It was a raw, bitter night in March when I arrived in New York, and the wind was blowing so hard it could strip the face and slap it on a windshield. And here I shall begin the story, as I suspect this turn affected my life more than others. I had left Romania in a hurry only twelve hours before, and after an atrocious long-haul flight, my ears were still popping with recycled air, and faceless whispers and that dooming chime of the seatbelt sign. It was a quarter to midnight. No cozy dark had welcomed me, however, but a cruel terminal brightness that embraced me at arrival like an afterworld experience. Then, the frantic rush of bodies, a ceaseless whirl of luggage carts, “excuse me, miss”, sporadic chimes. And when the sliding doors opened and shut, ghosts in sweatpants drifted to some other side. Eventually, I drifted too. Then everywhere I looked, there was a keychain and a hotdog. A bright and soulless Hell –Marvin Gaye singing in the background– but with all its tackiness, it had a modern kind of charm.

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By then, it had rained for a week, and giant grey-blue clouds loomed above the terminal bridges. And down below, on the street, beneath layers of poison, garbage, and piss, the wind carried the sounds of take-off. Everything was cloaked in a wet, shimmering darkness. I trudged along blindly for ten minutes or so, not knowing where the taxi station was. Bluish advertising lights shuddered on the pavement revealing shiny outlines of the car park which, in the moonshine, was sombre as a cemetery. Around me, clean-shaven businessmen clutching black, expensive briefcases. They were walking much too fast for the hour. They seemed like a flock of android inspectors, a sharp algorithmic sureness in their step. Somewhere in the backdrop, a bum asked for a cigarette. A family of five talked fast and noisily. A street musician, to my left, was playing on the saxophone an off-key version of Billie Jean.

 

It was not my first time in New York.

 

I had been there for a few years as a child. But one does not think in associations as a child. One does not see Hell in details. Listlessly, I pushed my cart to a halt behind a five-person line, and seated myself on my carry-on. As I waited, I counted the bubblegum constellation on the sidewalk. I had reached seven hundred when the optimistic nerve that possessed me on my journey, was dimming to a doubt. And I must’ve waited for a while, because someone tapped my arm eventually, and I woke up, and I couldn’t understand why a moustached purple-lipped man was jamming my luggage in his minivan, shouting for me to get in his car and, bewildered, I looked around the high-tech neon darkness of the terminal and, for a second, was as terrified as a drifter in a Lynch dream.

 

Everything is grander in the imagination.

 

Proof of this was that I was not, in fact, lounging on a sofa in a satin-lapelled robe, with Modern Talking in the background and curtains beating in a storm. Instead, I was crouched between two gigantic suitcases, in the back seat of a yellow van. My driver was a tawny man with fat, red cheeks and a sweat-stained turban, and the radio was blasting with a sheep-like sort of wailing. There was a  formidable aroma of synthetic sugariness that thickened the air and mingled with the countless body juices evaporated in a small place. And when we hit a bump, my teeth shook with the windshield medallions; with the camels, and the citrus freshener, and the moon and stars, and Muhammad.

 

Along the highway, orange cones dotted the road, guiding us through a maze of lane closures. I watched construction workers under floodlights, toiling like shadow puppets against concrete blocks and excavators. And on a far-off sidewalk lined with tiny cardboard-looking homes, I counted two delivery boys, four men trudging, a woman running (hopefully home from work). The air of industrial dystopia was appallingly eerie. Dots of rain began to sprinkle on the window and, at once, the sky came closer. Then, a dark and steel-like forest emerged out from behind a freeway slope, reaching high up in the sky like titan fingers.

