Citywide.

There’s a precise moment in any dramatic opera where the singer takes a full-bodied breath in anticipation of the sustained final note. In that space, between tension and harmonic resolution, there is a marked musical silence; where the violinists readjust their bows and the clarinetists lick their lips to prepare for the climax. But from the end of the front row, in a seat close to the emergency exit-that leads onto an unlit street corner-this savored silence is the key to a cage of unrelenting city noise.

            Outside those exit doors blows a laughing wind. The kind of wind that blows the mail out of people’s hands and throws it into a sewer drain before they can run to catch it. Wind that 

follows a young woman into a corner store where she clutches a case of baby food, weighs the change in her pocket, and places a pack of tampons back on the shelf. The wind goes angrily through forgotten back alleys and whistles as it punches through holes in a tent.

            This wind is relentless in its rustling of magazine pages-the cover torn off and used as kindling. It’s relentless in how it blows smells of cheap perfume from women on street corners into the upper-class bars on the east side. It’s cruel how it makes men’s heads turn, but only carries the drunken memories of the body’s shape and not the features of the face.

            Behind closed doors, the wind can’t find you. It becomes a background irritant in the silent moment of an aria. Then, as you’re sitting in anticipation of the singer’s mastery, the wind rattles the exit doors and makes a baby cry on the upper balcony.