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American Study #22

New York, Lower Manhattan — April

Lower Broadway

One morning around eleven, I looked out the window and saw what appeared to be a large canvas mail sack being blown down the West Side Highway. The sack rolled over a half dozen times before filling with air and taking flight, climbing quickly above the traffic, barely clearing a double-decker bus, the open upper deck of which contained a lone, hooded, and no doubt chaffed seer-of-sights. It rose in large graceful swoops toward the rooftops of the apartment towers in Battery Park City across the way.

This reminded me that I was out of stamps and that several bills were due, so I put on my jacket and walked over to the Bowling Green post office, passing among the usual Wall Street crowd, stooped against the gusts sucking between the glass towers and rusticated masonry. Even the huge bronze bull at the end of Broadway seemed to be in a defensive crouch. After franking my post, I decided to wander back up Broadway before jumping on a train for the public library in midtown.

A few minutes after one, I was down around Fulton and Nassau peeking in discount stores, with the sky above growing dark. Most of the people on the streets were eking out the last gasps of the lunch hour, ignoring or unaware of the advance of rain clouds that had passed over New Jersey and weren’t pleased. We all sensed that something palpable was happening up in the blustery air, that something angry was gathering. It felt like waiting for a really nasty fight to erupt in an apartment upstairs. There was a technical explanation: we were all experiencing a steep drop in barometric pressure. But that would just be the technical explanation.

Haste grew inside us all, in some even a tinge of panic, as we calculated how far office or job or shelter was. Some of us had a ways to go and to preserve our dignity were keeping ourselves from running until we had to. I stopped under the eaves of a pizza place to watch. An oily young character in a suit and tie came out of the subway entrance nearby and demanded to know where another entrance was in the vicinity. "This one is closed," he said, and he said it as though I were partially to blame, so I pulled out my map and found him another way underground. He was too preoccupied to thank me.

Two guys malingering under a scaffold razzed a clutch of women in fretful shoes, goading them on with a blaring "NNGGAAAAH!" that succeeded in causing several to bolt, and everyone who didn’t bolt to walk even faster. I crossed the street and bought a glass of carrot juice and watched for a few minutes more, then began making my way back towards Broadway and to the subway, wanting to stay up on the street until the moment of the clouds’ release.

I ducked into a doorway just as that beautiful moment arrived: cool waves of water-filled air dissolving the tension on the streets, rinsing it down into the sewers, sending it out to the rivers and the sea. As the moment ended, the throngs were drawn back up into the buildings as blood rises in a syringe and the city became again the clockwork apple it always was. The few people left on the streets were just people walking quickly through the rain, no longer partakers in a shared sensation, and any connection I had to them had vanished back into the machinery and would have to be assembled manually.

Down on the platform, I joined the well-prepared shaking and folding their umbrellas and the ill-prepared pitching their wet newspapers into the trash cans, all of us with an ear cocked for the approach of the next liberating train.

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