 

Everything is bigger in New York. Reality is bigger. The sidewalks are bigger, the people are bigger. The night is darker. Why would anyone ever come here? It was an inexhaustible space, inflated to absurdity. Every neighbourhood resembled the last, with a few calculated rearrangements. It had a frequency to it, repeating itself viciously, as if someone had tampered with the very laws of nature. An entire city built over a giant pit of nothing. Here nothingness took shape, you could feel it lurking around the corners of supermarkets. And yet there was a congestion that strangled all freedom. It was, in every way, much uglier than Eastern Europe. There was a crude tyrannical candour to the land I’d left behind. In comparison, American ugliness had no rules, no past, no historical mystique. It was an assorted salad of real estate, and commerce and immig –

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“Where you from?!” The driver suddenly intruded my observations with a thick-accented voice which made me think of being punched. I answered resentfully.

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“Rumania?! My friend wife Rumanian! Oho, you gonna be excellent wife!”, he remarked rather perversely, gawking in the rear-view mirror.

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I laughed artificially, then braced myself for the usual enumeration:

 

“And the best food! Cabbage rolls! Lamb balls! Mamaliga!|”, he continued with exclamations, laughing in between with a sort of stupid delirious energy. “Rumania! How is there?!”    

 

“It’s tough.”

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“Ye.” He smacked his lips with force. “But gooud futbal! Hagi! Very veeery gooud!”

 

I laughed a two-chuckled, irritated sort of laugh.

 

Then he asked: “So why you leave? Work or…aaa…boifrend?” An eyebrow raise, a judgy-knowing-imaginative smile.

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“Just needed a break.”

 

“You want break, you go to California, not hear. Hear is SHIT. Everywhere you look, SHIT. Gooud money, but much SHITA.’ He motioned with his hand that oriental type of frantic rejection. I laughed sincerely this time, but still wished he’d shut up, so I simply nodded back.

 

“You catch Ceausescu?”

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“Excuse me?”

 

“Ceausescu. You born then?”

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I told him no, wondering how bad I looked after thirty hours of wake.

 

“He was a-bit-aaa…strict,” he said in a playful tone, then asked me if he'd died.

 

“Long ago,” I said. 

 

“Executed right–?”

 

I told him how they shot him in the head on Christmas. He muttered a dispirited “Allah” and paused the music in what I imagined to be a sign of respect for the dead. Then we both assumed our former positions of strangers.

 

The effect of his intrusion was that I was suddenly revived from my culture shock and found myself in full anxiety attack, which I’d succeeded in postponing for most of the flight. I scratched at the greasy leather dunes of the backseat, glaring at fluorescent cones flying past the rear window. That this journey was a terrible idea was doubtless beyond question. I had hardly any notion of survival. But above all, I was worried sick that I’d been photographed departing at the airport in Bucharest. Had my picture made the evening news? I had shut off my phone to resist any temptations of checking. The media had no reports of my departure, but my father was all over the headlines: “Real-estate Tycoon Vanishes”, “From Big Shot to Big Drop” and my favourite, of course: “Gone with the Gypsies”. A blue-striped, white bus passed us, which interrupted my anxiety progression and seemed to signal, tantalisingly, the exigency of a bus card. This then, for whatever reason, made me contemplate the frailty of happiness. How short it is, how I'd taken it for granted. A bus can be so synonymous with misery. Finally (perhaps due to some intuition, perhaps a preconception) I imagined getting mugged in some dim and smoke-filled alley; up against a pizzeria dumpster, then jumped by a fat black truffle-eating rat. You're not a New Yorker until.

 

We drove past three more merchandise trucks, four superstores, a hundred billboards, and what I approximated to be some million kilograms of steel, concrete, and cables. Only now and then, if I'd squint at the horizon, I could see beyond this terrible immediate world. There, over the barren railways and the black water, stood the shimmering mirage itself. From a distance, Manhattan looked purely erotic. "Welcome to Queens", an exit sign read. The words struck me with the force of an inevitable end, like a bullet in the head. “Almost there”, the driver said. And though he was referring to our destination, what he really took me to that night (only then I couldn’t possibly have known) was a strange new violent world that nothing had prepared me for.