By Wyatt Hong

Everything was moving at 2x speed. The cab driver was yelling Punjabi into his phone as he trespassed the shoulder of the interstate to make a last second merge. By the time I looked up from my Google Maps, whose estimated time from JFK to our hotel had somehow halved, the skyline of Manhattan was looming in the distance like the Emerald City. Our driver slowed to the speed limit as we entered the Queens-Midtown Tunnel, his voice softened with the engine as if he'd come to an agreement, then as the meter jumped with various tolls for breaching the hallowed threshold, the inimitable corridors of stone, steel, and glass shuffled past my window like an infinite deck of cards.

We stumbled out of the cab and entered the automatic doors of the skyscraper whose top I couldn't make out from street level. The front desk didn't get our room right, said the hotel was overbooked and gave us an ADA bedroom with a promise to upgrade us later in our stay. Spread about the lobby were an influencer in a leather catsuit, two cameramen snapping her photos, a trio of men in blazers accompanied by a woman in evening dress. The only person in a t-shirt and shorts like us was an athlete with her Yonex racquet bag, here for the U.S. Open. We showered quickly in the bathroom full of safety bars, changed into respectable clothes, then shuffled into another cab, swallowing at 2x speed the sequence of left and right turns toward Upper West Side, stumbling briefly into the summer dusk before entering another tall building.

"Visitors?" the doorman asked.

"Yes." I gave my brother's name.

Their one-bedroom apartment had an unobstructed view of the Hudson River, and beyond that, New Jersey, which from here looked like the edge of civilization.

"How does it feel to be back?"

"I feel—" I began, pausing to slurp my wine. "Old."

This was our first time back on the East Coast after we had moved to Los Angeles five years ago. Our Honda filled to the brim with boxes, my wife and I had driven past New York at the height of COVID, the streets deserted like in the opening scene of Vanilla Sky with trailers full of corpses by FDR Drive.

Much had changed in five years. Trump had lost then re-won the election. There were wars in Gaza and Ukraine. Bitcoin rose from $10,000 to $100,000. We had finished our medical training, bought a condo, drove a Tesla like half of LA.

"Do you want more steak, Chelsea?" my sister-in-law offered.

"Yes," our three-year-old replied from the floor, mopping the hardwood with her dress like a robo-vac.

We had had a kid: that was the biggest change. The six-hour flight, which used to be an excuse for binging on bad rom-coms and Miller Lite, had turned into endless recitations of the in-flight safety manual ("Yes, these slides turn into boats when the plane crashes in the ocean. Fun, right?"), scrolling through every episode of Peppa Pig on the infotainment screen, and wiping half-chewed Cheez-Its off my lap.

"Thanks," I said as brother filled my glass. " I needed this."

I looked about his place, cozy for a childless couple but without space for another human being. I had been aghast at the price of the apartment when they had bought a few years ago.

"I don't know how anyone could raise a kid in New York." I told him as our wives got talking about our MBTI, the new fad for personality fit that had replaced the blood-type hoax in Korea.

"It's impossible. We'd move out if we ever have one." They had lived in New York for more than a decade now. My sister-in-law didn't know how to drive.

I knew they weren't planning on any. They were never going to move.

"Here's my advice." I drained the rest of my glass. "Just don't."

The next day began late with a $16 Americano (thank god our stay included breakfast) and a walk through Central Park. If revenge travel was a thing post-COVID, revenge New York was a thing too. Every child in the tri-state seemed to be at the playground that Sunday. The carriage horses looked more tired than ever. One squirrel, a true New Yorker, didn't budge when a tourist threatened it, then lurched at the poor man. More pencil skyscrapers had sprung up around the park since I last remembered, their necks craning over the lawn like machine harvesters in The Matrix. We walked to the Natural History Museum, adding to the tsunami of tourists taking selfies with dinosaur bones, then quickly left, passing starved families tearing apart whole pies of pizza on the stairs outside.

Once back at the hotel, I floated in the pool with my face to the mute ceiling and a fingertip on Chelsea's kickboard, thinking, "Why did we come here?"

"It's chaos out there. We never go out if not for company events." We ended the day in Long Island City, where my wife's high school friend and her husband had invited us for dinner.

We had braved the subway, which boded ill from the start when we passed tourists lugging suitcases up the staircase in the manner of sherpas. No one had budged for Chelsea on the train, not that I wanted her to sit next to a hobo taking up an entire row with his treasury of shopping bags.

"This is delicious." We had skipped, or rather, given up braving the streets for lunch. Chelsea was devouring the pork jowl like we had never seen.

