The college had found a room for Emil; he’d been in Los Angeles since the ’40s but had agreed to move to New York when he was offered tenure. His work, which swam in and out of fashion, was enjoying some renewed popularity. This was in the late ’70s, when the city was flyblown. Emil had grown to hate LA. Too bright, too wide, he’d say. His room was an old place that had belonged to the college for decades, in a building near Washington Square Park and across the street from campus. Years later, when I first visited, it was still full of the junk of whoever had been there before him, which he kept piled up, along with his own, like a second wall. Emil made it clear that I was not permitted to step inside. Instead, I had to knock on the half-open door and wait in the hall as he shouted that he was coming out. When he opened his door fully, I could see the stacks of books, of yellowing papers, of sketched diagrams and overflowing wastebaskets. When it was hot, he’d set a fan going, leaving it running as he left. He had an old wooden stick with an intricate Alpine scene carved into the handle, at which he would randomly point, telling me it reminded him of his boyhood. Along with a small nod of his head, he’d raise the stick slightly as a greeting to the desk when he left the lobby. He never told me his age, but he couldn’t have been younger than ninety.

It was 1993, and I’d come to college with the wrong intentions. I was a smart kid from a small town, and the city was the natural next step. Once I knew I was going, my home took on a superfluous quality, a skin being sloughed off. Towns allow you to imagine you’re the center of the world; cities are built to disabuse you of that notion. The school’s lectures and seminars nourished me, but I couldn’t find my way into what I considered the whole experience, so I remained steadfastly the hero of my own drama, with all others on the periphery. It’s hard to divest yourself of being a clever boy. I was alienated by the easy manner of my peers, and over time, knowing I did not possess their social skills, I began to resent them, to see them as lightweights and poseurs, strangers to the real life of the mind. I would stay in bed smoking, withdrawing as a means of punishing the world, lying among my slept-on paperbacks as I watched the sunlight roll slowly around the room. For my dissertation, I deliberately aimed to beat my classmates at the things they were good at — a tearing down of those various raincoated thinkers whose books they flashed as cultural currency — but I understood the subject no more than they did. It was all a pose, and I was lost, placing words on the page in arrangements of nonsense, failing to make them mean anything. 

My thesis advisor sent me to Emil because, in her words, he knew about that sort of thing. His office on campus was in some far-flung wing, high up over the city. Like his room, it was filled messily with stacks of books poised to fall in great avalanches. The office smelled of tobacco and old paper, and when it was sunny, dust would swirl in the beams of light that had made it through the ragged blinds. A word processor sat on the floor under a stack of tweed clothes. Here and there among the books were odd little wooden figures, old and folklore-like. A mezuzah was screwed to the side of his desk. Coffee cups moldered on the windowsill, and an upholstered wingback chair, worn at the head, sat in the corner. Emil would smoke continuously throughout our meetings. Over the course of an hour, the haze would settle into an atmosphere above us both. He would let me speak first, which I did, almost continuously, while he sat back and stared toward the window. At times, he’d pick up papers and look at them, which I allowed myself to think was connected to what I was saying. On at least two occasions, he fell asleep while I was talking. When he did respond, I struggled to connect it to what I had been trying to articulate. He would make reference to some book, get up and shuffle around looking for it, find a different one, then sit down and read that one aloud. By the time he’d finished, we were so many degrees away from our initial conversation that I’d lost the thread completely.

When I finally stepped out of the room into the cool, smokeless hallway, I’d have some words on paper that, upon later inspection, were incomprehensible to me. I’d put stock in the things that surrounded him — the messiness, the academic accessories, the old-world items — because to me these were the signifiers of an intellectual. I was convinced that smartness was contained in the way one carried oneself, and the older and more oblivious to the modern world those trappings were, the better. Whether I thought Emil was brilliant was moot; he gave me all I needed in his gestures. When he spoke, I’d hang on to his words for their sound and rhythm more than that kernel of meaning that kept moving out of my field of vision. I wanted to impress him.

