Manhattan

It's 8:20 on a Sunday morning, and I'm loading myself onto an Amtrak train headed north for New York Penn Station. The night before I cut short a wine and cheese housewarming party so that I would be able to rouse myself from bed at 5:00 to shower, pack, grab some things from work and head out. I'm looking forward to the trainride, needing the 3 hour-plus journey to recover from a weekend that featured run-ins with both management at work and customer service at the cable company. Starting at 8:20 I dive into the mission of my trainride: to determine if I am "losing it" and, if so, how I can get "it" back. I choose to bring along for my physical/emotional ride a panoply of reading material: The Economist, The Week and Outside magazines, as well as "Drown" by Junot Diaz and the latest from Haruki Murakami, "After Dark". I choose the latter, its splintered version of a pachinko parlor on the cover appealing to my fractured consciousness at this early hour. Bacon grease and Japanese fiction will fuel my journey.

The train pulls into Penn Station and I am instantly lost--despite the fact that I know where I am, I do not know how to get anywhere from here. I call my friend Katy, who used to live in Greenwich Village, and get directions to the financial center where I'm staying for this visit. I arrive via the subway, after traveling nearly the entire length of Manhattan. It is me and the Staten Island crowd on the train. I arrive in my hotel and put down my bags before opening the window drapes. This is my third time in New York and the first time I have seen the Statue of Liberty--from the 30th floor of the Marriott. On the way out to the elevator I notice the friezes and gargoyles on the next building over. It will not be until the next day that I notice I am peering out over what used to be the World Trade Center buildings. I'm two blocks away.

Corn beef and a Brooklyn Lager at an underground restaurant take me away from the Japanese Denny's of Murakami's novel and back into the now. But 30 minutes later I am lying in the sunshine that reflects off the Hudson Bay, napping and imagining how it would be if--as in "After Dark"--the television screen turned on and flickered as I lie there not caring that I am next door to a graveyard, that my job is secondary to my integrity and that my awareness is punctuated by bouts of sunlight that the Statue of Liberty cannot block.