A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago by Ben Hecht

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THE MAN WITH A QUESTION

Late afternoon. An hour more and the city will be emptying itself out of
the high buildings. Now the shoppers are hurrying home to get dinner on
the table.

A man stands on the corner of Michigan Avenue and Adams Street.
Unwittingly he invites attention. A poorly dressed man, with a work-heavy
face and coarsened hands. But he stands motionless. More than that, he is
not looking at anything. His deep-set eyes seem to withhold themselves
from the active street.

In the sauve spectacle of the avenue his motionless figure is like an
awkward faux pas in a parlor conversation. The newspaper man on his way to
the I. C. station pauses to light his pipe and his eyes take in the figure
of this motionless one.

The newspaper man notices that the man stands like one who is braced
against something that may come suddenly and that his deep-set eyes say,
"We know what we know." There are other impressions that interest the
newspaper man. For a moment the motionless one seems a blurred little unit
of the hurrying crowd. Then for a moment he seems to grow large and his
figure becomes commanding and it is as if he were surveying the blurred
little faces of the hurrying crowd. This is undoubtedly because he is
standing still and not looking at anything.

* * * * *

"Can I have a light, please?"

The man's voice is low. A bit hoarse. He has a pipe and the newspaper man
gives him a match. Ah, the amiable, meaningless curiosity of newspaper
men! This one must ask questions. It is after work, but, like the
policeman who goes to the movies with his club still at his side, he is
still asking questions.

"Taking in the sights?"

The man, lighting his pipe, nods slowly. Much too slowly, as if his answer
were fraught with a vast significance.

"I like it myself," insinuates the newspaper man. "I was reading Junius
Wood's article on Bill Shatov, who is running things now in Siberia. He
quotes Bill as saying what he misses most in life now is the music of
crowds in Chicago streets. Did you read that?"

This is a brazen lead. But the man looks like a "red." And Bill Shatov
would then open the talk. But the man only shakes his head. He says, "No,
I don't read the papers much."

Now there is something contradictory about this man and his curtness
invites. He seems to have accepted the presence of the newspaper man in an
odd way, an uncity way. After a pause he gestures slightly with his pipe
in his hand and says:

"Quite a crowd, eh?"

The newspaper man nods. The other goes on:

"Where are they going?"

This is more than a question. There is indignation in it. The deepset eyes
gleam.

"I wonder," says the newspaper man. His companion remains staring in his
odd, unseeing way. Then he says:

"They don't look at anything, eh? In a terrible hurry, ain't they? Yeah,
in a rotten hurry."

The newspaper man nods. "Which way you going?" he asks.

"No way," his companion answers. "No way at all. I'm standin' here, see?"

There is a silence. The motionless one has become something queer in the
eyes of the newspaper man. He has become grim, definite, taunting. Here is
a man who questions the people of the street with unseeing eyes. Why? Here
is one who is going "no way." Yet, look at him closely and there is no
sneer in his eyes. His lips hold no contempt.

There you have it. He is a questioning man. He is questioning things that
no one questions--buildings, crowds, windows. And there is some sort of
answer inside him.

* * * * *

"What you talking to me for?"

The newspaper man smiles disarmingly at this sudden inquiry.

"Oh, I don't know," he says. "Saw you standing still. You looked
different. Wondered, you know. Just kind of thought to say hello."

"Funny," says the motionless one.

"I got a hunch you're a stranger in town."

This question the companion answers. "Yeah, a stranger. A stranger. That's
what I am, all right. I'm a stranger, all right. You got me right."

Now the motionless one smiles. This makes his face look uncomfortable.
This makes it seem as if he had been frowning savagely before.

"What do you think of this town?" pursues the newspaper man.

"Think of this town? Think? Say, I ain't thinking. I don't think anything
of it. I'm just looking at it, see? A stranger don't ever think, now, does
he? There, that's one for you."

"When'd you come here?"

"When'd I come here? When? Well, I come here this noon. On the noon train.
Say, don't make me gabby. I never gab any."

