Morning

You arrive at Penn Station deep below the surface of New York. As the doors of the train hiss and close behind you, you find yourself surrounded by people flickering past like shadows cast by neon fires. You pick up the life you have stuffed into your bags, and start making your way down the platform. An escalator carries you up into the waiting hall where lines of people slither back and forth like snakes between exits and entrances. A constant crackle of announcements fill the air, informing passengers of arrivals and departures, and reminding them to have their tickets ready for inspection upon boarding. The low rumble of trains gently shakes the ground beneath your feet. You fight your way through the bobbing heads of the hydra crowd towards the nearest exit. The rays of the morning sun filters down through the stairs, inviting you up, and into the streets of New York.

For a moment you stop and stumble. The sidewalk holds a constant stream of people, running head to tail as if trying to escape from some cataclysmic horror just around the corner. The roar of traffic tears through your body, and the staggering towers of glass and steel throw you off balance. You drop down bags and jaw, and close your eyes to regain your sense of self. You can feel the city slip in through the pores of your skin, aligning the pressure within to the pressure without. A deep breath fills your lungs, then leaves them again. But the breath is not your own. It is as if someone or something is breathing through you.

"Please move on, you're obstructing the sidewalk." A black lady in a dark blue uniform stares you straight in the face. She holds up her arm like a clock impatiently waiting to tick off yet another second on its never-ending tour of the dial. You turn to look at the constant flow of people around you, moving in opposite directions up and down the same narrow path. Their faces seem different yet similar, and you wonder if those who leave to your right are the same as those who enter from your left. The lady lets her arm fall to your shoulder, and firmly pushes you aside. You plunge into the torrent, and immediately you are swept away, a face among faces.


Manhattan

"Talking to people who come here for the first time is a constant reminder of my own fascination with the place when I first moved here ten years ago."

John lives in a small apartment in Midtown Manhattan, just a few blocks south of Central Park. The apartment sits directly above the boiler room, lending a certain tropical air to the surroundings. John, too, is a somewhat exotic character. Not only does he live in a self-contained urban climate zone, he also lives in a time zone far ahead of everybody elses. As does most people who can afford a place in southern Manhattan.

John works four jobs a week to pay the bills, but still he insists it is not at all about the money. It is about the work itself, and the rewards it might bring. "It's the American dream," he says, tousling the low-cut mohawk that ends in a sharply pointed tip of hair hanging down over his forehead. "I firmly believe that if only I work hard enough, one day I'm gonna be amazingly rich and famous." And somehow he already looks it. He might be around thirty, but he still shines like a twenty-year old. His skin is smooth and strong, his clothes a perfect match for his fit and tender body. There is an almost unnatural beauty to him, as if he himself had become part of the promise that constitutes the American dream.

All his jobs centers on music, He teaches it in classrooms and in private, he leads the choir in a liberal church, and he records his own songs in a studio. This summer he is going on tour in Europa, and he plans to play gigs in the Danish towns of Aarhus and Copenhagen. He was born and raised in a small town south of Chicago, but his roots go back to Scandinavia. "I did some research on my ancestors," he says as he pours himself a glass of filtered tap water, "and it turns out that I might just be descended from a Danish princess." He adds a smile. We have never heard of her, and it seems too unlikely to be true, but that is probably beside the point. To John, it is just another matter of believing. The ultimate recipe for making your dreams come true.


Forenoon

Already you have walked for hours. Your feet are sore, your legs are tired, but there is no escaping the rhythm of their movement. Like a ritual dancer, entranced and enticed, you have surrendered yourself to a force beyond your control. Every block is a dazzling display of ambition and defeat, and every corner holds the promise of change. To stop is to give in to the sky above, whispering with its every breath of air that it can never be reached. The towers of New York have become the manifestation of your desire to prove it wrong.

