Features • Spring 2026 - Fear
Gezi
Once again, a newborn cried for the first time. The bald scream carried her voice through crowds in a chestnut-smelling street, rousing the cats from their curbside sleep. The sound stretched farther on to the trees of Taksim as they shuddered with an intensity foreign to them. The cats knew of what was coming before us. They found Spirit in a corner of İstiklal, licked and nursed her. They were the ones who would tell her about the name of the street, about how long before it meant independence, it meant dismissal and rebellion. They told her, as she cried, that she was rebelling even now when she did not know the word for it. They were the ones who decided that the time was right and carried the newborn to a nearby park. The cats, from atop the branches of Gezi, all silent in their knowing, wanted to show Spirit the trees.
Poetry • Spring 2026 - Fear
There’s something to be said about those little birds inside the eggs, with the sticky baby down and bones melted tender. This morning, you call me soup-for-brains and I imagine a boy’s guts cupped inside the feathered belly on my plate—another boy pressed open like a drum, a membrane. I drink the brine from a jar of Koon Chun plums for breakfast. Practice, I say, and you call me Pussy for the first time all week. They say it doesn’t taste like anything. Just the salt of the duck and the blood-tang of marrow. But I forgot you’re tutoring Leah Wong at her place today, so I turn and face your black-feathered buzzcut. No time for a game behind the school with the Chus’ half-popped basketball, which yesterday I poked till it dimpled and likened it to one of her mom’s big fake ones, and you hit me. For a split-second I thought I saw your eyes turn milky and your spine go baby-bent, but I pulled up your T-shirt and you were still hairless as a girl, your skin opaque. So it’s dinnertime and Mom isn’t home yet and all I have is the chick in my egg. He’s just boiled awake, beak parting to call me Dumbass. Soft. My fingers turn to yellow protein in calcium dust, prying you into this wet, scalding kitchen. Walls gum-pink and beating; I take you where heat reigns.
Features • Spring 2026 - Fear
By no means is this a famous story. It takes place in Huntsville, Utah, a small town of under six-hundred residents, located in Ogden Valley on Pineview Reservoir. Surrounded by three ski resorts (Snowbasin, Powder Mountain, and Nordic Valley) there is no shortage of idyllic views, nor a shortage of seasoned skiers wishing to park amongst these idyllic views. This is observed by the abundance of Parking by Permit Only signs that prohibit parking west of 7300 E Street, made possible by the Huntsville Town Ordinance on April 19th, 2018.
Fiction • Spring 2026 - Fear
Big John stood near me with the electric blue above us, screaming out with its shine for everyone to drink it. Lines of neon stretched and twisted into a beauty of advertising brilliance. We were drinking it and the bottles were sweating and it made me feel good for the first time all day.
The fresh online pieces we experiment with outside of our print cycle. Formerly known as Blog.
From the Archives
Fiction • Winter 2009
My father’s earliest memory was when he was five years old, looking outside into the darkness at the madwoman who lived a few yards down the dirt road, on the other side of the street. Every night she was there, he said. Every night she would sit outside in front of her house, a faceless silhouette sometimes backlit by the moon, slowly rocking back and forth. Every night for hours she would sit alone in the dark. She was crying out the name of her dead son, trying to call him home. “*Gou Er!*” she howled into the night. Her sorrowful voice rang out in the summer silence of the Chinese countryside. It echoed in the mountains. “*Hui lai!*”
My father remembers what his mother told him, when he asked what the woman was doing. “She is calling the spirit of her son,” my grandmother said. “If you call out the names of the deceased, their spirit will come back and sleep in the house.”
She added, very sternly: “Don’t go near her. She has a demon air.”
My father doesn’t believe in ghosts. He is a rational man, a scientist and soft-spoken atheist, thoughtful and patient in abstract discussions, patient with his daughter. We have talked about this story many times, though he hesitates to tell it. He doesn’t think of himself as a storyteller, and he doesn’t like ghost stories. For him, there is no use for the supernatural or perverse aesthetics in a real world already filled with grief and horror, and there is no time for self-indulgence when there is work to be done.
