what ate New York

The film poster that has Godzilla tearing up great chunks of the city and eating alive New York City should have been a giant Pacman, I think. For technology has eaten New York. And not only New York: Copenhagen, Madrid, Berlin: these are cities where I have witnessed this carnage, sinister and almost silent. We noticed it on the plane, a ride through the sky which has transformed from what was a quiet space, a time of dreaming and half-sleep, into a wilderness of seatback screens. Everything flickers. People feed themselves perpetual stimulation by the handful, like a supersized bucket of chips. As soon as we land out come the phones. Soon the aisles are crammed with people stooping under the bulkhead and standing over each other, so intense is their desire to be free of the traveling life and meet with the destination city, yet all have pulled out small devices and are keenly, yet dutifully scrolling. Oh, the dullness, pervasive and wee. Why travel five thousand miles through the ferocious universe only to read up on what’s happening at home? Instantly to rejoin the same long conversations we were wrapped in on our own soft couch.

We drag our cases to the A Train. My heart is pounding. This line is the subject of so much damn jazz. But when we get inside and the familiar orange seats are filled with black folks, every one of them inimicable, cool, and beautiful, the place proves to have changed somewhat since 2011. The suddenness of these changes and that nobody notices sometimes makes me despair and grieve. I miss my community, who have turned away from each other. Now even in the most exciting city anywhere, every third person is staring down into their lap, hung over the miniature news from elsewhere.

Used to be I was the annoying or crazy one, preoccupied and dreaming in a hyperalerted world, clogging up the pavement as I stopped short to stare upwards, to notice detail or jot things down, writing as I walked, holding my breath, my train of thought, my pen. Now I’m the passenger in everybody else’s aquarium world. In the street, people scroll as they stroll. City that never sleeps seems halfawake. And it’s all so iconic. The subway car that looks like every movie scene, the puddles and paddocks of outermost Thingie Island where the airport lies marshily. The Rockaways, Blvd and Ave. “We are passing under the East River,” I report. “We are passing under the World Trade Center. A lot of people died here,” reading the map, my eyes filling with sentimental tears. “True,” says my companion, “and then their friends went out and slaughtered many, many, many times more around the world.” After an hour of train travel, after nine hours of airplane travel, after an hour of bus travel in Berlin we come up out of the subway station at last, at 42nd Street, and the noise – the smell of French fries and traffic and metallic dust – the people and the way they pass, the hoardings, the sidewalks, the way they hold themselves – both of us standing their marooned by suitcases, we each burst into tears separately and hug across our baggage.

The lights, cameras, action are all around. We drift through the traffic of souls, uncounting. This explicit town, alive in all our dreams, overwhelms with its gross drama and chaotic splendour and decay, while at the same time it speaks to everyone individually. We find the New York Times, Dean and Delucas, the cafe. We find my friend, her black hair everywhere and her familiarity so moving. Even she, an artist, a true lifelong artist, ravels her phone at every opportunity. We buy burgers and a jar of beer, at the counter I worry we are taking too long to order and look up. There she is, hunched over her phone, as thought it were a knot in her hair she is unable to stop from worrying and untangling. Oh New York! Oh humanity! Come back to me! I miss the dreaming, the uncertainty, the hesitation and lostness. This striving, blaring, rushing, overstimulated community premium among the anthills we have built over the world is a place I experience through the dreaming comb, the honeycomb, of sweet nature, and the wild. Within eight stops of the Howard Beach station where the airport train meets the A train I have given up my seat to a pregnant lady and he’s given up his to an elder woman who rewards him with a sweet seamed smile, we’ve admired the pretty girl with green-tinged hair who has filed her front teeth into sharp vampiric points, I’ve passed on the name of an excellent book to a women who accepted my scribbled note and stashed it in her pocket, have told four people how beautiful they are, the tiny lady whose friend took his seat has paused at her stop, the stop before ours, to say, You have a nice day, now, and the beautiful man whose face was so somber and cold has smiled, shyly and ironically, when I said as he got off, You are a really beautiful man and I hope you have a really beautiful life. He said, drawlingly, Thank you. I love him.