- The landlords want more, more, ever more. Some of them, in Manhattan and parts of Brooklyn, don’t even want money anymore: they demand, instead, a quart of blood, or a pound of flesh. In your neighborhood, people are paying a finger every four months; you can tell how long they’ve been living there by how many of their appendages are gone. One of your friends lives in the West Village, and the next time you see her, she has lost all four limbs and is in a motorized wheelchair that is controlled by her mouth. “I love it here,” she says. “This really is the greatest city in the world.”
- The trains are delayed so often and so badly that people have begun to walk from station to station, through the tunnels. They all die. You can spot when it’s taken hold of someone: something changes in their eyes as they stand up as if they’re standing for the first time. The rats have been getting fatter.
- Someone you know pays $1000/mo for a seventh-floor walk up that is just a closet containing a single chair, in which he sleeps. “It’s so great to be close to the F,” he says. At night, the room is filled with whimpering from beneath the floorboards, beneath the apartments, beneath the street itself.
- One day, you get off at your stop to make your transfer and see a train you haven’t seen before. It is called the H. Unable to stop yourself, you board it. Since you are underground, you have no idea where it’s going, but you wait patiently. The only other person in the car is a very old woman, who gets up and comes to sit next to you. During the whole ride, she tells you the most marvelous stories about her childhood, about what New York was like Before. She gets off at West 4th, and you realize you can’t remember a single thing she told you.
- Not everyone who is rich is white, but everyone who is white is rich. “I’m so broke,” bargoers say to each other, as they pay their $75 tabs every night. You want to stop going out, but you can’t. You must stay relevant. “We are relevant,” you tell each other, at the bars. “That’s why we are in New York.”
- The Oculus: luxury item goods sold under the careful watch of police officers with military-looking guns, on the former site of the World Trade Center. Sacred ground. If you stand in the dead center of the Oculus at midnight and look up at the spines of the ceiling above you, a voice will speak to you. After the voice speaks to you from this most sacred center of Wall Street, 500 million dollars will appear in your bank account. You know three people who have tried it. They have all killed themselves two or three days after. They couldn’t handle the voice. Remember that the Oculus is nothing more than shiny, polished bone.
- There is a party in Bushwick. There is a party in Greenpoint. There is a party in Bed-Stuy. There is a party in Williamsburgh, ugh, yeah, I know. There is a party in Flatbush. You go to all of them. It is the same people. It is the same house. It is rude to point this out.
- At night, the bodega cats gather and plan out the events of the next day, sealing the fate of every human resident. When you go into a bodega, always bow to the cat.
- Someone else you know owns an entire brownstone in Chelsea. Whenever you tell this to someone, they whisper it back to you, in reverence, like a prayer. She throws a party one summer evening, and so you go, just to see what it’s like. The party’s theme is bones: she serves hors d’oeuvres on bone plates, champagne in bone cups. “Real bone,” says one person, and “real bone,” says another, and then everyone is clapping and weeping. “Real bone!” The hostess owns a low-income apartment building, and gets the bone when she collects her rent from her tenants, who are mostly low-income Black and Hispanic families. On the second floor, she has an entire room full of washing machines. She likes to run them all at once and laugh.
- You make a joke to your co-worker about the subway. “That’s so funny,” she says. “I never have problems with the subway.”
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