Ever since Manhattan built the Erie canal and became the bustling business center that we know, there has been one figure in the city who manages to be faster than anyone else. And he doesn’t lead by a nose, either – he’s always an order of magnitude faster. In the days of cart and horse, you could spot him coming down the street and clock him at 30 miles per hour. Now he’s on a bike, and here he comes, and there he goes. He’d smoke every damn bike messenger in the city –

– if anyone could figure out what deliveries he was making. Nobody has ever seen him stop. Nobody has ever caught him. Ask the police. They’ve tried. He never, ever, ever stops. One bicycle cop swears that she almost had him at a traffic jam, but the guy popped a wheelie and jumped his bike onto the trunk of a sedan, and hopped over the mess of cars. The APB for the guy simply says “bike messenger moving faster than humanly possible, you’ll know when you see him, whoops, there he goes.”

Nonna swears that the fellow will never slow down until the city itself does. But I worry that it’s the other way around – that if someone catches him, everything in the city will stop --

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