Der Adler von Manhattan

Short story about Ian disguised as Bryan the writer published in Germany in the book entitled "Regen im 5/4 Takt" in 2006. Author Helmut Kuhn lived in NYC from 1989 to 1994 when he befriended Ian. During a return visit to NYC in 2003, he contacted Ian and subsequently met up with him for a day.

The story was translated into English by Robert Holtzman as:

Eagle of Manhattan

I was in New York for a week. I had some things to take care of, and wanted to use the evenings to hook up with friends and acquaintances I hadn't seen for many years. I stayed in a maisonette Apartment high above the Village rooftops. From the window in front of my desk I gleaned the cities winter state. I held an old address book in my hands. Leafing through it brought back memories as if I could walk through time like a revolving door. I was looking for Bryan's number. I thought about him helping me, the day before my departure, to pack all my books into boxes. At that time I had given him as a parting gift a calfskin-bound edition of Lord Byron's Don Juan Cantos VI-XIV, which I thought was a good fit because of their physical resemblance. We spoke on the phone a couple of times. Then he wrote to me. Inside the envelope was an invitation to a lecture in SoHo. The card showed the title picture of that book. The painting of a fine red headed boy with a cone shaped hat, harlequin pants and a bare upper torso, which is lunging a horse with a young girl on its back. It was his first novel. The painting could have been from an English Impressionist. In his letter, which he had included, he asked me to review his book. It was a sizeable convoluted work with an unusual title. I read the first couple of pages, thumbed through it, lost interest and put it away. After that Bryan didn't get in touch with me any more and soon I had forgotten him.

I dialed his number. A woman answered. She sounded young. She didn't know anyone by that name, she said. Just then I remembered his last name but was unsure of the spelling. The woman hung up.

He was Irish. He came from a small place up North that reminded me of a melody. His mother died young. That connected us. When he was sixteen or seventeen he went to live in London, despite his preference for Paris. At some point he ended up in New York. As far as I knew he always wanted to become a writer. I remembered his use of language. A refined tongue, like Oscar Wilde's. He loved to inject a subtle twist into his mockery by inflecting a comma at the end of his sentences followed by an aggressive adjective with a question mark. His stand out characteristics was his fiery red mop and his arrogance. He carried both like a beacon and thus remained remote. I dialed information and got a number with the first spelling I tried. I didn't recognize him. He spoke slowly. He chewed his syllables and swallowed the ends of his sentences as if he was slurring. I visualized him then. Bryan the Charmer. The thin smile of a Dandy. I knew he never cared much about alcohol. He was a proud and cunning hunter and the only reason I ran into him in the bars downtown was, that he was meeting women there. He couldn't have been drunk. Not in the afternoon. Not Bryan. I heard him. I heard him like I heard him many years ago. He spoke on and on and I could barely make out the words even though his articulation started to improve. Something incomprehensible must have happened to him. Bryan spoke and I didn't take it in. I was a prisoner. Already a prisoner of his private horror long before he told me quietly, I got MS. I got Multiple Sclerosis.

That is an ugly name for an ugly disease, he said, stressing the adjective, as if he could beat the daemon using syllables like a stick. Uh-ugly. And then he said: You know, it's strange. I'm not missing anything. I don't miss women. I don't miss the city. Not even cigarettes. It's so strange. I miss the sky. I do miss looking up into the sky. A day before my departure I would come and visit him, I told him. Around noon. As he went to hang up I heard a thud followed by a curse, as if the receiver had slipped out of his hand.

The sky.

The air was clear and a mild chill spread like light upon the first green of the meadows. The stream of the Avenues had grabbed me, tore me away and flushed me into one of the side streets bordering the south side of the park. Along the wall a coach driver put straps of hay sacks on his horses heads. Away from the Avenues peoples pace slowed down. Armed with coffee cups and sandwich bags they allowed themselves to rest on the nearby benches. Squirrels were licking water from a leaky hydrant. I was scared. With their massive upper bodies they looked like miniature boxers. Afraid of Bryan. The driver began to comb down the backs and bellies of his horses. Afraid of what I had set out to do. I heard the puerile tune of a passing ice cream truck. I wanted to spend the afternoon with Bryan in the park. Before I reached the opera house I turned into one of the side streets leading to the river. Children and other pedestrians passed me as if I was walking backwards. The closer I came to the river, which was located behind a short incline, the fewer people I encountered. Finally there was nobody. I didn't know the streets. The buildings were old.

