Paul’s older brother Christopher died when Christopher was seven and Paul was just a baby. Christopher had gone down to the cellar searching for apricot preserves, the imprudent craving of a young boy who could remember a little too well the delight of a sugar-sticky mouth. But—and he had undoubtedly been warned of this—the wine, fermenting down there in the cool deep and swelling the bellies of its big round tanks, sent out its heavy pockets of flavorless, odorless gas, the secret feelers of the monster that trapped him on the floor. The whole town went searching for Christopher, up to the white church on the tallest hill, through the vine slopes and the slanted pastures, through gardens and kitchens and paddocks and even, presciently, down to the graveyard, but he was not to be found in any of these places. The father, thrashing down the stairs and holding his breath, found Christopher lying on the dank floor, frowning and pale as the dawn. He was not to be revived.



Now Paul sat in the kitchen, holding his hurt ankle, and watching the first apricots, delicate orange and swollen, tap against the windowpane. Paul was fourteen, and Christopher would have been in his twenties now, and married, and living in a cold stone building that the family would have built next to theirs. After Christopher’s death his father had put a lock on the cellar door, and his mother had put a small, blurred photograph of Christopher in a little silver frame from the jeweler’s in Alessandria, and Paul, at age four, had seized the frame and with an urge to reach its contents, its vacuous image of a small ghostly boy sunk deep beneath a fall lake, smashed it across the stone floor.



Now this morning the ugly sunlight edged through the windows and spilled its milk all over Paul, conveying with it a harmful level of nostalgia. With the girl Margaret here, Paul knew the sun would feel different. With Margaret, his old friend he’d seen again during this Easter break at home, it would feel like light, not failed sun, and so they would dunk themselves in its broad milkiness instead of sitting at the window feeling that the sun was veiled through a veil of memory. Paul felt the separation acutely, and was sick of himself.



The sun still felt white and wet like washed cloth from yesterday’s rainstorm. Yesterday a fast and monstrous storm had tackled the hills and scared Paul into running away. He’d tried to race the storm to the white church, that safe place on the highest hill of Cuccaro. He couldn’t escape, of course. But now the storm had vanished, and the morning sunlight slipped through the window and bandaged trapezoidal spaces of the kitchen floor and walls in white. 



Paul’s mother entered the room, as quietly as she did everything, pressed ground coffee into the coffee maker, and began pounding the air into milk for Paul’s coffee. Paul listened to her and looked out the window, at the first apricots hitting themselves against the glass. He did not want to turn around. He waited. 



In Paul’s bedroom there was a dead bee on the windowsill which had died a few months ago. During the worst of the winter, Paul had heard the bee buzzing against the pane for four nights, and when he looked the fifth day, it had died on the windowsill. It had been something so bright, so firm, so swollen, it seemed impossible that it would ever crumple in on itself, like any dead thing. But crumple it did, after a few months; its legs pinched together, the fine fuzz on its striped back diminished, its gleam rusted over.



Two nights ago, the night before the storm, Paul woke up (restless from his hurting ankle, and from thinking about the girl Margaret with whom he’d spoken in the garden that day) and saw the tiny dark bit on the mantelpiece, and in the vibrating dark he thought he saw it moving. The bee had been dead for months, and crumpled, and now Paul was sure it was moving. It seemed to be walking in circles. Paul pulled himself out of bed and ran down into the kitchen. The stone floors were terribly cold. They all wore slippers around the house (perilous not to wear slippers) but it had been too dark for Paul to find his. His whole life he’d never been to the kitchen alone at night, nor without slippers.



Now Paul had gone down to the nighttime kitchen to get a drink of water. He wished he could have drunk out of the faucet, but recently the water had gone yellow as urine and filled with black specks, as bad as it had been during the last year of the war, when Paul was ten.



The kitchen that night was quiet and cold and barren as a field. Paul’s hands shook as he took a glass from the rack. He felt like he was outside. He could feel the void of the sky inside the kitchen, like the walls were much too thin, like everything was shaking, about to fly apart. His feet stuck to the cold floor and made a wicky pattering against it that he feared someone outside would hear. He could feel the cold beaming up from his feet to his whole body, like lamplight pitched upward into fog. Margaret could have sat on a chair and steadied things, and he imagined her on a chair with him, but when he pulled her up in his mind she was a ghost on the chair, a mercury vapor light, veiled, horrible, and he banished her, because the real Margaret was not like that at all. He drank his water and crept back to his room. The bee was not moving. Paul hoped he was not going blind, like his grandmother, whose eyes were filled with clotted cream, who could not distinguish between dead moving bees and dead still ones, so long as they made no noise. 



Paul was back home at Cuccaro for Easter, and for the things that happened that week: Margaret, the kittens, the bee, the rainstorm and the next-morning sun. Paul spent most of his time at school at Alessandria, boarding during the week to save gasoline. Paul didn’t care much for his school. There the mattresses were wiry and lower, the conversation louder, the food much poorer. The floors were just as cold as at home.  Paul also didn’t care much for his home. And every time he came home, to his mother, his father (childhood polio had kept Paul’s father from dying in the war, though it had not kept him from farming) and his grandmother, he despised himself for feeling such discomfort everywhere. His parents spoiled him the best they could—when he was at home, they didn’t make him do more than feed the animals and water the new vegetables.



