sunset of the Empire State
Dear Steve,
I have not written to you in a long time, but you are often in my thoughts. I went back to NY for the second time in less than 2 weeks, this time expecting nothing but bad news. I saw my mother at the hospital, jaundiced and weakened, wired to the marrow with IV bags. The tumor in her pancreas had grown large enough to block her bile duct and she had a tube installed in her, for the biliary drainage catheter, that had to be flushed twice a day, and she slept with a bag of her own bile strapped to her leg. Sometimes she got up to walk in the hospital's long corridor, before lunch or dinner, pushing her blue IV pump along, making geriatric steps. Her blood was drawn and monitored, sometimes several times a day, and her urine was sometimes the color of black tea.
I stayed at her room every day from rush hour to rush hour, leaving after the sunset and the recommencing of the skylight's broadcast of nighttime messages. How did you manage to live in NY, in Manhattan, for more than 30 years? When the city blooms with its million voices and chromes, almost nothing else could survive. Every day when I got back to my parents' place in Queens, now empty, all I could do was go to bed. I woke up often. I started to watch TV again, after not having a TV for all these years. My mother's hospital room on the 16th floor was facing 1st Ave, Upper East Side, the line of Bagel Works, Pizza Park, Cleaners, Pit Stop, Pick A Bagel, and from another room I could see the Queensborough Bridge and a sliver of East River. Every day I walked between the subway station on Lexington and York, along 67th Street, and knew each building by heart: the terra cotta Seventh Regiment barrack occupying the whole block, the crimson fire station with broad balconies and red lights blinking in the wreaths of spruce, the black glass building of Fox, there was never any light coming out of it, and the matching black TV vans parked outside (the bleeding black heart of America), the restaurant L'absinth advertising themselves as cuisine bourgeoise next to New York Zen Do, and Saint Catherine Park furnished with a children's playground, around which Christmas trees were laid out on the sidewalk for the picking. In the morning people came to the bagel vendor and one late night as I was walking down 53rd Street, in the receiving end of the wind a gust of grease and cinder had me light-headed as the owner of a kabob stand doused the grill fire with a water bucket. There was music in the rue and rust. The recreation room for the patients had classes in the form of woodworking, copper enameling, or "relaxation techniques with watercolor." It also played movies and hosted bingo games twice a week. I sometimes used the library there. Volunteers would come to play music and sing pop and holiday numbers. One time, I stood to listen to the Daytop Village Chorus harmonizing Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer while kids at the table were making Christmas ornaments. A student from Julliard was there one afternoon to play the piano. Her name is Alina Kiryayeva and she played on the hospital's worn but tuned Baldwin - it had a sober but lovely sound. She played Mozart and Bach and, the most surprising of all, Chopin's Piano Sonata No.3 . I had never heard Chopin played like that, not even by Rubinstein, and my shoulders froze, my palms sweating, my stomach drained of its contents. I bumped into Alina afterwards at the street corner when I went outside for a smoke. She told me her fiancé had died from cancer.
I was among much death, the goners, the passing-throughs and the up-and-comers, inside every hospital room, in every elevator and corridor, over the In-Memory-of's on the memorial wall of names on the first floor. Patients with no hair and tubes coming out of their veined necks, family members who would suddenly cut short their conversations and let the silence drop. When I was down in the radiology department before my mother was sedated for her procedure of the day, a young girl was lying in bed next to us. Her mother, in her elegant New Yorker outfit, turned herself away to the wall, taking off her glasses to wipe her eyes, all the while keeping the rest of her body quiet and still - I don't think I'd ever be able to get over it. When she could talk again, she turned back to speak softly into her daughter's ear, their faces nearly touching. I was walking in on all those hushed words and family secrets of strangers, with each trespass of glance and the curtain opened for the nurse's visit, that they became more real than anything I had experienced, like being continuously born naked in front of a mirror. Being first a nurse and then a physician, my mother had dealt with sickness and death matter-of-factly that you could hang mortality as holiday lights and she would not move her feet from where she was. It was the rain on 5th Ave and the new pigment of her skin and eyes. She was not afraid, not of a boat plunging head first or the ambulance rushing to an upturned car, but she was afraid for my father and me, in a life she could no longer be a part of. She was afraid of those evenings my father would be sitting alone at home, motionlessly, not sure whether it's night or day, not sure why it matters - how the end could wipe out everything proceeding it. She was afraid for my sake, when I have to try to convince my father and myself that nothing is what it seems, not an empty bed or her unused clothes in the closet, that it's fine to grieve and then one should live to the day's conclusion.
