18. The end is nothing (How far north can roses grow?)

Somewhere in northern parts, late first roses might be coming into bloom.

My concern – if you can call it a concern – is those first roses, the first ever to come out of their buds when all else around them is just green. If I were to assume that flowers blossom later in the North than in the South – which is a fair assumption, I think – then roses that have blossomed in New York, haven’t yet further north. Let’s say upstate New York or New Hampshire or Maine. And because it’s June, New York roses have withered by now. By May, roses in New York have already given place to new roses – second and third successions of roses. The point I’m trying to make is: but maybe not yet somewhere to the north. If this were April or May, I wouldn’t have to think about any other places and could settle for New York. But it’s June, which is to say, it’s too late for first roses in New York. For those inaugural rose blooms. As first rose blooms matter, my thoughts, because they’re set in New York, have arrived too late.

So, I suppose there are no first roses left, but those late roses in northern latitudes. So, really, my question is: how far north can roses grow?

And if I try and picture roses, I see them growing in rose beds. In places with people. On gardens, on terraces, on verandas, in flower pots and in garden corners. Some against a wall or a fence, or climbing, in uneven spirals, up a pergola. The only roses I can see are those that come up in my recollection. And, in my recollection, they’re all roses whose evolution, from bud to full flower, is harnessed to the aesthetic pleasure of whoever tends to them and in accordance to an expected calendar. Roses: go into a flower shop, and roses will just be thorny branches with a promise. A plastic card will tell you what type, colour and shape it’ll have when it blossoms. And on the back, there’ll be a table with the twelve boxes for each month of the year, each identified with their initial letter:

J F M A M J J A S O N D

Together with planting, watering and pruning instructions, sometimes only in ciphered signs, these boxes will be ticked or coloured differently to mark the expected time of bloom. There’ll be indications of fertilisers, herbicides, insecticides, too. And so, rose blooms are reduced to controlled surprises. In the end, they have to deliver – lushness and ever changing variety in the apotheosis of spring. And the more the better. Just remember to pluck them in their prime - what you want is the ecstasy. It doesn’t matter whether you put them in a vase in the living room or in the centre piece of your dining table or by your bedside. Keep just one or bundle them up in a bouquet. You choose. Do whatever you want according to what you fancy. Go ahead. Just wear gloves and you’ll be OK. Tend them well and you’ll be certain to enjoy them in the time span marked in the ticked boxes overleaf:

A M J J A S

Next year, you’re up for another round. Unless, of course, you go back to the flower shop and chose new ones to plant. The offer on rose varieties is far greater than you’ll ever be able to cultivate, you can bet on that. Or, if you lack the patience, there’s always cut roses you can buy. They last for less longer, but they already come blossomed. If you’re into it, the price tag for cut roses is nothing if compared to the time and work put into cultivating your own. I’m pretty sure that, in any case, whether you buy a bouquet or keep a garden, you should always wear gloves. I know I said that already.

But, really, the thing is, I can’t remember a place in Manhattan where roses grow. In people’s places, gardens and parks, I imagine. But I can’t remember ever seeing them. No, let me correct that. There are plenty of roses to be seen. For instance, every deli shop has roses for sale. By the bucketful, literally. And deli shops are just about anywhere in the city. Not that I’ve ever taken a great deal of time to spend on the subject, but I suspect you can even find them during off‑season. Imported roses. Roses from South America or from across the Atlantic, maybe. (I’m curious: what, on the same parallel of New York, lies on the other side of the Atlantic?) Local or imported, these will always be art flowers, designer roses. Uncanny as it may sound, what I don’t remember is seeing an actual rosebush. Surely, because I never went looking for them. Never have I woken up one morning and told myself to go looking for roses; the thought simply never crossed my mind before. Or maybe I just didn’t look in the right places. Now that roses have entered my mind, next time, if I pay proper attention and keep my eyes peeled for them, I’ll probably stumble right into them and marvel at how they’d always been there, just before my eyes, and I didn’t notice. Probably.

Wild roses.