Only one of his old friends was back in town for Easter—Margaret, who had a face as homely as Cuccaro’s gravel path and languorous square: a short nose, a wide mouth, eyes that squinted up when she smiled, which was rare. She had always been so thin, so glum, making up mountains of lamb-filled pasta or potato dumplings with her older sisters and her mother (her father had died during the war, shot fighting in Dalmatia). One of her eyes had never quite lined up with the other. Paul wanted to see her.  It had been months. And many of the families with children his age had moved away, to Turin or Genoa, as the town population veered down to seven hundred from the thousand it had been in his parents’ time.



After the war, this was an infertile place. The land robbed itself. The cat bore kittens every year near Easter and every year she didn’t care for them and they died. The chickens made eggs with yolks as orange as the late sun, but only occasionally. The chickens groaned when Paul tried to collect their eggs.



Now they were all living under the air’s silent clamoring, this shaking memory of shaking, like after the ringing of a bell. It reverberated over the hills and through the fuzzy radio which recently had quit itself, through the rounded hills topped with small yellow-walled towns, this place to grow up with a distinctly horizontal sky and so many hills to tumble down under it. It was in the land and in the air, a grieving sense of the thing just swallowed now passing through the land’s insides.  



Paul saw Margaret on the second day of the break, as she walked towards the square and he towards home along the gravel path that ran down the spines of the hills.



“Margaret!” said Paul.



“Hello, Paul,” said Margaret.



“How are you?” said Paul. He was happy to pretend no time had passed, though it had been since last summer. She looked different, though, undefinably. She was weightier, taller, but in a way that kept shifting back to how he’d known her before, as if how she looked now was just outlines over how she ought to look.



 “Walking,” she said. “Walking along.”



Her voice, Paul thought, was very smooth and beautiful, even in dialect—a voice which would not be a disappointment to hear coming from over a high fence.



“It’s great to be home for Easter, isn’t it?” said Paul.



“Yes,” she said. She looked away, down the road. 



Paul was desperate for her to look back. “How has school been?” 



“We’re making dumplings,” she said. “I ought to be peeling potatoes. I went for a walk. I didn’t mean to see you.”



“Oh,” said Paul.



She looked at him. She smiled. “I ran into you, though,” she said.



“I’m glad to see you,” said Paul.



“We ran into each other,” she said.



“Yes, yes!” said Paul. “What a nice day it is, right?”



“I have to go do the potatoes, or I’ll be scolded,” she said.



Paul took it all as a good sign, even though as she walked away she began to run. 



Paul couldn’t wait to see her again, he realized, as he walked home along the gravel path. 



The clotted veins of the grandmother, her cheese-white forearms filled with soft dimples—this was how he knew women. His quiet mother, with dark, gleaming hair, whose hands were always floured (it always seemed intentional), like she was trying to fade away into part ghostliness, like she could touch her son who lived in the other place—the place which Paul defined as the place you see when you carry a mirror around in your hands and navigate your house by looking at the ceiling, the place of broad colors you can see in a reckless way when blindfolded, the wind that blows out from the balcony in a joyful way over the fields like the hugest most invisible bird, the place visible through the sifting flour, through veiled sugar (veiled sugar, they called it, not powdered) falling on cake, a place where Paul thought his mother, with her floury hands, could reach. On the other side his brother Christopher would just see those hands emerging out of brightness and they would stroke his cheek and his hair and hold him and come back to this earth washed clean with tears. 



Paul’s mother was always crying, in a squawky way, like a dark bird. In the summertime she sometimes sat in a white plastic chair on the patio with no top on, sunning herself, and those dark oblong folds came down low on her concave chest completely unconnected from any thought of nourishment.



But everything was like that, even the pasta boiling away in its salted water, that swelled up so delicious sometimes it made Paul cry, though he pretended it was the steam—each piece was always so small, each bowl so close to being finished even at the first bite. Paul dreamed of the thick rich mash of risotto, threaded through with kneaded cheese, pots and pots of it on each burner of each stove in Cuccaro, and of an infinite egg custard and the warm thick grainy sugar of corn semolina pudding, made all with cream, not watered-down milk, things with no pieces.



But at home such rich foods, when there were any, went first to Paul’s mother and grandmother. Sick was needier than young, Paul learned, and palliative more important than strengthening. 



On Easter, though, they ate a high cake shaped like a dove, some before church and some after. Paul’s father gave him the best part, the top all crusty with sugar, and dunked the soft center in sweet wine.



There was never a priest at the white church, not even on Easter. Everyone attended services at the orange brick church in the center of town, the church with the flat bell face that Christopher Columbus’s family built. Margaret was there, with her sisters and her mother, and they took up one pew but left room for their father, whose ghost, it could be assumed, had found a way back from the anonymous flowered Dalmatian field where for him the world had shaken a little too hard to keep its pieces. Paul’s family sat on the other side, Paul could feel his pulse or the trembling of the ground through his thighs on the hard pew, the sun made trapezoids on the stone floor and revealed dust in the air, the women wore lace and murmured Ave Maria sixty times (Paul always wondered if they were actually counting; their words blended into a numberless throb, like bees) and then the priest spoke for a time always much shorter than Paul expected, and then they all felt the wine sink deep into their tongues.



