Mark’s Campanile in Venice, the golden tip of the New York Life Building, these stone symphonies, these modernist arrangements the Americans must have carved out from rocks the size of moons, these last stabs at godless immortality. Now I am above the clinic on Twenty-fourth Street, where a social worker once told me I had tested negative for HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, forcing me into the bathroom to cry guiltily over the skinny, beautiful boys whose scared glances I had deflected in the waiting room. Now I am over the dense greenery of Central Park, tracing the shadows cast by young matrons walking their bite-sized Oriental dogs toward the communal redemption of the Great Lawn. The murky Harlem River flies past me; I skirt the silvery top of the slowly chugging IRT train and continue northeast, my body tired and limp, begging for ground fall.

I am over the South Bronx now, no longer sure if I am soaring or hitting the tarmac at Olympic speed. My girlfriend’s world reaches out and envelops me. I am privy to the relentless truths of Tremont Avenue—where, according to the graceful loop of graffito, BEBO always LOVES LARA, where the neon storefront of Brave Fried Chicken begs me to sample its greasy-sweet aromas, where the Adonai Beauty Salon threatens to take my limp curly hairdo and turn it upward, set it aflame like Liberty’s orange torch.

I pass like a fat beam of light through dollar stores selling T-shirts from the eighties and fake Rocawear sweatpants, through the brown hulks of housing projects warning OPERATION CLEAN HALLS and TRESPASSERS SUBJECT TO ARREST, over the heads of boys in gang bandannas and hairnets jousting with one another astride their monster bikes, over the three-year-old Dominican girls in tank tops and fake diamond earrings, over the tidy front yard where the weeping brown Virgin is perpetually stroking the rosary round her blushing neck.

On the corner of 173rd Street and Vyse Avenue, on a brick housing-project stoop riddled with stray cheese puffs and red licorice sticks, my girl has draped her naked lap with Hunter College textbooks.