Free In Sunlight and in Shadow by Mark Helprin Page B

knew that he was long gone and she would never see him again, when he had flown silently from light to dark, and back again, rising and falling beneath the steelwork, he had come into her life forever.

6. In Production
    O THER THAN HAVING to be there less, one of Harry’s chief pleasures in arriving late to work was to traverse the narrow blocks west of Fifth Avenue at midmorning. Here, industrial lofts were stacked twenty storeys or more in massive buildings that kept the street in shadow except when, rising or setting, the sun was low and its light golden red in rifle-shot alignment east to west or west to east. To a practiced ear, the noise of this district was divided and comprehensible. By listening as closely as if to birds in the forest it was possible to disentangle the weavings of sound and give each thread its due.
    The wind, above all, when it whistled past, moving in great volume through the high canyons and meticulously touching everything, provided a background of ascending or descending notes determined by the speed of the air, its temperature and density, what windows had been left open or closed, what chains were hanging, what ventilators revolved at what speed and with what squeak and shriek due to oil or its lack, or friction, malfunction, or rust. Adding to the roar were trucks by the hundreds, never in the same permutation, with different types of engines at various rates of idle, diesel or gasoline, shaking, jangling, or smooth, and parked in different patterns, and automobiles from limousines to motorcycles, not to mention carts, bicycles, and garment racks with little wheels that made more noise than locomotives.
    Like the bleats of Tibetan sheep, the car horns of Manhattan echoed across the cliffs. Conversation and argument in a dozen languages mixed with cries, shouts, and commands to back or stop, load or drop. Freight elevators were in constant motion, surprisingly rising and falling, sometimes emerging magically and unfolding from the sidewalk, their steel frames sprouting like beanstalks. Their castled gates opened and closed, slammed and shut, in iron and wood, solid and grid. Presiding over this were hundreds of men and scores of women who passed in and out of building entrances and stood by their trucks or pushed racks and dollies loaded with boxes, clothing, tailings, and bolts. This was a society that only they could fully understand. On every block, hundreds of companies, each more or less unknown to the other, went about their complex work, the thousands of employees divided into sections and subsections, cliques, groups, and friendships. Cross-banded by ethnicity, language, and past acquaintance, they mixed together on the street. When they came out for lunch, left for the day, or arrived in the morning, it was like Coney Island in July as thousands jostled against thousands. But at other times it was less crowded, and most often when Harry arrived at the Copeland Leather loft on 26th Street he would pass the chiefs and capos, those workers who absent formal powers managed to stand in charge and run the action of the street.
    Their networks were invisible, and they seemed to know one another whether they did or not. They inspected everyone who passed, and controlled their building entrances like guards at the White House. They worked sporadically, the casts they supervised changed every few minutes, and they could speak in concussive bursts that enabled them to carry on a conversation with someone across the street and a hundred feet down the block as if they were standing shoulder to shoulder. They greeted one another explosively. “Hey! Vinnie!” they might shout, as if Vinnie, whom they had seen half an hour before, had just come back from the dead. “Hey hey hey!”
    He—Harry, not Vinnie, not yet—could have joined the Harvard Club, sat in its vast main room and, surrounded by crimson and gold and bathed in the cocktail light of late afternoon, listened to the ticking of the