Crammed. Square. Monoliths made from dark stone with black-rimmed windows. Ten sometimes fifteen stories high. From the hilltop you looked down on whitewashed Art Deco houses, magnificent buildings, and the Hudson flickering. The apartments in my block are handicapped accessible, Bryan had said."

There was a ramp at the entrance door to his building.

Bryan sat in a wheelchair. Actually, the indoor version of a wheelchair, a swivel chair with armrests, and that thing is so damn slippery, he said, as he struggled into an upright position by pushing off the armrest with his left and leaning on the silver knob of a cane with his right. There was a leather belt strapped around his shrunken waist. The pant legs dangling off his skinny thighs. Wide ankles were stuck into grey felt slippers. Bryan used to be the big athletic type. He was always wearing blue and white striped sailor shirts, which accentuated his pointed shoulders and the red color of his curls. His broad back led to thin hips, which were tucked into tight jeans. Bryan looked at me. I recognized his melancholy. I used to think back then, that he was flirting with his sadness whenever it seemed useful to him. Often it had removed him together with his size from his surroundings, as if he could elevate himself, through this fine suffering to a state of unreachable superiority. Now I recognized his melancholy. It was far from calculated. He was hunched down. His bony head seemed far too large for his body. His face thin and shrunken. And despite all that it exuded a patrician quality, the honor of a noble ruin. Silky grey curls surrounded it.

"You know, back then, when I was a boy in Ireland, life seemed so endlessly long, now I realize: Its endlessly boring" – he laughed.

I remained silent. Motionless. As if somebody had shoved me into a pit full of leopards. Bryan erected himself. On tiptoes he moved the wheelchair, it squeaked.

"I was still young, I had yet to learn about the bitterness of life," he said.

He smiled.

I moved towards him. I sensed his joy and wanted to reciprocate. I couldn't.

Bryan showed me the narrow passage through his apartment. It consisted of this room and a smaller room as his bedroom. He had divided the room into a kitchen and living space using a colonnade and a bookshelf. Next to the colonnade stood a wheelchair pointing to the door. It smelled of soup. Through the window above the small kitchen table I could catch a glimpse of the sky. It smelled of antiseptics. Azure between dark houses. It smelled of a lingering illness. Sky patch. The backroom remained dark. There are handles in the bathroom Bryan said. Pretty useful. I tend to fall down lately. Mostly forward. There were portraits displayed on all walls. I realized, that they were drawn on manuscript paper. I, Bryan said. I, that's what I call this series. I've been working on it for years. It relaxes me, he said. It was always the same head. His. Coarse black brushstrokes in endless variations. Highlighted by a pale blue, maybe a crayon, on white background. I walked around. There were hundreds. Hundreds of red heads. Hundred faced ego.

His Head stood on the floor. Hung over the bed. Stuck above the toilet. He was resting on the kitchen table leaning against the window and peering in at me through the book covers. The lettering under the mask like heads was so small and evenly spaced that it seemed like a strange form of hieroglyphics.

"I'm not looking for it. The object of my observation", Bryan said.

"By the time I find it I will be dead."

I sat down at the kitchen table. Bryan rolled over to the sink. He lifted himself up. Standing on wobbly legs and leaning against the stove he put the kettle on and cleaned two glasses he had fished out of the sink. I looked out the window. Did I want tea? I saw two Monoliths and a small patch of sky. Black, please. Looking down I could see a small stretch of the street. No more Darjeeling, darling. No cars. No people. He only had green tea left, he said and asked me how I had fared. No kids? No cats? Just an unhappy love story? He wanted to know the name and I told him. Ne nodded. He had never drunk coffee, he said and he doesn't drink wine anymore, and doesn't eat neither meat nor potatoes, just vegetables, mostly soup, and if he had any left he would convince me of its exquisiteness, from which I deducted that he made the same soup all the time.