In my belligerent way, I was determined not to rely on parental support, so I worked a job at a dry cleaners. I’d come out, shrouded in sweet chemicals, go home, and try to write. In the early hours of the morning, my resentment would curdle slowly into panic, a clear understanding that I knew nothing, and I would become consumed with a mixture of anger and shame. The city became an insult, a curse flung in my face, full of people certain in their own useless ways, glibly determined not to see into the life of things. It was around this time that my advisor called me in for a meeting. I was convinced that they were going to suspend me, that they’d finally looked closely at my work and would suggest college wasn’t for me. Instead, she told me that they were looking for someone to help Emil, to act as a sort of assistant because of his infirmity, and that they would pay me to do it. I assumed this would involve research, though it wasn’t clear if he even did that anymore. The last book he’d published, a brick-size tome about alleyways, had come out under Nixon. There had been that revival of interest in Emil’s work in the late ’70s, but he was cited now by only a small coterie, and most of the existing copies of his books were at least twenty years old. He told me once that he knew someone who was going to reissue his writings, but he seemed ambivalent about the value of this undertaking. Everything turns to ash, he would say, stubbing out his cigarette.

Emil didn’t let me into the apartment, so there was no way I could help with the work. My job was to run the occasional errand: to the deli, the bank, or the pharmacy. Wednesday was senior discount day at the old movie theater four blocks from his place; at one in the afternoon, I’d duly turn up at his door to accompany him there. He walked so slowly that it would take almost half an hour to reach the theater. At first, I’d drop him off and pick him up, but after a couple of weeks, he indicated that he wanted me to come in with him. In the afternoons, the auditorium was a refuge from the summer heat, exceptionally dark and cool and irregularly dotted with the elderly. He was not a garrulous talker during a movie, but occasionally he’d lean over and say something quietly, a detail about the mise-en-scène or an observation about the material of a character’s coat. He was less guarded in the dark of the theater. I think it had to do with facing away toward something else; like many men, he required a third object through which to talk. Once, when Stallone flexed his muscles while climbing mountains, Emil tilted toward me and said it reminded him of where he’d walked as a young man, the Europe of his youth, the weekend jaunts before he and his friends descended back toward the cities where they worked. This was the most he’d told me about his life. When the film grew stupidly violent — a villain was impaled gorily on a stalactite — I turned to Emil in the dark, expecting the disdain and disgust of a man from his generation at this vulgar display. Instead, he seemed amused by the theatrics. This is Romanticism, he said, chuckling as another round was fired off and shook the snow from the branches, just before Stallone threw the British antagonist into an exploding helicopter. But, he said after a pause, it’s the American kind.

We would amble into the bakery on the way back, the one that sold knishes. The owner, Karl, who looked even older than Emil, would make him a bespoke knish with salmon filling. There was no air-conditioning, and as it was summer, I would sweat continuously. The place swam with the aroma of herbs and goldening dough and the occasional sweet, hot smell of garbage blowing in from the street. Every week, Karl would ask about the movie we’d seen, and every week Emil would reply that it was terrible. Fluff, he would say, rubbing his fingers together as if to brush off the offending substance. I knew that this was performance, and that he would not disclose to Karl the visible enjoyment I’d see in the theater. Men of a common age or place have their own decorum, and I knew enough, even in my youthful dumbness, not to interfere. Some weeks I asked him if he wanted to do something else, but it was always the movies. It didn’t seem to matter what was playing. His relationship with the cinema was so ritualized — the long walk, the silent appreciation, the dismissal on the journey home — that the content of the films was almost irrelevant. As the weeks went by, he would talk more openly on the walk about his ideas, extrapolating on the latent qualities of an innocuous object: a shooting stick, a commonplace book, a knife. It was clear that I was expected to listen rather than contribute, and if I made a response, he usually continued talking as if I hadn’t spoken. I was so self-conscious about impressing him that I would have answers readied in advance, little bons mots that struck me as deep or philosophical, and the effect of this anticipatory logic was that I rarely heard what he was actually saying. Only years later did I really piece together the elements of the life that was being shown to me.

One time, he told me about an idea he’d had for a book that would imitate the structure of a pinball machine. The table, he said, has a complete logic. It exists as a total narrative in which the ball dictates all variants of play. There is nothing present that you cannot see. It is a contained world. The question, he said, was how one could communicate this through the structure of a book, how one could make clear the table’s innate potential, imitate the silver ball’s trajectory. He stopped on the corner to wipe his brow with a handkerchief, the summer sun raising a light sweat on his yellowing skin and spidery beard. Someone down the block was screaming aimlessly. Because, he continued, raising a finger, you must also incorporate the matter of chance, of the glancing touch that reanimates a dormant pathway. I asked him why he was interested in pinball, but he kept speaking. The important thing, he said, is the simultaneous perspective one has from above and within, both seeing the thing in its totality and being in the maze itself, embodying the ball that ricochets off the barriers into temporary sanctuary before being spat out again into the anarchic field of the table. He mentioned that, after his arrival from Europe to Los Angeles, he would watch sailors on shore leave playing pinball as he wandered the amusements at Long Beach. Los Angeles, he said, is not a pinball table, because there is no angle of descent; the city operates flatly, simultaneous in all its zones. He turned slowly, leaning on his stick, and pointed downtown. Now this city, he said, has an incline. He stopped, then muttered something indistinct about how cities upend their citizens. When he set off again, he seemed to speed up unnaturally, and I had to hurry to catch him.

