The street became two streets, encircling a great, round building whose hundreds of mean and mocking windows were heavily barred. In front of the building was an imposing statue, carved in the same gray stone used throughout the city. Inside the prison were thousands of wretches, dirty, scabby, verminous, starving; thousands of convicts pacing, twitching, planning, calculating, remembering; thousands of convicts behind bland walls, condemned to smell their own bodies and the caustic chemicals, to feed on themselves and refuse, on hate, despair, foolish slyness.
The Governor left the car and beat his hands against the prison. He shouted defiance at the warden, the guards, turnkeys, stoolpigeons, trustys within. He picked up a piece of chalk and tried to write on the impervious, rugged stone. The chalk crumbled before he got beyond FR.
Outraged past bearing, he turned away, brushed by the statue. The figure was two stories high. On the base the letters stood out, shadowed by the street lights. GOVERNOR ALMON LAMPLEY. He ran back to the car as though pursued, his heart beating anxiously. He swung the knob; the car rattled between empty warehouses, lonesome flats, deserted homes. The arc-lights here were a deeper violet, the pavingstones took on a greenish tinge.
He entered the quarter where the foreign consulates were, each with its coat-of-arms carefully emblazoned above the doorway, the flagstaffs bare, windowpanes shattered and broken. After them came professional offices in houses hesitating between being homes or not-homes: dentists, pimps, doctors, mediums, occultists, fortune-tellers, literary agents, optometrists, dowsers, narcotics peddlers, osteopaths, contest-promoters, burglars, chiropractors, librarians, counterfeiters, attorneys, tea-tasters, educators, graphologists, architects, lapidaries, phrenologists.
He came to where narrow shops hunched against each other, none with entrances, each with a window for their shop-worn, mildewed goods: the folds of cloth faded and dingy, the hardware corroded and rusty, the books brittle and dogseared, the bottles fallen and crazed. He passed theaters where marquees, caught between changes, spelled out unintelligible attractions, created hermaphrodite stars. He passed filling-stations with hoseless pumps, radio-towers without antennae.
He took the trolley through quiet, quiet streets where all the houses spoke with assurance of sleepers within, of babies fed and diapered, dry and unprotesting, of adolescents on their stomachs and young girls curled into knots, of lovers lying face to face and married couples back to back. He passed shuttered houses, and those with the front door opened in welcome; houses with the porchlight left on for the expected visitor, and houses heavy with gloom and repulse. He passed open spaces: vacant lots, cramped parks, areas being excavated.
The street entered a more modern part of the city. The buildings were still of gray stone but here it was more smoothly, more fashionably dressed. There was not one which didn't reach to the roof of the city or embody the horizontal lines of the currently popular style. He halted the car before the department store which alone thrust its height through the city's enclosing shell and rose, who knew how many stories above it.
It had been remodelled over and over again yet it was still familiar to Lampley as the rest of the city: gray, massive, frowning. Oil lamps with dented reflectors behind them illuminated the show-windows. The Governor reached up and wound the route sign till it read, .HTUOM HTOMMAM-MUTOT XOV :TIAW. He lifted the control handle from its square nut and stuck it in the conductor's coinbox. He swung down the steps and stood under the portico of the store, gazing into each window in turn.
One displayed a single egg on a pedestal draped in black velvet that had turned green and purple. Another contained burred screws, threadless bolts, spectacles and eyeglasses with important parts lacking. In the next, women washed clothes in galvanized tubs, scrubbing them against metal washboards, ironing them with sadirons. One of them, stringy gray hair lank on fat shoulders, came forward and pressed her open mouth, like a pig's snout, against the glass. Her teeth were long and jagged, her tongue pale and coated, the inside of her lips spotted with sores. She pulled up her draggled skirt to reveal bunion-shaped shoes and wrinkled black stockings, dancing with bumps and grinds.