City: New York
Author: Jónas Knútsson
Location: Waverly Place, Greenwich Village

Next door to my apartment in the Village is a private ballroom. On weekends the patrons invade the neighborhood in stretch limos and whoop it up in the perfectly sound-proof den of iniquity, only to pour into the street as the feast draws to a close. The rest is pandemonium, a few feet from my one-way bedroom window. I never peek out as the incorporeal chorus lulls me to sleep.

A brawl. An older man keeps hollering, but the flow of his riff is never broken. I assume no one chooses to engage him.

“I’ve been shot twenty-seven times. Twenty-seven times I’ve been shot.”

During the ruckus, no one says a word except the guy bellowing, “I’ve been shot, twenty-seven times.”

The racket dies down. But the man keeps on shouting about being shot twenty-seven times. The ramblers have either gone home or been beaten to a pulp. But the man goes on shrieking, “I’ve been shot twenty-seven times.”

At last he falls silent.

Maybe he had been shot twenty-seven times.

“We need treatment.”

The woman is hysterical. She calls the man “son of a bitch,” “motherfucker.”

Every accusation is countered with the mantra, “We need treatment, baby. We need therapy.”

The man starts crying. The woman breaks into tears as well, but her torrent of rage flows uninterrupted: “You motherfucking son of a bitch. You son of a bitch motherfucker.”

“We need treatment,” the man concludes.

A long silence follows.

As I drift off into my long-deserved slumber, a lonely grumble ruptures the fragile silence outside:

“I’ve been shot twenty-seven times.”

City: New York
Author: Jill Widner
Location: The Consulate General of the Republic of Indonesia

I’m walking down 68th Street toward Wollman Lake, thinking about Joni Mitchell’s 29 skaters and anonymity and the blank face at the window that stares and stares and stares and stares.

Halfway down the block, on the second-floor balcony of a narrow gray stone building, I notice a red and white flag whipping in the wind. On the wall, a small bronze plaque engraved with a Garuda bird reads, “Consulate General of the Republic of Indonesia.”

It is an elegant 19th century mansion between Madison and Fifth Avenue. The air is so cold, so bright, the glass in the windows on the upper floors seems to vibrate.

The entrance at the top of the stairs is locked, but another staircase leads to the basement. I turn the knob. This door is open. Inside, behind what must be a security window, a woman is working at a desk. I am so terrible at beginnings. I don’t know what to say.

She is suspicious. “What do you want?”

“I saw the flag outside. I grew up in Indonesia. Nearly 40 years ago. I don’t know what I want. I just know I had to come in.”

“Where did you live, Jakarta?”

“Sumatra.”

“Where?”

“Near Palembang.”

Her face softens infinitesimally. She points across the hall toward another room, where several office workers are moving about behind another glass window. “He is from Palembang.”

I am standing on the public side of the security glass in a narrow waiting room. Except for a straight-backed wooden bench against one wall, the room is empty.^[1] A row of windows near the ceiling is meant to let in the light, but this is the basement of the mansion; the glass is grimy and wrought iron bars block the view of the sidewalk outside. I see the man from Palembang through the security window. He is speaking on the phone. I wait. I look from the bench to the bars on the windows.

It is the man’s parents who are from Palembang. He was raised in Jakarta. But he is familiar with Sungai Gerong, the oil camp across the river from Palembang, where I grew up. Though a little self conscious, a little shy, he seems willing to talk. He is younger than I am. Maybe he is uncertain of his English. He remembers the name of a dish particular to Palembang, a fish from the Musi River simmered in chili sauce. He asks me if I know it. I don’t. It isn’t long before we have run out of things to say.

He walks me to the front door. Hands me his business card. The receptionist is watching us through the security glass. She asks me where I live now.

“Washington.”

“D.C.?”

“State. Washington State.”

Suddenly she is speaking to me in Indonesian. “Tadi kita terbang ke…” I know at once what she is saying. “We flew to Seattle not too long ago.” I don’t know why sometimes it’s so easy and sometimes so hard.