Manhattan constantly ebbs and flows. Every morning the population soars from one-and-a-half to three million, and every evening it climbs back down again. Legend has it that if you stand still on any given corner from sunup till sundown you will see every single person in Manhattan pass by. But you will have to stand your ground good. Sooner or later, most rocks in the river will simply be swept away. The swirl of people is all around you, and the current is strong. The skyscrabers inverts the depths of the subway, adding layer upon layer of people above and below. They shoot out of holes in the ground like sprouts of steam from a hot geyser. They spin out of revolving doors like stray bullets from an endless chamber. They are the assembly line of New York, trapped inside the maze of Manhattan, confined by the lines of the grid, haunting its every corner, circling its every square.

After criss-crossing your way from Penn Station through Greenwich Village and the Financial District, you finally reach Battery Park at the very tip of Manhattan. The swarms of tourists buzzing around war memorials and along the marina seem oddly comforting to you. They, too, are strangers to the city, lost in the cracks between skyscrabers, trying to grasp, to understand, to comprehend. They gather here to move freely across the open lawns, to rest their eyes on the vast expanses of the sea, to fill their lungs with the breath of the world outside before the city sucks them back in.

You walk down to the ferry that allows the overwhelmed and the confused to put even more distance between themselves and the city. But something holds you back. The beatings of a gigantic heart, buried far deeper beneath Ground Zero than anybody will ever reach, throb through your veins, urging you on. It commands no goal, no purpose, no rest. Only movement. Constant and unchanging. Direction itself is nothing but the illusion of progress.

The waterfront is the last barrier between you and the freedom reflected by the Statue of Liberty across the bay. She looks so tiny from over here. You reach out and close your hand around her. A clenched fist between lovers. Then the winds come charging at you, pushing you back from the barricades, and into the city.


Brooklyn

"Everybody is so much in awe of this city, and neither of us really gets why."

Andy and Becca are a young couple working in the arts scene of New York. Or rather on the fringes of it. They are like urban Buddhas sitting in a coffee shop watching the crowds of people roll by. He with his bald head and his all-encompassing smile, she with her homely clothes and her wry observations. "Wouldn't it be great if all car alarms sounded like the tune of the icecream truck?" she muses. "Perhaps that would actually make people get off their butts and start reacting to them," he picks up her thought. They prefer bikes to cars, and they prefer a cheap garden house in Brooklyn to an expensive steel apartment in Manhattan. Even their cats seem to be all fur and no claws.

"It used to be kind of a rough part of Brooklyn out here," they explain, "but now tiny flowers are starting to appear in the cracks." The hood is almost exclusively African-American, and most shops have bullet-proof glass panes and heavy iron grates. The atmosphere, however, is relaxed and friendly. Groups of people hang out on street corners, or sit on the stubs in front of their houses. Most buildings are only a couple of stories high, and the street Andy and Becca live on seems to have more trees and bushes than all the streets of Manhattan combined.

"It happens like this all the time," Andy tells us. "If you wanna know which neighborhoods are gonna be built up within the next five or ten years, just follow the gays and the artists. They always go for the poor hoods where they can get cheap housing, and a less money-driven atmosphere. And when the place starts looking up, and prices start rising, they move out, and the middle-class families move in. The cycle just keeps on going." Andy and Becca are part of that first wave themselves, and their only regret is the consequences it has for original inhabitants. "At some point the rent simply goes up too high for them," Becca says with a despairing look on her face, "and they have to move out to even worse hoods. I wish there was something we could do about it, but I haven't seen anybody come up with a proper solution. I guees it's just the way of big cities in a capitalist society."

Andy and Becca have spent the last year saving up for a bicycle trip across the States this summer. They have got some two or three months to make it all the way out to California. They still have not got any gear or actual route mapped out, but they are pretty sure that they will start out by crossing the Brooklyn Bridge to Manhattan. "California is the dream goal," they say, "but even if reality gets in the way, it'll still be a huge success. Living off peanut butter sandwiches to save up the money, subletting the house to a bunch of college kids, packing up our essentials and riding out of town - that's really what it's all about. Fame and fortune, you say? We'll leave that to the Manhattans."