There were never services at the white church. And it stood on the hill so bright, so firm. It seemed like it would never crumple in on itself, like every dead thing. Up on the hill, it felt like something visiting from a separate place. It was a square moon sunk into the land. 



Paul had only once been inside. He’d been with his friend Mark, whose family had given up farming and moved to Turin to work on automobiles. Mark had noticed the hinges of the left door were so rusty they were getting pulled down by the doors’ weight, and they were so curious they spent an hour wiggling the left door and forcing against its hinges (each time, it shrieked horribly) until they broke it away and pushed inside.



It hadn’t felt like normal air, like the air outside or in other buildings. The air had been heavy and sweet as soil, touched through with glorious light from the high diamond windows, rich with the smell of growing things. Birds flew in and out. Both boys had felt fearful and they hadn’t stayed long.



The next week Mark and Paul coaxed Margaret and one of her sisters to come see it too but both doors had new hinges, bright as silver, in which they could see reflections of their stretched-up faces and all the trees collapsed in behind them like an accordion. The doors were locked shut and would not open.



They ran back home instead, along the gravel path on the ridge that connected the white church to the rest of the town. Paul had fallen on that gravel path and skinned his knees more times than he could remember. He didn’t mind falling because falling was always preceded by that moment, right when he felt he was running so fast he couldn’t stay up, when he ran so fast he started tipping over, when he felt the beginning of flight. Then he’d fall and smash his knees and sometimes his hands and his face, and if he smashed them hard enough when he walked back the grass would turn white and the sky would fill with black explosions and still things would start to move. 



It was on the afternoon before the dead-bee night that Paul ran into Margaret again. He’d gone to the store in the square to get bags of ground corn and dry pasta. His mother had gotten him new stiff trousers for the holiday and his legs itched around his knees and ankles. As he went up the gravel road he watched the blue bus walking smoothly up the hills. There used to be two buses, but the war crushed one of them in, so now there was just one. The Alps smoldered quietly far away. The sun came into the dry-goods store and rang off the thin crinkly plastic bags of dry pasta.



As he came out of the store, he saw Margaret on the road, holding a piece of red ice on a stick. On the road, she walked, with her hair with its wheat-furrow parted so straight. She blushed delicately, on purpose Paul thought.  



“Margaret! How are things?” he said. 



She looked to the side. “Good morning,” she said.



“What are you up to?” said Paul.



“Do you want this?” she said, holding out the ice. “I don’t like it.”



“No, thank you,” said Paul. 



She let it drop to the gravel ground and laughed. She was wearing a yellow dress and yellow socks folded down over her sandals. Lovely—she was very lovely. Her eyes did not interest Paul as much as the way they crinkled up.



“Well,” said Paul. “I have to bring these things home. Would you like to come?”



She looked out over the hills, at the blue bus creeping its way to Lu. “I should be helping my sister,” she said.



“All right,” said Paul. He stood there for a few minutes hoping she’d change her mind, but she didn’t speak, so he turned to start walking back to his house. She started walking along with him.  She hummed a little as they walked. Paul worried about what they would do when they got to his house. He’d show her the kittens, he decided—all four had still been happy and in their box when he’d checked on Easter. And he’d offer her coffee.



They arrived at the house, unlocked the gate, and went through to the garden, where the apricot trees and cherry trees and new-planted squash and tomatoes met them with their reeling turmoil of color and scent. Paul went around to the shed to check for the kittens, but their cardboard box was empty.



“Early apricots this year,” said Margaret.



“We need to find the kittens,” Paul said.



“Why?” Margaret said.



“Because they’re not in their box,” Paul said.



“Why not?” Margaret said.



“The mother cat never takes care of them,” said Paul, rummaging around the zucchini pots more and more quickly. “Here, help me find them,” he said.



“I’m sure they’re fine,” Margaret said, sitting down in the plastic chair and closing her eyes.



“I don’t think they are!” said Paul.



“Fine,” said Margaret, reaching out to touch one of the apricots.



Paul saw a bit of gray next to one of the tomato stakes. His heart beat fast. He reached out and grasped the kitten out of the cold dirt. It was limp and very dead. He held it delicately, then realized he didn’t have to.



“Margaret! See?” said Paul, standing up to show her. 



She wouldn’t look at him—if she wasn’t crying she certainly looked upset enough to be crying. Her eyes were squinted up. “I’m going to leave,” she said.



“Stay,” said Paul, hiding the kitten behind his back. “I’ll make you coffee. We’ll put cream in it. And we can take a walk.”



“No,” said Margaret.



“Well—” said Paul.



“I hope to see you soon,” said Margaret, like she meant it. 



Margaret left and Paul squeezed the kitten and put it behind a tree, then went into the kitchen and took out the sifter and the flour and sifted through the flour and watched it fall. It hissed like a breathing thing.



The apricots outside the window were small and firm. He wondered how it was that apricots don’t need to be fed apricots to grow apricots. He wondered how they formed out of the dirt, what was under the dirt, and what was under that. Certainly there were things under it, moving things and buried things and things both at once.



