At night, the avenues of New York are rivers of diamonds. At night, in this city, it is not night. Convinced I am unique, I walk down the West Side Highway at 10:28 PM as if walking onstage to accept an Oscar. Death wanted none of me in New York. The current situation in the West is often compared to the fall of the Roman Empire. Am I decadent? I don’t think so. My lifestyle is suicidal, not me. I’m just a nihilist who doesn’t want to die. Night falls over the Site: a clearing in a forest of glass. A year and a half after the tragedy, all that remains of the World Trade Center is a wasteland, a gray plateau surrounded by a wire fence. I will never know if what took place is as I imagined, nor will you. A siren in the night: the blaring ricochets in the narrow streets. White smoke rises from the drain between a Cadillac “For Sale” and the cracked sidewalk. The same smoke, ever-present in the past—we look at it differently now. A dead world, haunted by pretzel vendors. Not far from the Holocaust Memorial (18 First Place, south of Battery Park City), I look up: music sneaks out of an apartment and women’s laughter, the tinkle of ice in glasses and the yellow glow of American parties. I know this song: a global hit (“Shine on Me”) by the Praise Cats with a demented rhythmic piano and crazy lyrics like all disco hits: “I’ve got peace deep in my soul / I’ve got love making me whole / Since you opened up your heart and shined on me.”) I suddenly feel an incredible burst of joy, the same burst of gratitude that I felt on August 29, 1999, when I held you in my arms and welcomed you to earth. I play with the little blue Tiffany box in my pocket with the engagement ring inside. The foghorn is silent now. Only the melody dong dong dong tzing tzing tzing drifts from the window like a stream of warm air lifts flimsy summer curtains, the rest is silence. I mumble the words like a psalm. “I’ve got peace deep in my soul, I’ve got love making me whole.” I’m ashamed of my Catholic joy. Obscene in front of the largest crematorium in the world. Obscenely, inexplicably happy to be alive simply because I’m thinking about the people I love. Planes smash into walls and our society with them. We are kamikazes who want to live. Love alone gives me the right to hope. Freighters pass in the darkness—red lights like a nautical airport gliding across the black mirror. Birds fly off toward the dead stars. I pass the Cunard Building where, a century before, people bought their tickets to travel on the Titanic. The mouth of the contaminated river meets the sky. We flirt constantly with oblivion, death is our sister, it is possible to love, no doubt our happiness is hidden somewhere in that chaos. Will there be a worldwide democracy in thirty years’ time? In thirty years I and the rest of the planet will be forcibly disillusioned but I don’t care because in thirty years I’ll be nearly seventy. Somewhere, far off on the sea, the moon will soon be reflected and the water will look like a dance floor or a tombstone. I am sorry to be alive but my time will come. My time will come.