I am not really a city person, I don’t think.

What about Paris? She asked.

Paris felt like skating on a frozen river, if the river were surrounded by very expensive jewelry stores.

Well Rome, then. What about Rome?

Rome was like wandering the ruins of a shitty strip mall, only half the stores had been occupied by squatters and re-opened for purposes other than their original intent.

Have you been to London?

London was like a giant coffee shop - a very chic coffee shop, don’t me wrong; it’s got big clean windows with the menu written on them in paint, and cozy nooks where you can drink an overpriced chai latte and pretend to read Virginia Woolf, and hip but relatable music is probably playing, a band whose name you don’t know but whose best songs you recognize - but a coffee shop nonetheless.

New York?

New York is a commercial for what New York was thirty or forty years ago (minus the danger).

Well surely there’s great cities you haven’t visited. Madrid, Mumbai, Moscow…

Madrid was an after hours bus depot, but with really great graffiti. Mumbai (and this is easy) was like a slum. Moscow is probably like a drunk serial killer who drops his victims into the city sewers, or a figure skater who fell on her last jump in the Olympics (she was on her way to winning gold) and sobbed on national television and now she has eight kids and smokes three packs a day but she mops the floor with the most arresting grace you’ve ever seen (except she rarely mops the floor). Or maybe it’s a taxi driver in Prague who still wears his opulent, shabby clothing, clothes that remind you of an opera house (lit by candles) in the 19^th Century (I’ve never been to Moscow though, so who knows). I suppose Philadelphia is O.K., if you enjoy a city that is like a dollar store with really good food and a small antiques section that will occasionally yield a really great lamp or bedside table, and in the art section you might get lucky and find a valuable painting by a famous artist - never a Monet or a van Gogh, of course (though you’d be more likely to find them than Dali or Miro); most likely a second or third rate Renoir or Cezanne, something that’s too pastel for your tastes, but it might go O.K. in your downstairs bathroom, so you try to haggle with the clerk (she’s a disinterested black woman with four kids at home and she’s got to take two buses across town just to work another dollar store after this shift) to get the price down from three dollars to one dollar, but she won’t budge, so you just leave without it; some teenagers will shoplift it later. Las Vegas is a mini-golf course in need of new Astroturf, Managua is a family barbecue that gets out of hand and now you don’t recognize anyone but somehow they all recognize you, Beijing is like a Pittsburgh steel mill from a century ago, a molten river of metal and flame. New Orleans? It’s like a bad club with sticky floors that was once an authentic jazz joint and no one can seem to remember when or how it went wrong (kind of like when love sours); except when New Orleans is like a 1930’s blues bar where a lynching once took place, or like a fried catfish stand beneath a highway overpass and where all the regulars (and it’s only regulars) have diabetes and are missing teeth and stink like if shrimp were boiled in human sweat. I’ll do Chicago, too, why not? It’s a new, boxy Evangelical church on Easter or Christmas, when all the non-believers and lazy American materialists show up, but the regular parishoners are all too polite to say anything nasty or backhanded, so they just smile and kindly nod their heads and everyone leaves feeling pretty good; although in summer Chicago is a potluck at a small Midwestern church, a one room wooden church with a lone steeple, and they’re serving overcooked bratwurst and sweet corn and tangy baked beans, and all the Grandmothers bring jello-based casseroles for dessert. Hong Kong is a very nice convention center, but in parts it’s like a walk up tenement where there used to be cock fights and where people used to get stabbed, but now it’s home to lower middle class families and second hand cell-phone shops and only a myth of violence remains, while Shanghai is like a Vegas casino in the seventies, but mostly it’s actually like a gigantic factory that producers skyscrapers whole. Quito is a poem scrawled messily on the back of a post card bought from a thrift shop (in La Paz). In the poem, night descends on Quito like a rusted hammer, and the last tendrils of sun evaporate as dreams into morning. The city slums exsanguinate like dried blood into the mountains, spilling over the earth’s wimpled clamber like an invasive weed. Then the handwriting gets too messy for you to read anymore (which is fine with you because the poem’s overwrought anyway); on the front of the post card is a picture of two indigenous men standing in front of a pigmy horse. Cairo is like a graveyard of mausoleums, only the dead have come alive and they really love to fuck. Johannesburg is a prison, one of those 19^th Century wheel-and-spoke prisons where every corridor feels ten miles long and also like death row (it should go without saying that all the inmates make potent toilet-bowl hooch). Fez is what happens if the merchants of a medieval bazaar sold their souls to the same dollar store chain that owns Philadelphia, only if the men who own the Fez branch like anal sex; you might get stabbed there, but the knife will turn out to be shoddily made and you’ll end up with a surface wound that will get infected and kill you slowly. Detroit, oh Detroit. Detroit (this is also easy, probably the easiest) is an abandoned steel mill that you sneak into as a ten year old boy, and it feels grander and more sacred than a gothic cathedral; except Detroit is also a gun range where you can buy illegal guns and the employees watch you suspiciously, as if you might be a cop or a homo or a New York City photographer there to exploit their sadness; but mostly Detroit is a drafty Baptist church on a grey Sunday in January, and half the congregation is dead and the other half is dying. Buenos Aires is like a flighty, riveting girl with pale skin and very dark hair who plays guitar and writes inert poems that remind you of stained glass; even though she’s a narcissist who will never stop breaking your heart, you can’t help loving her immutably (sometimes, you hate to admit, it’s just the way of things). I’m told Berlin is the best ecstasy trip of your life, the kind of trip where you swear you see a world class violinist playing on the subway at four in the morning, but the next day your friends all convince you that you were hallucinating even though you know that you saw it, and if you didn’t, well, what the fuck’s the difference, anyway, and Nairobi, I’m told, is like the worst ecstasy trip of your life. As for Juarez? Well, I’ll quote Bolaño: Ciudad Juarez is like hell. It is our curse and our mirror, the unquiet mirror of our frustration and of our vile interpretation of freedom and of our desires. Mexico City, obviously, is a poor, drug addled poet in the seventies who steals books and unrepentantly fucks mentally ill women and will sleep just about anywhere. Kiev is like an ancient gypsy woman whose face is granite and whose eyes are like lapis lazuli; her whole family is dead and she’s floating on a lake or a sea of flowers in a drab Soviet era subway tunnel and she’s smiling like a madwoman, like a woman the drug addled poet once fucked in Mexico City. Can I correct one of my earlier statements? Tokyo is like the worst ecstasy trip you’ve ever had, the trip where all your friends abandon you and you go home to masturbate to the ex-girlfriend you still love and then you try to sleep but the lights of the city will. not. shut. up. (or maybe you’re just imagining that they’re so cacophonous, maybe they’re just whispering and your ears are too sensitive) That leaves me unsure of what Nairobi is; maybe it’s a witchcraft trial, or maybe a brothel where all the whores make you pray with them before they fuck you. Athens is like a shady auto garage where you know they’re going to rip you off but where you have no choice but to go anyway. Florence was once a great family restaurant that got passed down one generation too far, to spoiled, bickering brothers, and now the place is a chintzy tourist trap that survives on reputation only, and the locals don’t come anymore, except sometimes for lunch, and then they get so sad and nostalgic for their lost youths that they sneak out before any of their friends or neighbors see them. And Pittsburgh? Ah, Pittsburgh. Pittsburgh is a stark poem by a lonely American poet living in exile on a Greek island. In the poem a man whispers Pittsburgh into the ear of his mistresses’ baby as he throws him into the air, hoping that, someday, the child will grow up and be made unaccountably happy when he hears of America’s ruined steel city. Or, it’s a photo of a factory in Beijing. Or it’s a very nice bank lobby.

