, junkies, whores and musicians, a whole flotsam of wired eyeballs and rapid-fire mouths, couples looking for the Holland Tunnel, loners looking for neon love. The night shift was the city on speed. Lovemore loved every minute of it.

The night shift was also Angie. Lovemore had never met anyone like Angie.

Angie was from Coney Island and worked as a waitress at the diner.

"You come out to my mother's house, Lovemore. She'll make you dinner, you won't have to eat for a week."

"Would your mother like it if you bring a Zulu man home?" Lovemore asked.

"I bring you home as a boyfriend, she's going to have issues. She's old school. But I bring you home as a boyfriend you got bigger problems anyway. I go out with this guy Kenny. He's a fireman. You look at me crooked, he breaks you in half."

Sometimes, in the middle of the night, Kenny parked the fire truck outside the diner. Lovemore liked the man. Kenny usually ate at the counter and tipped Lovemore, as well as Angie.

"You know what I think we got to do, Angie?" Kenny said one night.

"Go for a ride in your truck to the river and make-out?" Angie asked.

"The chief sees me doing that, nothing nice will happen."

"So?"

"We got to find Lovemore here an American woman."

Kenny started pounding the counter, singing a song Lovemore didn't know called 'American Woman.' In his homeland people sang all the time, at work, walking down the road, it didn't take much to make a Zulu sing, but it was strange to hear this fireman's voice. His rhythm was like a one-legged locust bug. Lovemore watched Kenny put on his hat and walk singing out the door.

There were regular customers at the Hudson. They came in every night and Lovemore learned their names.

Kyle. He weighed three hundred pounds and always had pancakes with a side of bacon. Father McGinty. He worked at Saint Agnes and usually stopped by after his nightly visit to the hospital. There was Sarah. She lived in a loft on Spring Street.

"You come by, I'll show you my pictures," she said one night. No Zulu woman ever said a thing like that. America was such a different place.

One night Kenny pulled the fire truck up to the diner, went to the back, and took a bicycle off. "I found this in a dumpster."

He pushed it toward Lovemore. "You can have it."

"You are giving me a gift?" Lovemore looked at the bike, pushed it back and forth. It was very light. It would be a fast bike.

"Thank you," said Lovemore.

"Don't get all weepy," said Kenny. "It was in the trash."

Angie cuffed Kenny in the back of skull. "Hey, if the guy was burning in a building, you'd carry him down a flaming staircase. Just accept his thanks. Don't be a jerk."

The bike flew up the avenues. Only the garbage trucks were out on the streets at four A.M. Lovemore pedaled with demon speed, past shop windows filled with gossamer things, and gothic eyes and urethane bones, until he made a turn and saw in the sky a soaring tower topped by a silver spire, shimmering against a deep, black sky, hovering on steely wings, and protected by eight eagles forged from steel. He stopped and smiled, then began to pedal once more, around the tower and around again. It began to rain and Lovemore looked up into a fall of shimmering drops, the iron birds of the tower still there, defiant against the weeping sky.

He pedaled faster in the rain and sang a song that went like this:

Imvula! Imvula!
Chapha, chapha, chapha chapha
Imanz impahla yam
Imanz impahla yam
Chapha, chapha, chapha, chapha

The next night at the diner Lovemore was filled with stories of the city and the things he'd seen. He asked Angie about the tower.

"The Chrysler Building," she said.

Kenny put his cup of coffee down and said, "You know what I heard? At the top is an old room they used to call the Sky Club or the Cloud Room or something. Nobody uses it anymore. There's a whole lot of ghosts up there, I bet."

Angie was counting tips on the counter. Without looking up she said, "You're freaking Lovemore out."

"No," said Lovemore. "I believe Kenny. In Africa there is this tree near my home. My father told me spirits live there. I said to him once, why would the shades live in this tree? He said beautiful things in the world attract the ancestors. They wander in the shadows, but the beautiful things in the world are like beacons to them."

Every night after work Lovemore rode his bike through the city, the Chrysler Building serving as a compass, an anchor in the asphalt labyrinth. One time he rode until dawn, the rising sun painting the carved steel of the Chrysler spire in deep shades of red, birthing the steely birds in the blood of another day.

He became hypnotized by the sight and didn't see the car door open. He crashed against the metal, flew through the air and landed in the street with a sickening thud.

The world disappeared for Lovemore after that.

The first sylph he met was named Jazzy.

"This is strange, Africa. How did you end up here?"

The grid below: avenues streaked with red and white and flashing yellow, floating on a high voltage hum, third rail nerves, drum and bass beats, edged in conversations woven through a concrete and steel mesh.

"I've been here forever, of course," Jazzy said. "Well, as forever ever is in this place. That's Lowdown."

