New York City is the setting for two sharply contrasting encounters with arrival: Philip deliberately diverts there to see a place he believes he is from, while Allen later realizes that he has reached the city without knowing how. For Philip, its streets and landmarks briefly make belonging feel certain; that assurance falters on the Brooklyn Bridge, where the city becomes the backdrop to an abrupt, unexplained depression and a restless search.

Arrival and an Unchosen Detour

After William Stanley Milligan’s discharge from the U.S. Navy, Philip is given his pay and an airline ticket to Columbus. Travelling from Great Lakes toward O’Hare Airport in Chicago, he learns that two recruits on leave are heading to New York City. He abandons the ticket and joins them on the bus. The change of destination is deliberate: Philip wants to see a city he knows as the place he is from, although he has never been there.

At the New York bus terminal, he says goodbye to his companions, takes his duffle bag, collects maps and brochures, and sets off toward Times Square. His arrival is not merely a stop on the way home. The city is a destination that carries a prior claim on him, one he can test only by walking through it. The account gives that claim emotional force before offering any evidence that could verify it: New York feels familiar to Philip as soon as he enters its streets.

A City Read Through Its Landmarks

Philip spends two days exploring. He rides the Staten Island Ferry and visits the Statue of Liberty, then walks from the Battery through the narrow streets around Wall Street and on to Greenwich Village. He eats at a Greek restaurant and sleeps in a cheap hotel. The next day he goes to Fifth Avenue and Thirty-fourth Street, looks up at the Empire State Building, and takes the tour to its summit, where he studies the city below.

This route makes New York legible through movement and landmarks rather than through a settled home or a local companion. Philip ranges from the harbor to downtown streets, a restaurant and hotel, then to an elevated view of the city. The sequence conveys the energy of a visitor intent on seeing as much as he can, while the report that he feels at home complicates the ordinary distinction between tourist and native. The city is new to his experience but, in his sense of origin, not wholly foreign.

From the Empire State Building, Philip asks the tour guide which way Brooklyn lies. She points out the Williamsburg, Manhattan, and Brooklyn bridges, and Philip says he will go there next. His attention shifts from surveying the city at a distance to crossing into another part of it on foot. The Brooklyn Bridge becomes the next concrete point in an itinerary assembled as he goes.

Belonging Gives Way to Disorientation

Philip starts across the Brooklyn Bridge and feels good in the cool breeze. Halfway over, he stops and looks down at the water, which he finds beautiful. Then his mood changes: he becomes deeply depressed and cannot continue toward Brooklyn. He turns back toward Manhattan. The reversal is striking because the walk begins as a chosen extension of his exploration, but its midpoint becomes a limit; the same view that holds beauty does not prevent the sudden descent in mood.

Back in Manhattan, the depression deepens. Philip recognizes the contradiction that he is in New York and not having a good time, but cannot explain the feeling. He senses that there is something he must see, or some place he must find, without knowing what it is or where to look. He boards a bus, rides to its endpoint, transfers to another and then another, watching houses and people without finding a direction. The landmarks that structured his earlier exploration give way to transit without a destination. New York remains full of visible places, but none answers the search he cannot name.

At a shopping mall, Philip wanders to a wishing fountain and flips in a couple of coins. As he starts to toss a third quarter, a little boy tugs at his sleeve and looks up at him pleadingly. Philip gives him the coin; the boy grins and runs. The brief encounter interrupts the aimless search with a small, concrete exchange, but it supplies no explanation for what Philip has been trying to find. The city’s sequence of movement continues, now narrowed to the fountain, the coin and the child who takes it.

Kennedy Airport and the Other Arrival

New York also becomes the place where Allen discovers that his own journey has gone wrong. At an airport counter, a supervisor tells him that he cannot use his ticket to fly from New York to Columbus. Allen does not understand the problem until the supervisor identifies the location as Kennedy Airport; he reacts with alarm at learning that he is in New York.

Allen quickly offers an explanation: he says he has been discharged, must have boarded the wrong plane, and was unconscious when he arrived, with his bags left behind. He blames an error by the airline and is told that changing the ticket will cost a surcharge. Unlike Philip, Allen has not chosen New York as a place to explore. He encounters it as an unexpected destination and tries to account for the gap in his journey. Together, their episodes make the city both a promised point of belonging and a site of disorientation: for one, it is a place deliberately sought but emotionally difficult to inhabit; for the other, a place reached without conscious understanding of how.