Madness (13 page)

JFK airport to Greenpoint, Brooklyn requires an Air Train ride followed by the A Subway and then the G Subway to Nassau Avenue. It's ten at night and I'm on the other side of the world. I have my backpack and map and a bottle of water and I'm on the other side of the world.

Rising up from the subway rubbish bags and piles of newspapers tied with string line Manhattan Avenue. All the shops are Polish. Most are closed but the bottle shop is open and I buy a bottle of vodka. I find my hostel and sit for a long time on the bed, sipping the vodka, letting it roar in my mouth and throat. Then I take the lithium tablets, the venlafaxine and a lorazepam and turn on the black and white television and doze.

At 5 a.m. I walk across the street past the NYPD depot to a bakery whose window is a tender yellow glow in the early morning dark. Inside are rows of glazed doughnuts filled with rose petal jam, babka, all sorts of
chrus´ciki
(angel's wings) and ah, coffee. I walk back down into the warm subterranean world of the subway, resurface by Brooklyn Bridge.

Between the two stone towers of Brooklyn Bridge is the steel frame, functional below my feet, in perfect symmetry above them. The bridge has an energy to it – the lights and the cars and its own singular beauty. I take giant steps, up on my toes, grinning, breathing. The sun is rising behind me, throwing itself at the East River, reflecting there and rising again . . .

Down in Battery Park the street vendors are setting up their vans. I ask for a hot dog with mustard and onions, chilli and sauerkraut.

‘Brilliant morning,' I say to the vendor. He doesn't look at me and he doesn't reply, just stretches out his arm with the hot dog wrapped in a white serviette like he's stopping traffic. I walk north along Trinity Place and think of Berenice Abbott's black and white photographs of Manhattan. She used a Century Universal eight by ten camera that concertina-like, could almost see around corners. Berenice said of New York that, ‘its tempo is like the tempo of the compressed air drill'.

Oh yes.

I mutter as I walk – about light and shadow. I mutter about angle and perspective and depth, but none of my digital photos are anything like Berenice's, which leaves me feeling exhilarated and anguished in equal measure. She had such a fine eye for . . . the liquid of time.

Back up Broadway I go inside a cafe and ask for a double shot skinny flat white.

‘Excuse me?' say both young men behind the counter at the same time.

I repeat.

Silence.

Horror. No espresso machine. It starts to rain, fine as silk thread. I walk north on Lafayette Street looking for coffee but the intricacy of the buildings keeps my eyes skyward. On the corner of East 12th and Broadway is the eighteen miles of books that comprise the Strand Bookstore. Four stories of new books, second-hand and rare books and a decent amount of stuff first written in a language other than English.

I find the second-hand poetry. I love the musty smell, the yellow-brown pages, the crookedly underlined passages, the notes – things someone, who is otherwise invisible to me, found significant or erudite or beautiful, and so we make a kind of secret connection through the medium of William Carlos Williams. ‘Icarus drowning' is underlined twice in dark blue ink, marking the paper so deeply I have to stop suddenly on the stairs. Outside again and the sky is colourless between the glazed terracotta and limestone buildings. I take the subway to the corner of Central Park.

ha ha ha ha ha ha ha get down on the ground bitch ha ha on the ground

They're screaming.

I kneel on the grass under a sugar maple in the park. Cover my ears.

Screaming,my head beating like a heart.

on the ground vile ha ha ha ha ha on the ground vile do it do it

Fold myself up, eyes shut, body shut. Eyelids pricked by the ends of the grass.

we're here to kill you ha ha bitch on the ground vile do it do it

It is dusk when it stops. Softer light. My legs from thighs to toes are numb and blue and above is the sugar maple, roaring colour, and I use its leaves as a visual anaesthetic while I stretch out and wait for the painful tingling and rush of blood. The dizziness clears quicker on standing the second time. The sky is the hue of skin, flushed.