And you weren’t moved by any of them?

The only city I like is a minor city. Granada, in Andalusia. But I’ll only go back there if I lose my mind or if I decide to commit suicide. I went there with a woman I loved and she left me and her ghost haunts the city’s cafes and white alleyways like a moment of terribly disturbing déjà vu, the kind of moment when your grip on reality falters and you’re certain that dreams can predict the future or that you’ve lived past lives and are actually dead. Really, though, all cities are empty rooms, barren rooms with frail sunlight and warped hardwood floors. Rooms that you fill with whatever happiness or sadness you bring with you from your last city, or from your somnolent suburb, or your claustrophobic small town. Well, all of them except Istanbul. Istanbul is not a city you fill, or impress upon. Istanbul imposes itself, utterly, like summer in the Amazon, or winter in Siberia. I doubt anyone has ever fallen in love during winter in Istanbul, just as I bet no one has ever cried during summer (unless it’s the kind of crying that happens when you read a gorgeous sentence about death or heartbreak (and what is life but for these?), and you marvel, simultaneously, at the forms we - humanity - are capable of, both sublime and horrible forms, but mostly sublime forms overcoming the horrible ones, the way a family might end up laughing at the funeral of a murdered child (probably the family of the boy killed by infection in Fez), or the way the figure skater in Moscow smokes her cigarette with such dignity, or the way a whore in Nairobi murmurs the words to the Lord’s Prayer and grips your hand, or the Sundays in Detroit when the gospel choir sings like they sang forty years ago and the rafters shake and the old men and women stand and clap their hands and they sing their praises with such ferocity that they’re dripping sweat, they’re literally praying the devil right out of them, clapping and swaying like the city once did, pulling out their handkerchiefs, wiping their brows, clapping till their hands are raw, or the women in Juarez who risk their lives to ride buses out to cafes in in the desert where strange men will pay five pesos to dance two songs with them, to smell their perfume and feel their hips, or how some nights the clerk in Philadelphia will ride two buses home and find her four children sitting around the dinner table, laughing, and she’ll just stand there for a minute, in the doorway, watching, before they recognize she’s there and they call her over because they’ve saved her a plate, and it doesn’t matter that it’s inedible or that her shoes are soaked or that she hasn’t paid the cable bill in two weeks or that she’s got to be awake in five hours to get back to the dollar store, because, well, the kids are laughing and telling stories about their father whose making toilet bowl hooch in prison, but they’re laughing, and yes, she thinks, yes, Goddamnit, I’m home, aren’t I?). And that’s Istanbul, an overcrowded room, a forgotten attic, an attic stuffed with relics and trinkets, some of them resplendent, some mundane, so many of them that the attic floor sags in the middle and there’s barely any room to move, anymore, between all the stuff.