The Last Gentleman

edge and attuned like the great Jodrell Bank antenna to the slightest signal of something gone amiss.
    I am indeed an engineer, he thought, if only a humidification engineer, which is no great shakes of a profession. But I am also an engineer in a deeper sense: I shall engineer the future of my life according to the scientific principles and the self-knowledge I have so arduously gained from five years of analysis.

Chapter Two
    1 .
    IT WAS THE DAY after he broke off his analysis that the engineer received a sign: he set up his telescope in the park to photograph the peregrine and had instead and by the purest chance witnessed the peculiar behavior of the Handsome Woman and her beautiful young friend. Every morning thereafter the engineer returned to the park and took his position beside the same outcropping of rock.
    The peregrine returned to his perch. Every morning he patrolled the cornice, making an awkward sashay in his buff pants, cocked a yellow eye at the misty trees below, and fell like a thunderbolt, knocking pigeons out of the air in all directions. The engineer took a dozen photographs at magnification one fifty, trusting that at least one would catch the fierce eclipsed eye of the falcon.
    Every morning after work he set up his Tetzlar. After taking his two bearings, one on the eyrie of the peregrine, the other on the park bench, he had then only to lock the positions into the celestial drive, press a button, and the instrument would swing in its mount and take aim like a Navy rifle.
    The Handsome Woman came four days later, left a note, but the girl did not come. Again he prized open the semicircle of tin and again he found a verse.
    From you have I been absent in the spring,
    When proud-pied April, dressed in all his trim,
    Hath put a spirit of youth in every thing,
    That heavy Saturn laugh’d and leap’d with him.
    After that, neither one came.
    At night he sat at his desk in the Y.M.C.A. casting about in his mind and drumming his fingernails on the steel top, which had been varnished to represent wood grain.
    For two weeks he spent every spare moment at his vigil, coming to the park directly from work, forgetful of all else, sometimes forgetting to change his engineer’s smock.
    What had become of his love?
    Emerging one morning from Macy’s sub-basement, the engineer stood blinking in the sunlight at Nedick’s corner. It was the most valuable spot on the entire earth, having been recently appraised, he had read in The Times, at ninety dollars per cubic inch. It gave him pleasure to stand in Nedick’s and think about the cubic inch of space at the tip of his nose, a perfect little jewel of an investment.
    For a minute or so he stood watching the bustle of traffic, garment porters pushing trucks of dresses, commuters from Penn Station pouring down Thirty-fourth Street.
    Then, and for several mornings running, he experienced a hallucination which, however, he did not entirely recognize as such, a bad enough sign in itself. When he got sick, his sense of time went out of kilter, did not quite coincide with the ongoing present moment, now falling behind, now speeding ahead: a circumstance that no doubt accounted for the rich harvest of déjà vus. Now, as he stood in Nedick’s, it seemed to him that the scene which took place before his eyes was happening in a time long past. The canyon of Seventh Avenue with the smoking rays of sunlight piercing the thundering blue shadow, the echoing twilight spaces as dim and resounding as the precipice air of a Western gorge, the street and the people themselves seemed to recede before his gaze. It was like watching a film of bygone days in which, by virtue merely of the lapsed time, the subject is invested with an archaic sweetness and wholeness all the more touching for its being exposed as an illusion. People even walked faster, like the crowds in silent films, surging to and fro in a wavelike movement, their faces set in expressions of serious purpose so patent as to be funny and tender. Everyone acted as if he knew exactly what he was doing and this was the funniest business of all. It reminded him of a nurse he had in the South. Once his father took some movies of him and his nurse in a little park. Ten years later, when on Christmas Eve the film was shown and D’lo, passing in the hall behind the projector, stood for a moment to see herself with the others, the black nurses whose faces were underexposed and therefore all the