I take the subway back to Greenpoint and get into the narrow bed, under the chrysanthemum doona and I drown the people in my head with earphones up loud and vodka and they leave me alone and I sleep until four in the morning, at which time I wander the nearby brownstone streets until the Polish bakery opens and I sit drinking coffee, re-writing sentences and swinging around on the chair, watching the light change from grey to vanilla and finally, reluctantly, I see that I'm unable to capture the all-five-senses, unabridged feel of New York City in words. I take the subway to West 53rd Street – to the Museum of Modern Art.

‘But perhaps my art is the art of a lunatic,' Marc Chagall said, and I wonder about this, standing in front of his
I and the Village
, painting number 1335. The green-faced peasant with his moonlight lips, the goat (or cow? lamb?), the fractured perspective, the eyes – one black on white, the other white on black – holding each other like hands, and then the circles, the sun and the moon and the earth. It is unorthodox, magical, non-sequential, imbued with multiple and even conflicting emotions. I stand in front of
I and the Village
for a very long time, run my palms over my eyes when they're wet.

‘That is so not the point,' says a young girl sitting near me, talking on her pink mobile. ‘I never said that. Who told you? I'm gonna break his arse. I know. I KNOW. Oh my God.' She stands up. ‘There goes my fucking hero, watch him as he burns. Huh? Dave Grohl, you doorknob.' She laughs, and I laugh and catch a bus past Cartier and Saks and get off near Bryant Park with its wooden seats and plane trees and view over the tops of the trees to the Chrysler Building – all silver in the sun. Gertrude Stein in bronze sits cross-legged, her hands relaxed and unfurled in her lap. She's brooding or thinking or imagining, or perhaps all three at once.

ha ha ha ha ha ha ha get down on the ground you bitch ha ha on the ground

They're screaming.

I kneel on the gravel. Cover my ears.

Screaming.

on the ground vile ha ha ha ha ha ha on the ground do it do it VILE

I fold myself up, forehead on the gravel, eyes shut. There's not enough room for my lungs. But after a minute, a part of me, somewhere inside, shouts, ‘Get up. Fucking get up.' And I do, and once my pupils shrink back in the light, here are other people walking and people sitting talking and drinking coffee from paper cups with little rivulets and they look relaxed, unconcerned. No one else is curled up on the ground.

on the ground vile ha ha ha ha ha ha on the ground

I look up at the American Standard Building with its solid black brick façade and terracotta friezes coated in gold. I look around again at the other people in the park and at Gertrude Stein's serene face. I pick up my backpack and walk north on Sixth Avenue. The streetlights are coming on.

vile ha ha ha ha ha

‘Piss. Off,' I whisper, in time with my feet, following a line of yellow taxies to Times Square.

‘You fuckers,' I whisper, and then a bit louder, ‘PISS. OFF.'

It must be like standing up to an abuser for the very first time: terrifying and a tiny bit thrilling.

Just south of Times Square, someone is standing under a streetlight preaching. I walk nearer and take out a notebook and pen. He has two men close on either side of him and two behind, all wearing silver chains and bandanas, one holding an open bible. The preacher is wrapped in a tunic the colour of ripe tomatoes, around his waist is a bright gold belt like he's just won a heavy weight boxing title. ‘I say to you! Woe to the shepherds of Yisra'el! We are like sheep that have gone astray!' He's on the tips of his toes. ‘For the life of the flesh is in the blood and God has given it to us to make atonement for our souls!' He pauses rather dramatically and stares at the little crowd of people around him. ‘For it is only the blood that makes atonement for the soul.'

This is a curious sermon. For it is only blood that makes atonement for the soul. I walk on and try to make sense of it, because it is close to my own philosophy when I am depressed. But do we mean the same thing?

