On Sunday, Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani invited members of the public to meet with him, one on one, for three minutes at a time, in a sparely appointed room at the Museum of the Moving Image, in Astoria. His transition team titled the twelve-hour event “The Mayor Is Listening,” in homage to “The Artist Is Present,” the iconic work of performance art by Marina Abramović. Every day for nearly two and a half months, in 2010, Abramović sat at a table in the MOMA atrium and invited visitors to sit across from her. She made eye contact but otherwise said nothing, sitting still for hours on end. Taking in Mamdani’s œuvre over the past few years—the pre-primary walk down the length of Manhattan, the New Year’s Day polar plunge, and the multiple times he’s trotted the course of the New York City Marathon—I’ve thought less of Abramović and more of the magician David Blaine, who shares Mamdani’s taste for slightly masochistic public displays of fortitude. The job of mayor, after all, is usually less like a silent encounter at MOMA, and more like being encased in ice in Times Square for sixty-three hours.

The energy in the room was part D.M.V., part papal antechamber. (The sweet Adeni chai on offer as a refreshment surely didn’t help all the nervous fidgeting.) A few participants were museum staffers and venders who had been invited to join in, but most had heard about the event on Instagram the day before, when Mamdani’s team had posted a call for people to apply to attend. In an attempt to attract people beyond the superfans, they had asked some large local unions and community groups to spread the word. A biotech venture capitalist named Faizzan Syed Ahmad got a spot thanks to his cousin, an N.Y.P.D. officer who is on the Mayor-elect’s security detail. Ahmad brought his eight-year-old daughter and his father, who emigrated from India in 1978, and planned to pitch Mamdani on the idea of a Doha-New York biotech corridor.

Visitor No. 1 was Vinny Corletta, a former teacher of English and language arts, also from Astoria, who had lined up in the snow before the museum opened. Mamdani’s rent-stabilized one-bedroom apartment is just a few blocks away, and Corletta wanted to talk to him, before he moves into Gracie Mansion, about building more family housing. “I want to know that these two-bedroom, three-bedroom apartments or condos are being built,” he said, as opposed to big buildings crammed with studios and one-bedrooms, like the one Mamdani lives in. “I want to see, like, where it’s earmarked and located, that schools are going to be in those places, how many seats they’re expecting.” He added, “Something that’s real, that I can follow up on and track and trace.” When Corletta emerged from his three-minute meeting, he pronounced himself satisfied. “It was amazing,” he said. “He was really taking notes.”

To reach Mamdani, attendees took a left after entering the museum and went into a staging room set up in the Ann R. and Andrew H. Tisch Education Center, named after an uncle and aunt of the police commissioner, Jessica Tisch, whom Mamdani has asked to stay on in his administration. (Visitor No. 2, a young activist who’d left the Democratic Socialists of America because they thought the organization’s posture on Israel was inadequately aggressive, had come to take Mamdani to task about Tisch. “I’m interested in seeing if he can back himself out of what he seems to be becoming,” the activist said.) Each attendee was given a nametag and a visitor number, and was eventually summoned to an adjoining room, where they waited in a single-file line of chairs. Several people told me that when they finally got their turn with Mamdani, they were so flustered that their three minutes flew by before they’d gotten to say their piece. Visitor No. 97, wearing moon-pendant earrings and a black leather jacket, asked Mamdani a question her mother had wanted her to ask, and another her brother wanted her to ask, and ran out of time before she was able to ask the question that had been on her own mind, about Mamdani’s proposed Department of Community Safety. She also wanted to complain about digital advertising screens on the subway. “So dystopian,” she said.

Despite the team’s effort to diversify the turnout, the general makeup of the crowd suggested a certain amount of self-selection. Most were in their thirties and forties, and many readily professed to being Mamdani devotees. Of the hundred and forty-two people who ended up meeting with him, there were only a few who didn’t want to talk to a reporter, and no trolls or obvious haters. (A hundred and forty-two New Yorkers and no haters doesn’t happen without some pretty good screening.) Still, there were surprises. Visitor No. 108, a filmmaker, musician, and production-company operator from Bushwick, had come to tell Mamdani to beware of d.j.s. “In my opinion, one of the biggest recession indicators in New York City right now is the d.j. epidemic, because people don’t have time to learn instruments; people don’t have space to practice,” she said. Visitor No. 61, who asked that I withhold his name, was twenty-five years old and Jewish, and had voted for Trump twice, and then Mamdani this year. “I’ll vote for the populist candidate, Democrat, Republican, whatever they are,” he said. He was wearing a gray sweater and a gold chain, and he lived on the Upper East Side. In part, he wanted to make sure Mamdani knew that just because he’d voted for him didn’t mean he agreed with him on everything.

