Open City by Teju Cole

Washington Market, the active piers, the fishwives, the Christian Syrian enclave that was established here in the late 1800s. The Syrians, the Lebanese, and other people from the Levant had been pushed across the river to Brooklyn, where they’d set down roots on Atlantic Avenue and in Brooklyn Heights. And, before that? What Lenape paths lay buried beneath the rubble? The site was a palimpsest, as was all the city, written, erased, rewritten. There had been communities here before Columbus ever set sail, before Verrazano anchored his ships in the narrows, or the black Portuguese slave trader Esteban Gómez sailed up the Hudson; human beings had lived here, built homes, and quarreled with their neighbors long before the Dutch ever saw a business opportunity in the rich furs and timber of the island and its calm bay. Generations rushed through the eye of the needle, and I, one of the still legible crowd, entered the subway. I wanted to find the line that connected me to my own part in these stories. Somewhere close to the water, holding tight to what he knew of life, the boy had, with a sharp clack, again gone aloft.

FIVE
    I t was back in summer, on the day we went on a trip out to Queens with an organization from Nadège’s church called the Welcomers, that I saw, for the first time, the link between her and another girl I’d once known. That other girl had been hidden in my memory for more than twenty-five years; to suddenly remember her, and instantly tie her to Nadège, was a shock. I must have been circling subconsciously around the idea for several days, but seeing the link solved a problem. I never spoke to Nadège of the other girl, whose name I had forgotten, whose face had blurred in memory, of whom I now retained only the image of a limp. It wasn’t a deception: all lovers live on partial knowledge.
    The girl’s problem was far worse than Nadège’s. She had polio, which had withered her left foot into a twisted stump she dragged behind her when she walked. The articulated steel brace she used for support was always on her left arm. Watching her walk across the field at my primary school, I was afraid that the boys would mockher; that was my first instinct, a gallant, protective one. She was in my class, but I remember little now of what we talked about the three or four times we spoke to each other. I liked her ability to be comfortable with herself, and the way that, once she sat down, she was no different from other children, and in fact had a brightness about her that was out of the ordinary. She might have been the best student in class had she stayed, but her parents withdrew her, and she went to another school. I never saw her again after those first two weeks. And only when Nadège came down from the bus in Queens, on that Welcomers excursion, did I see the similarity, the echo that was like John the Baptist’s echo of Elijah, two individuals separated in time and vibrating on a singular frequency, only then did I remember that I had imagined a future life with this other girl when we had both been eight or nine years old, the first time I had ever had such a thought, and of course with no idea of what it might entail.
    I had seen myself as a grown man, protecting her as one might protect a pet, having many children with her, but I did not think of having her as a girlfriend. I don’t think I even had such a concept then. I didn’t pity Nadège as I had the other girl. The limp was only a visual cue, hardly noticeable in Nadège’s case, and no great impediment to her; perhaps it offended her vanity a little but that was all. Sometimes, she said, when she wore adjusted shoes, it wasn’t even noticeable. It was a hip problem, which she’d had surgery to correct in her late teens, by which time it was too late. It should have been done much earlier, but at least the procedure released her from chronic pain.
    We were on the Triborough Bridge returning to Harlem as she told me this, with her head on