Jazzy pointed to another sylph.

"He doesn't say much, mainly because when he speaks it's an awful sound."

"It's not," said Lowdown, his voice a rumble in the sky.

"See?" said Jazzy. "Now everybody will be looking for their umbrellas."

"Don't listen to that ball of air," said Lowdown.

The sylphs darted around the silver spire.

"So, Africa," said Jazzy, "how far from the round hills must you roam?"

"Stop pestering the man," said Lowdown. "He just cracked his head against the curb."

"Ouch," said Jazzy. "I knew it was no good when they put all that concrete down. It used to be lovely forests and granite hills."

"It used to be stinking slums and rancid streets too," said Lowdown.

"Remember when they burned the city?" asked Jazzy.

"It was the Africans that did that."

"And the Irish."

"Big trouble when those folks got together."

"And they let the flames just burn for a week."

"Do you know why, Africa?"

"Just tell him, Jazzy. I don't think he can speak."

"He does have kind of a cross-eyed look to him. The African slaves and the Irish slaves burned the place, but the landlords let it burn so they could re-build."

"And they haven't stopped since."

"And they never will."

Lovemore.

"See this, Africa?"

They flew down avenues, along the dark waters of the rivers, up sheer cliffs of glass, plunged into tunnels of buried sorrow.

Lovemore.

"Hear this, Africa?"

Cries and tears and shouts and songs and saxophone riffs bleeding over the sidewalk; whispers soaking an endless night; moans and laughter and a rip-tide of loneliness coursing in on the ocean's restless call.

Lovemore Ngema.

Lovemore opened his eyes.

"Are you Lovemore Ngema?"

Lovemore squinted against a fluorescent glare. A man was there, sitting in a chair.

"Where am I?" Lovemore asked.

"Beth Israel Hospital. You had a nasty spill. You've been here two weeks."

"Are you a doctor?"

The man stood and pulled out a badge.

"I'm with the Immigration Service. Are you Lovemore Ngema?"

Lovemore nodded.

"I'm sorry for your accident," the man said. "But the fact is you were issued a two week visitor's visa and you've been here three months."

Lovemore was still trying to shake the strange dream out of his foggy skull.

"What does that mean?" he asked.

"It means in a couple of days, when the doctors release you, you'll be taken to a detention center and deported."

Angie and Kenny came to visit that night.

"It took us days to find you," Angie said. "What happened?"

Lovemore explained about the all-night bicycle ride and the accident.

"You tangle with sheet metal, you always lose," said Kenny. "I remember once I had to pry this kid out a car -- hell, the fender was wrapped around his ass."

"Is that like a fireman thing?" Angie said. "Normal people don't want to hear stories like that. Listen, Lovemore, I've been working things out."

Angie was full of plans. Lovemore could stay at Kenny's place. She'd already cleaned it. She'd made up a bed on the couch. She'd shopped for food. Kenny was hardly there because he did three days on, four days off at the firehouse . . .

Lovemore held up his hand.

"I'm going home, Angie."

"To Africa? You only just got here."

Lovemore explained about the immigration man and the deportation. Kenny went Bronx over this, talking about everybody in City Hall he was going to call and how he'd sponsor Lovemore and just give him a couple of days and he'd figure it out.

"No, Kenny," Lovemore said. "It is time to go home. I miss the round hills."

Kenny did make some calls. There was nothing he could do for Lovemore. He managed to pull some strings and get Lovemore released to his care for the twenty-four hours before the African had to report to the deportation center.

"You run, I'm toast," said Kenny.

"Where would I go?" answered Lovemore.

So, that night they closed the Hudson Diner. The owner, Gino, wasn't too happy about closing his 24/7 operation, but it also meant he could go home. He made Angie swear she wouldn't wreck the place and gave her the keys.

Angie put a sign on the door that said: We're sending Lovemore back to Africa. Party!

All the regulars came. Music filled the diner that night, drawing in everyone from the neighborhood; people Lovemore knew, people he didn't, but all of them shaking his hand, and all the women dancing with him, and the cops and the firemen and the junkies and the whores, and even the priest from Saint Agnes stayed in the diner until dawn.

As the sky began to lighten, Lovemore walked outside and stood on the corner. The air was fresh. The city hum was quieter now, gathering itself for another day. He walked down the block to the next street. From there he could see the Chrysler Building beginning to glow in the early streaks of the rising sun.

It was time to return to Africa, and the round hills of his native land. It was time to see his mama again and his papa, and perhaps work on his papa's farm for a while.

He smiled.

Who can know a place in so short a time? Not this sprawling tangle of dreams, it is too vast. It would take ten lifetimes to begin to understand the rhythms of the day. But if you learn where the spirits live, well, perhaps that is a good place to begin.