[13] You come back to the hole-in-the-wall in the afternoon for a nap. And you are woken up by an apparition who walks into the room, a living proof that human skin is as tough as it is fragile. It must be a “she” for the voice that says hello to you has a high pitch. You nod and wave, fascinated by all the tattoos covering almost all the exposed, which is quite a bit, part of her body. You later learn from a paper that there is a national tattoo convention going on the city, and so she must be a participant in that.

YWH Bless USA; a nation of cults, subgroups, tribes that can gather around any and every possible thing: motorcycles, tattoos, stamp collections, various strains of music, various versions of YWH, i.e., houses of worship (few benign but mostly rabid, frothing at the mouth about how their Man is the man, and the rest all handmaidens of Satan. This is not a nation that is going to dogs, as the certain people with certain political beliefs would have you believe, but to just as dangerous gods. Devil take both dog and god!) etc.

[14] There are thoughts that run through your head as you walk down Broadway: a card in the game of Monopoly finally has risen from the dead. And like anything that might rise form the dead, it crumbling and rotting and giving off heavenly perfume of sweat. Resurrected anima would be like this, not dressed in some fair garb, as all iconology would have one believe.

You amble along people speaking in tongues, arguing, standing around vacantly, women careening down the sidewalks dressed in high fashion (why does it appear that New York has more creatures of the female kind than elsewhere? Is it because of the human density? Is it because you can’t avoid them as elsewhere?). Watching, absorbing, polishing the bearings of your neck to a high shine as it spins around and around, a carousel, you come to the bookstore that a friend has recommended to you.

[15] Wonderland. Temple. Faire Grounds. Dump of glitterbones. This city is apparently a shopping haven – you wouldn’t know because nothing else matters for you but this, this bookstore. You ricochet from shelf to shelf till you end up in the poetry section. You grab a ladder from a nearby aisle and begin your raid. The pile builds up, book upon book, a tottering tower of desire; that desire to gnaw everything down to the bone. Language, that tricky bitch, however keeps slipping on your tongue like quick silver, like falling rain, like the unattainable paradise of a dream.

You know you don’t have the wherewithal to buy all these, and even if you did your legs are not strong enough (Hemingway’s dictum wasn’t it? That to write one must have strong legs etc) to lug these around the walks that remain yet to be taken. So you spend the next half hour sorting and shuffling the stack like a pack of cards. You put the final pile on your head and sashay down the cashiers, so chic and all that, and put down the cash, stuff the geese down into your backpack and step out into the rush hour. Get your ass moving or the human torrent would knock you down. Praise the Lord.

[16] You get down into the belly and catch the train south to Brooklyn Bridge: a bridge of desire, of fog stealing over it on cat paws, of suicidal poets who twanged it like lyre to make word music, come Hart, come Walt, come Wystan, you come too hombre Federico Garcia, to this thing of mind arching between where one is to where one wants to be.

Also a bridge of stone and steel wire, also a bridge of tourists with snub nosed cameras, with bazooka cameras, a bridge of bicyclists, runners, roller skaters, of cars flowing underneath from Man-hat-tan-o to the outer isle of Brook-lyn-ne, one male, the other female, those metallic spermatozoa.

[17] You sit on a bench roughly in the middle of the Bridge letting you eyes rest, and feet rest too. Could Buddha have attained enlightenment under one of the end towers of the Bridge? Can you be illumined here? But for now no thought for a while. You then get up and wander over to the Brooklynne side: underneath wharves, brick buildings, a sort of a run down look in general. Behind you meanwhile are the towers of Manhattano throbbing with the pulse of currencies, and the setting sun.

You wander through the stylishly gentrified streets of Brooklyn Heights, where Auden lived, where Mailer lived, and which now, from all the Hun tanks parked in the streets, appear to be too expensive for writers to live anymore. Here is the church from where Abolitionists, those goddamned Yankees to all Southerners, railed against the stain of slavery, the stain that will never be atoned for it can’t be atoned for. Thinking these thoughts you reach the promenade overlooking the East River.

[18] The sun is now completely hidden behind the spires of the Lower Manhattano. It shines through skeletons of glass, as if it is x-raying the buildings for some forgotten tumor. Lady Liberty in the distance, waving her wand of light (which is also now nearly a big nothing, given how damned hard it is to get into the promised land) at tugs, coast guard speed boats, lights coming on here on the shores of Brooklynne, Manhattano, and in the far distance Jersey Cow.

