can think of to say after this, so they fall into a companionable silence thereafter. It’s a soothing walk, Manny finds, though just about anything would be soothing after the past couple of hours. More significantly, the park feels right—like the Checker cab, like the people who helped him at Penn Station, like his own inexplicable sense of belonging within this city that feels so strange and alive. His memory loss is weirdly selective. He remembers going to cities that have this same weird vibrancy before. Paris, Cairo, Tokyo. None of them, however, felt made for him. It is as if every other place he’s visited or lived has been a vacation, and only now has he come home.
At one juncture of paths, there’s a map. Manny’s marveling at the sheer size of the park when his gaze catches on the words Inwood Park tulip tree. In the same moment, Bel steps forward and puts a finger to the icon, leaning close to read the nigh-microscopic text nearby. “‘According to legend,’” he reads, “‘on this site of the principal Manhattan Indian village, Peter Minuit in 1626 purchased Manhattan Island for trinkets and beads then worth about 60 guilders.’ And apparently a big tree grew there, too, but it died in 1932. Ah, so this is where your ancestors began the whole business of stealing the country.” He chuckles and imitates Eddie Izzard. “‘Do you have a flag? No? That’ll be one island, then, keep the change, and we’ll kick in some free smallpox and syphilis.’”
Manny’s skin is a-prickle all over. Why? He doesn’t know, but he speaks automatically, unable to take his eyes off the map icon. “I think the apocalyptic plagues actually started a couple of centuries earlier. Columbus.”
“Right, right, 1492, sailing the ocean blue.” Bel steps back and stretches. “Seems a good break point. Want to go look at this extremely important rock, then head back?”
“Sure,” Manny says. He has a feeling it’s more important than it sounds.
The extremely important rock isn’t far from the park entrance, over near where a vast meadow edges Spuyten Duyvil Creek. As monuments go, it’s unassuming, Manny notes as they approach it: just a boulder that’s about waist-high, surrounded by a circle of bare dirt and a ring of grimy concrete. It’s positioned at a juncture of several paved paths, with a nice view of the creek and a high, narrow bridge that probably leads to the Bronx, or maybe that’s Queens. There are a few people around; he can see an old man in the distance, feeding pigeons as he sits on a park bench, and a young couple having a romantic picnic on the overgrown lawn, a good ways off. Otherwise, though, they’re alone.
He and Bel stop by the rock for a while, reading the plaque that names the spot Shorakkopoch, after the name of the village that was displaced. Or maybe that’s the name of the long-gone tree; the plaque isn’t clear. Bel sits on the rock and clowns for a moment by trying to cross his legs and meditate on the “energies,” while Manny laughs. The laugh is a little forced because there are definite energies here, strange and palpable as the umbrella became on FDR Drive, and he really has no idea what that means.
Then again, he recalls, the umbrella wasn’t the source of the strange power he used—or, at least, not the sole source. The power had come into the umbrella because it was everywhere, floating through the air and flowing along the asphalt of the city, and Manny just used the right combination of things? ideas? to summon it forth. A car, in that place of choking exhaust and whipping curves and potholes; that had been utterly necessary. Movement, too, that had been part of what made the power come. In the city that never sleeps, FDR is the highway that never stops, except for occasional accidents and traffic jams. Is the power dependent on context, then? Manny folds his arms, staring at the rock and wondering what secrets it holds.
“Ow,” Bel says as he gets off the rock. “History hurts. Whose bloody idea was it to put a rock on this spot? How’s that supposed to commemorate anything? Americans like statues. What’s wrong with a statue? Someone was being cheap.”
Cheap. Manny blinks. There is something in that word, a tickle of a thought. He nods absently when Bel says something about getting dinner, trying to tease out that tickle. But then he catches a