When I needed a break, I saw my friend Anthony who had moved here from Boston. One of his brothers had committed suicide. We met at a bar called The Magician's, in Lower East Side, and he said being womanless was making him onerous and horny. He was not ready to live elsewhere. I also saw Amy, the first time in a year. I took LIRR to Mineola like it was before and although I expected everything to look the same, I was surprised when everything did. She hadn't changed, maybe a bit of weight loss, now standing at 100 in bare feet, or less. I was feeling older next to her, even though she is 6 years older than me. We went to the movie theater, just like we used to, when we watched so many escapist or period movies (she is a big fan of Jane Austen and all things vintage Britain). It had never struck me when we were living together that Mineola is the most poetic sounding name of all the Long Island townships (Deer Park comes as the remote second place), almost Greek in intonation. I took the 1 a.m. train back, not knowing why people met the way they met, why so many tears are shed for one person but not for others. What hour, what tracks and platforms, what darkling crepitation. I always liked the lunacy of NY subway, the instant catapulting, the grinding train's caterwauling, and something lucid lurching into oblivion, each passenger's face a pantomime of interchangeable humanness. But something else was there this time, in the lair where one can flex the acrobatics of moreness and self-dissipation, going through the window's sinkhole like switchblade neon, deep inside the bare-knuckled city of Italians and Irish, of financiers and thoroughbred con artists, of nihilists and washed-out kinksters, a presence so pure and transitory that I held my knees together and dared not to close my eyes, lest I would miss it. I looked at the subway crowd around me, the boots and work attires, the gloves and bags, the hands kept to themselves, faces looking away, a shyness at the fast geometry of humanity, at having been born, an unspoken apology for being alive and the necessary ego to go on, the adolescent puzzlement at attachment and one's hope for happiness, if I could breathe long enough in this reservoir of foretold blue, I could touch something tender, something resembling the beginning. Two small kids found an orange set loose on the floor, barreling from one seat to another on the jerky train, and they picked it up. I didn’t know how they located the old man to whom the orange belonged, but they returned it to him. The old man put it back in his bag, looking touched and slightly embarrassed.
A laparoscopy and appointment for chemotherapy later, Day 7, my father was to take my mother back home. The day I was leaving NY, the mass transit employees went on strike. All the subway and bus lines were shut down. In the morning the half-deserted streets and I gave each other a conciliatory nod (as far as I remembered, the only time Manhattan was emptier was right after 9.11). Commuters walked across bridges from Brooklyn and Queens and some hitchhiked their way through, holding up signs of where they wanted to go. The traffic rolled in after noon and midtown came to a crawl. Cab drivers filled every seat with passengers going to different places. I shared a cab with a girl who happened to grow up in Mineola. The Chinatown bus was finally tearing away from the city. But can we ever leave NY? Whenever daylight was being let go in my mother's hospital room, shortchanged as the result of a wintry agreement, and the lights outside went up, in such manner, over such high-rises, I felt overwhelmed standing at an unlit window in midair. Under the sunset of the Empire State, the Tram’s cable cars shuttled back and forth to and from Roosevelt Island. Smokes rose from chimneystacks, and the buildings shone like multi-layered gold of LEGO pieces. Outside the soup kitchen of Bowery Missionary, a line of silent men had materialized. One afternoon, a hospital worker came to my mother's floor to deliver flowers. He was so old that his eyes were glassy and his facial hair had started to fall apart at the seams. His jowl was sagging and in folds, his wrinkled neck a thinning pouch that could barely hold any changes. He had a stitched-up mannequin slowness that you didn't know if he was moving or resting. The flower cart that was his work station was a rainbow of ribbons and accessories. A pot of white orchid emanated its ghostly beauty. I don't think I would remember such things if I saw them in a place other than NY. The city has made memory both a luxury and a lifeboat, so when a person leaves it behind, he has to retrieve it one way or another and ultimately become it. In the absence of God, I found in NY the boulevards and alleyways of God, where people were reminded why it was so hard not to live. Sometimes the revelation came in such unassuming things that I didn't know what it was till I was well outside the city, leaning my head on the glass of a bus, seeing the Moroccan-looking seamster working by the window of a tailoring shop not far from 57th Street where you had spent many summers. He wore a pale, almost monastic denim shirt and his wrist was drawing thread with an artisan's feel of needle. He seemed so content and undistracted from his work that he could be very well sewing a parchment of the Scripture, using the flow of his beating heart as ink. Sometimes things like that are all there is to separate life from death.