For years he has been trying to get me to write his stories, about growing up during the Cultural Revolution, about his and my mother’s lucky love story, about his experiences in the Red Guards denouncing his teachers and singing the Chinese national anthem in the midst of crowds of students in Tiananmen Square, waving the Red Book in the air and cheering for Chairman Mao. My father has been trying all my life to get me to understand and appreciate my background, his background, and the complicated, difficult chain of events that led him from farming communes in rural China to graduate school in Wisconsin. My father thinks his story of survival — China’s story of survival — will put my life into context and give me perspective on my troubles and grief.
He wants me to write about China, but not in this way. Not through the lens of Oriental superstition that no one believes in anymore. This story is self-indulgent, he would tell me. And I would not argue.
They only lived in that village for several months, in the summer and early fall of 1964. The army had moved into that remote mountainous region between Hubei and Sichuan to build a bridge across the Chang Jiang, and the military families were all housed in villages in the surrounding area. My grandfather was only a low-ranking officer at the time, but he was lucky enough to get a house that his family did not have to share.
They only got the house because no one else wanted to live there. The house was small and shabby, on the outskirts of the village, but that was not why it was empty. It was empty because the villagers said it was haunted. They said in the village that it was often visited by the spirits of the dead landlord and his young son who used to live there, and by the demons that plagued his crazy widow, mad with grief, who still lived in another of their houses, a smaller one, across the road. They said the air itself was contaminated by the devils that possessed the woman and caused her madness. This was the “demon air” of which my grandmother spoke.
No one from the village would live so close to the madwoman. They believed that her demon air was contagious. My grandmother believed it too. She was from the countryside, poorly educated, her heart full of traditional fears and superstitions. She did not want to live in that house with her young son, so close to a crazy woman and surrounded by the spirits of the restless dead. She was afraid of the invisible demons in the very air she breathed. But my grandfather insisted — he had traveled, gone to medical school in the city, and prided himself on being a modern-minded man — so she relented. It would not stop her from trembling with insomnia in the middle of the night, as she listened to the silence between the madwoman’s howls for hints of a ghostly visitor, but my grandmother knew her duty as an obedient wife. Nevertheless, she would warn my father, her five-year-old boy, to stay away from that woman.
My father never told me exactly what my grandmother said in that first, fierce warning, but I can imagine her younger voice — if not her younger self — filling her words with an ominous fear that goes back through generations of Chinese country folk; a still-remembered childhood fear of black-faced, wild-eyed, fire-tongued demons that live high up in the mountains and kidnap children to be slaughtered for dinner and slowly roasted over hellfire. I can hear her voice through the ears of my five-year-old father, confused and a little scared and vibrating with a strange excitement in the transmission of such a primordial fear:
*Don’t talk to her. Don’t even go near her. If you get too close to her, if you speak to her and breathe in her foul, demon breath, you too could be possessed by her devils. They will swim around you, slip in and whisper, damp and cold, in the nervous sweaty spaces between cloth and skin. They will pull at each hair on your arms and your legs with tiny teeth, glide needle-prick claws over every inch of your skin. They will enter your body through your nose, mouth, ears, or slither into your brain through the liquid space between your eyelids and the whites of your eyes, snipping thread-thin vessels to turn your vision red with blood, reaching a clawed hand deep down into your throat and retching out a sudden, anguished scream. *
*You too could lose your mind, *she would have told him. *You too could be possessed, exiled, despised, and shamed.*
“How did they die, the madwoman’s husband and her son?” I asked my father. We were sitting in the kitchen drinking tea after my Saturday piano lesson. I was fifteen, and it had been ten years since I first heard this story. “Why were their spirits not at rest? Was there a murder, a suicide?”