I glance at the business card: Department of Consular Affairs, Consulate General of Indonesia. I turn it over. He has written something on the back. Without reading, I ask, “Does this say, Saya mau pulang?”

He doesn’t understand. “It is my email address.”

“Because I used to say that—Saya mau pulang—or think it—I want to go home. Because this never felt like home. I always thought I would return.”

The woman is skeptical. “Tidak terlalu panas—It isn’t too hot for you?”

I shrug.

Of course, she is probably right. We were expatriates. We had A.C. in every room. What would I have known of the heat.

City: New York
Author: Kit Born
Location: McCrory’s store on 63rd Drive

My friend Danny and I always got into trouble, but what did you expect in 5th Grade?

We were supposed to go back to his house. We had spent the afternoon at my house, which was typical, and it was time for him to go home for dinner. We decided to go back to his house in a very circuitous route. Instead of heading southeast, we decided to head northwest, past our church, past the LIRR tracks and down to McCrory’s.

Danny and I each had five bucks.

We decided that it was time to become spies. We got to the store, passed the crowds of old ladies and plastic flowers, and picked up some Zebra pellet guns (Airsoft has nothing on these!) These guns came with 200 pellets and a sweet shoulder holster – perfect for hiding under our private school cardigans. We rushed for the checkout counter, plunked down our cash, and hit the street.

On the way home, to complete the spy image, Danny busted out a bottle of Brut 33 aftershave, which he insisted on us splashing ourselves with, all over those tight, wide-striped polo shirts.

We weren’t very good spies, as we decided to go back the route we had come, and just as we were about to pass by my house again, there was my mom, waiting, as was Danny’s step-dad. Mom wanted to know why we weren’t at Danny’s house, and where we had gone. I told her we stopped at McCrory’s on the way there, and she reminded me that McCrory’s was in no way on the way to Danny’s house. Moreover, where did I get the idea to spend money without asking her? Sure, I had some money in my piggy bank (which I thought was mine to do with as I pleased) but it was not to be used without permission.

Mom saw what I had bought, marched right over to the trash can and threw it in. This was to by my punishment for not going to Danny’s house straightaway and for spending money on useless, random stuff. Plus, I think my mom didn’t want us playing with guns. (At that time, I never would have thought that as a dad I’d side with my mom now too.)

So ended my career as a spy.

Danny had been a much better spy, as he was wearing his gun under his jacket already. He had no visible evidence. His dad drove him home. I took the heat and spent the next week “in lockup” if you will. Danny brought his heat to school each day and would shoot plastic pellets wherever he pleased when no one was looking. I remember picking up little yellow plastic pellets off the floor and telling myself, “Man, if only I had taken my gun out of the package on the way and hidden it like Danny did.” Over and over, I got to thinking: If only I could go back and do the mission again.

City: New York
Author: Denise Reich
Location: the Unisphere

“Come down,” they coax. Steven and Nick, all of nine and seven years old, are rolling their eyes at me. They’ve already clambered up and back down again like miniature mountain goats. “Just put your foot there. No, there. You’re not even listening!” I shrink back.

“Damn it, we don’t have time for this,” my mother storms, pacing back and forth. “Get down here.”

I don’t say anything. I don’t move. I simply clutch the rusting, peeling hulk of the globe and hang on tight.

The park is in such a state of decay that the fountains at the base of the Unisphere^[1] have been switched off, and the pool, which normally serves as a protective moat, has run dry in the July heat. We’d stepped easily over the shin-high barrier and run in.

We embrace the world. It becomes our personal jungle gym. We shimmy up the base, run around the concave curve and wave. The boys jump down after a few minutes, but my feet grow roots in the steel. I simply stop.

“Come down!” my mother snaps. The boys snicker behind their hands. They’re not even real New Yorkers, they’re just visiting friends, and they have quite an attitude.

I’m not afraid. I like heights. I’m frozen, fixed in place like the taut cables that support the structure from the inside out. The brushed steel of Africa reflects the sun and makes me squint, even in the ample shade.

