The Poetics of Space

The first stop on the scavenger hunt was the Wall Street Bull. That was so obvious from the initial clue that Etienne didn’t even meet up with us at the starting point near Washington Square, claiming she had a violin recital back at Julliard and she would meet us in the Financial District at some point around 11. The hunt itself happened to coincide with day three of an extended heatwave in New York. So, while waiting for Etienne, Carys went off to get an iced coffee, while I was left to sweat in the shade-less glare of the bronze bull, trying to ignore the stench of sweaty tourists lining up for photoshoots, while attempting to catch up on my Bachelard readings.

“Hey, Harry!” I looked up. Carys was balancing a drink-holder of at least four beverages and a bag of something (donuts) under her arm. “I got you an iced mocha. Didn’t know what else you wanted.”

“That’s fine,” I said.

This was in late July, about a month before I was to start my fourth year of a five-year architectural program at Cooper Union. The fifth-year that should have already concluded, had not a global pandemic thrown an I-beam into my plans. Carys, based upon the few conversations I had had with her over the past few months, was a philosophy graduate student at the New School, while Etienne, the erstwhile third member of our scavenger hunting trio, was getting an MFA in strings at Julliard.

“I also got this pic of you!” She held up her phone. It seemed, while preoccupied, I had accidentally positioned myself in an unfortunate pose, with my pelvic region facing the bull’s rear end.

“Funny,” I muttered while trying to slurp down the iced mocha through the already-soggy paper straw. I immediately caught the unpleasant taste of stevia, though, not wishing to be rude, suppressed the cringe.

Carys, oblivious regardless, giggled. “Check out the balls,” she said.

“The what now?”

She gestured towards the bull’s underside while loudly slurping her coffee. Glancing in that direction, I followed her line of sight to the somewhat prominent bronze testicles jutting from behind the bull’s legs.

“They look yellow-ey,” she said.

“That’s ‘cause so many people rub them,” I said. “Rubbed off the original color.”

“For good luck?” she asked.

I shrugged. “Financial luck, maybe. Or, it might just look funny.”

She raised her phone’s camera towards me again. I bit my lip, already knowing what was coming next.

“Ooh, why don’t I get a pic of you rubbing them?” she said. “I haven’t seen any of the other groups post their pics yet, so this’ll be a fun way to rub it in.”

I doubted we were the first to make it there, regardless of how badly the E train was delayed.

“I mean, there’s probably better angles…”

“C’mooooooon,” she whined. Another stream of sweat fell down my forehead, and I suddenly just wanted this whole thing to be over with already. Without changing expressions, I briefly brought my fingers to the bronze bulge just below the bull’s lassoing tail. She snapped several more pictures than I would have preferred, all while I attempted to not dwell on how much bacteria had accumulated on those mock testes from the scores of tourists grabbing them with far more enthusiasm than I did.

Of course, the advantage of Carys was that I was often freer to let loose my baseline grumpiness in her presence. She was, by all accounts, immune it its effects. Or at least much better at hiding them.

Carys got to work uploading her scores of pictures to the scavenger hunt Meetup page. I took the opportunity to make another attempt at Bachelard, though the glare from the brutal sun made it somewhat difficult going.

“A living creature fills an empty refuge, images inhabit, and all corners are haunted, if not inhabited.”

Etienne didn’t join us until almost 1PM. She lugged her violin case through the gathered crowd of tourists and Wall Street traders, clad in her standard lengthy black dress and omni-colored scarf, regardless of the summer heat.

“Sorry! Sorry” she called, waving towards us. “Professor Chen got held up. Plus the E train was fucked, again.”

The next several minutes were spent with Carys and Etienne chatting with each other over things I couldn’t hear over the background noise of downtown Manhattan traffic. Lacking anything else to do, I tried to continue on with my readings.