My father doesn’t remember, or maybe he never knew. He was five years old in 1964, and his parents never fully explained the woman’s history, if they even knew it at all. It was a long time ago, anyhow, and his early years were very confused because they were constantly moving around with the army, and sometimes he mixed up people and places in his memory from that time because they seemed to be everywhere all at once. After he started middle school things began to calm down — or at least his family stopped moving around so often, so that he finished middle school in one place and high school in another, and his memories from then are more distinct. Not that anything actually calmed down — in those later years everything became, if anything, more confused — but least he remembered his adolescence. His early childhood is not as clear.
But, if I really wanted to know, this was two years before the Cultural Revolution, and almost a decade after the Elimination of the Counterrevolutionaries campaign, which not only targeted intellectuals and capitalists, but also continued the Communist attack on landlords — on all wealthy families who held both economic and political power under the Kuomintang. He had the impression that the madwoman’s family had once been very rich — at least compared to the others in the village. Probably she was a victim of that wave of persecution in the mid-1950s. Her husband was probably taken away by the Communists, who either executed or tortured him, or sent him to a prison labor camp, where many were worked until they died of hunger and exhaustion. Or maybe he and his family were so persecuted and humiliated by the Communists, with their land and wealth gone, confiscated by the new government, that he could not take it anymore and committed suicide. It was common enough at the time for that to happen. Several members of my own family — some distant, some close — committed suicide after political persecution and public humiliation.
“But what about the son?” I asked. “They wouldn’t persecute a little boy.”
Maybe it was an accident, my father said. In the mountains many things can happen to small children if they’re not watched carefully, and though the children of former landlords may not have suffered direct harm from the Communists, they were often very cruelly bullied by other children. In any case, accidents happen. He may have gotten lost in the woods, or was eaten by a tiger, or he could have fallen into a river and drowned.
“Maybe his father killed him,” I said, “before he killed himself. Maybe he didn’t want his son to suffer as he had, so he decided to kill them both. So they could be together.”
Maybe, my father said. That happened sometimes too, whole families committing suicide together when they see no other choice.
“But then why didn’t the mother join them?” I asked. “Why didn’t she kill herself as soon as her husband and child died?”
My father put down his steaming cup on the kitchen table. The sun was in the process of setting and cast a rosy-pink glow on the cheap blue and white ceramic of our tea set, bought in a Chinese supermarket downtown by my mother long before she died, years before I was even born. The lid and spout of the teapot were chipped, and out of the four original cups that went with it, only two of them — currently used by my father and me — remained unbroken. I was about to suggest that we buy a new set when I looked up and saw my father’s crinkled brown eyes. They were looking at me, troubled and concerned.
“You think too much about death,” he said.
Perhaps I do. Perhaps, in the scheme of things, I focus too much on the macabre, indulge too much my morbid streak, my fascination with superstition, with demons and death.
But for years I have imagined a kind of circular retelling, a family mythology of signs and spirits. I imagine our family haunted by ghosts, or haunted, at least, but the uncanny motif of haunting. The broken teacups, the first one shattered the day my mother first told me my father’s ghost story, the second one smashed on the morning of her death. The day of my first period, two weeks after the funeral, and the unexpected rush of blood that soaked through my jeans and into the upholstery of the passenger’s seat of the new car that replaced the one totaled in the accident. Those months afterwards, when I stayed in my room for days on end, listening in the silences between my tears for the sounds of my father, vague and absentminded, moving around in the kitchen downstairs. Guidance counselors and therapists and family friends, their dry eyes and hands that pressed my hands and shoulders and touched with mild reproach my tangled, uncombed hair. Sleepless moonlit nights, the madness of sorrow, and whispers in the dark, hoping for the return of something lost. And my father, growing grey, tired, quiet, more distant than ever, his outlines fading as his shoulders gently stoop, his eyes creased and uncomprehending his daughter at thirteen, at fifteen, at twenty and never a moment beyond the first telling of a ghost story.
Could it be that she has haunted him, this madwoman from that village in the mountains? Could it be that it is because of her that my father is wary of sad women, first of my mother’s tearful rages, and then of his strange, unhappy daughter, remote and reserved, quivering with a vague and aimless anger?