Afternoon

You find yourself walking around the impoverished streets of Spanish Harlem. You have no recollection of how you got here, and you have no idea of how to get away. Rows of run-down apartment complexes, red and shaped like crosses, have taken the place of skyscrabers. A large group of brown and black Americans stand huddled together in front of a public healthcare center. It is as if they do not even notice you. The stillness, the quiet, the passivity of the place must have broken the spell that you have been under all day. The pulsating beat of your dreamlike trance has come to a halt, and you stumble back into the reality that had it sustained.

A street sign tells you that you are on the corner of 110th and 3rd. You feel relieved yet disturbed that you are still in the grid. Who are all these people who live outside the city, yet remain within it? Who have stopped walking, yet continue to be pushed forward in line? Who have fallen through the meshes of the net, yet still feel it tightening around their necks? The answer seems too disheartening to be true. You reach into your pockets for change like a fool trying to impress a king, but nobody comes to take it, nobody comes to listen to the jingle-jangle of your nickels and dimes. These people are somewhere else, beyond a gap that can only be bridged by something more powerful than money. And whatever it is, you know you will not possess it as long as the city possesses you.

Torn between hope and despair, between self and other, you escape down the rugged steps of a subway entrance. The air is damp and dirty. Breathing feels like choking. The lines of the subway map on the wall have become entangled in a blurry patch of running ink. As you scamper on into the darkness, your mind starts drifting away from your body, and back into the labyrinth of dreams. It seeps through the pores of your skin, through the stone and concrete of the station, through the steel and metal of the train that carries your body away. You are no longer certain that the person you are following is yourself. You could be anybody or anything. You could be everybody and everything. You could be the city itself. A foul and lonesome wind howls through the tunnels of the underground.


Queens

"I know New York like the back of my hand, but I'm a stranger in my own hood."

Matt is a Chinese-American who grew up in the Irish-American part of Queens. He lives with his mum in a town house crammed with paraphernalia that traces their family history all the way from ancient China to modern day New York. He just finished exams for the semester, and finally feels a sense of direction to his life. "I used to just bum around and get really crappy grades in high school," he says as he picks up another box of stuff from the couch and puts it on the floor, politely asking us to squeeze in. "But ever since I got into college, things have taken a better turn for me. I found out that my true calling is history, and now that's pretty much all I'm concerned with." He takes off his sunglasses to reveal the piercing eyes behind them. He is a self-proclaimed cynic, and his newfound sense of direction is overlaid with a relentless sense of cool.

Every morning Matt drives out to his college on the opposite end of Long Island from Queens. It is not too far away when counting miles, but adding in a good dose of New York traffic, he easily spends an hour and a half in the car. Luckily his grandmother lives just off campus, so if he does not feel like taking the long drive home, he can just stay with her. "My grandfather brought her over from China as soon as he could afford it," he says. "He came here right after World War II, though his story is still a bit of a mystery. He didn't speak a word of English, and he didn't have any formal education. But somehow he managed to get into university. Apparently he just knocked on the principal's door, and told him that his high school diploma had gone up in flames when his house was burned down by the Japanese during the war. My family's history of coming to the US is full of stories like that."

Many Chinese immigrants settled in Queens, and built up their own communities alongside those of the Irish, the Italians, the Slavs, the African-Americans, and so on, and so on. Almost half of the population in Queens is made up of immigrants. These days, Matt tells us with a grin, the real Chinatown is not in Manhattan as most people like to think. It is right here in Queens, and it is as insular as ever. Integration is very much a personal choice - as is holding on to your roots once you have made that choice. When his cell phone rings, Matt answers the call in Chinese. However, he soon reverts to English. "It was my mum," he says as he hangs up. "She scolded me for my accent, and I had to talk back in my own language. I've really been trying to pick up on my Chinese the last couple of years, but it's hard when you live outside the community."

