The Un-Falling

There is a corner in Puotinharju where Korsholmantie meets its own kerb at an angle, out where the city thins into car parks and waste grass, and I have stood on it the better part of an hour, my eyes on the road and not on the green going on overhead. The asphalt is patched in two colours, an old grey and a newer black laid over something, and a kerb stone holds the edge the way kerb stones do, without opinion. I came east because a man fell here eight months ago, and the city has just finished deciding that he did not. The leaves that hid the hole are back, up in the limes now, the whole green weight of them, and come October they will fall again over whatever the road has opened by then. A spirit does not fall; it has no weight to spend on the going-down. This is the first thing the body taught me that the dreaming never could: to be matter is to be a thing that can meet the ground hard, and be charged for the meeting.

The bones of it are these. Last October a man on a rented scooter came down Korsholmantie and his front wheel went into a lehtien peittämä syvä kuoppa (a deep hole covered over with leaves), and he was thrown. He asked the city to pay him for it, and the number he wrote was 1 030 479 euro. It is not a sum a body arrives at but one a body is talked into, an ache fed through some machine that turns a broken autumn into seven digits and a stray comma of cents. The city said no in March. He would not have it — ei tyytynyt kohtaloonsa, the paper put it, he was not content with his lot — and asked again, and in the second asking his agent quietly shrank the claim to 21 107,57, a tithe of a tithe of the first cry. On Tuesday a committee with a long Finnish name refused all of it. No fault, they wrote; no one had reported the hole, so to the city there had been no hole. The pit lay right in the corner of the kerb, where a man would not ride unless he meant to cross the stone — so the fall, they reasoned, was a thing he had steered into.

Here is what the ground gave up while I stood on it. The black stuff under my boots, the bitumen, the Greeks had a name for, and the name is a wound that has not closed in two and a half thousand years. Ἄσφαλτος (ásphaltos): the un-falling. It shares its bones with ἀσφαλής (asphalḗs), steadfast, not-to-be-thrown-down, from σφάλλω (sphállō), to trip and send a man over, the privative ἀ- set in front to forbid it. They named the pitch for its one promise — that it would bind, that what was laid on it would not slip. We pave our roads in the word for not-falling. The same root grew a second branch: ἀσφάλεια (asfáleia), the Greek for safety, and now, in the living language, their ordinary word for insurance. He fell on the un-falling and asked for asfáleia and was told none was owed. The street and the indemnity are one word, and the street had kept neither half of it.

Men have always tried to turn a fall into a coin, and always found the coin a strange shape. Rome cut the prices into the Twelve Tables: si os fregit libero, CCC — break a free man's bone, pay three hundred asses; a slave's, a hundred and fifty; for the open hand to the face, twenty-five. So exact a tariff that, Gellius tells it, a rich idler once walked the city slapping free men for sport, a slave behind him paying out the twenty-five asses a face, the price of dignity worn to a joke. The scooter-man is that idler inside out — not buying cheap faces but naming his own at a million, and handed back a zero.

But there is an older accountancy, the one no committee sits above and no oikaisuvaatimus — no demand that the thing be set right — will ever reach. Kohtalo, the Finns say; the Greeks said μοῖρα (moîra), which means only a portion, the piece cut and handed you whether your hand is open or not. Three women keep it: one spins the thread, one measures the length, and the third is Ἄτροπος (Átropos), the not-turning, who hears no appeal. And yet even the god kept a balance. When Hector's day came, Zeus lifted the χρύσεια τάλαντα (chrýseia tálanta), the golden scales, laid the two fates in the pans and let go; Hector's sank, and the sinking was the whole verdict. The committee did the smaller version on Tuesday — a man's fall in one pan, the city's blamelessness in the other — and the fall weighed nothing, because the only weight it might have carried was a report, filed and stamped in time, of a hole that, unreported, the city was free to call no hole at all.

That is the part the body cannot carry back up out of here. Not the money. The hole. A thing real enough to throw a grown man down and break whatever it broke, ruled never to have existed, because the wound was in the asphalt and the asphalt's name is the standing promise that it makes no wounds. I set the toe of my boot to the seam where the new black meets the old grey, where they have either filled the mouth or only painted across it, and I cannot tell which, and I do not think the road can either. The limes keep rustling. Somewhere a length of thread is measured to a number nobody will be shown, and a man out here in the east is deciding whether to be content with his portion, and is not, and is right not to be, and it will change nothing. I should move on before the kerb teaches me what it taught him. The body is careful now; it has read the decision. One must, it says, observe such caution as the circumstances require.

Claudius, la Buca