I am twelve years old, I will be starting the 8th grade in eight weeks, and I am tired. I haven’t eaten since last night, and when I look straight up I’m dizzy. The interior of the globe is as hollow as the open anorexic space below my ribs. We’re both fraying and exhausted. 

I sit down on the base and dangle my feet over the edge, dipping my toes into the air. Nick points at a spot somewhere below my heel. “Look, the step is right there.” I remain motionless, and the quartet below me explodes in frustration again.

A park vehicle pulls up at the edge of the pool, and a tall ranger, clad in regulation green, comes running across the cracked cement. My mother’s face flushes, and I know she’s thinking of ways to explain how I came to be on the Unisphere in the first place, but the ranger bustles by without a word. He climbs halfway up the base and squints at me.

“Need a hand?” The voice is the first gentle one I’ve heard all day. He isn’t furious with me. He can’t fix anything; he can’t stop me from hiding my breakfast and lunch again tomorrow, but he can get me down off the Unisphere. I nod, and he nods back, and extends his hand. I grasp it and the steps sprout out of the metal again, and in a minute I am firmly back on the ground.

City: New York
Author: Anne Germanacos
Location: Broadway between 70th and 71st

My last night in New York for at least six months, I walked through Broadway’s balmy June air, keeping pace with the bodies. I couldn’t avoid the realization that it was time my son grew up. I pictured myself telling him: You’re the age I was when I gave birth to you.

Two nights before, we’d been together on the same street, Broadway between 70th and 71st, walking with the crowds. Throngs of people had moved up the street past the big stores, flowing out in a neat curve where a naked man was performing some kind of sacrament. People were fastidious in avoiding him. Like everyone else, we speeded up but not without looking his way.

The first glance revealed a naked man touching himself. Looking again, sideways, I saw that the naked man’s hands only mimicked a fondling. His penis was uncircumcised, not quite flaccid. I tried not to look but did, though I didn’t want my son to notice my fascination, less for the flesh itself than for its treatment.

We’d been returning from a Broadway show. All day he’d been rude and aggressive. When we reached his apartment, he insisted that I should leave him alone. So I did, for the next two days.

Arriving there now in order to say goodbye, I listened while he sang elaborate ascending scales. I knocked as he hit high F.

City: New York
Author: Ling Ma
Location: The third floor of Henri Bendel

After I gave my resignation notice to my boss on a Friday evening in September, I left my workplace at 40th and Broadway for one of the last times and walked a mile to Henri Bendel^[1] to meet my best friend, and several of her college friends, at the store’s Chocolate Bar. Blocks pass quickly in New York, and on that evening the chilly breeze was nice amid the dusk and the traffic.

Though it was my first time at Henri Bendel, I didn’t linger in the main atrium to smell the Annick Goutal scents (there is a personal favorite in mind that smells like peaches and gasoline, issued once a year) or try a new hand cream. I walked up the spiraled stairs to the third floor, and there they were, a bouquet of post-collegiate girls sitting at a circular corner booth. I saw business wear, identically crossed pairs of legs, fresh-combed manes of hair.

We took turns talking about what we did, what we were doing, all these endlessly interesting things.

“I just quit my job,” I said. It was a relief to say.

“Uh, what?!” my best friend exclaimed. “Why, how, when?” The others devoured me with nervous questions.

I explained that it was something I had decided the previous night. The only way to do it was quickly, before I lost my nerve, and think about the consequences later. It had been my first day job, for which I oversaw from New York the manufacture of Bibles in humid areas of Asian countries. I didn’t hate the work.

My chocolate drink was cold and creamy; it matched the weather. I imagined the air inside my lungs was slowly condensing from the shift in climate—from the chilly weather outdoors to this interior retail roast. Unmoored by a profession, I was a vague, jobless entity now, and I felt myself disengaging from the careerist conversation.

The voices languished, and when there was little left to tally of our meager accomplishments, we gathered our fall jackets.

