From the top of the Empire State Building I looked down one night upon the city which I knew from below: there they were, in true perspective, the human ants with whom I had crawled, the human lice with whom I had struggled. They were moving along at a snail’s pace, each one doubtless fulfilling his micro-cosmic destiny. In their fruitless desperation they had reared this colossal edifice which was their pride and boast. And from the topmost ceiling of this colossal edifice they had suspended a string of cages in which the imprisoned canaries warbled their senseless warble.
At the very summit of their ambition there were these little spots of beings warbling away for dear life. In a hundred years, I thought to myself perhaps they would be caging live human beings, gay, demented ones who would sing about the world to come. Perhaps they would breed a race of warblers who would warble while the others worked. Perhaps in every cage there would be a poet or a musician so that life below might flow on unimpeded, one with the stone, one with the forest, a rippling creaking chaos of null and void. In a thousand years they might all be demented, workers and poets alike, and everything fall back to ruin as has happened again and again. Another thousand years, or five thousand, or ten thousand, exactly where I am standing now to survey the scene, a little boy may open a book in a tongue as yet unheard of and about this life now passing, a life which the man who wrote the book never experienced, a life with deducted form and rhythm, with beginning and end, and the boy on dosing the book will think to himself what a great race the Americans were, what a marvellous life there had once been on this continent which he is now inhabiting. No race to come, except perhaps the race of blind poets, will ever be able to imagine the seething chaos out of which this future history was composed.
Chaos! A howling chaos! No need to choose a particular day. Any day of my life – back there – would suit. Every day of my life, my tiny, microcosmic life, was a reflection of the outer chaos. Let me think back … At seven-thirty the alarm went off. I didn’t bounce out of bed. I lay there till eight-thirty, trying to gain a little more sleep. Sleep – how could I sleep? In the back of my mind was an image of the office where I was already due. I could see Hymie arriving at eight sharp, the switchboard already buzzing with demands for help, the applicants climbing up the wide wooden stairway, the strong smell of camphor from the dressing room. Why get up and repeat yesterday’s song and dance? As fast as I hired them they dropped out. Working my balls off and not even a clean shirt to wear.
Mondays I got my allowance from the wife -carfare and lunch money. I was always in debt to her and she was in debt to the grocer, the butcher, the landlord, and so on. I couldn’t be bothered shaving – there wasn’t time enough. I put on the torn shirt, gobble up the breakfast, and borrow a nickel for the subway. If she were in a bad mood I would swindle the money from the newsdealer at the subway. I got to the office out of breath, an hour behind time and a dozen calls to make before I even talk to an applicant. While I make one call there are three other calls waiting to be answered. I use two telephones at once. The switchboard is buzzing. Hymie is sharpening his pencils between calls. MacGovern the doorman is standing at my elbow to give me a word of advice about one of the applicants, probably a crook who is trying to sneak back under a false name. Behind me are the cards and ledgers containing the name of every applicant who had ever passed through the machine. The bad ones are starred in red ink;
some of them have six aliases after their names. Meanwhile the room is crawling like a hive. The room stinks with sweat, dirty feet, old uniforms, camphor, lysol, bad breaths. Half of them will have to be turned away – not that we don’t need them, but that even under the worst conditions they just won’t do. The man in front of my desk, standing at the rail with palsied hands and bleary eyes, is an ex-mayor of New York City. He’s seventy now and would be glad to take anything. He has wonderful letters of recommendation, but we can’t take any one over forty-five years of age. Forty-five in New York is the dead line. The telephone rings and it’s a smooth secretary from the Y.M.C.A. Wouldn’t I make an exception for a boy who has just walked into his office – a boy who was in the reformatory for a year or so.
What did he do? He tried to rape his sister. An Italian, of course. O’Mara, my assistant, is putting an applicant through the third degree. He suspects him of being an epileptic. Finally he succeeds and for good measure the boy throws a fit right there in the office. One of the women faints. A beautiful looking young woman with a handsome fur around her neck is trying to persuade me to take her on. She’s a whore clean through and I know if I put her on there’ll be hell to pay. She wants to work in a certain building uptown – because it is near home, she says. Nearing lunch time and a few cronies are beginning to drop in. They sit around watching me work, as if it were a vaudeville performance. Kronski, the medical student arrives; he says one of the boys I’ve just hired has Parkinson’s disease. I’ve been so busy I haven’t had a chance to go to the toilet.
All the telegraph operators, all the managers, suffer from haemorrhoids, so O’Rourke tells me. He’s been having electrical massages for the last two years, but nothing works. Lunch time and there are six of us at the table. Some one will have to pay for me, as usual. We gulp it down and rush back. More calls to make, more applicants to interview. The vice-president is raising hell because we can’t keep the force up to normal. Every paper in New York and for twenty miles outside New York carries long ads demanding help. All the schools have been canvassed for part time messengers. All the charity bureaux and relief societies have been invoked. They drop out like flies. Some of them don’t even last an hour. It’s a human flour mill. And the saddest thing about it is that it’s totally unnecessary. But that’s not my concern. Mine is to do or die, as Kipling says. I plug on, through one victim after another, the telephone ringing like mad, the place smelling more and more vile, the holes getting bigger and bigger. Each one is a human being asking for a crust of bread; I have his height, weight, colour, religion, education, experience, etc.
All the data will go into a ledger to be filed alphabetically and then chronologically. Names and dates. Fingerprints too, if we had the time for it. So that what? So that the American people may enjoy the fastest form of communication known to man, so that they may sell their wares more quickly, so that the moment you drop dead in the street your next of kin may be appraised immediately, that is to say within an hour, unless the messenger to whom the telegram is entrusted decides to throw up the job and throw the whole batch of telegrams in the garbage can.
Twenty million Christmas blanks, all wishing you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year, from the directors and president and vice-president of the Cosmodemonic Telegraph Company, and maybe the telegram reads “Mother dying, come at once”, but the clerk is too busy to notice the message and if you sue for damages, spiritual damages, there is a legal department trained expressly to meet such emergencies and so you can be sure that your mother will die and you will have a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year just the same. The clerk, of course, will be fired and after a month or so he will come back for a messenger’s job and he will be taken on and put on the night shift near the docks where nobody will recognize him, and his wife will come with the brats to thank the general manager,