Nothing to be got out of this motionless one. Nothing but a question. A
pause, however, and he went on:

"Have you ever seen such a crowd like this? Hurrying? Hm! Some town! There
used to be a hotel over here west a bit."

"The Wellington?"

"Yeah. I don't see it when I pass."

"Torn down."

"Hm!" The deep-set eyes narrow for an instant. Then the motionless one
sighs and his shoulders loosen. His face grows alive and he looks this way
and that. He starts to walk and walks quickly, leaving the newspaper man
standing alone.

* * * * *

The newspaper man watched him. As he stood looking after him some one
tapped him on the shoulder. He turned. "Specs" McLaughlin of the detective
bureau. "Specs" rubbed his chin contemplatively and smiled.

"Know that guy?"

"Who?"

"No; just bumped into him. How come?"

"You might have got a story out of him," "Specs" grinned. "That's George
Cook. Just let out of the Joliet pen this morning. Served fourteen years.
Quite a yarn at the time. For killing a pal in the Wellington hotel over
some dame. I guess that was before your time, though. He just landed in
town this noon."

The detective rubbered into the moving crowd.

"I'm sort of keeping an eye on him," he said, and hurried on.

GRASS FIGURES

You will sometimes notice when you sit on the back porch after dinner that
there are other back porches with people on them. And when you sit on the
front steps, that there are other front steps similarly occupied. In the
park when you lie down on the grass you will see there are others lying on
the grass. And when you look out of your window you can observe other
people looking out of their windows.

In the streets when you walk casually and have time to look around you
will see others walking casually and looking around, too. And in the
theater or church or where you work there are always the inevitable
others, always reflecting yourself. You might get to thinking about this
as the newspaper reporter did. The newspaper reporter got an idea one day
that the city was nothing more nor less than a vast, broken mirror giving
him back garbled images of himself.

The newspaper reporter was trying to write fiction stories on the side and
he thought: "If I can figure out something for a background, some idea or
something that will explain about people, and then have the plot of the
story sort of prove this general idea by a specific incident, that would
be the way to work it."

Thus, when the reporter had figured it out that the city was a mirror
reflecting himself, he grew excited. That was the kind of idea he had
always been looking for. But at night in his bedroom when he started to
write he hit a snag. He had thought he held in his mind the secret of the
city. Yet when he came to write about it the secret slipped away and left
him with nothing. He sat looking out of his bedroom window, noticing that
the telephone poles in the dark alley looked like huge, inverted music
notes. Then he thought: "It doesn't do any good to get an idea that
doesn't tell you anything. Just figuring out that the city is a mirror
that reflects me all the time doesn't give me the secret of streets and
crowds. Because the question then arises: 'Who am I that the mirror
reflects, and what am I? What in Sam Hill is my motif?'"

* * * * *

So the newspaper reporter decided to wait awhile before he wrote his
story--wait, at least, until he had found out something. But the next day,
while he was walking in Michigan Avenue, the idea he had had about the
mirror trotted along beside him like some homeless Hector pup that he
couldn't shake. He looked up eagerly into the faces of the crowd on the
street, searching the many different eyes that moved by him for a "lead."

What the newspaper reporter wanted was to be able to begin his fiction
story by saying something like this: "People are so and so. The city is so
and so. Everybody feels this and this. No matter who they are or where
they live, or what their jobs are they can't escape the mark of the city
that is on them."

It was after 7 o'clock and the people in Michigan Avenue were going home
or sauntering back and forth, looking into the shop windows, with nothing
much to do. The street was still light, although the sun had gone. Hidden
behind the buildings of the city, the sun flattened itself out on an
invisible horizon and spread a vast peacock tail of color across the sky.
In Grant Park, opposite the Public Library, men lay on their backs with
their hands folded under their heads and stared up into the colors of the
sky. The newspaper reporter stood abstractedly on the corner counting the
automobiles that purred by to see if more taxicabs than privately owned
cars passed a given point in Michigan Avenue. Then he walked across the
street for no other reason than that there were for the moment no more
automobiles to count. He stopped on the opposite pavement and stood
looking at the figures that lay on the grass in Grant Park.