No — that’s not true. Not quite. In the line between fiction and nonfiction I sometimes miss my mark, veer towards a clumsier angle of understanding and alter facts that need not be changed. My father the scientist is not haunted by ghosts. But she has haunted me. All these years later, I am still thinking of this ghost story. I am still thinking of this memory, and this madwoman, of my father’s.
I can see her in my mind to this day, as clearly as if I had actually seen her — her head bent, hunched over, her hair unwashed and disheveled and covering her face. It is daytime, and she is stumbling through the village, murmuring under her breath, talking to herself or to someone no one else can see. Sometimes she very softly wails. She lifts her dirty hands to her face when her voice begins to crack; she looks like she is crying, but her hair is in her face and I cannot see.
My father told me that all of the adults in the village ignored her when she staggered by and pretended she was not there when she tried to speak to them or beg for money or food. If she became too much of a nuisance they would shoo her away, sometimes violently, threatening her with sticks. No one would touch her with his or her hands. No one in the village even spoke to her except my grandfather, who had a different view. He believed that the cause of her madness was not demons or sickness but merely sorrow, for the loss of her husband and particularly her son. My grandfather would try to be kind to her and give her something to eat, if the family had any extra food. But times were hard, and charity was a luxury they could not usually afford.
Even my grandfather had his limits. He also would not touch her, nor was his charity seen by anyone except my father. In fact, no one gave her food in public. No one seemed to give her anything. No one knew what she ate, if she ever ate; no one had been inside her house for years. Maybe she stole food from the farms, but if she did, no one complained. From what they knew, she had next to nothing left, yet still she survived.
I imagine some people in the village probably said that it was witchcraft keeping her alive, that the demons that persecuted her also kept her from passing away. I can imagine the stories, especially the ones that the children would tell to scare each other: that the madwoman wandered the streets in search of sources of sweet human flesh, for which her demons gave her an insatiable craving; that she had killed her own son after the death of her husband in a sudden and inexplicable fit of madness; that she had carved the meat off his little skeleton and roasted it in strips over her cooking fire, then made a soup from the bones. You’d better behave, parents would tell their kids, in order to scare them into obedience, or the madwoman will come and get you.
The stories made the children cruel in their fear, especially the little boys. My father was among them as they threw rocks at her and laughed when they could make her flinch. They ran after her through the streets to make fun of her, shouting rude things and shrieking with laughter. But the madwoman, if she noticed them at all, never seemed angry. In her soft, wailing voice, she would coax them with promises of money and candy, if they would only come and give her a kiss. Her breath would gently lift her hair with each syllable, but they still would never see her face. She would tell them to come to her house, where she had good things for them to eat. Her coaxes, promises, and soft wails would continue, increase, with each thrown stone and shouted insult.
I can imagine my five-year-old father’s fearful face as she sharply turned to face him and singled him out. I can imagine the outline of her lips behind the stringy, fringed curtain of black hair as they formed the sounds of my father’s name. I can imagine her voice, soft, insidious, with a hysterical lilt that gradually turned her whisper into a wail, and then a howl, and then a scream. I can imagine my father, frozen in place, as she stumbled towards him with arms outstretched, and how he finally gathered his wits with a sudden shock and scattered with the other children before it was too late.
Then they would laugh, these village children, as they looked behind them over their skinny shoulders from a safe distance. But this time, my father did not laugh. She had singled him out of the crowd of children. She had known his name.
“And then what happened?” I ask my father. At home from college, I sit with him at the kitchen table, the fading autumn light warm for a moment through the steam rising from our teacups.
But there is a lot my father doesn’t remember. He doesn’t remember ever speaking to her, or trying to help her or comfort her, or interacting with her at all beyond those cruel boyish taunts. He doesn’t remember even that she had picked him out of the crowd, that she had known his name, though it’s possible that it happened. He doesn’t think about it much. The only thing he remembers with any real certainty is that first image, the madwoman in the moonlight. All the rest is speculation.