I wonder if wild roses still grow somewhere. Maybe I should find this out and look for them instead. That’s because I wonder – I mean, I really wonder – what it’d be like to witness the spontaneous bloom of the first wild rose to open its petals in the rosebush. And if you’d ask me what a wild rose looks like, I wouldn’t be able to answer you. Not even the colour. Rose, I suppose. But this is really only a supposition: wild roses are rose. Maybe white, too. But, then again, why else would roses be called “roses”, if their original colour was not rose? This is me speculating, of course, but it all makes sense. And, what’s more, no matter what any encyclopaedia might say, this is sense good enough for me. Another thing: wild roses must be smaller, too. Definitely smaller and without ruffles and double, treble petals of those roses with their attached plastic badge and composed Latin names. They’re just plain small rose flowers. They’re not selected, not tamed in their genes, and no-one gives them fertilizers or herbicides or insecticides; they’re entirely dependent on the sun and the elements. And, let me make this point clear, no‑one waters them, either. The point is: wild roses survive on Nature’s whim. And because of that, maybe their scent is more intense; maybe more condensed for such small sized flowers. But I’m only guessing here; there’s no cause-effect relationship I could put forward in any convincing way, and, as I said, all of this is based more on supposition than on facts. I’ve heard Nick Cave’s ballad about wild roses, but I don’t know for a fact if they really exist. But, for all it matters, this makes sense to me and, for that reason, it suffices; there’s no further information I need. I state this freely out of my own mind and therefore, as far as I’m concerned, this is true; this is truth as I know it, whether fact or fiction. Makes no difference. If there’s such a thing like wild roses, then somewhere – even if it’s far, far away –there must be fields where wild roses grow. They’re out there and if they’re out of reach is because they’ve been eluding me for all this time. This I make to be true as well.

I imagine.

Wild roses grow in green islands, in pockets of unploughed land, tucked and cloaked away in swathes of green. I realise that if they exist – if wild roses exist – they must inhabit a different world to this one; a parallel world if you’d like to give it some additional thought. I mean, sure, they’re there amidst other patches of land – but neighbouring the world of agriculture, not belonging to it. They must grow in places people – farmers, builders, oh, you name it – deliberate chose to ignore. Too difficult to access, too rocky to farm, too distant to be of interest; whatever the reason for ignoring parts of the geography, it's there where they thrive. Well, as far as I’m concerned, I’m not ignoring them. I want to know where they are. I don’t know how much time I’ve got left, though. Their days are counted. Eventually they’ll be ploughed or bulldozed giving way for the constant great urban sprawl. This is the wild roses’ inescapable fate. After all, wild roses, too, have roots. They can’t run.

Anyway.

Anyway, I’m not a gardener and I’m not that interested in flowers or plants. I guess this train of thoughts is leading me somewhere else, to a different destination, maybe even unrelated to roses – wild or tame. I just have to cross the street and something else will pop up in my brain. And, eventually, this too will be forgotten. Like my lost steps on the wet sidewalk. You see, they leave an imprint, but that’s only temporary. They’ll vanish once the rain evaporates. So, come to think of it, me too, I may actually be walking over someone’s thoughts. Only: these are discarded thoughts, because I can only imagine, fabricate, construct them. Once I do, then they’ll become mine – my own thoughts. However, these too, in turn, will evaporate or be trampled over; losing their identity, their shape and contents, with each successive superimposing imprint that blends and merges with the one before. In the end they’ll be all so tangled up that they’ll form an undistinguishable mesh of footprints, a shallow pool of water, mud and dirt. And this too will disintegrate once they dry up.

Keep on walking.

So, maybe I should forget about this too and just cross the street. From Greenwich Avenue to Seventh. And, farther, 14th Street. Northbound. North.

I run my hands through my hair and it feels brittle like dry hay. The skin on my hands has dried up too; all moisture breathed away in the wind channelled through the high‑rise buildings. I swallow instinctively to feel my saliva, for any remnants of liquid in my body. My mouth, too, feels dry and my throat and gullet ache. I gulp down another empty mouthful just to remind my body that’s what it needs to do once saliva resumes its furtive flow under my tongue. I need to drink, but there’s nowhere I can find anything to drink and there’s no-one I could ask. I could buy some on 42nd Street, but that’s already past my house, so I have no option but to keep on going. If only it’d rain again I could get under it and soak my skin in it. It wouldn’t probably quench my thirst, but I’d get some relief.

