Old Manhattan

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, perhaps the tastes of the forgotten past, when the bricks and gargoyles, the rooftops and fire-escapes, brimmed with soon-to-be fulfilled dreams and expectations. Where have you gone, you origin of this soon-to-be forgotten melody? I can still make out the last remnants of your dying interludes.

Sarah, an intelligent, overanxious, rushing through her mid-twenties sales representative, took her last drag on the last drug of her boyfriend’s last stash. It would be her last—she promised herself—her last taste of amateur anti-depressants for the evening (a sales representative scheduled to interview with Deutsche Bank should reduce such inhalations, she told herself). Bryan, walking aimlessly along Fifth Avenue, debated the fate of his romantic decisions with the judging elms of Washington Square Park. And I, a mere tourist of the legendary metropolis, re-created it anew in my mind.

Do we create it or does it create itself? Do the pipes, exhaust fumes, streetlights, buildings, trains, monuments, gutters, saxophone-spirals, gray and black fashion motifs, endless spindles and waves of intellectual exertions and exultations, and poetic resonances and mathematical proofs spawn themselves, or do we, lost children of “mitochondrial Eve,” provide the essential ingredient that keeps this dynamo permeating through time? We are the pipes, exhaust fumes, and streetlights; we are the melodies and dialogs; we are inseparable from the self-perpetuating flow that is the city.

The art-house movie kiosk bulged with its bright light, permeating the West Village with its enhanced, oracle-inducing call from the great beyond of pretentious, Europhile-catered nightmares and dreams. These beams of stellar light from the cinematic beyond filled the plaid-covered youngsters’ heads with images of decaying western fruit. The romance on their faces, ignited by their own primordial search for romantic stability—or whatever kind of stability can be established in this metropolis—, was either given fuel or exhausted and extinguished.

We rambled aimlessly from street-corner to street-corner, crooning and wheezing with our culturally-dated mating calls. Preparing the right seductive melody required finesse on our part; our motivation was to not only seduce Sarah but the city itself. Thus, we longed for the straying cat to climb onto the rooftops of our lives—to soak up the rain-drenched air and cry into our minds the inspiration for our own cries (the soon-to-be transmogrified songs of our personal histories, uttered to prospective lovers over unfinished tuna rolls and Pad-Thai).

Plates were chinking and rustling; Park Avenue chandeliers were swaying back and forth, as if Manhattan was a gargantuan ship making its way to the shores of (the now defunct) Ellis Island. Will you greet us with your incandescent torch, oh Liberty? Will you show us the land of possibilities once more and bring us into the fold of your urban veins and arteries? As the trains course through the underground rivers and surges, and as the bridges (connecting our loneliness to the loneliness of others) bring  their steel cables down in a forlorn attempt at becoming our safety harnesses, we lift our heads and plead with nature for one more hour—one more minute to feed on the fruits of Old Manhattan. It will fall, says the oracle; it will fall and no one will mourn for it.

Allow me to interdict by contradicting; your tired ways are no match for the days to come, oracle. If no one will mourn then, then let the lights burn out now; if nothing will be left of the urban veins and arteries then, then let us pump the city’s circulation with spirals of chemicals and vainglorious cantos now. Let us barrel through the lightning, thunder, and the gusts and gashes of wind and water, into the lukewarm spring of skyscraper-bound lovers, waiting out the millennial storm by staring into the heart of the coming tides, daring the light show to begin. We will hold hands until the cityscape melts into the background of time.