I started borrowing his books from the college library to anticipate his thinking. Most of his work was incomplete; he seemed to value the esoteric image, things that couldn’t be fully explained and bordered on mysticism, ideas with only one foot in the world. There were puppets, automata, arcades, cigarettes, cities, jewels. There was a long chapter on the viscosities of coffee that led, inexplicably, to a meditation on the appearance of blood at a public execution. There were writers I knew and others of whom I could find no trace. I suspected some were his own invention. At times his oeuvre seemed to verge on collapse into total, crazy failure. Perhaps he was making something with only a tangential relation to the world, something that required a leap of faith for the duration of its reading, and maybe that was the point of it — to make the act of writing a temporary spark in a constellation of other temporary sparks, which nonetheless illuminated some broader map that had been hidden under the auspices of common logic.

Whenever I tried to use his work in our conversations, he shut down completely. He knew what I was doing, even when I tried to disguise it. During one of my more fraught attempts, he stopped on the cusp of crossing the street. Cars were gliding by. There was the noise of construction and the honeyed scent of candied nuts in a street vendor’s tray. He looked directly at me, which he rarely did. My world is not your world, he said. He lifted his cane and pointed it toward the theater, half a block away. That is where they join, he said, and where they have something in common. I was chastened, but I didn’t understand, so I said nothing and resumed walking with him. Whenever this happened, I was tempted to dismiss his work as bullshit, something strung together in an old Europe that didn’t exist anymore, that spoke nothing of my life. As we entered the theater, he stopped again. No one thinks the bomb will go off until the bomb goes off, he said, looking down the dimly lit corridor that led to the screen. The bomb is nothing until it explodes, and then it is the whole world forever after. I imagined a cartoon bomb, circular and black with a fizzing fuse, tucked away unseen under the floor of the lobby. He gave a little nod and walked off toward the ticket desk. Then he turned back toward me with what looked like a mixture of affection and despair. Hot with frustration, I stared down at the endless pattern on the stained carpet and flicked my dead cigarette back out into the sunlit street.

When we made it inside, Arnold Schwarzenegger was playing Hamlet in some spoof trailer that was part of the film. We’d arrived late, and I was immediately confused as to what was real and what wasn’t. Emil, though, laughed quietly at Arnie’s heroics, at the combination of Shakespeare and high-powered weaponry. He leaned over, put his head close to mine. Everyone thinks he is German, he whispered, but in fact he is Austrian. The characters were moving between the real world and the movie screen itself, going in and out of fiction. I was open to the film’s superficial cleverness, its referentiality disguised as knowledge, though in reality I was there for the dumb fun, which was something I’d barely admit to myself, especially in Emil’s presence. I grew disappointed as the film’s pyrotechnics tapered toward the stock material of Hollywood: family, love, reality, peace. At the climax, Arnie was mortally injured and had to be returned to the other side of the cinema screen, where his wounds healed miraculously. I heard Emil muttering under his breath. Cheap, he said, so cheap. He stood up to leave before the credits rolled. I felt ashamed that I’d enjoyed it more than him.

He told me on the way back that he used to be a walker and would go everywhere on foot, coming home only at the end of the day to sleep. The world is foreshortened now, he said, gesturing down the block toward his apartment. He raised a finger to me, and his coat sleeve slipped down, revealing a worn shirt cuff with a button hanging loosely. I was disengaged — tired, frankly, of his pointing finger and his fragments that added up to nothing. At this point, two guys from college walked by, and a dim recognition crossed their faces. I was caught between acknowledging them — I didn’t know them other than listening to their spiels in classes and despising their easy, smart manner — and turning my face away. I felt shame, the angry kind. Through them I saw myself from the outside: some kid in the street walking an old man. The image of myself I’d constructed on my visits to Emil, of someone who through proximity was touched by the intellect of his company, fell away like tissue. I was glad to get him back to the apartment where, as ever, he refused to shut the door completely before I left. The corridor is part of the room, he said. It is a tributary of the room. Why would you close it off when you could let the spaces breathe each other’s air? I left abruptly with a curt goodbye. Next time, we see the film with the dinosaurs, he called out as I walked down the corridor. I raised my hand without turning to acknowledge him and rounded the corner.