"Korean food is so hype now that eating out has become unaffordable," the husband said, flipping the meat on his portable electric grill. "With this K-Pop Demon Hunters thing, it's only going to get worse."

Their small apartment was filled with Star Wars paraphernalia and anime figures. Their cat Jiji, named after the one in the Ghibli film Kiki's Delivery Service, gazed at us from her tower. The consultant and lawyer couple had no plans for kids.

"Do you remember the Inca Trail?" I ask my wife in our cab back to Midtown over Queensboro Bridge, the skyline twinkling like the Milky Way seen from the Andes. We had suffered altitude sickness on our four-day trek to Machu Picchu seven year ago, had told each other as we snuggled inside our sleeping bags that we'd never attempt such a crusade again. "I think this trip beats that."

The worst was yet to come. On our third day, we took the M7 down to Chelsea, my daughter's namesake, where my wife promptly lost her phone. We decided that it was pickpocketed between two photographs we took on the High Line, the phone conspicuously hanging out of her pocket in the former then missing in the latter. It had already been powered off.

We were eating our feelings away at the Van Leeuwen at Hudson Yards an hour later when I received a call from a woman who had miraculously found the phone. We met her at the Magnolia Bakery on Bleecker Street, where we treated her three kids to cupcakes, then took the M20 back toward Midtown, thinking our fortunes were turning, when a disheveled lady sat next to us then accused Chelsea of kicking her knee, where she just had seven surgeries, not to mention having four organs removed. We should've just got up and left, but I was sick of New York and got into an argument with her, one of those patient encounters that ruins your entire shift. The lady tried to record us on video. I snatched her phone away. She said she would report me to Washington DC and write up incident on the New York Post, causing a wave of giggles on the bus.

"Lady, keep your mouth shut because you didn't even pay your fare," the driver snapped at her.

She mumbled something about how glad she was that Donald Trump was the president and got off at the next stop.

"Don't let it get to you." The Arab man across from me smiled. "People like that everywhere now."

"Crazy lady," I tried to smile, then realized I had no strength left to.

Later that evening, after pulling teeth at the front desk to get our promised upgrade, we had dinner at a Japanese restaurant where we pulled out two chairs to make room for Chelsea's stroller while she napped, then fed her leftover sushi that our kind waitress packed into a bento box on a bench in Central Square.

"I can't believe we wanted to live here," my wife said.

"I know. I'm so glad we moved to LA." Believe it or not, New York had been a close second to Los Angeles on our residency rank-list. I wanted nothing more than to be back in our bed, the palm trees outside swaying languidly in the breeze.

"What do you like more, New York or Los Angeles?" I asked Chelsea.

"New York." She smiled, her mouth full of rice.

Even during the incident on the bus, she had been looking out the window, mesmerized by the billboards and the quilt of traffic. The city must have looked like Disneyland to her.

I understood her. I had been like that too.

In my twenties, I had wanted nothing more than to move to New York. I had loved couch-surfing in its various neighborhoods during summer breaks, had almost gone to medical school at Columbia if not for better financial aid at Yale, once dated a girl who lived in Hell's Kitchen. I had sat inside its jazz clubs, ice skated in Bryant Park, spent countless nights in Koreatown sponging up the soju with $1 pizza slices (now extinct) only to contribute my vomit to the pigeons' feed. I had felt alive in the crowd, buoyed with purpose as I passed places inside novels and walked through its museums, had read E.B. White's 1949 essay "Here Is New York" with pride, gloating over the line: "the city is uncomfortable and inconvenient; but New Yorkers temperamentally do not crave comfort or convenience—if they did they would live elsewhere."

But it seemed like I wasn't built to be a New Yorker. I had become soft. Soft like Charmin.

On our last full day, we headed to the Museum of Modern Art, where I had planned a private trip down memory lane. I had been interested enough in art at one point to take art history and drawing classes. Abstract expressionism had spoken to my prolonged adolescence, if for nothing else than it invited one to dredge up personal meaning as in a Rorschach test, and I used to pay my pay-as-you-please student fare to wander the galleries with EDM blasting from my earphones and tipsy from midday wine just to stand in front of a Rothko and let it work on me.

We paid the $30 standard pricing to enter the museum, mobbed with tourists and as many iPhones. It was nauseating to think how many digital reproductions of The Starry Night were created each day. I quickly found my Horcrux on the 4th floor: the smaller of the two Pollocks, the one with his handprint in the corner, that had once felt to me a knot of dreams and desires, of galaxies and quantum electrons, a blueprint of my soul and the universe.