We drank tea and looked outside.

He had to leave his apartment down in the Village, he said. I remembered it. It had been a pleasant, considering the constraints of this city, spacious room, a loft with parquet flooring, steps and a rod iron railing inside. He got by, cleaning apartments during those years. But he kept feeling more and more fatigued and unmotivated and when he was finally diagnosed he just wanted to write. At some point he had to move. The flat had become too expensive. Bryan rolled to the table. Suddenly he was in danger of sliding out of his seat.

"Damn slippery thing that is" he cursed.

He pulled himself together, looked for something on the floor, which I found in front of the cooker, handing him the belt, he refastened it around his legs and waist and then continued to stare outside. He practically doesn't leave his apartment anymore. He has a cleaning lady, he said. A young Puerto Rican woman. She would come by once or twice a week looking in on him. She also does his grocery shopping. The city is paying for that. That and the flat. Otherwise he has no income. Sometimes, he said, she'll push him once around the block if she has time and wasn't too tired.

"I loved this city. This city is everything. It's what every other place has to live up to. Restraint and exuberance. I still love it. But she's cruel to the poor. Look at her, she's made for the rich, n'est-ce pas?" he said. I thought about how he used to be haunted frequently by the fear of becoming homeless.

"Poverty is awful," he said as if he had read my mind, " but if you are poor you have the right to lie to yourself. That's your right. Maybe your only one," Bryan said.

He laughed.

"No, it is this city, not nature. I found out. Nature doesn't care whether you are rich or poor. Whether you are sick or strong. Nature only cares about one thing: That you are alive."

He smiled, vainly.

"I almost went to Paris when I was a young man, but I did what I had to do, car la vie est bien perdu, quand on n'a pas vecu, comme on l'aurait volu, so instead of here I would have perished in a room in Paris, but I'm not just living, I'm also working, you know, on my biography. And you know what? It turns out to be a novel," he said and then he laughed very loudly.

"I have stopped working on it,' Bryan said.

"...?"

"Why, well why? Because I'm not sure anymore that I haven't said enough already. Whywhywhy. Because you don't have to keep adding to it. Sometimes its better you don't say anything. That's why."

Bryan was silent. The piece of sky between the buildings was radiant. The sun must be shining behind the monoliths.

"...?"

"To the park? That would be great," Bryan said.

I saw his joy. He lit up like a little child.

"..."

"Wouldn't it be nice if we could go together to the park more often?"

Bryan was wearing his French hat, that's what he called his barrette. He put on a long black coat and gloves with cut off fingertips. He inhaled the cold air deeply. His hands were resting on the silver knob of his cane, which he held in front of himself as if he was sitting on a rolling throne. The streets and sidewalks were full of obstacles. Potholes. Cracks. Suddenly appearing metal sheets covering (95) open roadwork, slick and slippery. Curbs like steep slopes. I've never pushed a wheelchair before. As we reached the park the road became steeper. I couldn't find the brakes. I ran after the wheelchair and struggled to stop it. Bryan was digging his hands into his armrests and almost tumbled out headfirst. He was angry. Then we went uphill. I had to use all my strength. Sometimes I slipped on patches of ice still lingering on the lawn, other times the wheels got stuck in potholes, which I had failed to notice looking over his shoulder. Time and time again Bryan asked me, can't you push me up against that tree? I pushed him across the lawn to the nearest tree. He fastened the brake, I handed him his cane. He unbuckled the belt, I reached under his arm. He pushed off the knob, I lifted him and then he supported himself with one hand resting on the tree, with the other he fiddled with his zipper.

"Another unbelievably annoying detail of this endlessly boring illness", he said and produced a weak trickle.

We reached the lake. On its embankment sat a low build structure. A wooden deck extended over the water. I felt like having a coffee and a bite to eat. On my suggestion Bryan perked up quickly. Tea? Biscuits? Lovely! But first could you please get me to this discrete tree over there?