Paul got out of his chair, too miserable to stay still. His mother was upstairs sleeping, where she spent most of the day, and his father out in the fields. He felt the freedom of an empty house. So he hit his head and arms and legs against the stone ground and pressed himself into corners and bruised himself pulling the table onto himself but he could not find something that would resist him all the way. He went outside to the garden where the earth was plowed up to receive the zucchini seedlings and he plunged his thin arms into the dirt. He put his face onto the heavy clods. He lapped at it like a cat at milk. He pushed the soil into his mouth. He felt lost in his dread. It was dread, this heavy feeling, that made the sky feel like something he could fall into, too dangerous to look at with a mirror, dread that made things shake as if they were going to fly apart. Nothing was working, so he decided to run down the gravel path to the graveyard. At the graveyard there was a little round photograph of Paul’s brother under glass, on the front of his upright grave. The photo, and the flowers planted in baskets and placed on the stones with no way to root into the actual earth, usually kept Paul far away. 



But as he ran closer and closer to the graveyard he realized that he wasn’t tired at all, and he wouldn’t get tired, and he could run to Alessandria and back, if he wanted, if it weren’t so boring. So he turned and sprinted back to his house, steady and lost in dread, this monster, like a sky, thickening everything into shaking dimness.



He went back into the kitchen (stiff trousers ruined), found a heavy glass and the cellar key. The cellar was safe this time of year; the grapes were still tiny and green. He went down the stairs to the cellar, past the dusty jars of preserves and bottles of wine, avoided looking at the tanks which had watched Christopher die, and went to the winter storage room, where no one would come for months. 



The glass was heavy and sweaty in his hand, and he regretted that it was empty. He threw the glass at the ground and watched it smash. Then he picked up a jagged piece of the glass and dragged it over the soft pits of his ankle, where no one would look. But his skin beckoned the glass painlessly, and the knife embraced back, and everything gave: not what he wanted at all. Paul went back upstairs, neglecting the blood, which would not show on the floor or the steps once it dried.



The next day the storm came. 



The morning after the rainstorm, Paul sat in the kitchen by the window, in a crooked wooden chair with an embroidered seat, and watched the pale gold apricots bounce on and off the windowpane in the wind. They made light meaty thuds against the window, but they wouldn’t break it. They split the sunlight into ghostly shapes on the glass, dirty shapes that, where they caught on the dirty edges of dried raindrops, were bright as the sun. 



Paul listened to his mother walk softly into the room with her slippers. He smelled the fervid smell of coffee rushing out of the canister in her hands. He listened to her push a whisk through milk to fluff it up for him. He thought of Christopher: how easily his mother would have spent twice as many minutes every day fluffing up milk for both of them.



Paul thought again of Margaret. He was sure she would know his shaking dread, if he could explain it to her. He thought over and over the thing that had happened yesterday when the storm had come.  He had been next to Margaret and he had felt a heartbeat either in his hand or his neck or in her hand or her neck—a heartbeat. She would say that the earth’s deep, pitless throb was its heartbeat, even if the rhythm was spaced in such a way that they could not feel it, only because they were inside it. A heartbeat with neither heart nor beat, for all things are veiled and unveiled—the sky, shaking from misted to cloudless, the cold stones and the compost heat, the grapes, the floating poison, the boy dead on the ground, his brother. Paul felt his throat.



He looked out the window. Past the apricots he could see the hills—steaming up in the early sun, pale green fading in the distance to pale blue, where they blended into the sky like watercolors. He could hear the chickens, and the jangling of the horse’s bridle in the paddock. Paul wondered what it would be like to be everything, both wondering and feeling what it would be like to be everything, hill, beast and sky. The hills swelled up and almost breathed, neither asleep nor awake.



This is how it ends: with everything, everything, feeling different to him. 



      Yesterday there had been a terrible sudden storm. Paul had been in front of the house, having found the last kitten dead next to the outdoor sink. He lifted up the kitten, which was soft and wet and only as heavy as an egg, and turned to look down at the garden and the hills to see if he could see his father. He didn’t see his father, but he saw the sky had changed.



A curtain of rain quickened across the far hills—immense, gray, trapezoidal. A tin whirligig flapped haplessly on the balcony in vertiginous circles. A crew of black birds rose from a cedar, cawing, and tilted off over the hills. The rain was coming up fast, ghoulish, bigger than any monster Paul had seen before. He gaped at it.



Paul watched the rain patter up the gravel road, darkening it bit by bit, more terrifying than the darkest night. He needed to be with someone, to find someone with whom he could turn this horror into wonder. He scrambled backwards, ran out his front gate and to the right, towards the shop and caffe at the dip at the center of town, past the small crooked fountain and up the far hill, towards the small white church that stood on the flatness of the hill’s center, surrounded by lowering layers of narrow black-trunked trees. It was a long run up, past the highest houses. Paul’s left arm ached, and his ankle.  He had a jagged stitch in his side. Bits of trees and plants blew over the hills hard enough to knock tiles off roofs or horses to their knees.



The church door was locked. Paul sat on the small stoop, the smell of rain hitting dust rising against his limbs and face. He felt terribly alone. Then his eye caught on, or predicted, almost, a young body coming around the corner of the church. Margaret, of course. 



