Taking its time to mellow out on the soot-layered windowpanes, the saxophone’s melody softened its momentum. The grimy edges of these sin-covered vertebral exertions lay waste to the saxophone’s origins and enveloped its effusive sounds in a nothingness—a nothingness permeating and infusing rhythm into the heart of the city. The buildings—century-old relics, stretching their tired, old-world hands into the single-layered present from the nostalgic aura of the booze-soaked lights and sounds of the past—swayed with the melody’s multilayered textures, and I, easily misled by my infantile yearnings for the taste of cosmopolitan heaven, swayed along with them. Once again, I found myself on the island. The high-class, upper-scale rhythms of old Manhattan have almost completed their gradual, gradated diffusion into the synthesized novelty of mechanized beats, and we, lost children of falling markets and falling columns, roamed the streets in search of something—perhaps each other, p