“But mom told me you did try to comfort her, that one time, when you saw her crying alone in the fields,” I say. “You went outside to play one day and you saw her there, not acting crazy but just looking sad. You wanted to help her, but you hesitated. Your mother had told you not to go near her because of her demon air. But she was crying, and you could not bear the sight of her sadness. You wanted to help. So you went over and put your hand on your shoulder, to show that you were there to comfort her.”
Maybe, my father says. But then, maybe my mother was just trying to tell a story. What else did my mother say about it?
“That the woman grabbed you,” I say. “She grabbed your wrist and her grip was like iron. You struggled with her, but she wouldn’t let go. After a long time you were able to push her down on the ground, so that her hand loosened for a moment and you could pull your arm away. Then you ran back to your house and never tried to do anything like that again. That is, you never disobeyed your parents again.”
Maybe, my father says. But my mother was probably just trying to teach me a lesson about obedience. It is a good story, but she probably made the whole thing up.
“I think she died soon after that,” I say. “That’s what I remember mom saying. That she killed herself days later.”
My father exhales heavily and shakes his head. He doesn’t know, and he doesn’t think it matters. She was one of many who had lost someone, and she was not strong enough to recover. The story doesn’t make much sense anyway. How could the woman have known his name? Why would she pick him out, of all people? Why would a five-year-old boy think to comfort a madwoman? And why would any of this be related to anything at all?
*Because she chose you, I* want to tell him.* Because of a haunting. Because a dead son was summoned and you answered her call. Because you touched her, wanting to help, and she held onto you. Because madness and sorrow and spirits are contagious, and you breathed in her demon air.*
*And now you hesitate to comfort, to put a hand on a female shoulder shaking with sobs, to smooth the hair of a bent head that trembles in her tears like a black silk curtain. You are afraid that when you put your hand on my shoulder, when my bent head lifts to look at you and the black curtain of my hair parts for you to see my tears, it will be her face.*
*Yours may be story of survival, *I want to say*, but maybe mine is not.*
But maybe, again, I have missed my mark. It is too easy — my father would say, if this story were about anyone but him — to tell it as a ghost story. It is too easy to imagine a haunting like this. The psychology is simplistic and based on aesthetics. It is, perhaps, self-indulgent.
But I remember those summer nights and the bright moon that cast eerie shadows in my room. I remember softly calling my mother’s name in the dark and wondering if her spirit will come back to the house. I remember the sleeplessness, looking outside my window at night, watching my father kneel in the driveway beside the open car door. There is a bucket of soapy water beside him; he is washing out my bloody stain. His arm moves stiffly in and out of the car as he scrubs, hard, at the fabric of the passenger’s seat. His body, seen in pale moonlight, rocks slowly back and forth.
Features • Spring 2010
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*.
Poetry • Spring 2011
**Aria (I)**
**
**
If I were to drown myself in reckless beauty and make my wings creased lips parting,
I would hover in sibilance behind you,
my brother making a list of all instruments:
our faces are mechanical copies, yours only younger
and you make a grid with a pencil while I whistle
a jazz song from the 30s (I never knew the words)
and the light here is like the movies,
defining you with shadows
and staining you deep irreparable colors:
the way you’ve let yourself look is a pleasure
from which you can never return.
Your mind is perhaps like the movie projector,
always behind my head, always humming discretely,
and a pyramid of light arrives from that uncharted point
and tames the curling smoke with its certainty:
or perhaps your mind is not like that at all.
Doubtless it is a world of mechanisms nesting inside one another,
and a sentence standing for love is hurtling somewhere unknown,
but you go on cataloging the trusses and circuits,
and I go on whistling.
As you describe your count as the span of a cracked idea
you begin to shade yourself into darkness,
and I have already forgotten how I began,
that I promised you a ravaged image to ease your burdens:
and this chore blooms as the notes of a distant death passing,
a choir’s light stretching out to the vanishing point to break.
