The steam came out of the manhole cover like the city was exhaling. The city had been holding its breath underground since the steam pipes were laid in 1882 and every time the temperature dropped the city exhaled and the exhale was visible and the visible exhale was the only proof that the city was alive underneath the asphalt.

The steam was hot. The steam came from the Con Edison steam system that ran underneath Manhattan like a second circulatory system. The blood was steam. The veins were pipes. The heart was a power plant on the East River. The city had two circulatory systems. The one on top moved people. The one underneath moved heat. The people on top did not think about the heat underneath. The heat underneath did not think about the people on top. Two systems sharing the same body and ignoring each other the way a heart ignores a lung.

The steam rose through the manhole cover and the manhole cover had holes and the holes shaped the steam into columns that bent in the wind and the wind was the sculptor and the steam was the material and the sculpture lasted three seconds before the wind took it apart and made a new one. The manhole was the only art gallery on the Lower East Side that was free and open twenty-four hours and changed its exhibition every three seconds.

The tourists took photographs of the steam. The tourists thought the steam was cinematic. The tourists had seen the steam in movies. In the movies the steam meant something was about to happen. A car chase. A murder. A kiss in the rain. On the Lower East Side the steam did not mean something was about to happen. The steam meant the pipes were working. The steam was infrastructure not cinema. But the tourists did not know the difference and the photographs looked the same either way.

I played guitar on the corner and the steam drifted across the sidewalk and the steam was warm and the warm was welcome in January. I stood in the steam and played and the steam made me look like a man playing guitar in a cloud and the cloud was not mysterious. The cloud was a hundred and forty years of pipes under the street doing their job. But the tourists tipped better when I was standing in the steam. The steam was my lighting designer. The steam made the corner look like a stage and the stage made the guitar sound better and the guitar did not sound better. The steam had changed nothing except the way the audience saw me. That is what lighting does. It changes nothing except everything.