On the subway, rumbling under the map of Manhattan, somewhere or other beneath the dots, the lines and grids, the green space of parks, the skyscraper dreamscape, I read this:

“Cities are full of situations, sexually cunning people.”

It is Don Delilo, White Noise. Five years ago or so, I tried to read White Noise. It was an assignment and I rallied against it with all my will; I threw my late-teenage energy, such as it was, into hating the novel, into finding it blasé, so over, so dated, so not something I could relate to. Now I read it in between subway stops. 81st street and 42nd street are the bookends for one chapter; 14th and 72nd frame another. I find myself transfixed. Why is this, my dad wants to know, why the change of heart? I say maybe it’s because I failed to see the humour in it the first time around. I say maybe it’s because I was too afraid to recognize certain anxieties as being mine, too; that maybe it’s because, now that I openly own these anxieties, I can allow myself to enjoy the language.

Here’s a situation. Bryant Park. It’s fashion week but the only people outside the white tents are the nobodies, the people who work for the people who work for the people who do something related to fashion, and they’re badly dressed, they look cold, so we skirt the park. On the library side we try to identify the buildings around us. Lit up; dizzying. A man in a baseball cap comes close, asking for spare change. My reaction is always to turn the other way. I become absorbed in a bench. Is it some sort of denial, or is it just smart? I can hear him talking to the Man, and the Man’s two brothers, twins, nine years his junior.

“You take care of your sons,” the beggar tells the Man. I don’t know where this places me. And the funniest thing of all of course is that he does take care of them, as if they were his sons; and when he drops them off at the airport, leaves them there, he frets for their safety, their peace of mind.

“It is the nature and pleasure of townspeople to distrust the city,” Delilo writes. “All the guiding principles that might flow from a center of ideas and cultural energies are regarded as corrupt, one or another kind of pornography.”

I always liked the subway. I like it more now, and I have Delilo’s staccato words in my head whenever I mount the steps. I have no way of knowing whether the sentences that start to form when the cold sunlight hits my face are mine or his; but they end up being mine, twisted into something that only I could say. That’s all ownership is–and anyway, nobody owns anything here.

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The thing about jet lag is this: it doesn’t just mess with your sense of time, it messes with your sense of place. This is a far more serious offense. Time is nebulous enough on its own that when, for a few days, we’ve totally lost track of it, when we’re hours ahead of or behind ourselves, we feel that maybe it is, this secret force we live by, just asserting itself for awhile.

Place is different. There’s nothing so off-putting as falling asleep in the late afternoon, knowing you’re in Oxford, and waking up convinced you’re in New York, and being therefore in a New York state of mind, and realizing only by the voices outside, crawling their way home after an evening at the pub, only by the smell of your house (a nice smell, a specific smell), that your body is still where you left it hours earlier to sleep.

I don’t know how to count the hours, speaking of them. And I never know how to describe the time before a transatlantic flight: is it yesterday that we left, really, truly? I can hardly convince myself that this can be so–that yesterday, whatever that means, we woke up late, we had lattes and bagels, we took the subway to midtown, and then again back uptown, we ate a Korean lunch across the street from Columbia. And I ask this, not to be pedantic or navel-gazing, particularly, but because I genuinely do not know how to answer it: was it yesterday or today or some time in-between that we sat eating croissants at an altitude so high it is usually reserved for our hopes and dreams alone, that I wondered, because my mind had gone numb in the hours of no movement while we sped over an ocean, if the correct way to spell student was s-t-u-d-e-n-t or s-t-u-d-a-n-t? My copy of White Noise now bears proof of this struggle, but I don’t know exactly when the struggle occured. Student. Studant. Student. If I spell it wrong, will they let me back into the country? (In the end, I spelled it right).

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