The East River is the tidal estuary that runs between Manhattan and the boroughs of Queens and Roosevelt Island, and in City of God it becomes something more than a geographic feature: it is the watery threshold across which the narrator's spiritual transformation is first tested in public. He crosses it on the Roosevelt Island Tramway, a high-wire ride launched from a cement dock on a windy day, the car rocking as it carries him over the heavily tidal, sunlight-aglitter water. The crossing is undertaken in his new vestments — a blue blazer, charcoal slacks, and a gray turtleneck — and he notes that nobody in the crowded car notices he is no longer a priest. The river, in this moment, is the boundary between his old clerical identity and the lay life he is stepping into, and the fact that he crosses it at all is framed as a residual urge, a Sunday habit surviving the loss of the office that once gave the day its meaning.

The River as Boundary and Exile

The East River's currents are described as surging and unswimmable, suggestive of exile, and this quality is confirmed by the view from Roosevelt Island: across the water rises the immense wall of Manhattan, with the FDR Drive traffic crawling along its foot in an ant-file. The Fifty-ninth Street underbridge throws a broad shadow across the river as it soars past on its way to Queens. The river thus separates the narrator from the city he has known, placing him on an island that houses a hospice run by the city for indigent terminals, a low yellow-brick building on the south end of the island. The gulls lined up on the bulwark breasting the wind reinforce the sense of a place set apart, where the ordinary rhythms of Manhattan are visible but unreachable across the unswimmable water. The river's tidal, estuary nature — neither fully river nor sea — mirrors the narrator's own indeterminate state, no longer a priest but not yet fully at home in the lay world.

The River and the City as Organism

The East River participates in the novel's larger vision of New York City as a living system, a place where human and non-human life interpenetrate. The narrator's observation of the FDR Drive traffic as an ant-file connects the river's banks to his meditation on the brown ant population he watches with children in Central Park, where infinitesimal creatures build an underground city beneath a patch of dirt. The ants, each not an eighth of an inch long, work for a queen they will likely never see, taking instruction from one another antenna to antenna, unified in their responses like parallel processors or the cortical structure of neurons. The narrator speculates that if one could watch the random movement of great numbers of human beings in a city park the same way — one person, one couple, one family, a child — one could assure oneself of the integrity of the individual will, even as the masses celebrate a beautiful day. The East River, with its crawling traffic and its gulls, is part of this same aggregate organism, a channel through which the city's life flows and is observed.

The River and the Wider World

The East River's significance extends beyond Manhattan through the novel's associative geography. The narrator's account of the City of Birds at Valdemingomez, an enormous garbage dump north of Madrid, describes a great urban aviary whose population of storks, hawks, egrets, linnets, kites, jackdaws, ravens, condors, and turkey buzzards can, when aroused, circle the dump and, with a boost from the trade winds, carry its miasma of sulfurous gases as far east as Rome. The birds of Valdemingomez do not migrate, and over a hundred thirty species stay there summer and winter, laying eggs in old Big Mac containers, lining nests with cassette tape, and huddling in TV cabinets. This vision of a city built by and for birds, with its own ecology of refuse and flight, stands in implicit contrast to the human city the narrator crosses the East River to reach, suggesting that the river is one instance of a universal pattern in which life organizes itself around what is discarded and what is crossed. The river, like the dump, is a place where the natural and the artificial intermingle, and where the narrator's observations of the world's creatures — ants, gulls, birds — become a way of thinking about the invisible organs of aggregate thought that bind a society together.

The River and the Narrator's Transformation

The East River crossing is the narrator's first public appearance as a layperson, and the river itself seems to register the change. He climbs the stairs to the men's floor of the hospice, the third, the sound of his new loafers — bought too large — clopping on the stair treads, accompanied by his loud breathing. In the lobby, people wave and nod as they always have; a security guard calls out "Cool threads, Father," and one of the aides asks if he has a heavy date. The narrator reassures himself — "Not to worry, right, Lord?" — as if the river crossing were a kind of prayer, a way of testing whether the old conversation with God still holds. The East River, in this reading, is the water over which the narrator must pass to reach the dying man named McIlvaine, the one lunger he wanted to see, and the crossing itself becomes a rite of passage that the river's tidal, unswimmable currents both threaten and enable. The river is thus not merely a setting but an active presence in the narrator's spiritual journey, the boundary that must be crossed and the exile that must be accepted before the new life can begin.