If you look up, people live and work in beautiful skyscrapers where they rule the world. Sometimes they descend to walk among us, dodging garbage bags and streams of urine to reach those fancy restaurants that we mere mortals dream of admiring in shows, books and movies. They walk their dogs in Central Park on weekends. Privileged creatures: daycare and dog grooming, the most nutritious food, the vet for minimal discomfort. Successful New Yorkers come back pink from their boxing training, barre or whatever is in fashion that season. Lululemon clothing, yoga mat on shoulder, $10 Frappe in hand, she lifts her feet high to avoid stepping on the needy crowding everywhere. If you look down, in NY thousands are living on the streets, lying in parks, squares and subway stations. Sometimes they rise up and rush through crowds in Times Square, tourists on their way to a musical, or are photographed in front of gigantic advertising projections of happy consumers in perfect worlds.

I wonder what it will be like to live in this city where there are no stray dogs, only people who live like homeless people on the streets, while dogs live like princesses in their palaces on the Upper West Side. How will the millions of migrants who keep the cogs of the machinery going live: Spanish is spoken in hotels, restaurants, museums and airports. On the subway to Queens I felt at home among the melancholy eyes of my country. Some happy to leave the office, others tired after spending the day on Broadway selling sodas. How I would love to know their stories… I only heard one from the mouth of a hotel security guard in Manhattan. Hearing that I was speaking Spanish, he asked me in my own language where I was from. I am Ecuadorian, I replied; I’m from Puerto Rico, he admitted, but my best friend from childhood was Ecuadorian, in Chicago, where I lived before coming here, he explained. Funis was his name, Funis Fuentes, he said, looking up like someone searching the air for a ghost from the past. We were like brothers, we grew up together in the neighborhood, my mother loved him like her own son, she used to tell me that Latin Americans must open their hearts to everyone. They killed him, with a knife like that, they stabbed him to death, in the middle of the street, while I was visiting family in Puerto Rico. I never saw him again. I cried tears because of him… He was a magician, he added to break the silence of the suddenly shared sadness, he played dice on the street, but one day he got too smart with some guy and pulled a knife. And the end.

What will it be like to die in a foreign country, in a wild and frivolous city. I feel the power of the water pulling me into the bowels of the earth, the vertigo of skyscrapers rising before the abyss that plunges us into the place where almost 3,000 people from 93 countries lost their lives on September 11. I caress their names, so many names of Hispanic Americans who, being on top of the world, fell as victims of the most absurd violence of which we humans are capable, infinitely good but extremely cruel beings. (OR)