In Which the Magpie Makes a Ghost Map of the City

Magpie, definition, Cambridge Dictionary: 1) a bird with black and white feathers and a long tail, 2) someone who likes to collect many different objects, or use many different styles

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In the trailer for the movie A Ghost Story, which is coming out in a few months, a figure in a white sheet with eyeholes cut out trails around after Rooney Mara, who doesn’t seem to notice, up to her neck in the well of her own inscrutable interiority, as usual. The figure (it’s Casey Affleck under there, which seems perhaps not entirely pleasant) is comic, a Casper who might say “Boo!,” but the mood is clearly melancholy; the visual tone is itself uncanny, uncomfortable, hard to place. The Magpie, watching, thought, “Do I want to see this?” but couldn’t answer the question, which is promising.

The Magpie saw this trailer at the Landmark Sunshine Cinema, a theater which will be closing soon, like so many landmarks, known and unknown, in New York City. The city is becoming a place haunted by itself as building after building after building is either torn down or changed into “luxury apartments.” There have always been ghosts in this city, but now the city itself is becoming a ghost town, an invisible metropolis hovering around the outlines of the visible one.

It’s always been true, of course; New York never stops changing. The Long-Winded Lady, an anonymous New Yorker columnist of yore, remarked often in her column on the transformation of Midtown Manhattan in the 1950s from a place of small businesses, cheap hotels, and neighborhood bars into vast tracts of office space in skyscrapers. One wonders, along with the Lady (it’s genius Maeve Brennan under the nom de plume), how many offices in skyscrapers the city could have needed. One wonders today how many “luxury apartments” the city could need. One wonders, too, what it’s like to live in a “luxury apartment” that was once, for example, a room in St. Vincent’s Hospital where many people died. Are any moans or dying breaths still audible late at night? Or how about a delivery room that might have become a walk-in closet? A friend of the Magpie’s who once visited a cave in the south of France where ancient images of horses adorned the walls said, “I think that’s where women gave birth. That’s why the horses are there.” Might you, luxury-dweller, standing in that closet, sometimes feel the primal surge, detect a faint, bloody scent of new life? See anything on the walls, if you squint?

The Magpie, like every longtime New Yorker, has a personal ghost map of the city: This used to be the arty movie theater where I had sex that time; this used to be the restaurant where I fell in love; this used to be the offices of the newspaper that I read religiously; this used to be the community garden where I walked on the day he died; this used to be the corner store where you could get every literary magazine that ever existed. Equinox. Retail and office space coming soon. Cineplex. CVS. Verizon store. The buildings are gone, and those selves are gone, too. What’s left are the traces, the flick of memory as one walks by. Sometimes, when I’m on the subway, we pass an abandoned train station, a ghost station, usually dense with graffiti, momentarily illuminated by our light. I always think, Who wrote that there in those big balloon letters? What traces of themselves are summoned up when and if they pass it on the train, seeing it again for a second? Like the ancient images of the horses, the graffiti is both legible and not to outsiders. It meant something to the people who put it there, and it’s personal to them. We are all following ourselves around in sheets with eyeholes cut out, both comic and slightly tragic, mute before our own future/present selves.

It isn’t so much that the city was better before. I mean, it was, but that isn’t the point. In the off-Broadway play Radicals in Miniature, Ain Gordon is currently summoning up the spirits of downtown legends of the 1970s and 1980s. Most of them are unknown to the wider world and almost none of them lived in luxury apartments, although it’s nice to think that some of their juju might be smeared, invisibly, on the walls of the squats that are now condos. It isn’t so much that one was better earlier in life; generally speaking, one was not, although the less attractive parts of one’s personality might have come in crisper packaging.

It’s the ghosts everywhere, of selves, of others, and of buildings alike, and the subliminal knowledge that the way we move through space, what we move around and through, can be as constitutive of self as one’s own history or psychology or vocation. If the restaurant where I fell in love is a massive construction ditch, retail and office space coming soon, then I can only walk through that restaurant now in my mind, a ghost in a ghost building. Nothing remains of that moment but memory. One can, in a way, see Rooney Mara’s point in not acknowledging the ghost right next to her. Who wants to know that only memory is holding onto the person, only memory is keeping the building up? Where would it end?

Writing about still-life paintings in Still Life with Oysters and Lemon, Mark Doty remarks, “What is documented, at last, is not the thing itself but the way of seeing—the object infused with the subject.” He’s right, of course, but part of being a body in time is being a subject infused, albeit often unconsciously, with the objects one sees every day. A hospital. A movie theater. A garden. Places, in other words, where people gather for healing or entertainment or enjoying nature, as opposed to window upon window into locked, private homes that start at 1.5 million to buy. It does something to you, is all I’m saying. At those windows, an unknown face can only be an intruder or a ghost, peering in, like Kathy in Wuthering Heights. Tap on the window all you like, if you can reach that high. They won’t turn and say your name.

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