You sit on the bench breathing the cold water air that is blowing into your face, and kissing your body through the thin rain jacket you are wearing, alternately reading Milosz’s meditations on Chinese hermit poets, watching dogs and dogwalkers, the changing of guard on the horizon, the incoming dark, the web of solitude, the wedding cake lights of Brooklyn bridge to your right, and then right ahead at the confluence of two rivers, Husdon and East, the slick glittering tongue of Manhattano drinking. In India all confluences of rivers are considered especially holy. Isn’t this too a holy confluence then, yes the holy confluence of dollar and man!

[7] After you finish eating you walk two blocks north and get on the E-train, going uptown. Destination 5th Ave. The compartment, and perhaps the train, is full of suits. And even though you are dressed quite formally this morning in slacks and a button down, you feel comparatively underdressed. When the train pulls into 5th Ave station, you get off with most of the compartment. Going up the escalator, you get the impression of a human assembly line, bodies, nay clones, packed into business suits and ties.

You have the thought that since most business depends on the ability to bullshit beautifully, these folk -meatpackers of another kind, need to wear such assembly line uniforms, so as not to let shit stick. Your mind is behaving subversively for what do you think you yourself will be doing soon? You have to let go to the engineer’s ethics and the resultant wariness towards all hotair: the predominant coin of business, and other subsets of business like politics and organized religion.

You also suddenly remember advertisements for clothing you have seen a long time ago in tropical India, where to wear a suit is to court certain death by steam cooking, from brands called Grasim, Raymonds and suchlike. You laugh at the absurdity now – Indian men dressed in suits, walking around as men are walking around you here in the street, trying to sell this style in a country where temperatures hit 45 C in summers.

[8] You walk down the Avenue of The Americas, wondering why such a broad claim: is it supposed to include the whole American continent, be representative of the whole American continent, or is it just an echo of President Wilson’s claim to his sphere of influence: that exclusive backyard of Uncle Sam, with all those banana republics, all those dictators, and all that CIA meddling? Castro, however bad sonofabitch he may be, has certain legitimacy when he shows US the finger.

You arrive at the point of your business, and see all around you headquarters of the major book publishers; McGraw-Hill, Simon & Schuster etc. Gutenberg would be rather proud of all these bookies, who could make fortunes down the years off his idea, which was, wasn’t it, to propagate the Holy Book? Are Gideons then Gutenberg’s true inheritors? You also have a five second day dream of winning the jackpot and going up these steel towers to meet the bookmakers, the literary kingmakers, the suited ghosts, the men with blue pencils.

[9] The security guy barks at daydreamers like you: get in the line. Yes. Yes. You want to go to another country and you can’t bloody well wander across and around without papers. Watchtowers, barbed wire, border patrols, human trackers, the Great Walls of the West, and the hungry tide waiting, looming, for a piece of the fruit cake, for the good life, on the other side of the dam with closely monitored gates.

Yet this human fluid like water does manage to seep through the rock – the universe is full of boat people, full of all these wetbacks. What about you? Are you not a legal wetback? No sir, a legal alien. And if you wait for a few years, you might hope to become an earthling again here. Now, now, no more monologues in the line. Get moving. The guard barks at you: get your papers out in the right hand and sixty dollars in the left. Stand straight. Jump up. Bow down. Skip and hop as required. You have been through this before. Be curt. Answer to the point. Keep your voice low and clear. You mustn’t get excited. You mustn’t stammer.

You are to prove that you are ‘safe’. Are you safe? Isn’t there the snake of all sins coiled at the bottom of your spine as well? How to scan murder that lurks in the heart? Monsters arrive in iron birds, howling. A line from an Eagles’ song: everything can change in a New York minute. Yes, last night you looked down and saw the hole through which cold calculated murder went on its way to a supposedly tricked up paradise. And then perhaps a God, if he exists somewhere, wept.

[10] Forty minutes later, you are done. You feel exhausted, beaten. Make a mental resolution to become Roman, to cross over to the “first” world as quickly as possible. But what about psychic borders that remain uncrossed? And meanwhile, in the city, it is business as usual; suit twirl around you, tweeting, chirping into cell phones, the sky is clear, and you sit on a bench and breathe the air mixed with the aromas of the Indian food kiosk at the corner.

You disinterestedly thumb through the guidebook; the section for this part of the city is a litany of names, of architecturally significant buildings, various schools of architecture, and building material: glass, steel, marble, concrete. And a church every block: “You shall praise the Lord, and bring your tithes to Him joyfully. And He will call your transgressions off, i.e., Quid pro quo.”

