Lighthouses

This is the beginning of what I'm feeling may turn into a novel. The story seems to follow me wherever I go always recalibrating the way I see my past, present and future in NYC.

New York City is a lonely place. You must surrender yourself to the city and become it’s captive. Look for lighthouses. They will guide you on dark streets when you’re heart is aching most. They let you know you’ve not been abandoned, but are seen.

Francis could feel “the eye” following her. All she needed was toothpaste. She wanted to grab it and get the hell out of here. She loathed this corporate Hell hole and hated feeling tracked. She vowed to never step into this place ever again. But she knew well that this wasn’t the only store hunting her. She tried to keep her head low and walk directly for the toothpaste aisle. She knew the store’s surveillance systems were watching her, recording her movements. Waiting for her to stop and observe. In the toothpaste aisle, keeping the same rushed pace to escape this place as quickly as possible, she let her hand reach out and grab just any tube. She didn’t care which one, she cared more about spending too much time standing there inspecting each package. Aqua Fresh or some random new fluoride free organic toothpaste. It didn’t make any difference. A man walked by in a full face mask, sunglasses and a bulky coat. In the past she would have been afraid of this man. He looked like he might rob the place, but her feelings had changed. He was just trying to protect his identity, but it was akin, she knew, to wearing a tinfoil hat.

Francis paid for her toothpaste, scanning it herself and then inserting her card to pay. A woman stood nearby just in case the piece of shit scanning system didn’t work. Francis felt for the woman. She imagined that the store had the workers entire biometrics on file. She must have felt fearful to even move. The woman smiled weakly at Francis as she left. “Thank you for shopping with us.” Francis wanted to grunt, wanted to console the woman with a smile back, but this place made her paranoid. She ignored the woman and walked out the door, the toothpaste gripped tightly in her hand.

In the city there were cameras everywhere. She knew it and she carried a cell phone in her pocket that tracked her every move. She often dreamed of throwing her phone far away, deep into some river where it would sink to the bottom, never to be seen again. She imagined the phone being covered in mud, being dragged along with the tides still surviving with its little red light like a beacon, alerting the world that it was still here. Recording it’s plight till eventually the light faded and the battery burned out. Beep, then brain drain. Bye, bye phone, you evil monster.

Outside the store, on the street, the light of the day was fading and a soft rain began to fall. Francis unwrapped the toothpaste from its cardboard box, dropped the packaging in a nearby bin and shoved the tube into her jacket pocket. She lifted her hood and began zig-zagging her way through the city streets. Feeling around her jacket for her wallet, she felt the brim of a baseball cap, took it out and pulled it low over her eyes. Why did she not wear the cap in the market she wondered? She guessed in her haste she forgot it was there. In and out was her motto, don’t creep, don’t stall.

She kept her head down, kept moving. A man walked into her and bumped her shoulder hard. “Sorry,” he mumbled. Francis rubbed her shoulder, “fucking Dick.”

She knew the man didn’t mean to hit her and she knew too it could happen to her. It had happened to her. Everyone did their best to keep their heads down, their caps pulled low and if possible their eyes behind dark shades. Well, not everyone, she mused. Some people are into this shit. They were the people who wrote pro surveillance comments under social media posts complaining about bio technologies stealing your soul. The comments, likely written by bots were always along the lines of “I’d rather be safe in the greatest country in the world,” and then often ended with #mypresident.

The whole my president or not my president sentiment made her want to gag, especially when it was exaggerated by someone saying, “I’m not from your country but this is my president.” The rebuttal to these remarks was almost always some quote from the George Orwell novel, 1984, a book published in 1949 about living under a totalitarian regime. She understood the reaction but couldn’t take reading the same quote over and over. It made her wonder if the people creating the post had even read the book. She laughed and then scolded herself for still being on social media. “You’re an idiot.”

A police car passed, it’s siren blaring. Then another. Francis wondered what was happening. One police car could mean anything but two meant something was going down. A fire maybe? Who knew. The sound of sirens was constant in the city. It was a rare moment that you didn’t hear them.

Ahead of her a woman moved hurriedly, stepping sideways against the crowd of people, flattening herself, trying to make room in between forward moving bodies. Francis watched her and wondered if her story had anything to do with the police cars that had just passed. She peered the woman’s shoes, red like the flashing lights of sirens. The woman’s feet danced at a similar pace, with the same urgency of an emergency vehicle stuck in traffic. She wanted to follow the woman, follow her feet. Follow the red, her favorite color, but the woman had dissolved into the crowd. Francis hoped she had found the space to burst through, to flee the crowd down some side street. She hoped most that the woman didn’t go home to find grief.

She muttered a prayer. She wasn’t really religious but a prayer or good vibes as the non- practicing liked to call it was due in this moment. She knew the feeling of grief all too well. She didn’t wish it on anyone.

Francis continued to push her way along the street. Barely lifting her eyes, instead scanning the ground for communication. This is the way everyone moved these days. People walked hunched, bent over, staring at the ground, avoiding eye contact. Many were on phones, trying to block out the world around them. Others moved like this to avoid the cameras, fatigued by the constant feeling of being watched. A ground level language had started to develop. Shoe color, hem lengths and minimalist signifiers like the width of the fabric rib on your socks. How much would it stretch, did it stretch too far, was it loose or did it hug your ankle tight? Logos, once emblazoned across your chest or back were now printed on pant legs. There were message in the concrete, tiled into the street, written in chalk. Symbols only recognized by those in the know. Lazy arrows drawn to doorways. Graffiti artist now wrote low instead of high on buildings although they still did that. I was a difficult to resist an open space, but it was harder now. You had to be even more covert. She knew these forms of communication had always existed in the city. She thought of the Toynbee Tiles, messages of unknown origin embedded into the asphalt across the city. You had to look down to see them. There were only a few, but she’d seen them in real life. Always in some form of,

TOYNBEE IDEA
IN MOViE `2001
RESURRECT DEAD
ON PLANET JUPiTER

No one knew what they meant but there had been many who tried to decipher them.

The city never stopped evolving. Even small businesses had moved their signs to ground level. You still had to look up once you were inside, but the smaller the business the less likely they had cameras that actually worked. People felt safe in these places. They took their time in the ways they would have taken time in a department store. Stopping to lift a purse, check it’s handle for sturdiness and moving on. Now they stood in dollar stores, perusing racks of cheap neckties, fingering the fabric and then walking away to find what you really needed, bathroom cleaner.

Once at the counter, checking out, paying for you toilet paper and rolls of masking tape, you did your best to make absolutely no eye contact. Even if the voice of the man, tallying up your purchase sounded so tender and you could envision the thank you rolling off his soft lips, you kept your head low. You no longer knew who to trust.