“Margaret!” he yelled. “We need to get inside!” 



She didn’t ask why. The branches were about to fly off the trees. His panic inflamed her panic. They needed to get out of the storm. The countryside was blowing in around them, erasing them.



They slammed themselves against the doors, which would not open.



They worked frantically at the doors. They battered against them like their wood was made of longing. They slammed their fists against the heavy dark doors and against the rusty hinges, as if they were going to break into the other space. The rain wet their ankles. They were maniacally terrified of the storm. As they pounded at the doors, cracking one a little, tearing at the splinters, they moved into what they would both consider the best kind of meaninglessness, the meaninglessness of oneness, where nothing else needs to be said.



Finally the distance was so thin he broke through and clawed her out. They clawed each other out. They yanked at each other, like wrestling. They yanked each other through the opening they’d made in the door. The splintered door scratched them with its claws. They bled, and they lay on the ground. They waited. The storm ceased—gravel to sugar to nothing but air.



As his terror faded, Paul began to look around. The ground was covered with dim moss. Soft things moved in the corners. What stones there had been had mostly rotted away or washed away. It was different from what he remembered. Maybe it was a house, not a church. They’d all always thought it was a church. Maybe it was a house.



For a little while, Paul thought, this! This was the other space. Where was Christopher, and his mother’s hands? 



But of course when he looked around—there was only Margaret.



The half-circles of sun, modulated with shadow, rocked delicately across the floor. And soon enough Paul felt discomfort. He hated himself—even here, even now, he could not hold up the sliding cielo of dread. He felt fear dangling all around him, dawdling dark shapes that evaded his blind grasp. He began to know that lying here in this space could not be the solution. They were inside something, and interiors must not be the solution, Paul felt deep down in his heart: interiors and burials, even in the richness of blackness, even in this shut space where the air sank down heavier than water or skin and embraced them, even here engulfed in the mantle of this glorious moon.



Meanwhile, the birds flew in and out above them. It was clear when the sunlight struck them that the feathers on their wings were perfect. Their feathers overlapped their feathers gray into milky white, their quills fine as brushstrokes, their bodies firm, their inky black eyes and gnarled feet blooming, their contours elegant and unruined as a pen line on a white page. And Margaret said, “I bet those birds can see the hills.”

In the mountains we chewed melons,
sifting everything as two seeds caught
slippery between the rockiest white teeth,

bald 12,000 foot fists, veined with memoratic
rivers, a small feeling of past lives... you are seeing
visions of the long-haired boy from the river

with your neurons in the dark— a Dutch
sans colors, his leathery belly as barefoot
as the operating floor, your heathery hands

shook like a hummingbird with patchy
instinct, tracing bee-lines with purple
chalk, scooping in the cison, hopscotch

with a coda, round and round
we always gnaw on the same subjects,
teetering over a stanza and landing

on an ant bed of spruce and
the impermanence of first loves—the
mountains hold memories the way

muscles do— a cornsilk glacial tear
greases a fishy earthen canal
which you probe with blue gloves

to count centimeters, calling avalanche
from behind the operatic curtain
which opens like the palms of Atlas

to hold the crying pink sun
chewing oxygen and his mother’s bloody
skyscrape, the world gasping for black

while you stand cataloging carmine
rings on a fallen spruce, wondering
how this time of year, seasonless and

shifty, always reminds you of that boy
from the river, how nothing you studied
in medical school ever made sense and yet

the decomposing shells of birds
smell familiar, and the unstitched
threads of your mind are momentarily loosened,

asking me why the present moment
is never lucid, why light impregnates
through smaller objects

and how could the watermelon-shaped caste
cover horizons unbirthed
to your jealous pale eyes,

scalpels to the bark, each old lover
itching the heart which, like the never-ending
sentence, is inflammatory when left

unoperated.

Contributor’s note: Rebecca Cooper wrote this in the Year of Dairy Products from the American Heartland, give or take some subsidized time.



“No no no. So let me tell you. I did this quiz in the* New York Post*: ‘How Much of a New Yorker Are You?’ Or some shit*.* Man, I've lived here my whole life, so I was like, I got this shit. But *shit* man. The quiz was hard. It's like *I don't know this stuff*: ‘'What's the highest Subway station in New York?’'”



I shrugged.



“Smith-9 Street in Brooklyn. *What*!” the man continued, his flailing arms almost thwacking a girl in a fuchsia jumpsuit. She mashed her gum loudly. The man didn't notice. “Who knows that shit? That's not New York. Here's the one I got.   What's the only borough that's connected to the mainland?”



I should know this. I'm walking down the length of Broadway to hand out blank *maps* of Manhattan to strangers. My roommate Ama Francis and I have 480 more maps and just over 12 more miles ahead of us.



“The Bronx?” I say.



“Yea! My friend liaves there ‘cause it's the only part of New York that's connected to the mainland, so if shit goes down, he can just keep running. You know. Cause elsewhere, it'd be like: *Run—water! Ah*!”



The stranger pretends the boundary of his concrete block is the edge of the island.



