2004. New York.
5th Avenue.

1

Why should everything be different?

No longer walking down the streets, down Fifth Avenue, when the drizzle has begun to fall in the evening. When people, wrapped in their trench coats, hurry through the night, searching, asking.

When they look at their watches to see when the next Subway is coming, and the somewhat chilled fear of possibly missing a date becomes palpable. Perhaps quite a few people are still walking through this rainy night, with beads of rain running down their already chilled cheeks, their hair hanging wet and sticky in their foreheads. The eyes are restless, like those of a tiger that runs around searching in a will-less city of departure.

Since we are already with the topic"will-less": It wasn't exactly as if I had deliberately set out to do it, but somehow Sue and I got into the church and had a little tryst there.

How should I describe it? Do we pick up where Sue and I met? No. That's too easy, too simplistic, and so clichéd that it makes you sick to your stomach. Maybe you prevent that by starting there: We entered the church. Outside, everything was dark. Our footsteps echoed through the spacious, venerable church.

I don't think anyone knows exactly what happened. How can one do this in the heat of the moment?

Sue looked over at me in the half-light.

I lifted her chin up to me and kissed her, urging her up the steps to the altar.

That was just under an hour ago.

If you listen hard, you can often still hear the sirens on the other side of the city, the cops on duty, a more than topsy-turvy world.

NYPD in all its glory.

You listen through the splashing of the rain, and you hear, surprisingly, the unusual quiet of the night, which seems to be quite unusual in a big city like this.

But still everything wraps itself in the gray variety of smells of rainy, hazy asphalt, where sometimes only, sporadically another person rushes past me.

When you smell the sweet smell of womanly perfume, hear the strong and pleasant rhythm of high-heeled shoes flying past you: tock, tock, tock, tock, there comes this pleasant feeling in me of being at home here.

If one looks at the sky, it seems at these moments like a blanket of dusty incomprehensibility; docilely one tolerates the existence of a gigantic city, whose extent actually disappears unknown in the feeling, not suspecting that it too once had a beginning, and as soon as every restlessness in hundred-year-old conversations, whispers, laughter, foolishness and nonsense will fall silent, only then will everything again enter into a new cycle, will major shareholders, millionaires and businessmen in black boss suits, with red ties will have disappeared from the scene, producers, manufacturers and industrial magnates in all their incomparable diversity and inner divergence will be lost in spirit, only as a misty memory in the minds of the new civilization.

Henceforth, a different law would apply, other hands would build what had once been unthinkable. Today, looking at the architectural composition of these huge skyscrapers rising from the sacred ground, like a smile of money and power, one feels the domination that prevails deeply rooted in the