New York

There was a parade in the city, as I arrived, and resplendency washing down from the sky. You might call it my triumph, my Romanesque entry into the gothic and deco masterpiece city, without even the pest of a slave at my ear, muttering “memento mori�. So it goes, Kurt Vonnegut, so it goes that I live your city as you die, buy your book, read your words while walking your streets. So it should be: I descend into the brightest and warmest day, not simply of the year, but the best April 22 on record. And so too should there be a parade: but wait, no, the unraveling begins with my needling hubris, this was not my parade, it was the Greek parade.

How very New World, I say, to celebrate the motherland with a parade. Floats and costumed cavorters, students waving banners, a thousand meters of dance along an endless New York avenue, all of it the loud shout to the motherland, all with the subtext, thank God we’re not there any more.

We mount a steed, a Kawasaki stallion of metal and combustion, we zoom the length of Manhattan, we stop only to eat, drink: smoked salmon sandwiches on the Upper East Side, ice tea in Brooklyn, dhosas in mid-town. Riding the bike is thrilling, electrifying, but I feel a detachment from it: time dilation, jet lag exhaustion? How else to explain my placidity at racing the East River on the Queensboro bridge?

I live on a sea of New Yorkers: the multitude, and the sliding pile of magazines in my cousin’s flat. I equivocate: is this magazine incisive, or too self-possessed? I work in Greenwich Village, handy for ambling round the corner to Cooper Union, catching a reading by Jonathan Franzen and Salman Rushdie, launching an international literary festival in the city. Rushdie’s voice has nowhere near the gravitas one should expect. How possibly to evade the agents of Ayatollah Khomeini for over a decade, if one speaks with a horn-like blurt of a voice? How to pronounce upon the times with a rounded voice, an inflated ball of locution?

And then I took a walk, and I ate pizza, and I met a girl.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 25th, 2007 at 8:31 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.