My new hostel for the final of four weeks is on Eighth Avenue, Chelsea, next to an erotica store for men who love other men. In the window of the store are some sexy mannequins, one with a patent leather jock strap, one with nipple clamps, another with a fabulous-looking harness in black and red. There are pumps and pouches and rings and mesh and fishnet. Steam is rising from the underground Con Edison pipes.

Out the back of the main hostel building is a sunken courtyard with a wooden table running down the centre and sitting around the table are young Hispanic men in shorts and singlets drinking beer. All of them are ripped. I can see how beautifully the deltoid muscle of the shoulder inserts itself between the heads of triceps and biceps in the upper arm and how pectoralis major is like an open fan over the chest wall and the perfect contour of brachioradialis around the elbow. I slide off my backpack and sit on the steps leading down to the courtyard and get out a book and pretend to read.

The women's dorm has six bunks. Tonight it's Maricela from Bogotá, Marie-Anne from Paris, Aisha and Jac from Saskatchewan, and me. Aisha has her hair in cornrows running side-to-side and then extending from the base of her skull almost to her waist.

‘How long did it take to braid?' I ask Aisha.

‘Eight hours,' she says. ‘Over two days.'

‘Fabuleuse!' says Marie-Anne.

We swap little shots of information about our lives. I offer the vodka. We laugh. Here I am on the other side of the world, a normal young woman visiting New York City for the first time, warm and alive and with a mind of her own.

In the morning I catch a bus to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I have a map of the main building with its two million works of art spanning five thousand years. Greek and Roman Art to the left, Egyptian to the right, European Sculpture straight ahead and another world above. I sit down. The echo of voices in the Great Hall rolls over me. I'm under a waterfall of stimuli. The water is heavy. There's a rush of noise, a wave, and then silence.

‘Excuse me, Ma'am . . .'

The voice: so close, I shatter.

‘Ma'am? Are you okay?'

I grope . . . gather the shards.

‘Oh yes,' I say. ‘Yes, fine, sorry. Sorry.'

‘You've been sitting here an awful long time. Do you need help?'

‘Not at all, thank you, sorry, um . . .' I stand and smile. The woman smiles. We walk together toward the main exit.

‘Have you enjoyed the exhibitions?' she asks, pleasantly.

‘Very much indeed.'

Central Park in the late evening is quiet. Few people. Balls of light along the paths – white light and yellow, picking up the tree branches and throwing shadow. Piles of autumn leaves. The sky a murky orange where the encompassing Manhattan lights are sopped up by clouds. It is cold and I walk briskly, thinking about religion. It's not belief in one particular god that I'm drawn to; rather it is the broader concept of faith and derived from it, meaning. I'm curious about anyone who is sure that the path he or she is taking through life is somehow intrinsically
the right one
. What is it like to be part of such a community, to be committed to it, to be guided by it, to have respect for it, to yearn for its growth, to wake every morning with a sense of purpose?

There is a group of trees to my left covered in fairy lights and I take off my glasses so that the pinpoints of light refract, and then I fall without warning onto a hip-high barbwire fence. The pain in my right groin is so sudden and fierce that I roll off the fence to the ground and wonder if I've pierced my femoral artery. I lie on my back on the damp grass, looking up at the trees with their tiny lights and at the near-by hedges cut into animals. A fine rain starts to fall and it occurs to me, much like an epiphany, that I don't want to die here.

Inevitably the pain eases and of course I haven't pierced my femoral artery, but I lie with the lights and the hedges and the realisation that I'd really seriously like to stay alive. The people in my head laugh but I don't mind. In the rain, the sky and the stars are streaming.

On the plane home, squashed into cattle class between two middle-aged businessmen and the presents for friends and family at my feet, through all twenty hours, I chew over the links between spirit and faith and melancholic illness. Is the ‘illness' a response to meaninglessness? Is it a somewhat illogical response to a spiritual void, a lonely soul? And therefore could a cure be prescribed
not as a drug
, but
by a particular physical and spiritual environment
? Suddenly it all makes sense. New York City is my cure!