Day 3: I am the card player

MoMA
WTC
Movie at AMC

Day 3 was spent in the wonderful Museum of Modern Art where waves of people moved from room to room and eddied around like a slow-moving hurricane. The initial awe quickly merged into a peaceful familiarity as I encountered simulacra upon simulacra - real ones - of famous images seen on a computer once upon a time. Over here Chirico's Great Metaphysical Interior opening up an expansive interior within an interior, there Giacometti's Le Chien and beyond the corner a roomful of Pollock. Oppenheim's Teacup sent tingles rushing up to the back of my neck, and several rooms down Picasso's Card Player moved me to tears. In the last minutes before the closing of the museum, I scoured the top two floors looking for the Card Player in vain; it was as if, after granting me one privileged viewing this illusive painting had vanished into thin air.

After being kicked out of MoMA, which closes at the strangely early hour of 5:30pm, I visited the WTC ground half expecting to see a large crater. It was cordoned off by tall steel meshes, and by what I could make out looked like a construction site. I walked around listlessly among straggling groups of visitors, most of whom were taking pictures in front of a background of nothing. And as I circled the ground, I tried to not think of how imposing the towers would have seemed from where I stood now and how deafening must have been the sound of a thousand cries.



We sat in a small clearing within a neighboring skyscraper complex in the fading light of the evening. I don't remember what we spoke about sitting in the lengthening shadows. Did we even speak or did we simply eat our fast-food dinners and ruminate on heuristically-best subway routes back to the hotel? I don't remember anymore. I do, however, remember watching a movie at an AMC that evening, an otherwise ordinary experience colored wonderful by awareness of the New York outside the theater walls, and then taking my last walk through Times Square to a suitable subway stop.