* * * * *

The newspaper reporter had been lying for ten minutes on his back in the
grass when he sat up suddenly and muttered: "Here it is. Right in front of
me." He sat, looking intently, at the men who were lying on the grass as
he had been a moment before. And his idea about the city's being a mirror
giving him back images of himself started up again in his mind. But now he
could find out what these images of himself were. In fact, what he was.
Whereupon he would have his story.

Being a newspaper reporter there was nothing unusual in his mind about
walking up to one of the figures and talking to it. For years and years he
had done just that for a living--walked up to strangers and asked them
questions. So now he would ask the men lying on their backs what they were
lying on their backs for. He would ask them why they came to Grant Park,
what they were thinking about and how it happened that they all looked
alike and lay on their backs like a chorus of figures in a pastoral
musical comedy.

The first figure the newspaper reporter approached listened to the
questions in surprise. Then he answered: "Well I dunno. I just came into
the park and lay down." The second figure looked blank and shook its head.
The reporter tried a third. The third figure grinned and answered: "Oh,
well, nothing much to do and the grass rests you a bit."

The reporter kept on for a few minutes, asking his questions and getting
answers that didn't quite mean anything. Then he grew tired of the job and
returned to his original place on the grass and lay down again and stared
up into the colors of the sky. After a half-hour, during which he had
thought of nothing in particular, he arose, shook his legs free of dirt
and grass and walked away. As he walked he looked at the figures that
remained. The arc lamps on the park shafts and on the Greek-like fountain
were popping on and the avenue was lighting up like a theater with the
footlights going on.

"Funny about them," the newspaper reporter thought, eyeing the figures as
he moved away; "they lie there on their backs all in the same position,
all looking at the same clouds. So they must all be thinking thoughts
about the same thing. Let's see; what was I thinking about? Nothing,"

An excited light came suddenly into the newspaper reporter's eyes.

"I was just waiting," he muttered to himself. "And so are they."

* * * * *

The newspaper reporter looked eagerly at the street and the people
passing. That was it. He had found the word. "Waiting." Everybody was
waiting. On the back porches at night, on the front steps, in the parks,
in the theaters, churches, streets and stores--men and women waited. Just
as the men on the grass in Grant Park were waiting. The only difference
between the men lying on their backs and people elsewhere was that the men
in the grass had grown tired for the moment of pretending they were doing
anything else. So they had stretched themselves out in an attitude of
waiting, in a deliberate posture of waiting. And with their eyes on the
sky, they waited.

The newspaper reporter felt thrilled as he thought all this. He felt
thrilled when he looked closely at the people in Michigan Avenue and saw
that they fitted snugly into his theory. He said to himself: "I've
discovered a theory about life. A theory that fits them all. That makes
the background I'm looking for. Waiting. Yes, the whole pack of them are
waiting all the time. That's why we all look alike. That's why one house
looks like another and one man walking looks like another man walking, and
why figures lying in the grass look like twins--scores of twins."

* * * * *

The newspaper man returned to his bedroom and started to write again. But
he had been writing only a few minutes when he stopped. Again, as it had
before, the secret had slipped out of his mind. For he had come to a
paragraph that was to tell what the people were waiting for and he
couldn't think of any answer to that. What were the men in the grass
waiting for? In the street? On the porches and stone steps? They were
images of himself--all "waiting images" of himself. Therefore the answer
lay in the question: "What had he been waiting for?"

The newspaper reporter bit into his pencil. "Nothing, nothing," he
muttered. "Yes, that's it. They aren't waiting for anything. That's the
secret. Life is a few years of suspended animation. But there's no story
in that. Better forget it."

So he looked glumly out of his bedroom window, and, being a
sentimentalist, the huge inverted music notes the telephone poles made
against the dark played a long, sad tune in his mind.

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