There was a bar on the inside of the old boathouse. Leather armchairs like the reception area of a fancy hotel. The tables on the wooden deck were elaborately set. Fanned napkins. Silver vases with roses. Private function. Sorry, the barman said. He pointed to an adjacent room behind a screen. A ships Stewart showing you to second class. There was no access to the terrace from that room. Plastic chairs were grouped around bare tables and the smell of an open kitchen filled the air. Fast Food. Bryan conceded. It wasn't worth arguing. His eyes reflected the sunlight. In that moment the smell, the remnants of scrunched up paper bags and French Fries faded away. The premises turned into the observation deck of an alpine mountain peak, a mundane Café at Lake Zürich. I brought salads in plastic containers, red French dressing, instant coffee, hot water in paper cups and a peppermint tea bag. Bryan sat in the sun and looked out on the lake.

He talked about literature. I could only visualize that one novel I never finished reading. I couldn't even remember what it was all about. Some passion. I couldn't recall any more.

"It's the subject of all my books. Passion. Great Passion. My passion. I've never, and that I'm sure of, written about anything else. All my books share this subject, in different variations of course."

"...?"

"Fourteen. If I don't count the autobiography, excuse me, the novel, which contained a certain amount of passion, n'est-ce pas?, eleven novels, two books of poems, one collection of essays."

"...?"

"They sold for next to nothing. Tout a fait."

"...?"

"No not all of them, the majority is still sitting in the desk at my agents' office. He is like a brother in law. Very lazy."

"...?"

"The critics varied in their assessment. In a single column review in the Village Voice a young woman sneered at the supposed realism in the book of love, and the book of time was listed once in the New York Times book review's recommendations for Christmas. I think between a lavishly illustrated Harpers edition of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn and a volume about the art of cooking pasta. I can't complain."

"..."

"I think they have a lot to do", Bryan said cheerfully.

"..."

"That's not all bad. I wrote more than Franz Kafka and less than Blaise Cendrars. I made more money with it than Maxwell Bodenheimer and less than Ernest Hemingway, and there were a higher number of copies printed than Christopher von Grimmelshausens. First edition, that is. I'm not finished yet."

Bryan groaned.

"..."

"Life will get everybody down on his knees eventually. Sometimes, several times. The whole trick is, not to remain there until the referee has counted you out," he said.

The sun seemed to tickle him now. Bryan leaned backwards and crossed his arms behind his head.

" You may remember I used to be very keen on women. I hung out endlessly in Cafés, went to Art Openings, boring lectures, suffered through the most tedious presentations, took Ikebana classes and Brazilian dance lessons. Just because there were women, I volunteered as a nude model for NYU drawing classes, painted ostentatiously in the Guggenheim, wrote in the most impossible places like the Mars Bar while being jerked off under my overcoat. I was obsessed. Absolute. You could say that..."

"...?"

"No I was more obsessed with the hunt, the stalking. The art of approaching, seduction, also the literary kind, as described by Stefan Zweig, Lord Byron, et, mon petit, you yourself gave me his Don Juan Songs as a gift."

"..."

"L'art pour l'art. I always preferred desire to its fulfillment. Ah, this wonderful game of, attack, tactics, calculus, clean intrigue, tactical retreat, lurking, compliment, letting them come, compromising. Impeccable. I reeled them in. But only, if they had all their senses together and if they possessed a sixth one, the sense for eroticism. If they didn't have that sense",

- Bryan made a demeaning hand gesture."

"... forget about her"

"...?"

"I don't know. Now that you mention it, I think yes, I must have hurt a few. I'm sure of it. Strange. I've never thought about that. But you know what? Here comes the best part. I am happy! Now, I mean. Happy that I'm free from women. Free! Finally! Unbelievable!"

I looked at him in disbelief.

