Inside, darker down these stairs spiraling into the vertiginous, spiderspinning of passages, webbed steps steeped to the pitch of night’s fall, precipitous, scary, and not recommended for those with the conditions of having a heart or a brain — the hammering’s loud, reverberant with the stone, and so he shouts over it, while apologizing all the while as he’s screaming, too, that he has to, their Guide he’s restless…now waving the Group toward him with a hand, then away with an umbrella, as if a warning of sorts, despite underground; they follow behind him, close and yet far enough away to estrange, always toward and then into what seems like a small, dankmoldy antechamber at the furthest eastern edge of the Island: an Introitus of sorts, a space just beyond dark, walled against light, keeping it from them, behind which heavy uniform slab this tunneling once went on, once led — as it’s said, as it’s guided over and over — into Manhattan: a passage proximately ruined into this wall, a progress thwarted, an answer, there’s your answer right there. Less than a mile off, what they’re sold. It’s told to have given out onto the bathrooms of City Hall, which stall…we’re not sure, that surety not included. I’ll take your questions only at the end of the tour. Inaccessible, too. Please, save them for the end, and yourselves. They feel at the walls on their ways so as not to be lost, though the tunnel tunnels on only straight, keeping their eye fixed on the halo of their Guide, which is the glint of voice from his person and that that’s flashed from the hat — not the voice of his person, but that of his function, his task, the glow of the plasticized crown…and so feeling their way, they go gripping a grope at walls knocked through with others, with these walls, and halfwalls, with quarters, ruin fortified, then reconstructed again to appear just rubbled enough to be safe, ostensibly, it’s passed around, ideally these fallen rocks falling as stones, some of them glassy, others dropped dull, this haphazard deconstruction of destruction even more haphazardly rehabilitated to now. And then — wall. Masonry. Ashlar. And now again, stop. This wall’s been arched, their Guide says, this arch’s walled in. Here, with newer stones. There, and with rocks found variously around the Island, its shores. In the style, though. Of the period. From the tympanum (which is the space between the top of an entry, or exit, then the arch arching above it, he explains while realizing, too, he’s forgotten to previously — wisdom lost on those arrived early) on down, all the way, it’s filled in now, full up. Me-zu-zah — there’s that, too. A crowning chink, beyond which it’s impassable, inaccessible, not today, try tomorrow. Kiss it, no matter — respect. The stragglers, those behind the curious, their spouses and kinder, their compensating others, have come to a stop, to a stand. Finally. They come and they come, they come then keep coming. Forever, six days a week nine to Shabbos. And then — they’re here, and then there’s no more, no further to go, turn around. About face. Stragglers first, with the Guide to guide now from the rear.
Take the keystone out, the Guide says, and this wall’ll fall.
And how the Island might, too.
Stick together, stay near.
Workers break for their brunch, which is tough rolls, gristly salami no harder than vodka…they’re silent behind the velveteen ropes hung from scaffoldings’ stanchions, makeshift brasspoles — how they’re almost exhibits themselves…
Please, no video, or flash photography. Tarnished, tarnisht.
This way, just this way — after you.