On 23rd Street, I turn east to my place in a more hurried step; the box with the silicone implants bothering my pace. I should just leave it there and later tell Wu I’d lost them or that they were stolen or some other excuse. Yet, somehow, something tells me I have to keep carrying it. I have to see the end of the story of Mrs. Wu’s breast implants, no matter what happens. On the corner with 24th Street, three black guys in baggy jeans and oversized basketball shirts stare at me. I don’t know whether because of any particular signs of my behaviour or because of what I’m carrying. It’s funny and my face almost breaks into a smile: if only these guys knew what’s inside the box, they’d never bother stealing it! Anyway, I pass them and they leave me alone. Perhaps they were just dumbstruck – a sweaty white guy in a dinner suit with a black lacquered black box under his arm at this hour must surely come across as some oddity. And, it’s true, they look at me like an animal that escaped the zoo Yet nothing in their attitude – which seemed intimidating at first, but, seconds later, on hindsight, was maybe just defiance; that expression on their faces black guys have – meant no harm. Nor particular interest in the box, I later also realise. I make a right turn, while, abstractly, rewinding Wu’s dinner in my memory, and the wind suddenly blows in my face, sweeping dust in my eyes. I decide to turn east a few blocks farther up instead. But as soon as I start moving northbound, the wind abates. I stop on the next corner and check whether it’s quieter, calmer to walk.

Something freezes me to the ground.

I feel the adrenaline surging through my veins, blood rushing to my heart and brain, overriding my rational thinking. I’m suddenly in a state of total alert, of full awareness. My senses are sharp and heightened by every movement, every shadow, every sound, and my mind purged of all structured, thought. My instincts take over: I’m more animal than human. And my instincts are ready to take over. Once they’ll be set in motion, they’ll decide events.

Run, hide, fight.

I scan the surroundings, poised to react, but there’s nothing. Nothing, except the billowing fumes from the subway.

These fumes not billowing upwards. Rather, they flow close to the ground and towards me, as if there’s something behind me sucking those white fumes. Only, I can feel no air draught. They uncoil, spawning what looks to be more like tentacles than clouds of vapour. As I look around me, I notice the street’s deserted; there’s no-one I can ask for help: around me, the city is empty. I secretly hoped the three black guys had followed me, after all. But I knew they hadn’t. I am on my own. The subway fumes condense, spiralling inwards, into white milky ropes of smoke. No, not smoke – smoke doesn’t behave like that: something denser, instead. And those fumes are watching me, my bones tell me. I look for a pair of eyes in their cloudy substance. No, those fumes are blind. Yet I’m sure they feel my presence. I can sense they know I have no-one to turn to. I turn towards them and a gust of wind blows on my face, striking me like a slap. It’s warm and dry. True, subway fumes are warm. But this is something different. For one, subway fumes smell of burnt rubber on scraped metal and these have no smell . (But this may be an inconclusive observation, since my olfactory senses had left me ever since Wu’s place on Pell Street). And, secondly, these fumes don’t appear to dissipate in the air. Their whorls encroach on me, thick and massed, now unequivocally aware of my presence and the shape of my body. Tentatively, I take one more step towards them and they seem to try to come for my ankles, like silent whips about to be lashed. As they approach, the wind blows stronger at me, making it harder for me to keep my eyes open.

There’s when I feel a force – a hidden, unknown force lurking inside those white coils. Squeezing my eyelids together to withstand the wind, I take one deep look into them, although I know the truth behind that force won’t be revealed to me through my sight. And that’s because, I know what it is, I’ve sensed it before. And it’s there. And only I can see it.

I know.

I know; it’s coming back. It’s all coming back. There’s no sound, there are no signs, but I can see the inscriptions; even with my eyes closed, I could see them. The inscriptions of old; of the beginning of times; of evermore. Pencilled in the blood of birth and the sweat of years, there they are again, hovering like dozen half moons, like a dozen white smiles, before my closed, clenched, eyes. Inscriptions of hatred and loathing, of thundering anger and corroding fury. The inscriptions of what can never be lost. They tell the tale of insidious betrayal caught in the throes of unpaid vengeance. One thing leads to another, all caught in the jaws of fate. Before me, glittering in their whiteness, there they are: the sharp, cold fangs of my fate, slashing through the air I breathe.

What I read is my name.

There’s a sharp buzz in the air, swishing through the edifices, sending sound ripples in its wake. Barely audible at first, but then, progressively louder, infiltrating my pores, getting inside my skull. Reverberating and crackling in my ears; resounding in my jaws; blinding me… The Cyclops.

Still stunned, I straighten myself upright and face east; to the east at large trying to understand the source of the wind, but I already got the message. And this is: I must steer away and keep north. I must hurry.

I hasten my step, cold sweat running down my back; the last traces of liquid in my body, I realise. But I must run, nonetheless. Run north.

