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By Root 712 0

let me tell you what it’s like. First thing I’ll tell you, gentle reader, is that the Brooklyn Bridge is gone, probably the most beautiful structure ever built according to the madness of New Yorkers. Brooklyn Bridge is gone, or at least the half of it on the New York side. The section on the Brooklyn side goes out as far as the first set of pillars, and after that it just crumbles away. Like the arms of Venus de Milo. It’s a suggestion of an idealized relationship between parts of a city, a suggestion, not an actual relationship. And maybe that’s why intrepid lovers go there now, lovers with thyroid cancer go up there at night, because it’s finally a time in New York City history where you can see the night sky. That is, if the wind’s blowing toward Jersey. They go up there, the lovers, they jump the police barriers, they walk out on that boardwalk, the part that’s still remaining, they look across the East River, they make their protestations of loyalty, I don’t really have much time, so there’s a few things I want to say to you. I’ll go even further. Because this instant is endless for me, and that’s why I’m dictating these notes. What I do is, I find the ferryman on the Brooklyn side, out in Bay Ridge, old Irish guy, I pay my fresh coin to the Irish ferryman with the green windbreaker, pet his rottweiler. I say, I got some business over there, and the guy says, No can do, pal, and I point at it and I say, Business, and he says, No one has business there, but I do, I tell him, and I will make it worth your while, and he says, There’s nothing over there, but in the end he accepts the offer, and then we are out upon the water, where the currents are stiff, and the waves treacherous, as if nature wants to wash this experiment of a city out into the sea, as if nature wants to clean the wound, flush the leftover uranium, the rubble, the human particulate, we’re on the water, and right there is where that statue used to be, we’ll get the new one from France before too long, and that’s where New York Plaza used to be on the tip there, I tell the ferryman to take me farther up the coast, I want to know every rock and piling, every remaining I-beam, I want to know it all, so we go past the footprint of South Street seaport, and here are the things that we lost that I might have seen from here, the Municipal Building with its spires, City Hall, the World Financial Center, the New York Stock Exchange, where did all those bond traders go, what are they doing now, are they in Montclair or Greenwich, and then it’s Chinatown, bombed almost to China, bombed down to the bedrock, edged by Canal Street, which is again a canal as it was way back when, and Little Italy is gone, those mobster hangouts are all gone, they’re all working on the Jersey side now, trying to corner the Albertine market there, and Soho is gone, New York University is gone, Zeckendorf Towers gone, Union Square Park is gone, the building where Andy Warhol’s Factory once was, what used to be Max’s Kansas City, CBGB, and the Empire State Building is gone, which, when it fell sideways, crushed a huge chunk of lower Fifth Avenue, all the way to the Flatiron District, the area formerly known as the Ladies’ Mile, the flower district is gone, the Fashion Institute of Technology, in fact, about the only thing they say is still somewhat intact, like the Acropolis of Athens, is the Public Library, but I can’t see it from here. The bridges are blown out, the tram at 59th Street, gone, and as we pull alongside a section of the island where I’m guessing Stuyvesant Village used to be, I say, Ferryman, put me down here, pull your rowboat with its two-horsepower lawn-mower engine alongside, because I’m going in, I’m going to Tompkins Square, man, I’m going backward, through that neighborhood of immigrants, so now I step on the easternmost part of the island, same place the Italians stepped, same place the Irish stepped, same place the Puerto Ricans stepped, and I’m going in there now, because as long as it’s rubble I don’t care how hot it is, I’m going in, it’s like a desert of glass,