“*Run!*” He hits the crack in the pavement closest to me. “*Water! Blah!” *He spins 90 degrees and runs north on Broadway toward 214th Street—*“Run!”*-- until he hits the edge of the concrete tile, spins again over his right shoulder, runs away from me, his black high tops practically screeching on the hot July pavement—*Water*!—spins again, runs. He looks like a pinball or a frenetic toddler in a tiny playpen.



“But in the Bronx he could just keep running.” He breathes hard. “9 /11 did different things to people.”



The summer air hangs above the asphalt as if it’s thick enough to stir.



“Anyway, girl, I'll take your map. I'll do it for you. You want me to map the shit that means something to me? What Manhattan is for me? Okay. You got it, babe. Good luck.”



My blank maps are 3.5” x 7” postcards with a cartoon outline of Manhattan on the inside. The island looks like, as Truman Capote puts it, “a diamond iceberg” floating between the East and Hudson Rivers. Or as Pat Flanagan writes in his postcard to me, months after handing him a map, “an abdomen without the appendages necessary for life,”, “a halved steer,”, “a leg of lamb” one meat hook shy of a slaughter house.   I think it looks more like a jalapeno pepper, with a vein down the middle for Broadway, a transverse line for Houston Street, a rectangular blemish for Central Park and a baby pepper, or maybe a stray leaf, by its side for Roosevelt Island.







It’'s nearing the end of the first hour, the noon sun is just about standing over us, and Ama and I are finally past Inwood Hill Park. We’'ve handed three maps to the Watchtower ladies sitting on the edge of the park, giving out the religious pamphlets. In return for their accepting our maps, we took our own reading material—two brochures, one on depression and the other on “Global Warming?”. I hand a map to a woman tending a churros stand at the corner of 198th and Broadway by trying to pass my Italian off for Spanish.  *Draw your mind* is the phrase that finally got her to take it. A post office worker, dripping with sweat, palms one without listening to the explanation.    



Ama spots a tall, burly man leaning against an M100 bus post on Dyckman Street, where Broadway meets with the final segment of Riverside Drive. A baseball bat and a duffel bag large enough for four basketballs drape from his sides. Ama approaches him. Even with the sun almost directly overhead, she stands in his shade.



“Hi! We're doing a mapping project of Manhattan and we were—--”



He pulls out an earbud from under his sweatband. “Huh?”



I realize it looks like he could eat her.



“We're doing a community art project, giving out blank maps of Manhattan, and asking people to represent Manhattan in a way that'’s meaningful to them. You can draw, write, label. And—--”



“Wait what?”   



“We... we want you to record the stuff in Manhattan that makes it home. Whatever you like. ”



“I take this and draw anything I want on it?”



We both nod.



“Anything?”



“Anything,” Ama says, “and then you mail it back to us.”



He puts out a hand. The skinny map looks even more miniature in his grip.



“Thanks!” Ama says, turning back south on Broadway.



“Wait. Have you guys been to Inwood?” he asks, pointing uptown. “Some *great *basketball courts up there. Real good places to picnic.”



“We just passed by—”



“Because one time in that park I saw this hummingbird by a flowering tree, just like beating its wings a million times a minute. And I walk up close and that thing is beating faster than anything I’ve seen in my life. Its little heart going ba-boom ba-broom in its chest. Have you ever seen a hummingbird?”



Ama says in Dominica, where she grew up, yes.



“I can map that?” he asks.



“Of course.”



“Because really. Have you seen a hummingbird from* up clos*e?”



Broadway runs north-south across the length of Manhattan. It starts from Bowling Green in the south and cuts northwest across the island from 10th Street to 79th, where it unkinks itself, rejoins the grid, and forms the spine of the Upper West Side. From there, it runs almost perfectly straight the rest of the way to Inwood, jumps over the Broadway Bridge, continues through Marble Hill, a sneaky little part of Manhattan that'’s not actually connected to the island, and goes up through Yonkers and Sleepy Hollow before disappearing into Route 9.



It used to be a Native American path, cut through the brush and swamps of old Mannahattan, called the Wickquasgeck Trail. When the Dutch came, they took it as their main highway and renamed it *Breede Weg.* Then the English won out, and anglicized it to *Broadway. *But it wasn’t until 1899, when Mayor Robert Van Wyck signed a law changing the name of Western Boulevard—the segment above Columbus Circle—to Broadway that the whole avenue became unified under the same name.



It’s hour three and it’s starting to feel like Broadway' is a conveyor belt with Manhattan zipping by on either side. English appears out of the Spanish. Awnings for “CA$H LOAN$” and C-Town morph into red brick facades laced with ivy. The metal skeleton of the IRT subway line sinks into the ground at 122nd Street.



Ama and I have started taking bets on who will and won’t respond agreeably. A woman hobbles out of RiteAid near 110th street, dragging her left foot behind her right. Ama says no. I say yes:



“What? What do you want? Directions or money?”



“Actually we’re doing a mapping project...”



“And how much do I have to pay for it?”



“Nothing.”



“Oh in that case, thanks sweeties.”



Empirically, the hipsters are too snide. Three of four Columbia undergraduates stop, but the Columbia Medical Students can’t be bothered. Ama considers doing a sociological project in tandem with my cartographic one.



An elderly man, hunched over his empty shopping cart, shuffles uptown on Broadway. We both bet no. He looks up from staring at his brown orthopedic shoes when I ask him to join the project.



