14.10 I didn’t let myself be carried through the doors, though: at the last instant, I held back. This wasn’t easy: bodies were wedging me in on all sides. I had to push against them, turn myself around, then hoist and grab at passing arms and shoulders in order to move the other way. At some point, in that final stretch, I’d made my mind up not to take the ferry after all. To go to Staten Island—actually go there—would have been profoundly meaningless. What would it, in reality, have solved, or resolved? Nothing. What tangible nesting space would I have discovered there, and for what concrete purpose? None. Not to go there was, of course, profoundly meaningless as well. And so I found myself, as I waded back through the relentless stream of people, struggling just to stay in the same place, suspended between two types of meaninglessness. Did I choose the right one? I don’t know. I worked my way out to the side, and stood watching the crowd parading by. Their tight-packedness made them edge and shuffle rather than flow, a stop-start rhythm that was nonetheless placid rather than agitated, their stares fixed not on the back of the person right in front of them (although their eyes all pointed there) but rather on some abstract spot beyond this, or, perhaps, on nothing. The thought struck me that I should be filming this scene on my phone for Daniel, or, perhaps, myself—but I didn’t act on this thought. I just stood there, watching. The man on crutches shuffled by; and the one with the wig; and the ones in polyester suits; and the ones in plain, casual clothes. Many had small backpacks, most of which were loose-strung over single shoulders; one young man, though, had a larger one strapped tightly to his back, over both shoulders and around his waist, but hadn’t closed it: cloth-like fabric of a fleshy hue was trailing slightly from its unzipped opening. A woman with striped black and yellow shoes edged past me, and for a fleeting instant I thought it was the Minister. It was my jet-lag kicking in, colliding times and places in my head. I saw, amidst the mesh of limbs and torsos, a large bump on someone’s neck. I didn’t see their face—only their neck, and this just for a second. Helicopters thrummed again; I thought of humming-birds; again a radio crackled, and some children, possibly the ones with the candy-floss, or maybe other ones, processed by. The crowd thinned out; late arrivals scurried past me; then the doors closed; and, almost immediately, the gantries, like the drawbridge to some castle that I’d never enter, were hoisted back up.