The windows are black

I step outside. I put one foot in front of the other, I move in a specific direction towards a specific destination, I know where I am going, but I don’t need to articulate it, because my destination surrounds my body. I am caught in its pull, forward, onward, and my movement towards this destination is as elementary and all-consuming and impersonal as the relationship between my lungs and the oxygen that surrounds the earth, ready to be inhaled.

I walk. I stop. A car. I walk on. I cross a street, Kent and North 3rd, and a neural pattern independent of the part of my brain that constitutes my persona and its experience devises a potential route: left on Metropolitan, right on Wythe, left on North 1st, right on Berry, left on Grand, right on Bedford, left on South 1st, right on Driggs, left on South 2nd, right on Roebling, left on South 3rd, right on Havemeyer, left on South 4th, right on Marcy, Marcy, Marcy, Marcy. I follow it.

I see: a Jewish supermarket, a Jewish hat shop, a Jewish second-hand shop, a Jewish hardware store, a Jewish pharmacy, a Jewish post office, a Jewish butcher’s and delicatessen, a florist’s which may or may not be Jewish, at least the sign isn’t in Hebrew script, a clothing shop, likewise without any indication of the owners’ religion, as well as: a diner, a steakhouse, the car park in front of the steakhouse, the parking attendant for the steakhouse, the bus-turning circle, buses, the bridge access ramp, the bridge, the greengrocers under the bridge, the secondhand shops under the bridge, the electronics shops under the bridge, the sports-shoe shops under the bridge, and then: the stairs.

One after the other, my feet touch each individual step, next to the steps there is a grate to prevent you from falling down onto the street in front of the buses, cars, fire engines, lorries, taxis and police cars. I reach the platform and look at the view: façades and roofs, façades and roofs, until this view is interrupted by the inevitable arrival of the subway train.

The subway train is clean and silver, the doors of the train shine, the train is hot, even though here it is above ground. The doors open, I get on, see people of various colours and shapes, variously dressed, with various destinations. The doors close, the train, which runs above ground here, starts moving. It moves slowly, the ascent onto the bridge, the noise, just noise for now and the view from the bridge of the water. Above the bridge: other bridges, on them other trains, in them other people, the opposite shore, the tunnel, the noise, the noise of the destruction of space, its violent separation into here and there. The windows are black.

Or a mirror, depending on one’s depth of field. Images of bodies and clothes and handrails and emergency brakes move together in this specific section of the solar system, surrounded by noise, carrying us past stations I don’t get off at, brief interruptions in the blackness on the way to a specific light.

I see the floor of the carriage. From the perspective of the carriage it is not moving, from an absolute perspective, it is, and over a certain period of time it picks up speed, which can be calculated based on various basic properties of the universe such as impetus, mass, inertia, gravity. I am standing firmly on the floor of this subway train, which is accelerating along a clearly defined trajectory towards a clearly defined goal, my hand is grasping an iron bar upon which there are microbes that pose no threat to my immune system. I shift my weight from one foot to the other based on signals from my muscles and from an organ in my auditory canal, the floor is moving and the system in my ears tells those muscles which have to contract to contract, so that I keep my balance on this floor which is moving, on tracks laid down on a planet that is also moving, and then the train stops moving, and I get off.

I step out onto the street. I cross it. I get to the other side. Houses everywhere, they are made of wood, stone and steel, of cement, plaster and glass. I walk past them, and then I stop in front of a building, right in front of the opening in the middle, one metre wide, two metres tall, and above the opening there is a sign, and I turn the body that is me ninety degrees to the right, towards the opening, and in the opening it is dark, almost black, and I walk through the opening and then I am inside.