You also note that a famous museum of modern art is right around the corner. Perhaps you should pop in there and transport yourself to the wheat fields of Arles, to a smoky room where peasants are eating potatoes, to a sky full of drunk, hallucinating stars, to streets where whores, postmen, their wives and sun walks? But your find this impulse unappealing. You can’t wrestle with that soul in a glass tower, where he is also business. Yes, aren’t those shell-shocked, flaming souls, well preserved in a fort worth a lot of business?

[11] After sitting in a café - drinking coffee, writing notes, watching a psychotic old woman at the next table have a continuous and a passionate conversation with an imaginary person, a bearded intellectual type/hobo reading a thick book (what is it about? who is the writer?) – for an hour or so, you step out into the panorama of Fifth Ave and walk southwards. You have lost all interest to absorb architecture on this trip, so you put the guidebook away and don’t even look up at the spires in the sky. In the distance the scalloped top of Chrysler Building etc. Fogget-about-it.

This feeling persists when you step into the celebrated Grad Central Station – deservedly celebrated and much photographed because it is quite a beautiful building. You can’t imprint it on your mind however any differently from Hal Morey’s famous photograph of light streaming through its high dormer windows. And also those painful passages in Elizabeth Smart’s ‘By Grand Central Station I Sat Down And Wept’. Is this then a case of media fucking up one’s perceptual abilities? Deadening them? You walk out with this question on your mind, and soon enter the Public Library.

[12] You walk up to Asian Reading room, pull out a volume from the shelf and begin to read away the sense of isolation that has been creeping upon you in the last few hours. Perhaps reading this summation of Ferdowsi’s opus will make you feel light again. Already you are lost in this other world, where someone audaciously composes 60,000 rhyming couplets telling the history of a people in poetry for a daughter’s dowry. And alas never getting the 60,000 gold dinars sent by the Sultan in time. The camels bearing gold entered the city through the Camels River gate as Ferdowsi was departing through the Gate of Razan, as well as through the other more permanent gate.

As you read of Rustum, who lived to be six hundred years old, you make a note to undertake a similar history of these past few centuries, mixing imaginary dragons and beasts with all those real ones they have seen. These are other bits you find writing in your notebook: Gayumarth, the primal man who fought the Evil Principle with lions and tigers; Hushang, the first iron worker, who discovered fire when he hurled a boulder at the menacing dragon, missed and struck sparks; Tahmurath who learnt writing from the Demons (is writing then fundamentally a demonic art?); Zahhak, the Arab with serpents embedded in his shoulders that needed to be fed two human brains a day; the great white haired Simurgh rescuing a baby; and then Rustum again, the boy drinking with men, the baby with ten wet nurses, striding away into a New York afternoon on his horse Rakhsh or Lightning.

In place of friends he now has a wall of books, to which he turns in order to occupy those empty hours when his spirit could be forging itself in the human crucible. Intellectual investigation, then at various points of time, lapses beyond the simple need and curiosity for knowledge into some kind of an activity that will fill his hours before death. And because he doesn’t know how many of these he has been granted, and also because the wall of books seems to grow taller and throw a larger shadow, another kind of darkness, across his face with each passing day, reading lapses from a pleasurable stroll among the bushes of print into some kind of a marathon or an endurance race among open pages, all seemingly on fire.

His bed is littered with open books ?all picked up and begun as a turning away from something that was already opened previously. Is this only thermodynamics at work, an expansion of entropy, of bookish static filling both real and psychic space? He sighs attain a deeper pitch the more he shovels poems, plays, criticism, science writing, political polemics, history, travelogues, magazines down his maw ?does he sometimes see the connection between that feeling of suffocation and the velocity with which he is eating? And then, how many friends does he have? How many real conversations with voices, not those frozen in ink and pulp, but those issued by voice boxes does he have?

Dismal bleakness when he thinks of those latter questions. Best to ignore them and continue with the fetishistic séance, with various characters in attendance: Hamlet, Dionysus, drunk Henry Miller ready for the next orgy, Plath with her Nazi daddy and ancillary gas oven, grandfatherly Narayan wandering about Malgudi - a town he has exiled himself from, brooding Rilke flogging loneliness in Paris as he awaits the angel of Duinio Elegies to descend. These are manageable characters for him to summon and hold onto, steadily, in his brain, in that lobe where such processing occurs.

The rest, i.e., old friends who have become ghosts or are turning into ghosts or whom he is turning into ghosts, lovers who are frozen in the amber of his poems, and then those with whom he is unable to make himself understood, are best kept at abeyance. They are incisors of the god damned black dog which is stalking him, and which he wishes to kill with his bare hands, soft and dandy, and eat raw, sucking out the marrow out its cancerous incandescent bones.