The Substitute

May 1, 2012, 11PM: a day of conspiracy between politics and nature. Today Occupy Wall Street held demonstrations in most of the public parks in Manhattan and Brooklyn. From the moment I left my apartment in the morning, to when I returned in the evening, I felt I was being stalked by every good and evil intention in the world, my body pushed along by a rogue wind. It was the finest weather I had seen in New York City in months. The city's conscience seemed to be stirring out of its torpid winter sleep at last. I saw thousands of seagulls flocking up the Hudson from New York Harbor, forming a wall of white plumage from Battery Park to Chelsea. The trees in Madison Square exploded-overnight, it seemed- with pink and lavender blossoms, the second wave of flowers in as many weeks. New Yorkers of every imaginable costume turned out for the rallies in Wall Street, Washington Square, Central Park. It was one of those days when the whole island of Manhattan, above and below ground, agreed, as if by silent contract, to gather its millions of incommensurable fragments into a single critical mass, which, though it lacked a central nucleus, articulated, nevertheless, the immensity of its cohesion.