One of the things that fascinated me the most was how Bolte Taylor discussed certain thoughts she’d had at the exact moment the stroke took place. She was home alone and needed to ask for help. So she had to call someone—I don’t remember who, maybe her mother or someone at the hospital—and she had to get the phone number from the list of contacts in her cell phone. It was the single most important phone number she’d ever call, because her life depended on it. Yet she couldn’t recognize the letters in the contact list; if I remember correctly, she couldn’t recognize either letters or numbers as signs. Here’s what impressed me so much. At one point she knew that all the information she’d accumulated since her childhood (including the phone number) was there in hundreds of little drawers in her brain, and she was aware that it was all misplaced now. Everything she’d registered throughout her life was someplace, but how could she know which one of those numerous drawers held the precise information she needed just then, the information that would allow her to ask for help? That’s how I felt, only in my case I wasn’t looking for a telephone number. I was looking for the spot where I had gotten lost. Which one of the drawers, of those hundreds of drawers surrounding me in the labyrinth of passageways, could I open to find myself huddled inside, cheerfully surprised that I had actually found myself? Desperate, furious, and hopeful at times, I spent a long time opening and closing drawers—one day, then another, and another, and every one of the nights. Eventually I pooped out, was completely spent trying to locate myself. And I knew that nobody could help me because I wasn’t able to say in which of those drawers I could be found.
That’s when I hit rock bottom, sir, because once I’d realized that my brain was playing tricks on me, figuring it out by way of that same trickster brain, and after accepting that I needed help, and after selecting the friend who would push me the hardest, who could pluck me out of wherever I was, I was astonished to find myself confronting the worst fear of alclass="underline" not knowing where I was. This is what happened. Picture the long, winding furrows that make up our brain’s gray matter—I think they’re called cerebral convolutions—as if they composed a skein of organic wool. Well, that’s where I was, inside the skein, asking for help, it’s true, but not very resourcefully. I was still in the grips of agoraphobia, cowed by even the smallest tasks, like walking down the street. I dressed and went outside expecting to get my due for the mere act of walking down the street: death. I honestly believed that death was waiting for me outside. I didn’t even think about the dog or the tree. My only option was to walk and to die. So that’s what I did. I went outside.
I REACHED THE PARK near my apartment by clutching at everything, grasping at the walls at times, as if I were blind or drunk. I remember the grass was sprouting green. It was springtime. I had trimmed my own hair the day before, from what little still grew beneath my wig, as if trying to delay nature’s resurrection, the change of season after the snows. Grass in the park, shorter hair on my scalp, because I wanted to express the following: flowers, squirrels, hibernating animals, wait till I recover for rebirth, wait for me so that I can watch you. But they hadn’t waited. There were the trees, shameless, blossoming, in spring, while I hadn’t left winter yet. Enwai—my name for New York—was in full bloom. And that’s how I began walking, expecting to die. I crossed the park without leaning on anything, free, evolved: from a simian woman to woman erectus, convinced the city would be the last place my feet would ever touch, my eyes would ever see, my badly wounded head would ever appreciate. Enwai was like Yoro’s first sonogram, and I absorbed it all with a blend of expectation and fear, while Yoro, in my womb, revealed the genesis of New York as I meandered along, her heart beating hard and fast, what’s expected of a six-month-old fetus or a city in continuous gestation, never completely born: the unborn city.
I began at the intestines. A jumble of streets in a mile-long stretch from north to south, from Delancey Street to what would become Ground Zero, and a two-mile ambit east to west from the Williamsburg Bridge to Broadway. Everything was spinning around me. I was giddy and nauseated, probably due to morning sickness, but I continued forward. They call these guts Chinatown, it breaks the grid of the body, and there can be no straight lines or squares between the stomach and the anus. I’ve always thought that chaos is a product of time, of complexity, and that’s why I found it incredible that Yoro, being as yet so simple, so unfinished, could already have such disorder in her belly, this tangle that impeded any view of the beginning or the end. The first time I dared enter a store in this neighborhood, they told me, “We don’t accept credit cards. All business here is done in cash.” The big intestine doesn’t want to pay taxes for what the mouth, and not it, enjoyed; or maybe Yoro’s digestive tract was still immature, unable to digest the type of sophistication that came with credit and banks over palpable, jingling cash. My baby’s functions weren’t developed, I think, beyond absorbing the tiny amounts of amniotic fluid she drank from me. That day was a holiday in Chinatown, and there was a parade in the street. I followed behind a long red Chinese paper dragon that skipped and slithered beneath the firmament. How lucky, I thought. How lucky to be able to lift off the ground. How lucky it would be to fly with my heavy belly, with the lightness of a balloon or a planet held by laws one doesn’t even need to know. Free, no references. The dragon had huge yellow scales like flames, supported by all the big and little hands of people celebrating the festival, walking in procession through the digestive galleries, the visceral tubes digesting chicken feet at all hours, orangy pig snouts, starfish, frogs, a variety of aphrodisiac powders from many different creatures who in their best days ran across the windy Asian prairies on four legs.
Enwai is the name she gave herself, that’s why I call her that, though it’s all been forgotten and now everyone calls her New York. They insist on emblazoning NY, her initials, on mugs. NY is also the name of a state, which tourists wear inscribed on T-shirts—I ❤NY—to splash a bit of style across their chests, not realizing that the heart doesn’t symbolize their love for the city, it represents the pulse of the city thumping between their skin and the cotton fabric. Even now, when I think back to that walk through Enwai, I feel like saying “Listen up, folks, be careful with that heart. It’s not just a sticker or a patch. It’s my little girl’s muscle, or an island they call (by way of that obsession for naming everything) Manhattan, of which only a third is asphalt, steel, machinery; so look out, because in the other two thirds, every year come March, organic matter is developed, like a boy, a rose, an ovary.” But I don’t want to get sidetracked by other things. I was talking about that walk I took, wandering through Enwai on the third Sunday of a month of March, when I saw Yoro, who in that month had developed—besides her intestines—her head, her brain, her lungs, and her left arm.
Walking, I was surviving so far longer than I had expected, but anxiety affected my breathing enough that to get away from the crowds, I sneaked into a narrow alley. I would have liked to ignore the fact that Yoro had an appendix. At that point in time they were considered useless, and sailors had them removed before embarking on a voyage lasting months, to avoid the risk of the appendix’s becoming saturated with noxious residues or bursting when they were far from land. As soon as I caught my breath again I went down to catch the subway. I found a seat, but a lot of people were standing. It was a sunny day, women were wearing dresses and skirts again, and nearly everyone’s legs were bare, like a great forest of white and black trunks that in brushing against one another after months of cold gave off the electricity of a stranger’s skin. Others in the subway brushed against me lightly. After such a long time, that whisk of another human’s skin comforted me. How little it took to bring joy, no more than the brush of anonymous skin.