From my notebook

The apartment feels like a cave and the building a forest. If that is so then Noam is its ghost whenever he walks around inside it. He has no identity here. This city outside this place is alive but barely so, a sleeping giant hiding behind the heavy brick facades of skyscrapers. It breathes in steel grates and stumbles along on legs numbed from sleep. Noam only notices it when he catches his face in the window of a passing taxi, and hears the concrete sigh.