The city is composed of islands crisscrossed by avenues and streets, tunnels and trolley lines—a grid of connections waiting to be made. Majestic bridges span the rivers in steel-spoked splendor, while the ferries carry their loads safely to shore.
The bridges, the tunnels, the ferries and streets. And do they dream?
The ferries dock in the terminal. They open their metal mouths to sing out the people who march forward, unseeing, heads like battering rams as they grimace at the blustery cold and sometimes forget to sing, sometimes forget that they were made for singing. The playful wind takes exception to this, and a hat skitters across a sidewalk, chased by a businessman in gray, which brings a chuckle to the audience of news agents and shoeshine boys, the telephone girls hurrying to work in shoes that pinch, the bricklayers, the street sweepers, the sidewalk vendors whose carts teem with whatever the citizens think they might need.
High above it all, the window washers hoist themselves up by the miracle of rope and hover in midair on small planks to clean away the grit of so many dreams discarded. They wipe with their cloths until the lives on the other side of the glass become clearer. Every now and then, faces appear at these windows. Eyes meet for a second, maybe two, the observed and the observer each surprised to find the other exists. Then they look quickly away, the connection unmade, islands once more.
The wind whistles down into the skyscraper-bound canyons, across the broad expanses of the avenues and the narrow confines of the streets, where lives unfold in secret, day in, day out:
Sometimes a man sighs for want of love.
Sometimes a child cries for the dropped lollipop, its sweetness barely tasted.
Sometimes the girl gasps as the train screams into the station, shaken by how close she’d allowed herself to wander to the edge.
Sometimes the drunk raises weary eyes to the rows of buildings rendered beautiful by a brief play of sunlight. “Lord?” he whispers into the held breath between taxi horns. The light catches on a city spire, fracturing for a second into glorious rays before the clouds move in again. The drunk lowers his eyes. “Lord, Lord…” he sobs, as if answering his own broken prayer.
The cars drive on. The people hurry to and fro. They sigh and want and cry and dream. Taken together, their symphonic whyohwhy might reach the heavens and make the angels weep. Alone, they are no match for the noise of industry. The jackhammers. The cranes. The streetcars, subways, and aeroplanes. The constant whirring machinery of the dream factories. And do these things dream of more?
Another day closes. The sun sinks low on the horizon. It slips below the Hudson, smearing the West Side of Manhattan in a slick of gold. Night arrives for its watchful shift. The neon city bursts its daytime seams, and the great carnival of dreams begins again.
Evie woke in the middle of the night with a throbbing headache. With tremendous effort, her eyes struggled open. The room wobbled, then settled into focus. She had a vague memory of kissing Sam. In a woozy panic, she looked down, relieved to see that she was still in her party dress and alone. A wave of boozy nausea washed over her and she stumbled to the bathroom, where she splashed water over her puffy face. It was early, before dawn. Plenty of time to sleep, and to figure out a way to let Sam down easy. Evie angled her head to drink straight from the bathroom tap. Then she crawled back to bed to sleep it off.
It was the light that woke her.
Evie blinked, her eyes adjusting to the buttery morning sun bathing her room in a hazy glow. But this wasn’t her room at the Winthrop. This was her room on Poplar Street, back in Zenith. Slowly, she took it in: the dresser with her silver hand mirror, the painting of a Victorian girl selling flowers, the star-pattern quilt sewn by her grandmother when she was born. She was home.