Open City

On 124th Street, Julius sees two young Black men, who acknowledge him, then walk a different direction. Near Morningside Park, the two men return, joined by a third man, and mug Julius. They steal his wallet and phone and inflict a number of bruises and cuts, with perhaps more severe damage to his left hand. Julius tries to clean himself off and keep walking as if nothing has happened. He does not think his injuries are severe enough to go to the hospital, and heads back to his apartment.

There, he thinks about how he will have to cancel his credit cards, make a police report, and tell his work what happened so he can take a few days off to recover. Through his window, he sees a woman praying with a tallit—a Jewish prayer shawl—and considers that if prayer is defined as “a practice of presence,” then his walking around the city, viewing art, listening to music, and talking to friends and strangers, could also be considered a form of prayer (215). Julius also thinks about the stories other people have told him about being mugged.

Two weeks later, Julius visits a diner on Broadway. He watches a blond young man teach Chinese to an Asian woman. Julius is still having trouble with his hand, but his other injuries have healed. He sees a line forming around a nearby federal building and walks by the line as he leaves the diner. In the line are a diverse group of people going through immigration procedures. Julius stops to watch a woman joyfully greet her family after emerging from the building, but a guard tells him to move along.

Julius discovers a small memorial identifying the land as an African burial ground. He thinks about the bodies that have been discovered, and how the gravesite has been covered with businesses and government buildings. He remembers learning that in the 19th century, when the nascent science of anatomy led to freshly buried corpses being illegally dug out of the ground to supply the anatomists with models for dissection, Black corpses were exhumed at higher rates than other corpses, and this led to the passage of the 1856 New York Anatomy Act. He also remembers that the corpses in the Negro Burial Ground were laid there individually and with ceremony—it is not a mass grave. When he reaches to pick up a stone, he feels a sharp pain in his injured hand.

In May comes the anniversary of Julius’s father’s burial, which occurred in 1989, when Julius was fourteen. He had to have clothes made, so his aunt took him to a tailor. The tailor taking his measurements was comforting. The day of the funeral was very hot. During the funeral, Julius recalled a traumatic incident from five years earlier, when his driver hit and killed a young girl. He realized that he had repressed the memory and was now reliving it as if for the first time.

After his father’s funeral, there was a party at the family home. Julius’s mother was not present at the party or at the tailor. There were some unruly kids at the party who burst out laughing and couldn’t stop. Julius still considers their interruption of the somber tone to be a positive thing. He remembers the day of the funeral, not the day of his father’s death, and conflates some of his memories with images of funerals he has seen in paintings.

On the eighteenth anniversary of the funeral, Julius is riding the subway in New York. He sees an MTA employee checking the vents and thinks about the Zyklon B used in the camps in the 1940s. His grandmother fled to Berlin to escape the Holocaust, and he knows very little about his grandfather. Julius thinks he sees one of the men who mugged him, but realizes it is not the same person. He recalls dreaming about the mugging, and that in the dream he hit the muggers, which caused him to feel pain in his injured hand. Julius chats with the MTA employee about his work on the ventilation system.

Moji invites Julius to a party at the apartment of her boyfriend, John Musson. Before he arrives there, Julius walks around Mitchel Square, noticing how buildings take on the names of the people and corporations who make large donations to them. He considers how commerce has spread into hospitals. Walking through the nearby, predominantly Puerto Rican neighborhood of Washington Heights, he encounters Mary, the nurse who used to work for Saito. They talk about Saito until Mary’s baby cries, and she leaves.

Julius looks at the site of the Loews 175th Street Theater, which had become a church. He thinks about its architecture and history. Then, he walks past the Coliseum and up some stairs to Pinehurst. He walks through Cabrini and to the Cloisters Museum. Julius recalls visiting the museum with his friend and looking at the walled garden. Thinking about the various plants leads him to thinking about Paracelsus, a German humanist, and his search for signs. Julius connects Paracelsus’s pursuit of aligning the internal and external with the practice of psychiatry. He recalls telling his friend about how the minds of patients can trick them and uses the concept of a “blind spot” to describe what psychiatry lacks.

At Moji’s party, Julius finds himself attracted to Moji and, perhaps as a consequence, dislikes her boyfriend. Julius stays late into the night, talking with a woman from Cleveland. On the terrace, John talks with Julius about plants. In the morning, Julius wakes up before the other party guests and goes out on the terrace. Moji joins him there and tells him that he forced himself on her eighteen years ago. She describes how it happened while they were both drunk at a party, how she suffered in the intervening years, and how she didn’t tell anyone. She asserts that John does not like Julius, even without her sharing what Julius did. Other guests wake up and interrupt them before Julius responds, and he leaves quickly thereafter.

This confession causes Julius to think about Nietzsche and Scaevola. As he walks home, he considers heroism and villainy, believing that everyone thinks they are a hero in the story they tell about their lives. He stops at a diner on Cabrini for coffee and then walks to the George Washington Bridge, where there is a car accident. When he gets to his building, he sees his neighbor Seth throwing out mattresses that have been infested by bedbugs. Julius thinks about how his friend had bedbugs right before he decided to leave New York and move to Chicago with his girlfriend Lise-Anne.

Julius completes his residency at the end of summer and joins a private practice under David Ng, on the Bowery. In his office, Julius can see the birds outside. He has moved to a new apartment near the office and describes how he has furnished the office, including a detailed description of a postcard of Heliopolis. He listens to classical music on New York stations and learns about a series of concerts by the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra. He attends a performance of Mahler’s Ninth Symphony and thinks about Mahler’s life.

Julius describes the music at the concert, as well as how he stands out as a young Black man at classical concerts in New York. Also, Julius describes the conductor, Simon Rattle, of the orchestra, and how an old woman leaves during the final movement. Julius thinks about Mahler’s final illness and the end of his life. After the concert ended, Julius accidentally exits through an emergency exit to a fire escape. There is no handle on the outside of the door, and he has to climb down several floors until he can get back into the building. Before he reenters the building, he sees stars in the sky above and remembers that in many cases, the stars are so far away that, by the time their light reaches his eyes, the stars themselves are already dead. He is looking at dead stars—looking into the past—and his “blind spot” prevents him from seeing newly-born stars.

Julius walks by Central Park, passing Saito’s apartment, and takes the subway to the Chelsea Piers building. A tourist boat invites him aboard for a free trip, and Julius accepts. They go past the Statue of Liberty, and Julius thinks about how people are no longer allowed to climb into the crown after 9/11. The novel ends with him thinking about how, when the statue was a working lighthouse, birds would die because they were disoriented by the flame.