“Words … are little houses, each with its cellar and garret. Common sense lives on the ground floor, always ready to engage in ‘foreign commerce’ on the same level as the others, as the passers-by, who are never dreamers. To go upstairs in the word house is to withdraw step by step; while to go down to the cellar is to dream, it is losing oneself in the distant corridors of an obscure etymology, looking for treasures that cannot be found in words. To mount and descend in the words themselves—this is a poet’s life. To mount too high or descend too low is allowed in the case of poets, who bring earth and sky together.”

The next clue, as far as we (I) managed to deduce, was somewhere on the High Line. We took the train up to the Whitney Museum, where Carys immediately wanted to take a detour to check out their current exhibits.

I dawdled near the 14th Street Highline Entrance. My forehead was already soaked with sweat again, and I was running low on moist towelettes. The scavenger hunt had, to begin with, been Etienne’s idea. Or, actually, it had been her idea to RSVP on the “NYC 20-Somethings” Meetup group event. Honestly, only in my heat-diminished senses in the past few hours was I able to admit to myself that I had, in fact, been stalking her.

No, that’s a bit too harsh. Using technology to my advantage, perhaps? Still, her schedule as a dedicated Julliard violinist gave me vanishingly few opportunities to see her again, so perhaps I could justify my somewhat intensive interest in her Meetup activities as nothing more than an example of using social media technologies to my advantage.

Still, watching Etienne and Carys chatting over upcoming exhibits through sweat-smeared eyes, I couldn’t entirely suppress the sudden surge of guilt threatening my stomach, nor the muted bile of self-loathing and isolation beginning to drip across me in the same slow but merciless pace of the sweat invading my skin.

We walked across the High Line, trying to pursue the vague clue for the next stage of the “hunt.” Carys was checking her phone every few minutes, providing updates on our competitors.

“Uh oh,” she said. “That group with Travis, Danielle, and Rashid is already at the Cloisters.”

“How the hell did they manage to get all the way up there so soon?” Etienne asked.

“Uber?” Carys said.

“I thought that was against the rules.”

“I don’t see anything here about that, but I can check…”

This conversation continued on between the two of them, while I kept a few paces backward, finding nothing in my thoughts that I could add. I looked back at the ebook on my phone.

“Words are clamor-filled shells.”

“I think it's those teeth up there.”

I looked up at Etienne’s voice. She was gesturing to a large sculpture of dentures on the High Line path, near the public restrooms.

“You think so?” Carys said.

Etienne shrugged. “Maybe. Really it’s too hot to even think straight.”

“You want an iced coffee?” Carys asked. “There’s a café back there.”

“Sure!” Etienne said. Carys didn’t bother asking me for anything.

“But first,” Carys said. “Can I get a pic of you by the teeth? Maybe pretending to be eaten by them?”

“Sure!” Etienne said with a sudden burst of enthusiasm.

“It’ll look cool on the Meetup group! Who cares if those assholes ubered to the cloisters, anyway?”

Etienne dashed over to the denture statue and sprawled her body inside, extending her limbs and contorting her face in an expression of mock horror. Carys laughed as she took picture after picture, never looking in my direction.

I retreated to the shade under an overhanging ceiling. Even several feet away, I could hear Carys and Etienne laughing. I looked back down at the ebook opened on my phone.

“Thus, an immense cosmic house is a potential of every dream of houses. Winds radiate from its center and gulls fly from its windows. A house allows the poet to inhabit the universe… the universe comes to inhabit the house…”

The laughter stopped. I looked up, and saw Carys and Etienne walking away towards the outdoor café nearby. Their backs were towards me. They were holding hands.

I opened up the Meetup app. Carys had already uploaded a dozen or so pictures of Etienne in the denture statue. I saw no trace of me with my hands on the bronze bull testicles.

“To make of this world enough of another world to again experience for the first time our world.”

The city radiated in the heat of the summer sun. Somewhere, another world waited, curled in a corner in reposed, ergonomic sleep, spiraled in the familiar warmth of a single sunray. Waiting to be awoken.

The buildings surrounding me on all sides stood still and silent. If they had bore seeds of another world they found no fertile rich enough in me to grow anything.

And I didn’t even have a world of my own to experience. Even for the first time.