Between the Chocolate Bar and the exit elevator, one has to walk the length of the curiously situated lingerie department. I looked at all the delicious confections I could no longer afford, flimsy swathes of expensive fabrics in rashes of pinks, abnormal growths of lace, stitched hard blacks. I slowed my pace, marveling at these alien delicacies. 

If there was anything my first job had imparted to me, it was how to dissemble an object, in spite of its interesting whole, down to its unremarkable parts. A Bible—the ultimate exercise in product packaging—can be cross-sectioned and reduced to its paper stock, ribbon marker, mull lining and other assorted offal.

That’s when I knew I wanted to live in New York: in the midst of staring at those fragile bralets and bodysuits, when I refrained from deconstructing anything. I did not want to. More than anything, I wanted to be a sensualist. To live in a city that prizes and offers these luxurious and unnecessary articles at overmarked prices is wasteful, self-defeatist and terribly escapist. Specifically, I wanted to be a sensualist in New York.

City: New York
Author: Tara Deal
Location: The Meatpacking District

We return from vacation to the city glaring with snow drifts. The snow is not opaline and sweet, falling like the tiniest flakes of ice cream, as we expected, as we remembered. That’s what we told people: yes, the snow is beautiful in New York City. But now it’s deep and ugly, discolored. Packed up along the curb on Gansevoort Street, in the Meatpacking District. Sometimes, a bone or chicken wing appears.

Our car goes into the garage, darker than normal, in the brown afternoon in which all things look ordinary. We haul our luggage to the back, aiming for the door that leads to our building lobby. Turn the last corner, through the maze of salty cars and one last black truck, and crouching between it and the door, aiming for us, expecting our error, is a man with yellow sunglasses and two guns.

The guns, we tell the police later, were black like ice. Or gray velvet winter sky, depending. That’s more like it. That is, we can’t remember. Our stories contradict each other, and we have to be put into separate rooms to sort it out. And write it down.

Remember the fear? Before the man slipped out of the garage as if he were a magician, leaving us stunned at the end of his trick.

No, what I remember is being grateful. For the neighborhood that began to come to life along the sidewalk, while we were still inside the garage, lying on the cement. Grateful for the people out there who might see something, then say something^[1], though they never did. Even so, the city, it seemed, somehow saved us. The man ran away when it became clear, as streetlights came on and candles were lit in restaurants, that soon there would be no place to hide here.

And what about those weapons? The police still want to know the truth.

And why did one man have two, a piece for each of us, and why did he leave without shooting?

City: New York
Author: Andrea Jarrell
Location: the Corner of Prince and Elizabeth streets

My son and I stand in front of the apartment so my husband can take the picture. Daniel, who is seven, has no idea what this place means to me—a long gone year in my post-college career dreams. We found the building easily after a tromp through Chinatown and Little Italy^[1]. But the neighborhood is completely different—chic shops and no more Italian bakery across the street. My roommates and I—three Western girls come to the big city—used to worship the smell of bread baking in what looked like a secret Wonka factory.

I had come to New York over a decade before to work in fashion magazines. But after spending two years writing copy about make-up and jewelry and being surrounded by models, I’d had an inkling I wouldn’t last much longer. Like my apartment, New York City was too cool for me. So I convinced myself I’d met the man of my dreams and ran off with him back to the wide-open spaces of the West. The moment the plane touched down I knew it had been a mistake—a mistake from which it would take me another few years to extricate myself.

I shiver. Our summer vacation day has turned dreary and cold. Daniel wears a bright red NYC sweatshirt we bought hastily in one of the Chinatown shops. He leans against me and my arm goes round his little chest, holding him tight: my own talisman against the folly of my youth. My husband says, “Smile.” And I do.

