Downtown

After a tasty, if overpriced, brunch at Bubby's with friends to kill the remnants of my post-holiday-party hangover, I headed down to United Artists's neglected movie theatre in Battery Park to see STAR TREK: NEMESIS. My nearly forgotten fondness for the television show's been revived by the reruns I've caught recently on TNN, so I'm forced to admit that I was actually looking forward to this one.

How was it? Not bad. Pretty decent, really, with some good bits, although they gave away far too many of them in the trailer. On the whole, it was entertaining, but after watching the stalwart Captain Picard charge off on his half-dozenth incredibly perilous adventure (leaving the rest of his command staff, and the entirety of the Enterprise's crew, to putz around aimlessly in his absence), I was struck by a particular inanity of the series: why is this guy, the captain of a massive ship staffed by what must be hundreds, if not thousands of loyal subordinates, doing all this shit himself? Doesn't he have people to do this kind of thing for him? This is a man who has entrusted to him what must be a billion-dollar vessel and the lives of all its crew, and he's flying himself down to random planets to investigate scientific anomalies, tool around in his new Land Rover, and shoot it out with the Sand-People natives. Where is the Federation's equivalent of the Navy Seals or Delta Force, the highly trained commandos who can grit their knives in their teeth and pull on their night-vision goggles (or the 24th Century equivalent) and get down to the dirty business of infiltrating these forboding alien spacecraft and toppling their owners' evil regimes? I understand a captain's needs to take action and protect the lives under his charge and all that, but at some point, someone needs to take him aside and point out that he's not exactly doing his crew, or himself, a favor by running off and beaming onto that big bad alien ship to shoot it out with all the dastardly space Nosferatus singlehandedly. Somewhat irresponsible, isn't it?

After leaving the theatre, I took a couple of random escalators in my search for the exit to the street and found myself instead in the towering, deserted lobby of the Embassy Suites hotel. Another escalator, and I was outside on the equally deserted streets, facing the brilliantly lit World Trade Center site. New York is not a city known for its silences, but the one I walked into was so pervasive, so eerie and still, that it felt haunted. And remembering where I was, as I started to walk for the subway, I realized that made perfect sense.

"Haunted" is an adjective usually applied to empty houses. But cities of ten million people can also be haunted, can also have their share and more of restless ghosts. If you don't believe me, just take a walk through lower Manhattan on a Sunday night in winter.