It had been 59 years to the day since the Rosenbergs had
been electrocuted that I arrived in New York City. It was, I especially
remember, a day of firsts. It was the first time I had taken a taxi cab (from
LaGuardia to Jamaica). It was the first time I had ever slept without a pillow
and it was the first time that I bought deodorant at a 7-11. Beyond all else,
the city was hot. I had until that day lived my entire life in Georgia. Heat
was no challenge and in many ways was a welcome (albeit aggravating) friend.
However, this heat seemed trapped within the skyscrapers and subway tunnels, a
ghost dragging itself through the city like a sluggish shade. Unable to move on
but unable to stay completely still. There was also something old about this
heat which hovered, musty and stale, like a stench in the home of an ancient
relative whose candy bowls hold only keys and gray fossilized taffy unfit for
eating.
My first moment that allowed me to sit was monopolized by
the view from the top window of my dormitory building. There was luck for you.
The perfect outline of the city, just beginning to freckle itself in
electricity against the blushing twilight sky seemed distant and close enough
to touch at the same time. For a moment, I wished that the sun would not set
and would simply dangle on the border of land and sky for eternity. Yet the
hours overtook it and the city awoke beneath the darkness of night.
I reflected on what New York City meant to me. Undoubtedly,
there was something sinister about it. For two centuries, this had been the
place where people from across the world buried their old, their young, and
their dreams. I thought of tenement buildings, brown, colorless and decaying
holding families. Mothers who worked in the day, whose clothes were stiff with
sweat who slap their children and hug them with the same arm. Fathers who
frantically study English books and the Torah against the backdrop of a single
pine table. Children crawling like grub-worms across the floor, crying,
nagging, pleading against the noise of vendors and carriages on cobblestone
below. The wind had taken them all over. Their bones were tossed across
America, left to root into the earth where they landed. These buildings now
stand vacant, haunted by the echoes and phantoms of tears and the strikes of
matches.
But even the wind was not strong enough to disrupt the heat.
It was enough to make a person crazy not because of its extremity, but for its persistence.
Humidity was trapped in the fist of the city. Neither solid nor liquid, it
oozed like a blob that could not abandon its shape and no matter how it creeps
out of cracks in its prison walls, it could not travel far.
59 years ago to the day, the Rosenbergs had died while electricity
surged through their bodies and I was here, looking from Queens into the city
that draped itself in heat to keep out the chill of the mid-Atlantic.
