Time will pass as time will pass. The City still stands. One year becomes five, then ten. Children grow like weeds as do the sycamores shedding their rough bark with the warmer weather, dirty trees, the residents say, sweeping up after them. The residents have lived here forever or they have just moved in. The residents are thinking of leaving, or they have just arrived.
On the High Line the high school kids practice their samba; there is no more room in the cafeterias for dance and besides, tests are being taken, scores tallied—the fate of the untutored millions. In front of the dancers, on the billboard, the underwear model looms over a skeleton in lace, his erection obvious. And what of the machinations of his mind? thinks one of the dancers, a boy who has recently learned the word machination and is eager to use it until, called to pay attention, he loses the word entirely, dance not his forte and his concentration gone weak, he tells the instructor, a woman who rallied the principal to sign the forms to allow the teenagers to pass out the doors of the school, doors guarded now by dropouts hired by a security firm for less than minimum wage, registered guns clipped to their belts. Not your forte, tough shit, the woman who rallied the principal told the boy. You’re going to dance as if it’s the last thing, she said. And so he does, and so they all do; they dance as if it’s the last thing, high above the crowds of Chelsea, the throngs beneath the High Line and west, in the rebuilt parks along the newly shored landfill and west, on the concrete, fireproofed pier where once the banana boats docked and now the next batch of toddlers ride the new donkey carousel, screaming at the tops of their tiny lungs.
But this is in five years, maybe ten. Now, here, the seminary bells toll, marking the beginning of one hour or, possibly, the end of another.