Free Red on Red by Edward Conlon

longer hidden beneath the heedless green. The blocks of six-story prewar apartments gave way ahead to the patchy commercial strip above the George Washington Bridge, the gas stations and storage spaces near the precinct. Too short a walk, coming down.
    When he was married to Allison, Nick would begin his walks on the Upper West Side, full of new strivers, people who came here for the money and freedom. Sunday was brunch and the
Times
. On Sundays,you saw white women pushing their children in strollers. During the week, you saw the same white children, pushed by black women. Following Broadway north, you came upon a ten-block stretch of no-man’s-land, of winos and bums selling old porno magazines on blankets on the street, men who stared through you, with the sour, goatish smell of schizophrenia. The fleabag hotels then gave way to Columbia University, fortress and factory, that sent a lot of strivers and a few schizophrenics to the neighborhoods below. In Harlem on Sunday mornings, you heard gospel bursting from storefront churches, and saw the women in their hallelujah hats, dressed up to meet Jesus for a date.
    As you crossed the border to Washington Heights, on 155th Street, you passed the most melancholy landmark in the city, which Nick thought of as the museum of museums. Even the graveyard across the street was less desolate, with its sign that warned,
Activo Cementerio
, promising at least the company of ghosts. The same couldn’t be said for the museums, which comprised an entire city block of stately old beaux arts buildings, surrounding a plaza of herringbone brick. Two of the institutions were definitely gone. The Museum of the American Indian, the American Geographical Society—these had moved elsewhere; as for the American Numismatic Society, it was hard to tell if it had been abandoned or just ignored, a penny dropped in an old pocket. The illustrious names were engraved just below the rooflines—the now-lost tribes, like the Eskimo, the Salish, the Algonquin, and the now-lost explorers, such as Livingstone and Magellan. As you read around the plaza, it had the look of old ticker tape, of data you no longer needed to know. The motto of the Geographical Society was carved above the door:
Ubique
, Latin for “everywhere.” Nick wasn’t sure if the word was ill chosen or the loss was in everything but the translation. How could it be everywhere if it wasn’t even here?
    The Hispanic Society shared the same air of desertion. The section of plaza before it was sunken and walled, which trapped leaves and newspapers in eddying off-river breezes; the fountain was dry and its two flagpoles were bare. But while the other places were sites of double erasure—no more Iroquois, and no more Iroquois exhibit—the Hispanic Society was in the middle of a thriving Hispanic society, which had pushed the edges of the older black neighborhood farther south. An equestrian statue of El Cid dominated the section of plaza. He was a champion of the Reconquista in the eleventh century, who helped drivethe Moors from Spain. Legend had it that when he died, his wife strapped his body upright on his horse, to lead his troops in one last battle. A thousand years ago, he helped kick out the new people; now his monument stood in an immigrant neighborhood, whom half the country thought of as invaders. That was the difference between history and a joke; you could kill a joke if you repeated it.
    In Washington Heights, on four Sunday walks, Nick saw four different fights—a cock fight in an alley; a dogfight on a roof, from which the loser was thrown, yelping, to the sidewalk ten feet from Nick; a catfight between the prettiest girls he’d ever seen, tearing each other’s shirts and screaming,
“Puta! Puta, puta!”
; and then a gunfight, as shooters from a passing car let loose at three guys on a corner, who emptied their own guns back at them. After the gunfight, Nick ran to Riverside Drive, where the old Jews still lived, from