As Matt drives us back to the subway station, he complains about the poor condition of the trains. Coming in from Manhattan, we noticed how they smelled like some poor homeless guy who had not touched water for months. Some people even preferred to stand even though there were empty seats. "Nobody ever gives a damn about Queens," Matt points out almost gleefully. "We used to have nice trains here, but then the mayor decided to dump them somewhere off the coast of Delaware. He wanted to make an artificial reef out of them. So now the fish use them to hang out and lay eggs and shit, while we have to ride around in rusty old trains that actually look like something they just dragged up from the bottom of the ocean. How ironic is that!"


Evening

As the sun sinks low in the sky, shooting beams of light down the west-east lines of the grid, the clouds above you whip themselves into a fury of black and purple. Forks of lightning strike down against your skyscraber rods, followed by the ever lower sweep of the clouds. They close over you like a lid, and immediately your streets begin to boil with furious activity. People seek shelter in cabs and doorways as showers of dust and rain run wild through the wind tunnels between your buildings. Bright orange cones are hurled from sidewalk to street, causing cars and trucks to brake and swerve. Nature has challenged the power of your grid, and the offspring that is rightfully hers rattles the cage, and lets loose all the chaos and confusion that have been trapped behind the bars of your master plan to rise above even the very forces that gave you life.

In the twinkling of an eye your streets have turned to darkness and gloom. Shop owners have covered their outdoor stalls with big sheets of plastic, or taken the goods inside. People have either stopped in their tracks, or are moving about with sudden jerks. Your traffic lights and signposts are warnings at best, and your roads and intersections stage a dangerous game of near misses. Your heart is failing, the rhythm of its beat is gone, and blood is pulsed irregularly through your veins and arteries. A sudden gust of wind sends an old black man in a wheelchair full speed ahead towards the curbstone. Flailing his arms frantically, he manages to grab hold of a lamp post, and flip his wheelchair over on the side. He just lies there, covering his head with his arms, while dirt blows hard against his body. A sudden surge of powerlessness overwhelms you, and leave several blocks in complete darkness.

The storm opens up its Cyclopian eye over Central Park, looking down on its momentary kingdom of calm. Your frightened inhabitants have been cowering under trees and behind bushes. Like relieved yet wary animals they come out of hiding, and look back up at the skies above. A frosty chill descends upon them from on high, far beyond even your capacity to build and conquer. They shudder in their summer's wear, betrayed by your promise of fulfillment. A young couple huddles together closely, and wraps a picnic blanket around their frightened embrace. A businessman in shirt sleeves bares his arms as he holds his briefcase up to protect his balding head from the cold. An eerie silence searches for a voice. Then the eye closes shut, and nature reclaims her own.


Jersey City

"To me, writing a script is like walking on my knees from Madrid to Vladivostok."

If you live in Jersey City it is as if you lived on the wrong side of the tracks. You might live in a much nicer hood than Spanish Harlem, and you might be closer to Manhattan than if you lived in Brooklyn, but still, technically, you are outside New York. "I can tell straight away if people are from Jersey or not," Robert says one evening as we stand on the platform, waiting for the PATH train to take us across the river and into Greenwich Village for a night on the town. "It's something about the way they dress, the way they keep their hair, the way they walk. There's too much pretense. It might just be five minutes on the train, but in New York five minutes are enough to change the meaning of everything you see, hear, and know."

Robert spent twelve years out in L. A. before moving to New York. He had wanted to be a filmmaker ever since he dropped out of Yale University, and used the tuition money to go to Africa to shoot documentaries. He ended up in Hollywood writing scripts for shows like Miami Vice and NYPD Blues. His last job out there was an adaptation of Philip K. Dick's "Minority Report". He was one of the three original writers, but he bailed out when Steven Spielberg bought the option for the script. "I always bit the hand that fed me," Robert lets on as he pours us another round of expensive Californian wine. "There was an arbitration case on whose name was gonna be on the credit roll, and one of Steven's friends ended up winning it. He got three and a half million, and I was stuck with a hundred and fifty thousand."