Wish you joy and much peace in PA.
I have not written to you in a long time, but you are often in my thoughts. I went back to NY for the second time in less than 2 weeks, this time expecting nothing but bad news. I saw my mother at the hospital, jaundiced and weakened, wired to the marrow with IV bags. The tumor in her pancreas had grown large enough to block her bile duct and she had a tube installed in her, for the biliary drainage catheter, that had to be flushed twice a day, and she slept with a bag of her own bile strapped to her leg. Sometimes she got up to walk in the hospital's long corridor, before lunch or dinner, pushing her blue IV pump along, making geriatric steps. Her blood was drawn and monitored, sometimes several times a day, and her urine was sometimes the color of black tea.
I stayed at her room every day from rush hour to rush hour, leaving after the sunset and the recommencing of the skylight's broadcast of nighttime messages. How did you manage to live in NY, in Manhattan, for more than 30 years? When the city blooms with its million voices and chromes, almost nothing else could survive. Every day when I got back to my parents' place in Queens, now empty, all I could do was go to bed. I woke up often. I started to watch TV again, after not having a TV for all these years. My mother's hospital room on the 16th floor was facing 1st Ave, Upper East Side, the line of Bagel Works, Pizza Park, Cleaners, Pit Stop, Pick A Bagel, and from another room I could see the Queensborough Bridge and a sliver of East River. Every day I walked between the subway station on Lexington and York, along 67th Street, and knew each building by heart: the terra cotta Seventh Regiment barrack occupying the whole block, the crimson fire station with broad balconies and red lights blinking in the wreaths of spruce, the black glass building of Fox, there was never any light coming out of it, and the matching black TV vans parked outside (the bleeding black heart of America), the restaurant L'absinth advertising themselves as cuisine bourgeoise next to New York Zen Do, and Saint Catherine Park furnished with a children's playground, around which Christmas trees were laid out on the sidewalk for the picking. In the morning people came to the bagel vendor and one late night as I was walking down 53rd Street, in the receiving end of the wind a gust of grease and cinder had me light-headed as the owner of a kabob stand doused the grill fire with a water bucket. There was music in the rue and rust. The recreation room for the patients had classes in the form of woodworking, copper enameling, or "relaxation techniques with watercolor." It also played movies and hosted bingo games twice a week. I sometimes used the library there. Volunteers would come to play music and sing pop and holiday numbers. One time, I stood to listen to the Daytop Village Chorus harmonizing Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer while kids at the table were making Christmas ornaments. A student from Julliard was there one afternoon to play the piano. Her name is Alina Kiryayeva and she played on the hospital's worn but tuned Baldwin - it had a sober but lovely sound. She played Mozart and Bach and, the most surprising of all, Chopin's Piano Sonata No.3 . I had never heard Chopin played like that, not even by Rubinstein, and my shoulders froze, my palms sweating, my stomach drained of its contents. I bumped into Alina afterwards at the street corner when I went outside for a smoke. She told me her fiancé had died from cancer.
I was among much death, the goners, the passing-throughs and the up-and-comers, inside every hospital room, in every elevator and corridor, over the In-Memory-of's on the memorial wall of names on the first floor. Patients with no hair and tubes coming out of their veined necks, family members who would suddenly cut short their conversations and let the silence drop. When I was down in the radiology department before my mother was sedated for her procedure of the day, a young girl was lying in bed next to us. Her mother, in her elegant New Yorker outfit, turned herself away to the wall, taking off her glasses to wipe her eyes, all the while keeping the rest of her body quiet and still - I don't think I'd ever be able to get over it. When she could talk again, she turned back to speak softly into her daughter's ear, their faces nearly touching. I was walking in on all those hushed words and family secrets of strangers, with each trespass of glance and the curtain opened for the nurse's visit, that they became more real than anything I had experienced, like being continuously born naked in front of a mirror. Being first a nurse and then a physician, my mother had dealt with sickness and death matter-of-factly that you could hang mortality as holiday lights and she would not move her feet from where she was. It was the rain on 5th Ave and the new pigment of her skin and eyes. She was not afraid, not of a boat plunging head first or the ambulance rushing to an upturned car, but she was afraid for my father and me, in a life she could no longer be a part of. She was afraid of those evenings my father would be sitting alone at home, motionlessly, not sure whether it's night or day, not sure why it matters - how the end could wipe out everything proceeding it. She was afraid for my sake, when I have to try to convince my father and myself that nothing is what it seems, not an empty bed or her unused clothes in the closet, that it's fine to grieve and then one should live to the day's conclusion.
