There are something like two hundred types of iron manhole cover in the sidewalks of the City of New York. Most of them are round, some are square, and all are patterned, some in beautifully circling tesserae, some in stripes, some florally, some with clear sans serif letters naming the interior or foreign cities in which they were produced. Therefore I imagine sometimes that New York is not merely an international port, but an interplanetary one—that if I stand on a particular manhole cover on 43rd Street and allow myself to be enclosed in the cylinder of blue light that will rise from it, I will be instantly transported to another city, this one on a planet in orbit around the star Alnilam in Orion’s Belt, whereas another round iron platform on Water Street will send me to the moon. Perhaps some of them are for internal transportation, so that using one will send you into one of the massive water mains deep below Manhattan, and using another will simply relay you more quickly than the subway could to a third platform somewhere in the Bronx, which is next to a fourth that goes to Theta Draconis VII. Or then again maybe they connect through tunnels of memory to different points in one golden book or golden life. I stood on one large round cover and its 108 square tesserae and after a shimmering moment found myself, two years ago on my birthday, on 11th Street, on the sidewalk outside a famous Italian bakery, holding hands with Dana, who was taking me inside, to the back, to buy me a piece of cake and a cup of tea and quietly sing me “Happy Birthday,” because I had made no plans for a party and she insisted that we celebrate. After I finished the cake we walked out again and I stepped on another manhole cover and found myself on 43rd Street next to my father last week, wearing a suit and tie, about to go into his club and have crab cakes for lunch. After that another manhole cover sent me onto Manhattan Avenue in Brooklyn, where I took a lovely summer stroll in the late morning just under two years ago after spending the night at Alma’s apartment, and stopped at a Polish doughnut shop with a diner counter to have what they called a “sweet twist” and coffee in a paper cup, and continued on and turned down Bedford Avenue past the park and under its tall plane trees. Just at the mouth of the subway station I stepped on another manhole cover and was engulfed in green light and then I was on the grounds of the Confucian College in Beijing, standing before a large square wooden building that serves as a freestanding classroom, with beautiful red and yellow ornamented beams inside the high ceiling and windows opening onto pine trees. I found a small copper tag in my hand that said, “Electrum is also called green gold.” But I only thought that I was standing there, because the scene flickered before my eyes, and then I realized that I was in fact a high school student on my way to play handball with Blackie on the Lower East Side. I crossed over a manhole cover and then I was a college senior on my way back home from having breakfast with Solomon at the diner in Chatham Square. I crossed over another and I was outside The Black Head on a bitter cold night under seven stars about to go in and join seven friends. Right beside this one there was another, that I stood on, and which sent me to the roof of the building where I grew up, on an autumn night an hour or two past sunset. I sat in my mother’s garden with a mountainscape behind me of roofs bearing oaken water tanks, and the lit up Woolworth Building before me looking in its milky white and green light like it was made of water and sugar. I saw that I had a glass of whisky on the table, and the night was so clear that despite city light the sky was covered with stars. I am only one small man, and so I have to jump from place to place, but the places that I jump to, whether or not I can see them, are all connected in a single whole . n
Will Heinrich is the author of The King's Evil. This story is excerpted from The Electric Chair, a novel in progress.