Robert looks like a crossover between David Lynch and Tom Waits, and he has no intention of falling short of any of them. He might be in his mid-forties, and he might be living in Jersey City, but there is no way he is going to stop dreaming. Three years ago he sold an idea for a script to a producer, and he has been living off the money he got to write it ever since. It was supposed to be done four months ago, but he is still struggling to finish it. For the first time in his scriptwriting career he feels like he is doing something that is more than just a job. It is an up-close and personal passion that burns from the tip of his pen, and even though his hands are full of soot and blisters, this time he is going to follow it through.

"My father is a Professor of Literature at Colombia University," Robert explains as he drives us back to Penn Station in his old rusty tin can of a car. From there we will bid New York farewell, and catch a train on down to Philadelphia. "He's taught all of the American classics, specializing in Melville and Hawthorne. That's probably why I never got around to reading any of them. I wonder what it makes me in his eyes, throwing parties and treading water in the movie business? Well, here's your stop." And so we get out, with a sudden invitation to visit him and his parents at their old cranberry farm in Martha's Vineyard, near the island of Nantucket where Ishmael set sail with Captain Ahab in his frantic pursuit of the great white whale.


Night

Times Square is your final stand against nature. You light up the sky like a midnight sun, spreading your neon rays down 42nd Street and beyond. Your Broadway shows and your video screen commercials and your fancy restaurants compete for the attention of the people who built you, and who continue to keep you free of nature's grasp. If it were not for them you would not exist. You are them, and they are you. It is a cannibalistic relationship that can only be sustained by constantly feeding off each other's hopes and dreams and ambitions. The days of subtle manipulation are long gone, and your commercials have become a neverending series of commands. The will to act, the will to power and money and fame, is your biggest advantage over nature, and you scream out your simple message of choice and change from an electrical billboard posted high above the rest. "Vote!" it says, reminding yourself and your people that in the labyrinth of dreams, reality should never be taken for granted.

Your streets are teeming with people searching for something or someone, some even for themselves. Just like you, they have all been blown out of their senses by steel towers and criss-crossed streets, by honking cabs and hoarse vendors, by cheap perfume and stinking manholes, by subterranean wormhole trains and twenty-second floor roof gardens. Their soul, their sense of self, their peace of mind, is all but gone, suspended in the very structures that surround them. They are drifting ghosts with bodies for spirits. And somewhere out there, on the Avenue of the Americas or in a back alley in Chinatown, on the balcony of an off-broadway theatre or in the toilet stalls of a dingy club on Bleecker Street, the mindless sense machine that is you walks among them, screaming for more and for mercy.

While nature might be conquered in all her outer splendour, the residue that resides within us all can never be defeated. And every day at midnight, it rears its head in anger and frustration. The blind one-way movement of the business hours become a restless pacing back and forth in front of the same few couple of blocks. Pedestrians spill into the streets, cars park at crooked angles. The faces of the crowd become less taut, their eyes more bewildered and out of focus. It is as if a moment of clarity had dawned upon them, as if the futility of their endeavors had finally been revealed to them. For a few brief hours, before and after shows and bars, they know their sense of purpose has been thwarted by forces not even New York can control. It is the hour of rebellion, of revolt and usurpation, when people lose faith in city and self, and only beasts are left to prowl the streets.

The patchwork mind of the city shatters like glass, and as neon lights refracts through the shards, and showers a final display of color on the multitude of forms, every single person is left to fend for him or her self only. There is no more single organism, there is no more collective dream, there is only you and the reality all around. You have until dawn to make your move, or love and order will be restored once again.