Walking through Midtown Manhattan on an unseasonably warm October Saturday afternoon, there is a moment where the sun is still up a few dozen miles in any direction, but it's already dusk inside the walls of the high-rise fortress, and the sky is a weary post-apocalyptic pink, and the glass and gold storefront windows cast vermillion reflections on the flushed faces of tourists with backpacks, and Eastern European teenagers with Macy's bags, and black-clad businesspeople shouting into their headsets...
"You went to New York this weekend? What did you do there?"
"Well, it was only a day trip. Just a lot of walking around."
... and the sewers emanate a humid fog that reeks of feces, which gets caught in the oily yellow glow of the food carts that illuminate the treasures of the street vendors' wares -- gleaming bronze pretzels with diamond-chip salt flakes, obsidian leather purses, the cheap glass beads that Manhattan was bought with, copper shawarma nuggets studded with pockets of raw garnet...
"How nice! Did you go to any museums?"
... and gradually, gradually the sky darkens and we hit Central Park, and the only light is the paltry stream from the street-lamps and the brighter feverish neon glint on people's skin that obscures their features, sharpening only their waxy, vampiric pallor and the hungry hollows of their cheeks, and it is in these moments that I know how the ruddy peasant of the pre-industrial world felt as she took her first timid steps onto this concrete Babylon and shuddered with horror and delight.
"No, unfortunately. I wanted to go to MoMA to see the Kirchner exhibit. But by the time we'd walked from Chinatown to Times Square..."
... and I saw a woman sitting on a scarlet beast full of blasphemous names, having ten heads and seven horns, and the woman was clothed in purple and scarlet and adorned in precious ornaments and pearls and precious stones having in her hand a gold cup full of abominations and unclean things of her immorality. Upon her forehead was written a name, a mystery, Babylon the Great, the Mother of Harlots and of the Abominations of the earth, and I saw the woman drunk with the blood of the saints of the earth and the blood of the witnesses of Jesus, and when I saw her I wondered greatly.