I was now hanging from college by a strand. My work was a little dead thing. I spent all my time in my room: reading, smoking, listless. I had no friends, no connections in the city, but to go home would have been a failure beyond admitting. The impetus that had brought me to New York, the long dream of achievement I’d held on to back home as something that set me apart, had ground slowly into inertia. I’d reached a kind of stillness, a sleepy web through which I moved. My own city shrunk to a few blocks too. I’d go walking at night, sometimes down to the verges of the river. It pleased me to move in a straight line in the dark. I was, I realize now, profoundly lost. I’d resigned myself to the periphery, knowing that I had nothing to give to a world that didn’t want me. Emil’s presence became a paradigm for that disconnectedness — some little old man wandering a cage, talking in order to hear himself. I can see now that I resented him because he was lonely too, tucked into a little room on someone’s dollar, knowing deep down he was producing only for himself, parroting the illusion of creativity to whichever vessel came near him.

I took him to see the dinosaurs. He was unimpressed by the special effects but cackled at the predictions of doom. Hubris, hubris, he muttered, either to me or himself. I, though, allowed the film to manipulate me, my resistance dissolving eventually into a deep enjoyment. When a velociraptor jumped toward the camera, seeming almost to fly out of the screen, we both flinched involuntarily. His hand brushed my arm. I glanced over, and we briefly shared the adrenalized look of two people who had been through something — the most unguarded connection we’d had. On the way home, though, he started to chip away, taking issue with the film’s ending. You cannot have good and bad dinosaurs, he said. We walked on, and he spoke again. That is a film about things coming back, he said, because things always come back, and by the time they do, they’ve been away for so long that people treat them like a toy, a novelty, and then they get eaten. His leg was clearly bothering him, and he stumbled. I led him slowly into the bakery, where Karl brought out a chair from behind the counter. For a moment, Emil seemed so tired as to be almost delirious. He breathed slowly and with great effort. There will be a night, he said absently, when you do not know what the morning will bring. I had a night like that, once. Its seeds are always there; they are here even now, in this place, with us.

He paused, lit a cigarette, and sat in the cloud, breathing in. In one version of this night, he said, I died, and in another version, this version, I lived. But the line between life and death is very thin. We pass through it every day without seeing, but now and then the line will become visible to us. It is like dust in the air. It illuminates the outline of what has always been hiding. He seemed to be reciting, as if reading from an invisible script. I hope you never experience a night like that, he said to me, but its materials are gathering, even now, and you must prepare yourself. Karl, listening, leaned on the counter and said nothing. Emil looked up at him. They regarded each other silently. Some understanding was passing between the two men, something they shared. Impulsively, I took Emil’s cigarettes from the table and lit one for myself. I’d never done this before; it would have seemed impossibly rude. A look of disbelief crossed Emil’s face. After a second, his eyes creased, and he smiled, laughing. I had never heard him laugh, not properly. He looked up at Karl and gestured toward me with his stick, and Karl laughed too. I allowed myself to join them. Look at him, said Emil. He doesn’t even know what he’s laughing at.

In the end, I moved away. I transferred to another college upstate in a pantomime of continuity. I played along for a while, but my project fell away when I tried, finally, to knit it together. I dropped out and found work in an insurance office on the edge of town. The years rolled by. I’ve tried to remember the last time I saw Emil, but our meetings were so repetitive that it’s hard for me to disentangle them. I would meet him, we’d walk, we’d see a movie, we’d walk again, I’d drop him off. Those days have collapsed into a soup of dark auditoria and smoky corridors, the smell of bread and tobacco, the filthy hum of the sidewalk, and being at odds with all the people and things that surrounded me.

Before I moved upstate, I stole one of Emil’s books from the college library. I keep it on my bookshelf, although I haven’t read it for years. I think, if I’m honest, that I’ve never understood it, that all his gnomic phrases and ideas just turn into air. I don’t know.

There’s no way he can still be alive, but I choose not to look for the evidence that he isn’t, so when I think of Emil, I see him still shuffling inside that room, with its books and wallpaper cured by the endless smoke. I see him replacing his carved stick in the stand by the armchair, half waving a backward farewell as I pull the door toward me, not quite closing it, allowing the world of the corridor to engage with the world of the room, the two infused by each other’s atmospheres, touched mutually by an ever-narrowing shaft of light.