"That's the good news. It's like smoking. At some point it really stops completely. I'm glad I'm not on the prowl any more. This hormonal scourge. This biochemical mace, this aggressive cocktail that ruled me, ruled me since my first erection and operated me like a Romeo robot. I subjugated everything to this hormonal brew. Sacrificed my whole life to it, toute ma vie, n'est-ce pas?, and most of my reasoning. Even writing. Eleven novels, two books of poems, one collection of essays. I would have never thought it possible. I'm free now. I still get a hard on, but I'm free."

We laughed and I sensed the relief. We padded each other on the shoulder as if we had just now run into each other again. Happiness. He was happy, Bryan had said. Not every day, but more often than before, Bryan said. Bryan started to speak French. He quoted verses by Rimbaud, a few lines by Brel. He's learning Spanish now, so he can read Lorca and Neruda in its original language, and the Don Quichotte, that was his hearts desire. Then he spoke a few sentences, from which I gathered, that he had learned the language at breathtaking speed.

"Otherwise it would be an unbearable punishment," he said. "If I still had this desire for them. For women."

"...?"

Just to one. I'm still speaking to her. In my thoughts. Frequently I'm speaking to her. She came from Paris. I don't know what she is up to today. I'm thinking she's married. I'm thinking she's got children and is happy. Tout a fait."

Bryan had enough.

"Wouldn't it be wonderful if you moved back to the city?"

We came to a bridge leading across a brook, which was more like a runnel. An old lady was leaning against the railing. She was looking down on a bunch of yellow blossoms between bare branches and barbwire.

"Excuse me. What are those flowers called? Can you tell me the name of those flowers?" Bryan asked.

"Those are daffodils", the old lady said.

"Daffodils? Oh how splendid. Just wonderful."

"Oh, that's nothing. You have to look at the flowerbeds in front of the Swedish Cottage. Not only are there flowering daffodils but also narcissi and crocuses. It's glorious. A miracle", the old lady said.

Pitying him she looked down on Bryan.

"I'll bring you to the Swedish Cottage", she said.

We passed the great lawn, crossed bridges and streets until we reached a hill. The Swedish Cottage. A dark log cabin the size of an allotment shack, in front of it a small flower bed. The old lady paused reverently. She was waiting for a reaction.

"Its magnificent!" Bryan said.

"Isn't it, but that's not all", she said.

"There is more?"

Her benevolent face was beaming.

"We have an eagle", she said.

"An eagle?"

" He lives on a rooftop across from the park. You want to see the aerie?"

"Can we see that, can we?"

"He's from Sarajevo"

"From Sarajevo?"

We tracked back across the same roads and bridges passed the same lawns and it seemed to me that Bryan had even used the same trees to urinate. During the siege the eagle came down from the mountains into the city, the old lady told us. Nobody new where his nest was and every night the attackers had tried to shoot him down but could never hit him, so he became a symbol of freedom for the people in the beleaguered city. After the liberation the eagle never returned. Some say he was only a figment of the imagination. Then somebody caught an eagle in the mountains and it was said, that it was the famous eagle of Sarajevo. An impressive male creature, the old lady said. A Bosnian businessman living in New York had bought him and built an aerie on the roof of his building. All that time Bryan and I had searched the sky. That's how New York has an eagle. We could only make out crows. We came to a round place. There was a bronze statue in the middle of it. Mushroom, Ace of Spades, a small girl with strange pigtails. Alice in Wonderland.

"Up there is the eagle's nest"

The old lady pointed to the flat roof of a large brick building.

"You have to put a quarter in."

The little lady pointed to the telescope.

"They put that up just because of the eagle."

I threw a coin into the machine. Bryan peeked through the telescope.

He seemed disappointed.

I peered through the lens. On the roof of the building I could only see a shed, tree trunks against the sky.

"You usually see him at night", the old lady told us.

Bryan started to get cold.

On our way back we passed a flower shop. I bought a pot of daffodils. It got dark. We saw a Café and Bryan wanted to get a cup of mocha and an eclair. A young waitress picked up our order. Bryan turned on his charm. He started to blush.

