The Boy Detective by Roger Rosenblatt

of snowflakes. So, to say nothing of it, I won’t.
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    W HO COULD TIRE of New York? Dr. Johnson said that anyone who tires of London tires of life. London? Was he kidding? The roses in the window of an old bar and grill. The stick marks on the sidewalk made when the cement was still wet. The courage of small birds. The courage of people coming from work, going to work. Sometimes, when I drive in from Long Island, before teaching, I pull off to the side, stop, and watch. I close the car windows and put on a CD of John Lewis of the Modern Jazz Quartet, playing a souped-up version of Bach. Or I play the Rach Three, so that my fellow citizens may go about their errands to the accompaniment of Rachmaninoff. The Rach Three moves as they move, alternately melancholy, sprightly, sweet, bittersweet, aggressive, bombastic, sad, and exultant. How brave are these people. Rachmaninoff weeps without tears.
    The city does not exist without people walking in it. Does not exist, I say. And if you doubt me, recall those scenes in science fiction movies that attempt to show the end of the world. For the scenes to be persuasive, the cameras do not go to the mountains or to the seashore, both of which can do quite well without human company. Show the Rockies as they would look after a nuclear blast, and the picture would be no different from an ordinary spring day. But when the moviemakers seek to indicate total and absolute lifelessness, they shoot the empty city, and it’s almost always New York. Deprived of people, the place is lunar. The buildings look lost. The empty streets look lost. Where people once defined the space, merely by walking here and there, space no longer is.
    This is strange, is it not? People walking create the space in which they walk. The walk lays out its own street. Does this mean that when the walkers are removed, the city itself no longer exists? That the space they defined is unreal? And if that is so, no wonder the city feels like a dream. Why, man, it is a dream. I told you so.
    See there, pal? If you blur your vision, the soldiers’ uniforms become their wars. And instead of merely watching the soldiers on leave as they walk here on Eighteenth and Broadway, you see them in dangerous territories where they earn their stripes, riding in armored MRAPs, in olive, yellow, and brown places where the natives plant IEDs in their path. Not camouflaged in front of Paragon sporting goods, they stand out in a crowd. Earlier, when I passed her, I should have saluted. Even if she blushed or rushed to get by, I should have saluted for the very patch of land that became her uniform. Even if she giggled.
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    â€™T IS OF THEE , my country, that I sing, feeling in love with it as ever yet estranged these days, removed from politics and policies, more than when we were in Vietnam, more than when we were in Cambodia, out of it, like a guy suddenly flush, who jiggles the change in his pocket, looking for someone to give it to, and finding no takers, shrugs.
    I was in Cambodia, too, not in it exactly but next door, at the Khao I Dang refugee camp in southern Thailand, on another case, talking to children who had escaped Pol Pot’s work camps. Some had buried their parents, digging with their little hands. Many had been tortured. In the refugee camp they danced the water drop dance to entertain the visiting journalists. Outside the tent rose a small Golgotha of prosthetic limbs. The weather was inclement. The rain would explode, soaking us from top to bottom, clothing clinging to our bodies. And just when you thought you might go under and drown, the sun would blast the rain away and drape you in a dry heat. You stood where you had stood, unwrinkled as you were before the rains. I felt at home there. Awake. Alive.
    America is a detective story, is it not? It runs from hope to crime to pursuit to justice to regeneration, and back to hope. I’ve always had a special taste for the beginnings of detective stories,