I gather speed, fuelled by fear. My cowardice turns out to be my last advantage; where before it was my most supreme weakness, it is now my last supply of strength. So, I run. I run as fast as I can and faster still. The skin of my foot soles burns in my shoes, but I pick up even more speed. I don’t dare look behind me at the shadows following me. I don’t need to: I know they’re there, and that’s enough; that’s all I need to know at this moment. They’re there and I need to run. I know that they’ll catch up with me if I as much as quiver. I cannot afford to even think of not speeding up my pace. Thinking, entertaining thoughts of any kind, will distract me and I must concentrate on getting the most of my muscles. I have only one choice, and that’s to run even faster. Everything narrows down to this. Yet, despite the fear and the horror haunting me, knowing I have no other alternative feels, for the briefest of moments, almost like a relief. And, so, I run.

When I pass 29th Street, my body’s desiccated, my skin clinging to my flesh like it’s not there; like I’m a moving plasticized skeleton, mummified in the dry air. I know I’ve crossed the threshold of my endurance and of my physical powers, and that soon I’ll be out of breath. My forces will fail me; I’ll break down and be caught. However, I also know I must go on and accelerate, even if takes me to terminal exhaustion. My only hope is to run so unattainably fast that I’ll detach myself from my body. Like a lizard discarding its tail when pursued by a predator, I’d run and leave my flesh for spoils to rescue my soul.

I miss the turn on 33rd Street to my house. Too risky; turning might’ve slowed me down. And, two blocks further up I almost get run over by a firemen truck on call, blaring its horn and flashing its blinding white-blue-and‑red lights. But I don’t slow down. Much to my astonishment, I’m still running. And still picking up speed. The Cyclops buzz is like a train swirling inside my skull, clunking, hammering and howling in what seems a maelstrom of scattered syllables that once belonged to words, howled from somewhere deep and long ago. Like shards of sentences, still shrill, but too distant in space and time. Words beyond rescue, like the cries of drowning children; futile in the abyssal depths from whence they’re shouted, and unintelligible like words yelled underwater.

42nd Street.

With the Port Authority Terminal on sight, everything begins to blur and I can no longer feel I’m breathing. My eyes are as dry as glass and hurt against my eyelids, so I force myself not to blink and concentrate exclusively on moving one leg after the other as fast as I impossibly can. I made it to 42nd Street, after all, and I’m still going. In the distance, I catch the lights of Times Square, but they all merge into a constant white neon flash.

And, then, suddenly.

Suddenly, I think of Wu and wonder again why I’m still carrying his black wooden box, the events of dinner playing back in my mind in a succession of flashes. This must’ve thwarted my pace and slowed me down for just a fraction of a second, but it was enough. On my back and thrusting into my chest, I felt the cold whip of the shadow tailing me, and it blew icy daggers of pain on my skin, burning my innards. Only, this time, there’s no rocket ship to fly me out and I black out, strung out, everything getting dark around me. So instantly dark - pitch dark -, that I can’t tell whether I’ve gone blind or if all the lights have been turned off in a flick of a switch. The remnants of my conscience tell me the first to be more probable, but, in all truth, I’m now beyond caring and I’m now beyond fear. Even the fear of getting permanently blind; of becoming a prisoner chained to eternal, hopeless, darkness. It makes no difference.

And, so that’s what it came to. I made it to Times Square. But no further. I surrendered and collapsed, and fell to the ground. Somehow, as if it’d mattered, I thought I’d be breaking into a million little pieces, like an old glass vase; my bones hitting the hard sidewalk and splintering in a galaxy of shiny, tiny fragments. But, no, there’s only a thud, merely audible, when I fall, like a discarded dirty mop, thrown away from a window high up. In the utter blackness I begin to see specks. Little specks of, first, unascertainable colour, and I think: It's the sky. It's the stars in the sky, I'm not blind! But, afterwards, I notice, these specks are pink. Light pink. As they gradually become larger, I realise what it is: rose petals; rose petals are showering on me. They never reach me, though; I pass out before they can touch me or before I can feel them touching me. I can’t tell.

And so, this is it: this is how the end is like. The end is like nothing.

I guess you figured that too by now if you were listening in; if you’d be following me, running with me through the streets of Manhattan. But there’s no “you”. The truth is, I’m not talking to anyone. I’m not even talking, and that’s how simple it is. The truth, the ultimate truth, is like the wall at the end of an alleyway or the neon light bulbs of a Times Square billboard ad: it stares in your face and there's nothing else beyond it. And the truth is: I’m not sharing this with anyone. And, so, soon all thoughts of wild roses will be lost.

Oblivion will plough them away too.