The last time he went to Ireland, for his mother's funeral, his siblings let him know, illness or no illness, after being out of touch for so long, he best remained where he was. The coffee came and with his hand shaking he took a sip. Nobody wrote to him. The cake came and he took such a big bite that he choked. The waitress padded him on his back and cleaned the crumbs from his mouth. He smiled at her.

We sat at his kitchen table, the flowerpot on the windowsill; cups filled with tea, Bryan leaned back. He listened to music. He seemed to inhale the sound. The patch of sky was black as a crow. How deeply he sucked in the sound. He felt happy and contented, he had said.

Suddenly he was slipping off his chair again.

When he had set himself and laboriously pulled himself together, I thought I understood him. He grew into an aged childhood. The ugly illness had taken his time. He lived in suspended time, a permanent here and now, I thought, and nature didn't care whether he was rich or poor, he lived in a world without time, strong or meek, which consisted of sounds without rhythm, colors without hope, only one thing mattered, a world of the forgotten, the buried, the marginally perceived, fractures, pieces - he was alive!

The further he penetrates this realm of superimposition the more immeasurable it must seem to him. He didn't have any time to waste. He listened to Beethoven. Egmont. He listened to Parker. Davis. He listened to Wagner. Glas.

"This morning there was a lot of Richard Strauss being listened to", he said."

"Rrrr.....rrrrrichard", he repeated the letters with a tongue roll, his eyes closed.

Bryan didn't read novels any more. He was reading poems. He read Celan, Blake, Whitman, Walther von der Vogelweide. On the shelf the Gilgamesh, he learned Verses in their original tongue, recited them, as if he could wrest away from the foreign languages their hidden treasures and keep them forever. He chewed syllables, ate sentences as if it was a banquet and washed them down with a requiem. Only one thing mattered: He was alive. Dark contours around his eye sockets. On his forehead and temples the skin like parchment. Did you already see his skull through the skin? He ran on against the ugly disease. It was a sitting race, hopeless and steadily passing urine, I thought, fear and agony and closed eyes. This way, I thought, he fled. It didn't matter where he fled to, just someplace away from this skin, which surrounded him like a cold and damp mixture of cotton wool and clay, fled far away, through an ocean of spiritual colors and compositions, into a pure inner self, a rescuing hundred faced - I.

Just now I noticed he had lost control over his hands fine motor skills. I remembered how he had choked in the Café on a piece of cake that was far too big for him. But not because he was too greedy, but because he had to take a chance. Once the piece of cake was in motion, he had to bite down wherever it landed in his mouth. As if I was too embarrassed to watch. But I was watching him closely. Bryan couldn't write anymore and he tried to hide that fact from me.

He looked at me with the thin smile of a Dandy. He rolled over to his computer and loaded a new CD. Leonard Cohen. Something buried. Say goodbye to Julia leaving. To hit the right keys on his keyboard had become a game of luck.

Say goodbye to Julia lost.

"Wasn't that the name of your little girlfriend, the one you're still dwelling on?" he asked.

I nodded.

"What did you see in her? What did you want to see in her?"

"..."

"Isn't it crazy how much we value an encounter? And how meaningless it is in the end. N'est-ce pas?"

"..."

"Was she pretty?"

"..."

"I sat beauty on my knees and I found her bitter", Bryan said.

"..."

"Children of fortune are cruel. They do not know the duality of the world, and their happiness is based on the suffering of their fellows", he said.

Bryan was slipping off his chair again.

I grabbed his hand, he thanked me. He looked into my eyes.

I saw his joy and this time I could reciprocate.

"Life takes everything from you. But you will always take something with you, as well. I want to die", Bryan said. "Wouldn't it be wonderful if you were living with me?"

He smiled.

The door fell into the lock.

Behind it I could hear Bryan groan.

I walked along the corridor to the elevator. I pushed the button. The door opened. I could hear a creak. Bryan's office chair. I took the elevator down. I walked outside, cold wind sweeping through the black Monoliths, the streets were singing of a sleepless night, the sky glowing bright and red without stars. Maybe he'll fly passed my window, the Eagle of Manhattan, Bryan had added in parting.