**Aria (II)**
If I were to forget that god is not a pulley once more,
(and where weariness has thrown me I cannot say)
then you could be buried in the frost.
I cannot bear for us to remain in heaven and on earth.
Because I have stopped severing my body from the mirror
to rise like a cloud of heat that distorts
only enough to reveal its presence,
I am standing halfway up the ladder, helpless.
If you have a contract with me,
forget it: I have perforated myself,
exhausted as the nights I used to cut through
strolling through the city where everything is designed for children.
But if you must pursue me,
I sleep in the woods outside town, waiting for summer to empty to autumn
and the community pool to empty out its bodies
and return to the self-love of its own stillness.
Gravity severs us from the forgotten
and until we knot our arteries, making one map,
we will have to be patient.
While we are in flux we cannot be located.
Climbing the panels of corrugated glass,
nothing is made for your safety
but I am keeping watch,
and for beauty I cannot drop like granite wrapped in sackcloth,
tied to the corpse that whispered to me the secret of freedom
like the Count of Monte Cristo, whose resolution meant nothing,
into the odorless green of the Mediterranean.
Fiction • Spring 2020
“Hello,” he hoped, and I saw immediately that he was a Jewish boy, just like my brother, and I became upset that the only ones who ever hope hello at me are Jewish boys.
“If you insist,” I said.
Don’t get me wrong, I think Jewish boys in this day and age have much to recommend them. I know plenty of girls who were raised to be stoic—that means not complain, maybe not even want to complain—who sigh their tasteful chests up and down in want of a Jewish boy.
“I’m sorry,” I told him, “it’s Saturday. You’ll have to go home to your mother, who will be happy to have you I’m sure.”
“You keep the Sabbath?” he said.
See? I didn’t tell you earlier, but he doesn’t even look Jewish. I can simply spot them from the masses. One tribesman’s heart cries chosenly to another’s.
I didn’t tell you earlier because I know you’re liable to call stereotype. It’s the 21st century! you’ll be thinking. You are a highly educated young Jewess! But please go ahead and describe the picture you conjured when I said “I saw immediately he was a Jewish boy.” Yes, I know all about it. So I am now absolved from blame for as long as I have you, dear or accidental listeners to this weekly midnight radio program.
The whole truth is he was very tall and childishly hairless, with a bit of blond fuzz coating his head and an apparent inability to grow a beard.
“No, I don’t keep the Sabbath,” I said, suppressing my sudden desire to shout Shabbat Shalom! right there on the sidewalk of Hoboken, New Jersey, beside an Irish pub.
“Oh,” he said, “me neither”—a bit proudly, which meant he was still deeply smushed beneath his mother’s thumb and rebelled by poking at it gently with his little finger; or a bit guiltily, even worse, because what is more typical than Jewish guilt? My poor big brother Jakey has it in spades about a whole cabinetful of faults, mostly never playing baseball with our old-now dad who can’t play baseball anymore.
“Just don’t tell my dad about the shabbos thing,” the Jewish boy said, and grinned. “He’s a rabbi, after all.”
A rabbi’s son! And to think—I don’t have to tell my few but steadfast listeners—I’ve been seeking a nice Christian boy for some time, with no luck. It’s about time for children, I say, and I want mine to have insurance. Coverage against man, the universe, and acts of God. I’m no ignoramus; I listened when my Nana spoke. I don’t want blood that’s also liability.
“Hey,” I said, “what happens when a minister’s son, a rabbi’s son, and a Jewess walk into a bar?” I laughed alone, because the joke was its own punchline; I was on my way into the pub to meet my Catholic man. I told him so.
“You have a Catholic man?” he said. His smile vanished.
“No,” I repeated. “I’m going to meet one.”
“Can I come too?” He looked at me, which was a very unfortunate event, because Jewish boys can read me like the alphabet. “I’ll come too,” he corrected himself. I walked in the door without checking whether he was following me. Assuming he was.
2026