The Children of Hamelin by Norman Spinrad Read Free Book Online Page B

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    Time had dissolved into an illusion by the time we reached the Empanada stand tucked into a hole in the city wall between the Hip Bagel and the old Figaro just around the corner from Bleecker. Nothing had changed in this cosmic corner since the early Jurassic; same unobtrusive funeral parlor and tiny Italian coffee house across the street, same smell of the summer of the mind drifting down MacDougal: coffee and sausage and pot and human heat. Yes, Figaro’s had existed in its own separate time-stream since the Dutchmen conned the Indians out of Manhattan; it was like the Eiffel Tower or St. Peter’s Cathedral or Niagara Falls. The prototypical Village coffee house, the archetype; its existence was so bound up with people’s memories and tourists’ expectations that the image shaped the substance and preserved it in amber as it had been in the Golden Age as it was now as it would be when tourists from Jupiter would mingle unnoticed with tourists from the Bronx: a corner of picture-postcard Paris Left Bank bohemia plunked down in New York replete with weathered-brown sidewalk tables, glassed-in porch and entrance foyer, walls papered with old French newspapers, ornate espresso machine, and everything, including the clientele, aged in the wood to the color-texture of old bourbon.
    Figaro’s was the cornerstone of the Village in space and time: fronting on Bleecker and looking up MacDougal toward Washington Square Park, it was the southwest pivot of the street scene that boiled along MacDougal—the flow of motorcycle gangs, Jersey hoods in hot-rods, teenyboppers, locals, rubbernecking tourists, that promenaded down MacDougal to Bleecker, turned east at Figaro corner, then north up Sullivan back to West Fourth, meeting itself again at the West Fourth head of MacDougal and back into the cycle again. Existing as it did as the materialization of an image that belonged to no real Village era, Figaro stood outside all eras, timeless and unchanging, projecting into the nows of all Village time-loci but contained by none of them like the Rock of Eternity. Because it was always an anachronism, it would never be an anachronism.
    And standing there in its nontemporal aura, all my MacDougals, past, present, and future, were one, existing in memory and anticipation, outside of time.
    “This is the space-time navel of the Village,” I told Robin, trying to explain the inexplicable.
    She looked at me with warm but opaque eyes. “Oh yeah,” she said.
    Could she really understand what I meant that I had found a place to stand on this corner, some kind of common ground with the strangers in the street, with the kids from the Bronx and the tourists and the local Siciliani and even new generations of junkies yet unborn; that all this corner was a Hollywood Village set on which we were all extras. I could stand here forever and never get older like someone in a twenty-year-old stock shot of the Village reincarnated in a hundred B-movies....
     
    After a second or a century, I felt Robin tug at my hand. “Let’s go to the circus,” she said. She pulled me across Bleecker and back into the time-stream, the now of MacDougal Street that unfolded like a carnival midway before us as we seemed to float up the street on our private magic carpet past savory hero-and-pizza stands, poster shops, timeless Italian groceries, the Kettle of Fish, tiny candystores selling Zig-Zags and poisonous black Italian cigars, the Caricature, feedback whining and shrieking from hole-in-the-wall rock joints, a clot of skeletal speed freaks outside Rienzi’s, Japanese sailors gawking at two sixteen-year-old chicks freezing their tight little asses off in out-of-season miniskirts, two old Eighth Street fags walking arm-in-arm, a bull dyke in a motorcycle jacket, a man in porkpie hat being walked by a shaggy brown Irish Wolfhound as big as a pony, an uptight Irish cop rousting three stoned heads off a tenement stoop, a Bowery bum bugging a bearded