Susan McCarty / City / Body / Fragments

City/Body: Fragments Susan McCarty

CONJUNCTIONS:55, Fall 2010 Corner of A and Fourth/Eye  In New York, there is an important distinction to make between where you live and where you sleep. You sleep in your apartment. You live in the city.      It is a dripping August, which you know by the smell of it: dried urine, rotting garbage, and the unleaded smell of cabs burning off fuel as they idle in the shimmering heat, each a mirage, a promise of something better on the other side. You can’t get into a cab today because the ten dollars in cash and change sitting on the desk in your apartment is all you have until payday, which is Friday. Today is Sunday. You don’t have a bank account because the check-cashing place is convenient to your apartment. Also, you don’t trust yourself with a bank account; the margin of error is always, always so small. Instead, you like to watch the stack of cash dwindle in front of you. It causes you anxiety, but it also makes you feel as though you are in control of something here, in New York. You are in control of nothing, of course, but the illusion helps.      Because you sleep in the East Village, in a studio apartment in an old tenement that you share with a roommate, you walk the streets for entertainment. On paydays, you allow yourself a Cuban sandwich from the take-out counter on Avenue A. Today, however, you simply stand in front of the door for a few minutes, because smelling something is almost as good as eating it, and smelling something other than urine and garbage makes you happy. The smells are engrossing, in fact, which is why you don’t notice what has been going on behind you until there is the sound of something whining through the air, not very far from your head, and then the noise of the bystanders, who must have been there all along, suddenly rushes in and you turn in time to see two men grappling with each other, in the street, just feet away. One of them has a hammer. In the moment it has taken you to notice the scene and become confused by it, the man with the hammer bounces it off the side of the other man’s head and there is a sound that would, under other circumstances, be a satisfying sound—the sound of a job being completed, of something being forced into its proper place. You actually see the eye of the struck man wobble in its socket, as if it has just been dropped there to settle. And they are both screaming—one in anger and the other in pain, but the sidewalkers are screaming too and so the scene takes on a kind of miserable white noise wherein no one person’s distress can be sorted from another’s.       The police sirens are what finally cut through and break the cord that had knotted around you, anchoring you to this place to watch a man maybe get killed. This is true for everyone, and when the cop car screeches up, the men have already run off together, like wild elopers, one with his hand over his eye and a trail of blood down his shirt, the other just behind him, brandishing the hammer like a cartoon wife with a rolling pin after a mouse.