That day, it aroused no special feeling in me. With my hands on the stroller, I only saw paint splattered violently on a canvas.

"Do you think you could draw that?" my wife asked Chelsea.

"Yeah," she answered confidently.

It had lost its magic, or I had become a Muggle. I wheeled the stroller through the galleries like a man looking for the restroom, and it was only when we were passing the halal carts outside that I realized I had entirely skipped the triptych of Monet's Water Lilies.

We spent the afternoon recovering in our suite, where Chelsea had me read her a coffee table book on the history of Carnegie Hall, until it was time to head to our final stop, the Top of the Rock. I had been to Rockefeller Center to see the Christmas tree plenty of times but had never been to the top. As usual, Chelsea fell asleep in her stroller in the mayhem of Midtown and slept through the video presentation and the fake snowflakes at the end, then the ear-hurting elevator ride, before the wind finally woke her.

"Look where we are."

Gazing at the panorama from the 70th floor, the sun beginning to set, I remembered feeling something similar many summers ago as I had stood at the window of my friend's apartment on 31st Street, when every single dream had seemed possible. New York had seemed beautiful then, as a Venus flytrap or a Portuguese man o' war might appear beautiful to someone who does not know its method of survival or the laws of evolution that engendered such mesmerizing colors.

But what I felt now was tinged with horror. After some dozen years, I had come to accept the world built by men, sheltering the embers of my youth under callous indifference and resigned stoicism. I stood there with my hands firmly on my daughter's stroller like Pi on the carnivorous island where he discovers a fruit filled with human teeth.

The buildings clamored towards heaven like weeds growing in a cistern, like hands of drowning men reaching out of a chamber. It was such a view that even God would pause before destroying this Babel.

"Pretty, huh?" I took Chelsea out of her stroller into my arms. I pointed out the Empire State Building, the World Trade Center, the Statue of Liberty, the Hudson River flowing towards the Atlantic.

She gazed at the vista, squinting her eyes at the sunset as the wind peeled her hair from her cheeks.

Feeling her small hands tighten around my shirt, I recognized that a parent's job, as important as protecting one's child, is to protect her childhood, to keep the world beautiful, before she comes to hate, then later, to accept it.

Come to think of it, my first memory was around her age: I am at an auditorium, at my preschool in Seoul, I think, watching a row of girls dance in red, flowery skirts. I hear castanets, maybe. That's all I remember.

And maybe this will be hers.

It was the night of the bus incident. Still in West Coast time, we had gone on a late stroll through Central Park, calm and dotted with lamps like stars on a lake after a storm, the homeless snuggled on benches engraved with names of the dead. We had walked up Broadway towards Lincoln Center, where a filmed opera was playing on a large outdoor screen. We arrived at the finale and the wild applause that followed, the screen showing the soprano, overcome with emotion, then the cast, entering to bow in turns.

The staff were starting to clear the fences around the plaza. We weaved through the river of elderly New Yorkers hobbling in walkers and found a bench by the reflection pool.

Sitting there in the dark with the long day past us, the next day not yet begun, I had felt my first pang of nostalgia since arriving in the city. I recalled the times I heard the New York Phil, anxious that someone would clap between the movements, as someone always did. I had once attended a friend's recital at Juilliard across the street. Back then, I was sure I was going to drop out of medical school to become a writer. I was working on a book of poems. She was training to be a concert violinist, the kind that plays at Carnegie Hall. I wasn't sure what she had become. I had lost touch with many. Being an adult was like that.

"Remember the time we watched Swan Lake here?" my wife asked as we trailed Chelsea back to the plaza.

"Yeah." I did a penguin-jump.

"You should really audition."

In our early dates, we had loved coming to New York. We'd take the morning Metro-North from New Haven just to walk around the city and sit on its benches and stand in line to eat, then head back to Grand Central for the two hour train ride, past the brownstones of Harlem and the quaint suburbs with their anchored boats until she'd fall asleep on my shoulder, and I'd gaze at the trees and the houses in the coming night until all I could see was my reflection.

Our daughter was running around and counting the chairs.

The patrons with gray hair had ebbed. Young couples were embracing in the dark, the same kind I had seen on the rocks at Central Park, the benches, the strips of grass and by the fountains, islands in the ocean of chairs, silent, poor, thirsty for life.

They sat across the empty screen facing the Chagalls and the chandelier and the grand staircase with its red carpet, waiting to be let in.

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