Visitor No. 53, Gabriella Gonjon, who was raised by Dominican immigrants in South Jersey (“between Princeton and Six Flags”), said she was terrified of how Donald Trump is targeting immigrants. “Hearing Trump say he doesn’t want people from third-world countries here,” she said, “that really scared me, and it just makes me feel like, even though I’m born here and I’m a hundred per cent a citizen here, I don’t know when that line is going to change.” But that’s not what she wanted to talk to Mamdani about. Gonjon, who is twenty-six, and a trained architect who works for a city agency that oversees school construction, had a complaint about the new OMNY contactless-payment system in the city’s subway stations and buses. “I don’t feel like our identity should be tied to every stop that we go to,” she said. MetroCards had afforded riders some measure of privacy. “Especially with this immigrant thing—like, I don’t want to be targeted in any way.”

Joynal Abedin, a Bangladeshi immigrant in his sixties, from Woodside, came to the museum dressed in a blue suit and a green shirt and tie. He wanted to talk to Mamdani about the plight of the small landlord. “All homeowners are not billionaires like Donald Trump,” he said. Despite Mamdani’s championing of the city’s renters, Abedin was determined to make him see that mom-and-pop landlords such as him deserved empathy, too. But when he got into the room, the Mayor-elect, whom he had met before, disarmed him by reciting the names of his children. “Asked me about the kids by name,” Abedin said. “What can I do?”

As the afternoon wore on, snow accumulated in the museum’s back garden, and Mamdani’s visitors kept coming, shaking ice off their boots. One man recited what he wanted to tell Mamdani over and over again under his breath, his eyes gauzy and lost in the middle distance. Another attendee had written notes in pen on the back of her hand, which read, from top to bottom: “Rent Iftar Glitter com. Red Hook + Gowanus Knitting Small Biz Bus Idling.” In the afternoon, Lina Khan, the former head of the Federal Trade Commission, who is one of the leaders of the transition team, arrived in the staging room to talk with the visitors, along with other top advisers, including Elle Bisgaard-Church, Mamdani’s chief of staff, and Dean Fuleihan, a soft-spoken seventy-four-year-old veteran of state and city government, who will be serving as Mamdani’s first deputy mayor. Visitor No. 97, the woman with the moon earrings, emerged from her meeting around 5:30, saying she sensed Mamdani flagging. “He was exhausted, you could see it on his face,” she said. “But you couldn’t tell by the way he talked.”

Mamdani first began discussing the idea for “The Mayor Is Listening” back in September, with Julian Gerson, the speechwriter who came up with the idea for the walk down the length of Manhattan. Sunday’s event was designed to be a sequel, another big swing that signalled Mamdani’s ongoing belief that holding public attention will be crucial to enacting the ambitious changes he hopes to bring about in the city. I asked Fuleihan, who helped Bill de Blasio implement universal pre-K, how much of the job of mayor involved public performance. “A complete agenda of affordability—that requires constant communication,” he said. “No one in the past—and this isn’t a criticism—would have had me doing this,” he added, smiling wryly.

Mamdani emerged just after 9 P.M., a smile pasted across his face. “I’ve been in that room for fifteen hours!” he said. (He took a five-minute break every hour, plus lunch.) He reported that one attendee had come dressed as a hamburger, that more than one had revealed that they were undocumented, and that several people had cried during the sessions, including him. One person had said their No. 1 issue was changing the time of construction on the Van Wyck Expressway. “It’s currently 8 A.M. to 4 P.M., and that makes no sense,” Mamdani said. “They would like for it to be reverted to what it was before that, which was nighttime construction. Which makes a lot of sense.”

When Mamdani was coming up in New York politics, he and others affiliated with the D.S.A. were preoccupied by the ways that holding office can change people. “I think there is every pressure, once governing, to make the process insular,” Bisgaard-Church told me on Sunday afternoon. Even when Mamdani was a little-known State Assembly member, in Albany, Bisgaard-Church said that the two of them had thought hard about how to maintain “deep connections” with constituents. “We have a real duty also to uphold people’s hope and faith that we can do things differently, and that starts by actually having some direct time with the Mayor-elect,” she said.

On the cusp of his inauguration, Mamdani seemed only more conscious of the risks of being trapped in a bubble.“It cannot be that the only New Yorker you see is the reflection of yourself in the tinted window of that car,” he told me, as the museum emptied out. “It cannot be that every meeting you have is one you agreed to, or that you set up.” Like any insurgent politician, he hopes to retain some of the magic of his campaign, even as his day to day fills with the unmagical realities of governing. During his victory speech last month, Mamdani referenced a line once delivered by Mario Cuomo, the father of his vanquished opponent Andrew Cuomo, that campaigns are written in poetry, while governing is done in prose. His win had suggested that politics had gone post-text. Now, everything is performance. ♦