I was lost and my self-assurance was rapidly plummeting as I walked up and down in East Village, New York, searching for a venue. My only clue was "2A upstairs on Avenue A". It was Tuesday, May 28 and I was dead-set on attending a literary event arranged by an organisation with a name such as Fiction-Addiction. A handful of authors had been selected to come and read passages from their works to an eager and appreciative audience. The authors for the evening included Fiona Maazel, Aryn Kyle, Jessica Soffer and Teju Cole.
I received an indirect invitation after making contact with one of the authors, and since I was particularly interested in meeting him, was certainly not going to let the moment pass me by. But then I got lost.
It turns out that I actually walked past the venue twice. Somehow, in my careful counting along Avenue A, I could not seem to find 25. Where was my error? At last, with frustration giving way to hopelessness, I looked into an empty bar on the corner of Avenue A and E 2nd Streets. Maybe I'd be pointed in the right direction. "Upstairs," said the barman. A sense of relief and embarrassment instantly washed over me.
I walked upstairs and there was another bar full of people. At the far end a podium was erected and near the bar, along with a make-shift stand with the books of the authors for the evening. I looked around quickly for my author of interest and there he was: Teju Cole, author of the highly acclaimed Open City and the lesser known Every Day is for the Thief.
I first encountered Cole as part of my art history thesis literary review concerned with the curious figure of the flâneur. Like many other fans of Cole's work, I followed him where I could, including Twitter. Eventually, though I cannot now recall when, he reached out to me and so began an interesting relationship in cyberspace, and it was this that made me want to make contact with Cole more than anything; to make real the abstract communication the internet had afforded us.
As I stood at the crowded bar, I thought about the correlation between my endless walkabouts of New York's streets and those of Cole's Open City protagonist, Julius. I wondered if Cole, when bringing Julius to life, suffered similar discomforts of being frustrated by the many streets and unnecessarily complex subway system of this expansive city.
We eventually met. He walked over and greeted me warmly as I wondered how he could've known it was me. Immediately I felt as if a cyberspace connection had been translated into the real and physical world. I felt that I could now comfortably say that I know this person, not only their tweets or side-profiled avatar.
We agreed to have a drink after the readings. Cole was last in the line-up and he had the crowd hanging on his every word. Perhaps it was the short Gustav Mahler symphony played on his tablet e-reader which helped draw the crowd's attention. His reading was of the last chapter of Open City, and he gave context to the symphony he had just played through Julius's narration of the life of Mahler in New York.
We had time for one drink as Cole graciously accepted the compliments of those who remained behind. He couldn't stay long and neither could I, given the navigation to make my way back home. We talked art history and hip-hop and he told me that his favourite rapper was Mos Def (now Yesiin Bey).
He asked me how I was finding New York to which my response was "overwhelming but very interesting". I mentioned getting lost to which he replied, "What better way to learn a new place?" We agreed that another meeting would have to happen in future. In the end, we didn't see each other again that week. But those brief moments that we met and spoke certainly helped to put a voice, animated body and face to a name I always admired.
Teju Cole's Open City has won the fifth annual International Literature Award – Haus der Kulturen der Welt, along with Christine Richter-Nilsson who translated the book into German.