From West to East

« From West to East, from past to present Previously…What have Effing and Marco been doing with the Gresham brothers’ money? May you surmise/conjecture/guess the reasons? Do you agree with Effing’s decision? In this episode…What recurring words is the excerpt strewn/fraught/studded with? Can you spot out any specific lexical field? What did you like most in the excerpt? Do you agree with the narrator’s idea of change? For obvious reasons, we didn’t go out that night.

The next night was clear, and at eight o’clock we went down to Times Square, where we finished our work in a record-breaking twenty-five or thirty minutes.

Because it was still early, and because we were closer to home than usual, Effing insisted that we return on foot.

In itself, this is a trivial point, and I wouldn’t bother to mention it except for a curious thing that happened along the way.

Just south of Columbus Circle, I saw a young black man of about my age walking parallel to us on the opposite side of the street.

As far as I could tell, there was nothing unusual about him.

His clothes were decent, he did nothing to suggest that he was either drunk or crazy.

But there he was on a cloudless spring night, walking along with an open umbrella over his head.

That was incongruous enough, but then I saw that the umbrella was also broken: the protective cloth had been stripped off the armature, and with the naked spokes spread out uselessly in the air, it looked as though he was carrying some huge and improbable steel flower.

I couldn’t help laughing at the sight.

When I described it to Effing, he let out a laugh as well.

His laugh was louder than mine, and it caught the attention of the man across the street.

With a big smile on his face, he gestured for us to join him under the umbrella.

‘What do you want to be standing out in the rain for?’ he said merrily. ‘Come on over here so you don’t get wet.’ There was something so whimsical and open-hearted about his offer that it would have been rude to turn him down.

We crossed over to the other side of the street, and for the next thirty blocks we walked up Broadway under the broken umbrella.

It pleased me to see how naturally Effing fell in with the spirit of the joke.

He played along without asking any questions, intuitively understanding that nonsense of this sort could continue only if we all pretended to believe in it.

Our host’s name was Orlando, and he was a gifted comedian, tiptoeing nimbly around imaginary puddles, warding off raindrops by tilting the umbrella at different angles, and chattering on the whole way in a rapid-fire monologue of ridiculous associations and puns.

This was imagination in its purest form: the act of bringing nonexistent things to life, of persuading others to accept a world that was not really there.

Coming as it did on that particular night, it somehow seemed to match the impulse behind what Effing and I had just been doing down at Forty-second Street.

A lunatic spirit had taken hold of the city.

Fifty-dollar bills were walking around in strangers’ pockets, it was raining and yet not raining, and the cloudburst pouring through our broken umbrella did not hit us with a single drop. We said our good-byes to Orlando at the corner of Broadway and Eighty-fourth Street, the three of us shaking hands all around and swearing to remain friends for life.

As a small coda to our promenade, Orlando stuck out his palm to test the weather conditions, thought for a moment, and then declared that the rain had stopped.

Without further ado, he closed up the umbrella and presented it to me as a souvenir.

‘Here, man,’ he said, ‘I think you’d better have it.

You never know when it might start raining again, and I wouldn’t want you guys to get wet.

That’s the thing about the weather: it changes all the time.

If you’re not ready for everything, you’re not ready for anything.’ ‘It’s like money in the bank,’ said Effing. ‘You got it, Tom,’ said Orlando.

‘Just stick it under your mattress and save it for a rainy day.’ He held up a black power fist to us in farewell and then sauntered off, disappearing into the crowd by the time he reached the end of the block. It was an odd little episode, but such things happen in New York more often than you would think, especially if you are open to them.

What made this encounter unusual for me was not so much its lightheartedness, but the mysterious way in which it seemed to exert an influence on subsequent events.

It was almost as if our meeting with Orlando had been a premonition of things to come, an augury of Effing’s fate.

A new set of images had been imposed on us, and we were henceforth cast under its spell.

In particular, I am thinking about rainstorms and umbrellas, but more than that, I am also thinking about change – and how everything can change at any moment, suddenly and forever. (pp.

208-210, chapter 5). To be continued… What will happen next? Pick up elements that show the story has come full circle. Do you see any similarities between Marco’s and Effing’s experiences?. »