When I needed a break, I saw my friend Anthony who had moved here from Boston. One of his brothers had committed suicide. We met at a bar called The Magician's, in Lower East Side, and he said being womanless was making him onerous and horny. He was not ready to live elsewhere. I also saw Amy, the first time in a year. I took LIRR to Mineola like it was before and although I expected everything to look the same, I was surprised when everything did. She hadn't changed, maybe a bit of weight loss, now standing at 100 in bare feet, or less. I was feeling older next to her, even though she is 6 years older than me. We went to the movie theater, just like we used to, when we watched so many escapist or period movies (she is a big fan of Jane Austen and all things vintage Britain). It had never struck me when we were living together that Mineola is the most poetic sounding name of all the Long Island townships (Deer Park comes as the remote second place), almost Greek in intonation. I took the 1 a.m. train back, not knowing why people met the way they met, why so many tears are shed for one person but not for others. What hour, what tracks and platforms, what darkling crepitation. I always liked the lunacy of NY subway, the instant catapulting, the grinding train's caterwauling, and something lucid lurching into oblivion, each passenger's face a pantomime of interchangeable humanness. But something else was there this time, in the lair where one can flex the acrobatics of moreness and self-dissipation, going through the window's sinkhole like switchblade neon, deep inside the bare-knuckled city of Italians and Irish, of financiers and thoroughbred con artists, of nihilists and washed-out kinksters, a presence so pure and transitory that I held my knees together and dared not to close my eyes, lest I would miss it. I looked at the subway crowd around me, the boots and work attires, the gloves and bags, the hands kept to themselves, faces looking away, a shyness at the fast geometry of humanity, at having been born, an unspoken apology for being alive and the necessary ego to go on, the adolescent puzzlement at attachment and one's hope for happiness, if I could breathe long enough in this reservoir of foretold blue, I could touch something tender, something resembling the beginning. Two small kids found an orange set loose on the floor, barreling from one seat to another on the jerky train, and they picked it up. I didn’t know how they located the old man to whom the orange belonged, but they returned it to him. The old man put it back in his bag, looking touched and slightly embarrassed.
A laparoscopy and appointment for chemotherapy later, Day 7, my father was to take my mother back home. The day I was leaving NY, the mass transit employees went on strike. All the subway and bus lines were shut down. In the morning the half-deserted streets and I gave each other a conciliatory nod (as far as I remembered, the only time Manhattan was emptier was right after 9.11). Commuters walked across bridges from Brooklyn and Queens and some hitchhiked their way through, holding up signs of where they wanted to go. The traffic rolled in after noon and midtown came to a crawl. Cab drivers filled every seat with passengers going to different places. I shared a cab with a girl who happened to grow up in Mineola. The Chinatown bus was finally tearing away from the city. But can we ever leave NY? Whenever daylight was being let go in my mother's hospital room, shortchanged as the result of a wintry agreement, and the lights outside went up, in such manner, over such high-rises, I felt overwhelmed standing at an unlit window in midair. Under the sunset of the Empire State, the Tram’s cable cars shuttled back and forth to and from Roosevelt Island. Smokes rose from chimneystacks, and the buildings shone like multi-layered gold of LEGO pieces. Outside the soup kitchen of Bowery Missionary, a line of silent men had materialized. One afternoon, a hospital worker came to my mother's floor to deliver flowers. He was so old that his eyes were glassy and his facial hair had started to fall apart at the seams. His jowl was sagging and in folds, his wrinkled neck a thinning pouch that could barely hold any changes. He had a stitched-up mannequin slowness that you didn't know if he was moving or resting. The flower cart that was his work station was a rainbow of ribbons and accessories. A pot of white orchid emanated its ghostly beauty. I don't think I would remember such things if I saw them in a place other than NY. The city has made memory both a luxury and a lifeboat, so when a person leaves it behind, he has to retrieve it one way or another and ultimately become it. In the absence of God, I found in NY the boulevards and alleyways of God, where people were reminded why it was so hard not to live. Sometimes the revelation came in such unassuming things that I didn't know what it was till I was well outside the city, leaning my head on the glass of a bus, seeing the Moroccan-looking seamster working by the window of a tailoring shop not far from 57th Street where you had spent many summers. He wore a pale, almost monastic denim shirt and his wrist was drawing thread with an artisan's feel of needle. He seemed so content and undistracted from his work that he could be very well sewing a parchment of the Scripture, using the flow of his beating heart as ink. Sometimes things like that are all there is to separate life from death.
Wish you joy and much peace in PA.