“Map my memories? All my memories are from here for the last 80 years.”



His accent is the thick Polish-Yiddish one I imagine my father’s grandparents had when they settled in the tenements on the Lower East Side. He lingers on the r’s. I wonder if he was around as *Jewish Harlem* changed to *Italian Harlem* and changed again into *Spanish Harlem. *I wonder what he thinks of the Whole Foods opening 10 blocks away. Or of the mannequins in mesh underwear bent over in the American Apparel store window behind him.



He takes a map.“This is all I know. Is that okay?”



In 2000, the city of New York dedicated a division of the Department of Information Technology and Telecommunication (DOITT) to geographic information system (GIS) mapping. Its prize creation, NYCityMAP, is possibly one of the most complete maps of any city ever made. It was designed to be the first fully integrated map of the city, for use when multiple agencies need to be working from the same document, like in the event of a water main break.



They’ve released an online version for anyone to use.   Click on any building in the five boroughs and the map will tell you the year it was built, the real estate owner, the number of floors, the approximate number of units. Select from the menu on the right and you can see all the subway entrances, all the traffic cameras, every garage and off-street parking lot. Last month they added the ability to scroll between aerial views of Manhattan in 2008, 2006 and 1924. Now you can watch old Penn Station emerge from where Madison Square Garden currently buries it.



The Map “may be the first great map in which the old cartographic function, to point a path, matters less than a new one: to provide a picture of everything, in depth, in case, for now,” Adam Gopnik wrote in 2000 when the base map of NYCityMap was unveiled. “Yet the Map, being all maps to all men, will, in its nature, remain forever unfinished.”[[1]](#_ftn1)







On 86th and Broadway, Ama and I spot in a floppy fisherman’s hat man surveying the table vendors selling old books and wire jewelry. Pat Flanagan, he says his name is.



“I just love this,” he says.  “You know why?   I just moved up to the Bronx, but for the first seventy years, this,” he gestures to Broadway, “this was it. It’s ALL memories. Nights out drinking. Old lovers and heart ache. People think they know this area, but you see that grille?”



He waits until I follow the line of his pointing finger and face the street.



“People pass by this street every day but they never notice that cast-iron fence. It’s got to be over 100 years old. If the subway was built in 1904, and the grilles needed to be there for ventilation from the very beginning… Well let me tell you. Your project is about creativity, yes?”



I nod.



“Well there’s nothing more creative than a bunch of 12-year-olds left to their own devices. I used to hang out there with the neighborhood boys when I was 12 and we would all go exploring. We’d never get in trouble or anything like that… but those grilles are the access points to the subway tunnels. And let. M. Tell. You. It’s like the 19th century down there. I’ll map all of it for you. You’ll be hearing from me, Rebecca.”







The summer after my freshman year of college, I worked on my own Sisyphean project for a nonprofit called CultureNOW: a giant map of all the public art work in Manhattan. My boss insisted that every street be named, every piece of artwork be both labeled and pictured on the front, and cross-referenced on the back, with information about the provenance, artist, location, and material. The selling point of the map, according to my boss, was that it was the “largest compilation of art in the public realm to date.”



For a while, the file was so unwieldy that every time I tried to open it, Adobe self-destructed.



I doubt very much that anyone can make sense of the final product. It’s little more than noise, really—with a super baroque system of organization.



Yet for all that effort to be complete, the map still became, secretly, my vision of the city. Inside my lime green office, I decided what counted as public and what counted as art. Should a carousel count as a piece of public art? What about the statues in the gardens at the UN? Does the UN count as a public space? What about the artwork inside public schools and hospitals?



It’s from this mess that this fractured map project—with its aim to put the work of one cartographer into the hands of many—emerged. The idea was not just to acknowledge, but to *celebrate*,* * * *the bias of the mapmaker, and to recognize the impossibility of completion from the start.







2PM: Ama and I are skidding just west of Central Park when the sky cracks and it starts to pour. Fearing a shoebox full of  200 moist maps, we seek shelter in the cafe by Lincoln Center where I run into my old high school history teacher. We make small talk; I hide my mid-afternoon mojito.   Rain slides down the sheets of glass. I jot down notes about the expedition—something about New York   starting to feel like a small town, the fear of going up to strangers, wearing off.



The rain lets up, and we stumble out to 66th street. The air smells fresher, and it sticks less thickly. I slip three maps in quick succession through a McDonald’s store window, through the vent in a movie vendor’s ticket booth, into the hands of a Mr. Softee driver.



Just past Columbus Circle, a man is digging through the recycling.. “Can I have two?” he asks. “ So I can keep one?”



42nd street speeds by. Or maybe we speed by it. I’m reminded of David Letterman’s description of it as a petting zoo now that they’ve closed the street down and have reserved it for “pinkening Brits and pooped grandmothers.”[[2]](#_ftn2) I’m also reminded of my Russian roommate’s description of it—it really does look like an airport. But the signs *are *shiny and the theaters really *are* impressive. We hand a couple of cops some maps and they stuff them in the fronts of their uniforms.   



34th street zooms by.



