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Requiem for a city

August 22, 2024   ·   1 Comments

By Anthony Carnovale

I’ve been to many places around the world, and I’ve managed to let each place go. Sure, memories come into the frame from time to time, but they pass as all things do.

And then, there is you.

Only you haunt me, loitering, knock-knocking at my insides (my heart, my brain, my lungs). You pop up on my screen, in the song that I’m listening to. There you are in the books that I purchased, the lid of the pizza box I squeezed into my luggage. I mean, they’re nothing without you. Trifles, really.

No, what you’ve done to me is akin to an act of violence. You’ve broken me, split me in two: my mind from my body. I’m less whole because I can’t just be here, in one place, in one Time. My body in Orangeville, my mind on the corner of Third and Mercer in NYC.

Why can’t you just leave me alone? Maybe you, too, suffer from the greatest of all fears: the fear of being forgotten. Is it you that prods me into writing this piece, another piece, more words, more time, more life given to the construction of you. There’s a reason why so many people feel as if they know you without ever having experienced you. I used to think the same thing. I now know different. Because once I visited you and let go of everything I thought I knew about you, I was consumed by you. And now, this:

Maybe, there’s something else you want? Did I take something that I shouldn’t have? Did I leave something behind? Is there something that you want me to see? Something you need me to know? What is it that you’re trying to tell me?

I hear voices, infernal noises. They leave burnt-out trails in my mind, shaped like the words on this page:

“He paints such lovely birds. I feel bad buying all of these cards”.

“Jose, the next time she comes in, just give her what she wants”.

“Yeah, she really knows how to work the oven.”

“Oh, there’s books in here. Damn. I must have read something like 23,000 books in prison. Those books kept me alive, man.”

“Yes, but are you happy on the inside?”

And when these voices — your voice — have gone silent, behind all of that silence, images, like slowly developing Polaroids, come to the fore:

The image of those workers, those poor garment workers, their burning bodies falling to the ground like angels on fire. There’s a steel ribbon wrapped around, and up the side, of the building, with the names of victims and quotes from survivors engraved through it: “They were coming down with hair and clothes burning – you know the girls at that time wore long hair. When the bodies didn’t crash through the deadlights, they lay there on the sidewalk three or four high, burning…”

I stood there, afraid to look up.

I stood there on the pavement, the streetscape, where last night’s garbage lay strewn, needles tossed, bills plastered onto posts, people plastered on drink, heroin. I never knew a human being could lean like that and still be alive. Everything ripped, torn, scaffolding everywhere, buildings crumbling — people, too. The sounds of water from hoses, garbage trucks, the smell of that trash, the workers, that man, his black body, that lean, I walked. I ran. I saw:

The immigrants that built you up spoke Italian, Irish, Yiddish. Now, asylum seekers from West Africa and South America that pick away at you from the inside, hauling plastic trash bins filled with the heart, guts and lungs of yet another renovated Brownstone, or a new restaurant about to launch. While the refugees from Venezuela sit outside the grocer in SoHo with their broken sign written in broken English, their faces broken by grief, by despair.

“I just wanted my children to see Time’s Square.”

At night, exhausted, with the smell of you stuck to me like smoke from a fire, I try to ground myself, to give myself a few moments for the subtle moments: the stale Tiramisu from Caffe Reggio. Sweating in the basement of the Strand Bookstore. The two young girls taking photos outside Electric Lady Studios (where Taylor Swift recorded her song “Love”). You couldn’t even give me that. A chance to catch my breath. You start knocking, again.

I was a thousand miles away from home, and only three blocks away from where mafia boss Vincent Gigante wandered the streets in his bathrobe, feigning insanity. Just two blocks away from Washington Square Park where 20,000 bodies of New York’s poor were dumped and buried.

In the early morning hours, there we were: me, six stories up, as another tragic story unfolded below. You: A bald-headed woman. A needle in her arm. Every night. One night, I thought she was dead. She was sprawled out on the concrete, the inside of her purse surrounding her head like a recycled halo. I watched, like one of the thousands of gargoyles perched atop the guilded skyscrapers that mark the dead and the dying like tombstones in a cemetery. The next day, I thought I saw her walking along Broadway in a dress that made her look like a queen.

And then, it was time for me to leave.

Now, I’m sitting at my desk, writing. I’m in my study, in Orangeville, but my head and heart are in Greenwich Village. The Lower East Side. On Bleeker Street. No matter how hard I try, I just can’t mark myself in Time. I just can’t seem to shake you. By some strange alchemy, you’ve broken me. Three weeks after I landed, my feet still haven’t touched the ground.

For me, you’re like a story whose meaning will never be clear. And I know that, like the chorus of a Greek play, you know where all of this is headed.

So please, tell me:  Will I ever be whole, again?

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