I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate. All those moments will be lost in time... like tears in rain... Time to die. --Blade Runner (1982) "Because we don't know when we will die, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens only a certain number of times, and a very small number, really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that is so deeply a part of your being that you can't conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times. Perhaps not even that. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems so limitless." --The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles You met Madorah Thompson at the 21 Club at 21 W 52nd Street in New York in August of 2014. Normally, you're not the kind of guy would be caught at a place like this. You both sat at different tables, each alone. She was extremely attractive, pretty even, and dressed in all black: fedora, blouse (showing her midriff) on top of a skirt and leggings, and combat boots. You were also dressed almost all in black: jacket, shirt over plaid your kilt, leggings, and combat boots, with two large gold hoops on each ear. And a cowboy hat. You also had gold bracelets on each arm, worn over the sleeves of your jacket. You glanced at each other briefly before the waiter came to take your orders. You decided to extend yourself, which you seldom do in New York. --Hi. --Hi yourself.
--I'm Isabel by the way, Isabel Cohen. You told her your name. She said: --Interesting. How do you pronounce it? You told her: strictly phonetic, just the way it's spelled. --So you're Jewish. --Yep. --My ex is Jewish as well. We have 2 kids, who obviously are also Jewish, since Jewish culture is transmitted through the mother. --You got that right. Do you have a girlfriend? --Yep. Her name is Tamara, and she lives in Minneapolis. --Ah, a commuter romantic relationship. How do you manage that? --We manage it. I fly to Minneapolis once a week to see my kids and to see her. (After you met Isabel, you told Tamara about her, but you said you and Isabel were simply just friends.) Then suddenly, Isabel changed topics, more or less ignoring the information that you had just shared with her about Tamara. --Hey listen, I have an idea. After we're done here, can we grab either coffee or even lunch? --I haven't had lunch yet. So yes by all means lunch. --I haven't had lunch yet either, so lunch. --Sounds like a plan. --I'll come looking for you when I'm done. I'm headed for the nonfiction section right now. --I'll just stay with fiction for now. I'm looking for the Complete Works of Marcel Proust, and also the Complete Works of Samuel Beckett. Jenny will give me a generous discount with both volumes. --I see. See you in a bit.
New York, New York: In any case, to discourse about New York and its transformation, or you should say its transformations: For transformations are precisely what define the city and what set its conditions of possibility-and what animate the people who live there. You're a New Yorker even if you weren't born there. But you or anyone else can most certainly be a New Yorker even if you weren't born there. You become a New Yorker the first time you say: "That used to be Danny's and that used to be Clancy's," before the Internet caf plugged itself in and before Starbucks installed itself. You start constructing your private New York the first time the city came into your view. Maybe you were in a cab leaving La Guardia when, on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, you saw the Manhattan skyline. All your worldly possessions were in the trunk, and in your hand was a piece of paper with an address on it that would turn out to be your first home. You say to yourself: "Look, there's the Empire State Building; look there: The World Trade Center towers." Maybe your first time in New York was when your parents dragged you there on vacation as a baby and towed you all over the gigantic avenues while shopping for holiday season gifts. Your first view of the city from your stroller was the legs of adults on the sidewalks, and you wondered why the sidewalks sparkled at certain angles.
It's August 20l8, and you and Zooey have been living in Ventimiglia, on the Italian Riviera, close to the French border, since May 2017. You both got married late May 2017 at the US Consulate in Marseille. Your kids Maya (30) and Nelson (28) were there, as were Jake Gyllenhaal, Scarlett Johansen, and Zooey's older sister Emily, who stars in the TV series Bones. You have twin girls, Natalia and Sarah, now one-year old. Before the marriage, Zooey told you she didn't want a pre-nup. Of course as a former indie-movie actress in Hollywood, she was worth millions of US dollars, much more than you were. She told you she wanted both of you to have a joint bank account. She said: --My money is yours and your mine.