Ama and I cut through the Flatiron District, and pass through the nondescript stretch of Broadway between 18th and 13th, where Broadway is the borderland between the Meatpacking District and Union Square. Distracted by some conversation about food—we’re starving by this point--we lose Broadway near 10th street. Finding our way takes 15 minutes. Ama teases me about getting lost in the city I grew up in.



“Where is what you were looking for?” a voice calls after me. High-pitched, giggling.



I look down at a head of duckfluff blonde hair, clumped from the humidity, and further down still at a set of bloodshot blue eyes hidden by glasses. “Truman,” he says, shaking my hand. “And, by the way, what *are* you looking for?”



He slips me a piece of paper: “It is a myth, the city, for anyone, everyone, a different myth, an idol-head with traffic-light eyes winking a tender green, a cynical red. This island, floating in river water like a diamond iceberg, call it New York, name it whatever you like; the name hardly matters because, entering from the greater reality of elsewhere, one is only in search of a city, a place to hide or lose or discover oneself, to make a dream wherein you prove that perhaps after all you are not an ugly duckling, but wonderful, and worthy of love.”[[3]](#_ftn3)



I have to admit, he says, that there is something *essentially elsewhere *about New York. It is a place that people come to precisely because it doesn’t ever offer itself fully.



Truman asks if I can hear it—the typewriter*, *a mile uptown, going clackety clackety schpling in pursuit of *Here Is New York*. “There are roughly three New Yorks,” E.B. White bangs out in his room at the Algonquin during the feverish heat spell of July 1948*.* “There is, first, the New York of the man or woman who was born there... and accepts its size and its turbulence as natural and inevitable. Second, there is the New York of the commuter—the city that is devoured by locusts each day and spat out each night. Third, there is the New York of the person who was born somewhere else and came to New York in quest of something. Of these trembling cities the greatest is the last—the city of final destination, the city that is a goal.”



Or what about those shears? Truman asks if I can hear Gay Talese, a few blocks down the street,   splicing together ledes from *Times* articles.   “New York is a city of things unnoticed. It is a city with cats sleeping under parked cars, two stone armadillos crawling up St. Patrick'’s Cathedral, and thousands of ants creeping on top of the Empire State Building. The ants  probably were carried up there by wind or birds, but nobody is sure; nobody in New York knows any more about the ants than they do about the panhandler who takes taxis to the Bowery; or the dapper man who picks trash out of Sixth Avenue trash cans; or the medium in the West Seventies who claims, '‘I am clairvoyant, clairaudient, and clairsensuous.'’”[[4]](#_ftn4)



New York is always *here *and *there*, n'’est-ce pas? he says*. *You can live here your whole life and never own it. Have it always remain just beyond your reach. It'’s intoxicating. Keeps you on your toes, keeps you drinking coffee, and keeps you walking.



Listen, he says, and Adam Gopnik whispers, “New York is always somewhere else,. “Across the river or on the back of the front seat of the taxi... We keep coming home to New York to try and look for it again.”[*[5]*](#_ftn5)



“How can you map something you'’re still looking for?” Truman asks and skips off.







Our knees ache by the time we reach SoHo, when the numbered streets give out to “Prince” and “Spring” and “Mercer.” It'’s about 4:30pm and the easy conveyor belt of the Upper West Side has disappeared. We'’re pulling ourselves along now. Fifteen maps remain to give out.







“And what, by the way, *are *you looking for” echoes in the Canyon of Heroes.



“Merci beaucoup,” I say, handing the last map to a young Parisian girl sitting at the edge of Battery Park,   sketching the water into her book.



Ama and I fall into a bench a few down from her. I’m sore and covered in dirt—literally. I swipe my finger across my chest, and it comes up black and greasy. I am hungry and tired and lost and satisfied and exhausted. We check the time: 6:27pm. I mark it down.



It just feels so good to sit down. To sink into a bench warmed by the summer. We stare blankly ahead, at the pedestrians and the bike riders, at the waterfront just beyond, at the confluence of the Hudson and East Rivers in the distance



I try to remember why this map project meant so much to me. Why I needed to know that I could put a little bit of New York down on paper. Why I would walk 13 miles to capture just a fraction of it. Why I needed to believe that Manhattan would arrive piece by piece to my P.O. Box over the next few weeks.



The waves lap at the base of the Statue of Liberty.   My knees ache, my shoebox of maps is empty. I’ve tried my best to find it. I’m physically unable to go any farther—the street stops and the water laces protectively around. Yet the Statue still rises up in the distance, almost mocking my *here*ness. The city is still just ahead, essentially elsewhere. *There*.



[[1]](#_ftnref)  Adam Gopnik, “Street Furniture,” *The New Yorker*, November 6, 2000.



[[2]](#_ftnref) Lauren Collins, the New Yorker talk of the town, “Zoo York,”*The New Yorker*, September 14, 2009. http://www.newyorker.com/talk/comment/2009/09/14/090914taco\_talk\_collins



[[3]](#_ftnref) Truman Capote, “New York” *Portraits and Observations, *1946. (p. 10)



[[4]](#_ftnref) Gay Talese, “New York is a City of Things Unnoticed,” *The Gay Talese Reader.*  



[[5]](#_ftnref) Adam Gopnik, Iintroduction to *Through the Children's Gate*.