City: New York
Author: Abraham
Location: the Bowery subway station

Easy to get excited about New York when you’re 23 and in a band from Nowhere, Midwest. And easy to pack up your van and shiny new trailer and drive and camp out until the entire landscape is city. The hard part is when you get to the city and realize no one cares, and that you’re probably in somebody’s way. When you set up your gear in a small coffee shop in Williamsburg and wait for the crowd. And wait. And they say, “You guys better start, we got other acts after you.” When you still play the best doggone show you can muster up for your two friends sitting on the couch. And when the patrons are glad you’re done playing.

So it only seems natural that we meet ‘Q’ waiting for a subway train somewhere under this city^[1]. We’re half-swooned by the smell of a million people and a hundred years, and this guy, Q, approaches my five friends and me. Or maybe I should say, “this cat.” From fifteen feet away, he appears to be a subway janitor wearing a fresh leather jacket and jazzman shades, sweeping the floor. But he’s already half way through a business rap:

“Y’all in a band’r somethin’? Y’all look like y’in a band…”

Big smile, silver tooth. At least one.

“Ever think’a makin’ a record? Here, all’a y’all get a card…”

Now each of us is pondering a glossy, black, embossed business card that reads, “Q; Hip Hop Production, Engineering and Management,” along with a phone number and Brooklyn address. It says nothing about subway janitor, and none of us ask.

We look like targets for anything in a New York City subway but making a hip-hop record: a good knifing maybe, or at least someone asking if we’re lost (which we would be within the hour). We are six doe-eyed country muffins wandering a concrete wonderland looking for girls and beer, finding only the latter. (Up to this point, the only attention we’d drawn was from a hooker carrying her own bedding and a few helpful homeless fellows.)

Sweep, sweep, sweep.

“Thanks man, yeah, we’ll totally get a hold of you if we….” I sound like a pretty girl who doesn’t like to hurt feelings even though she has to. I look up with a half-smile but he’s already gone. Up to the street? Down the corridor? Who knows. And there’s no telling how long we were rapt, spellbound in this strange moment. Either way, we all snap back into reality, and just in time for the next train to who-knows-where, NYC.

Something about a record producer sweeping a subway and a rock ‘n roll band with nowhere to go in the capitol of the Known Universe struck me as paradoxical, though my card vanished in New York later that night. Today, I wonder if this even happened. I mentioned it to one of the guys recently, and he just shrugged. He still has his.

City: New York
Author: Carrie Teicher
Location: the New York Public Library

This is when it started to rain. Tourists in khaki vests vanished, the chatter of student groups dissipated and suits sprinted back to dry office towers. James, the homeless man who lives in the small garden tucked in front of the northwest corner of the New York Public Library^[1], calmly started to pack up his belongings for the safe shelter of the F-train platform.

I took a seat on one of those garden-green folding chairs that moments earlier was occupied by the bustling crowds that congregate daily on 42nd Street. Of course, it’s not so much the people who are here now, but the people who were here then: perhaps it was the lanky teenager with the bright red book-bag that made me think I saw Adam.

A decade earlier, when we were at that teenager age when we knew that we were nothing but wise and almost invincible, Adam and I came here to the library’s stone steps. Here was where he told me what he wanted to be when he grew up (happy, or an artist), where he wanted to travel (Ougadougou, or Seattle) and how the virus he contracted was going to kill him (slowly, by destroying each and every one of his T-cells). At the time it felt safe to tell him on these steps that I, too, wanted to be happy, and I, too, wanted to see Ougadougou^[2].

The warm rain made my t-shirt cling to my body; I was back to the here-and-now world where there was no Adam, just me sitting on a NYC-park-service folding chair with chipped paint. I went over to sit on the old stone steps, and I cried, though crying would not bring him back to our spot on the library’s stone steps.

Then the rains had gone and the benign summer day was back. The tourists ran past the steps to go take their obligatory snapshots with the lions^[3]. The students came back to sit with their laptops. The scene abruptly filled back up with all these people who are but transient visitors. And I sat on the cold, wet steps and cried. I only feel this alone here at home surrounded by all these people living their lives in a place that should still be ours. James emerged from around the corner, back up to his garden. As he passed, he said to me, ‘Welcome back’.