The Wilderness Singers

From NEMESIS - OPENING CHAPTER: Sunlight poured down on the late afternoon sidewalk in downtown Flushing, Queens. A throng of people moved slowly past small stores and jutting tables of produce sellers. Orientals and Hispanics shared the sidewalk, along with a few white people like George Gessler. He was in his middle forties. His close-cropped hair was graying at the temples. He was of just under average height, and trim, and he moved efficiently and with just a hint of impatience through the slowly moving crowd. The engineer had finished work There were days when he dressed rather formally - when he needed to make a technical presentation, or meet with visitors come to inquire about a project. Today he was dressed casually in chinos and a short sleeved shirt open at the neck. Pens and pencils stuck out of the shirt pocket. It was early Autumn. The afternoon was humid and threatened a shower. Gessler passed Chinese restaurants, and small clothing and jewelry boutiques and lottery shops, and greengrocers with fruits and vegetables arranged in wooden bins on the sidewalk. The crowd allowed only slow progress, and he reminded himself to be patient. He glanced in passing at the produce tables, where some of the items were unfamiliar to him. Salsa music pounded from one of the parked cars, while, more musically it seemed to Gessler, the Chinese voices rang out with their distinctive tones that rose or fell. A vendor spoke sharply and incoherently to a customer, a would-be haggler perhaps. The foreign words melded. The common modes of speech here were modulated tones and high-pitched screaming. A problem for the lab, Gessler thought, to try to find any sense in this babel. Above all of the other noises, a whining police siren cut like a knife. He thought it ought to have been cooler by now, but a viscid late-summer atmosphere lingered stubbornly in the city. He wiped moisture from his forehead with a handkerchief, and then carefully returned the handkerchief to his pocket. The police cruiser sped from the avenue up a side street and was gone. To some robbery or domestic tragedy that he might read about in tomorrow's newspapers, perhaps. Who knew how all of these immigrants lived, and what they lived for? And what sort of desperation there was beneath the surface? Gessler was on his way to meet a woman for the first time, on what was something of a blind date. The woman was Chinese, and they'd made contact in an unusual way - through a "personal" ad, of all things. In his free time, Gessler studied the Chinese language. One recent evening when he was alone in his apartment he had been looking through a Chinese language newspaper. He was turned to a page of classifieds, and after several seconds he realized that the blocks represented "personal" ads from Chinese women or men. The ads would list the person's age - usually - and a few descriptive comments. Good-looking. Divorced. Single. Children. 25. 40. Gessler had let his mind dwell on the possibilities. He thought he was feeling tired of the single life. His mother, with whom he'd been living for several years, had died recently. He knew that it was not easy to meet new women, and he thought that the "personals" approach was worth a try. He didn't imagine that there was any risk in it. He'd crafted some letters in both Chinese and English, and sent them off to the newspaper and waited. When she called him Gessler thought that someone had dialed a wrong number. He was about to hang up when he realized that the words were Chinese and that she had spoken his name. They talked for a few minutes, but with difficulty - her English was limited, and Gessler helped her along with his even more limited Mandarin. He arranged to meet Nina - that was her English name - for dinner one night after work. There had been others, too - three women, in fact. He'd taken them to dinner, or on one occasion just pastry and tea. The first woman he'd met was a divorcee with a daughter in China. The woman told a sad story of meddling in-laws who broke apart her marriage because they wanted a grandson instead of just a granddaughter. She broke down as she told her story. Gessler listened politely. Too troubled, he thought - and on the first date. They did not call each other again. There was a young woman who worked in a women's nail salon. Gessler liked her shiny black hair, but she seemed naive and unknowing. He didn't mind about the salon - a lack of English limited the kinds of work a person could do here - but she had not been a professional in China, either. Not of my class, he thought. There was a tall woman in her middle thirties. Her English had probably been the best. She was not only working as a bookkeeper but had almost finished a college degree. When he asked her something she would squint earnestly and answer in a tentative manner. They ate and talked for a couple of hours. Gessler did not have much of a feeling about her. Too blasé, he thought. And if she had any feeling about Gessler then she certainly hid it well. Now he made his way to the public building where he'd arranged to meet Nina. It seemed to him a strange pass to have come to. After the failure of the first few meetings he was now rather tired of the process. He thought that perhaps he'd made a mistake pure and simple, and that there were no suitable women to be met in this fashion. He would just follow through on this lead, and then step back and take a rest from it. Maybe there were no short cuts, in fact. Nothing, for someone as reserved as Gessler, that could make the process of meeting people any easier. It was only lately that he'd really begun to think about having a family. He supposed that it was not too late. His life had gotten too solitary, he thought. For that matter, he had become disenchanted with New York City generally. He was beginning to understand that in his walks through the city it was almost unheard of to make contact with another human being - for him at any rate. And it probably would not be much different in any other city. The women seemed absolutely afraid of contact. When he was younger and more naive he could remember speaking to strange women in parks, only because (for example) they were reading a book that he had liked. Almost invariably the woman would leave without a word or glance - the book closed, put away. It was as though he had committed an unpardonable offense, something absolutely gauche, and she was just speechless. Well, he would not attempt it now. The feeling of anonymity - it was partly his personality, and it was partly just the nature of urban life. You seldom saw the same person twice here. If he spent a thousand days walking around the city it was going to be the same. Weekends ended with the same result, as did the work-week. There were colleagues to talk to, and casual friends, but for the most part he felt cut off from people. While he waited for her he wondered to himself: What are the odds of meeting someone really fantastic? But it couldn't hurt to try, he thought again. If this is another failure you step back and re-think it all. As for American women, weren't they all basically the same - shallow and materialistic? How much money did you have in the bank, what sort of car did you drive - those were the important things. Were you handsome. Men were blamed for being superficial, but no one was more superficial than women. Listen to them carry on about the latest movie actor, and you couldn't help thinking there was not one of them that did not equate conventional good looks and an expensive haircut with nobility of character, for God's sake. Gessler did not stop to think to what degree he was generalizing. He also had a notion that all Chinese shared a common value system, and that their concern was rather more with what was inside a person, than outside. But this generalization (if Gessler had thought about it) was bas