“Tell me what to do,” I say.
Paulo nods, looking smug. Thinks he’s got my number. “Ah. You don’t want to die.”
I stand up, stretch, feel the streets around me grow longer and more pliable in the rising heat of day. (Is that really happening, or am I imagining it, or is it happening and I’m imagining that it’s connected to me somehow?) “Fuck you. That ain’t it.”
“Then you don’t even care about that.” He makes it a question with the tone of his voice.
“Ain’t about being alive.” I’ll starve to death someday, or freeze some winter night, or catch something that rots me away until the hospitals have to take me, even without money or an address. But I’ll sing and paint and dance and fuck and cry the city before I’m done, because it’s mine. It’s fucking mine. That’s why.
“It’s about living,” I finish. And then I turn to glare at him. He can kiss my ass if he doesn’t understand. “Tell me what to do.”
Something changes in Paulo’s face. He’s listening now. To me. So he gets to his feet and leads me away for my first real lesson.
This is the lesson: great cities are like any other living things, being born and maturing and wearying and dying in their turn.
Duh, right? Everyone who’s visited a real city feels that, one way or another. All those rural people who hate cities are afraid of something legit; cities really are different. They make a weight on the world, a tear in the fabric of reality, like… like black holes, maybe. Yeah. (I go to museums sometimes. They’re cool inside, and Neil deGrasse Tyson is hot.) As more and more people come in and deposit their strangeness and leave and get replaced by others, the tear widens. Eventually it gets so deep that it forms a pocket, connected only by the thinnest thread of… something to… something. Whatever cities are made of.
But the separation starts a process, and in that pocket the many parts of the city begin to multiply and differentiate. Its sewers extend into places where there is no need for water. Its slums grow teeth, its art centers claws. Ordinary things within it, traffic and construction and stuff like that, start to have a rhythm like a heartbeat, if you record their sounds and play them back fast. The city… quickens.
Not all cities make it this far. There used to be a couple of great cities on this continent, but that was before Columbus fucked the Indians’ shit up, so we had to start over. New Orleans failed, like Paulo said, but it survived, and that’s something. It can try again. Mexico City’s well on its way. But New York is the first American city to reach this point.
The gestation can take twenty years or two hundred or two thousand, but eventually the time will come. The cord is cut and the city becomes a thing of its own, able to stand on wobbly legs and do… well, whatever the fuck a living, thinking entity shaped like a big-ass city wants to do.
And just as in any other part of nature, there are things lying in wait for this moment, hoping to chase down the sweet new life and swallow its guts while it screams.
That’s why Paulo’s here to teach me. That’s why I can clear the city’s breathing and stretch and massage its asphalt limbs. I’m the midwife, see.
I run the city. I run it every fucking day.
Paulo takes me home. It’s just somebody’s summer sublet in the Lower East Side, but it feels like a home. I use his shower and eat some of the food in his fridge without asking, just to see what he’ll do. He doesn’t do shit except smoke a cigarette, I think to piss me off. I can hear sirens on the streets of the neighborhood—frequent, close. I wonder, for some reason, if they’re looking for me. I don’t say it aloud, but Paulo sees me twitching. He says, “The harbingers of the enemy will hide among the city’s parasites. Beware of them.”
He’s always saying cryptic shit like this. Some of it makes sense, like when he speculates that maybe there’s a purpose to all of it, some reason for the great cities and the process that makes them. What the enemy has been doing—attacking at the moment of vulnerability, crimes of opportunity—might just be the warm-up for something bigger. But Paulo’s full of shit too, like when he says I should consider meditation to better attune myself to the city’s needs. Like I’mma get through this on white-girl yoga.
“White-girl yoga,” Paulo says, nodding. “Indian man yoga. Stockbroker racquetball and schoolboy handball, ballet and merengue, union halls and SoHo galleries. You will embody a city of millions. You need not be them, but know that they are part of you.”
I laugh. “Racquetball? That shit ain’t no part of me, chico.”
“The city chose you, out of all,” Paulo says. “Their lives depend on you.”
Maybe. But I’m still hungry and tired all the time, scared all the time, never safe. What good does it do to be valuable if nobody values you?
He can tell I don’t wanna talk anymore, so he gets up and goes to bed. I flop on the couch and I’m dead to the world. Dead.
Dreaming, dead dreaming, of a dark place beneath heavy cold waves where something stirs with a slithery sound and uncoils and turns toward the mouth of the Hudson, where it empties into the sea. Toward me. And I am too weak, too helpless, too immobilized by fear, to do anything but twitch beneath its predatory gaze.
Something comes from far to the south, somehow. (None of this is quite real. Everything rides along the thin tether that connects the city’s reality to that of the world. The effect happens in the world, Paulo has said. The cause centers around me.) It moves between me, wherever I am, and the uncurling thing, wherever it is. An immensity protects me, just this once, just in this place—though from a great distance I feel others hemming and grumbling and raising themselves to readiness. Warning the enemy that it must adhere to the rules of engagement that have always governed this ancient battle. It’s not allowed to come at me too soon.
My protector, in this unreal space of dream, is a sprawling jewel with filth-crusted facets, a thing that stinks of dark coffee and the bruised grass of a futebol pitch and traffic noise and familiar cigarette smoke. Its threat display of saber-shaped girders lasts for only a moment, but that is enough. The uncurling thing flinches back into its cold cave, resentfully. But it will be back. That too is tradition.
I wake with sunlight warming half my face. Just a dream? I stumble into the room where Paulo is sleeping. “Sao Paulo,” I whisper, but he does not wake. I wiggle under his covers. When he wakes he doesn’t reach for me, but he doesn’t push me away either. I let him know I’m grateful and give him a reason to let me back in, later. The rest’ll have to wait till I get condoms and he brushes his ashy-ass mouth. After that, I use his shower again, put on the clothes I washed in his sink, and head out while he’s still snoring.
Libraries are safe places. They’re warm, in the winter. Nobody cares if you stay all day as long as you’re not eyeballing the kids’ corner or trying to hit up porn on the computers. The one at Forty-Second—the one with the lions—isn’t that kind of library. It doesn’t lend out books. Still, it has a library’s safety, so I sit in a corner and read everything within reach: municipal tax law, Birds of the Hudson Valley, What to Expect When You’re Expecting a City Baby: NYC Edition. See, Paulo? I told you I was listening.
It gets to be late afternoon and I head outside. People cover the steps, laughing, chatting, mugging with selfie sticks. There’re cops in body armor over by the subway entrance, showing off their guns to the tourists so they’ll feel safe from New York. I get a Polish sausage and eat it at the feet of one of the lions. Fortitude, not Patience. I know my strengths.