There wasn’t much else to say, so we started walking again.

It was a long walk down the cracked remains of Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Blvd. The farther we got from the Bronx, the more we saw nice buildings that only looked somewhat destroyed and people working on making them nicer. When we got to Central Park, we expected it to be ruined like everything around us had been. But there were FEMA trailers, and people milling around, working and cleaning. Sebastian wanted to go by the turtle pond. It was clear where it had overflowed, and there were so few turtles left in it. He wondered out loud if they had lived or died, or gotten washed to sea in the storm surge. I told him to shut the fuck up about the fucking animals already. But I didn’t feel that way. Some part of me that I pushed down really wanted to know, too, if they were okay.

We came up on The Met through the trees of Central Park, and walked around to the front. It was this beautiful, stately white building, with marble arches and stairs. As we came around the front, we saw all these men in black, with huge guns milling around on the front steps. There hadn’t been all these guards anywhere else we’d looked. It suddenly hit me that one room by Frank Lloyd Wright was more valuable to the kind of people who ran the world than ten families in the Bronx. Than a million people like us.

When I saw all those guards, I remembered this day a while back, before I met Lux or José or Sebastian. I was traveling around, and I’d ended up in Pittsburgh. I’d wandered into this museum. I think it was a Carnegie Museum. I had some time to kill and I wanted to stand around and look at paintings and get lost. I wasn’t bothering anybody, but people kept giving me these looks, the kind you start to notice if you get them long enough, even if you’re just trying to mind your own business. Maybe they couldn’t figure out what I was, because I was wearing a skirt, but my legs were super hairy and showing, and my hair was short, and I had on a Brando shirt over a binder and torn-up men’s combat boots. I went from one room to the next, and in every room, a museum guard came up to me to ask if I was looking for someone, or if I was lost. After a while, to get them to leave me alone, I’d say things like, “I lost my mom,” and give them these outlandish descriptions of drag queens I’d met once at a party in Bayonne.