We started inching toward the opposite shore. Out in the middle of the river, me and Sebastian paused in our rowing. The city loomed up on either side of us. The East River seemed cleaner than I’d ever seen it—no condoms or used tampons floating along it, no beer cans, no plastic bags poking up like the heads of turtles. The skyline reached up on either side of us, the Manhattan side a bit taller, but the Brooklyn side no less full of condos and affluence. Years ago, when I first got there, I met this old guy living out on the street one day. I sat down and talked to him, and it got to be nighttime, and I took what little money I had, and he took what little money he’d spanged that day, and we bought ourselves big bottles of malt liquor that we put in brown bags. We took what little money we had left after that and got ourselves rides on the train, and, to get our money’s worth, we rode it as far as we could. We rode all the way out to Gravesend, out to the beach. While we sat on the beach, he told me all about Brooklyn sixty years before, when he had been a bit older than me. He told me he’d had a favorite place to go, one that was just on the other side of the East River in Williamsburg. It was a dirty old bar with dirty Christmas lights in the window, and old fluorescent signs from beer companies, and they had big Styrofoam cups that they’d sell beer in for super cheap. He said that back then, he didn’t have much money, but enough that he could always get good and drunk there. He went there year after year, sitting in the red pleather booths, watching as the old Polish people from the neighborhood left or died, and the young hip people came in. Up until the early part of the century, he said, he’d go there and drink then walk down the side of the East River. Back then, it was still mostly populated by factories, old buildings made of brick where they still made things—not like now when all people do is sit around and make things with their computers. He’d go down to the river when it was still broken down and industrial, and he would climb out onto these long ledges of concrete that reached out in to the water. He would look up, and all around him would be blackness, and then there was the city, twinkling above him like a spectral vision. I never forgot that. That guy’s probably dead now, but I can still see the city the way he saw it.