At five past three in the afternoon as I was exiting the toilet stall in the men's room on the 16th floor, the wall-mounted TimeMist air-freshening capsule emitted its squirt of sweetly nauseating mist. I gazed at the device while the aerated compound thinned into the atmosphere. There appeared to be sticky orange residue, specked with dust, around the orifice from which the product emanated.

I turned the wrong way out the door, walked the wrong way down the
wrong hall. All of a sudden left was right. West was east and north
was south.

The Enterprise - 34

As the city thawed to reveal minutely wider cracks in the walk and deeper holes in the street, we continued our obstinate and incremental labors.

Odd events took place in our periphery. There was a race riot all up and down 25th, from Fifth to Sixth. Blacks shut out of construction work, apparently. We heard the commotion from the office—sharp cries of venomous hatred, the crack of splintering bricks.

One day on our way to lunch we found twelve hundred dollars in cash. Peter saw it first. Or was the first to point it out. To put a word onto the apparition: that.

“Look at that!”

There it was: a tight, rubber-banded roll of sixty twenty-dollar bills, green against the gray cement blotched with petrifying gum. It was a dense and powerful object, exerting a dark, magnetic force. You looked at it and you just knew it was twelve hundred dollars in cash. Had to be. You wanted to touch it but you didn’t want to touch it. You wanted to grab it. But you didn’t.

Two passersby, young men from some indeterminate European country—possibly Switzerland—or maybe Belgium—saw it too. For the merest moment we all—seven of us—stood in a circle to behold the radiant thing.

Finally Peter picked it up. He unfastened the elastic and began to count.

“Whoa,” we murmured.

“Wow.”

“Jeez.”

“Holy shit.”

The two men grimaced and gesticulated. It soon became clear that they were not laying a claim per se. But they were clamoring for some kind of recognition. They had seen the money on the ground. Now here it was in this man’s hand. These were the facts. Perhaps they were due a token of recognition? A witness fee, of sorts? Peter peeled off two hundred dollars and handed it to them. They accepted the money with grandiose shrugs, Europeanly, as if to say: We’re not asking for it, you know. We’re not even really accepting it. But we’ll take it. Since you insist. They went on their way with waves and smiles.

Back in the office, we sat down to eat at the conference table. Peter had the money in the kangaroo pocket of his nylon windbreaker. He opened the discussion with a vow to respect the group’s suggestions and concerns. A subtle rift began to form between those who felt we should divvy it up right here, right now and those who felt that morality dictated some other course of action, or at least a decorous exercise in delayed gratification. I didn’t know how I felt.

“Hey Peter, keep it. Come on, you found it. Keep it,” suggested Sam, perhaps hoping to flatter Peter into sharing.

“My dad’s a minister,” answered Peter. “I should bring it to the police.”

“They’re going to put it in their pockets,” Kevin howled. “They’re cops!”

“Cops are different now,” I volunteered.

“The right thing to do is the right thing to do,” asserted Peter. “It doesn’t matter what they do.”

“You wanna give it to the cops, call the cops. Give it to them. Give it to the cops,” Kevin said. He got up and gathered his trash. “Walk over there with the money. Like a fool. Hand it over.”

Later that afternoon, by email, Peter reported that the police at the 13th Precinct barely cared. Come back in nine days, said the lady desk cop. If it’s here, it’s yours. Nine days later, Peter circulated among our desks and handed each of us $200 in cash.

Julio was speaking. Others turned their heads in his direction, looking for eye contact. Looking away the moment it was granted. Seeking it again. The way you do. Jen, a junior account manager, peered over with a pleasant smile. Her chin rested on her fist, which clenched a fine-point Sharpie.

“... and they said they have a new process in place, and we all have to adhere to that,” spoke Julio. “We all—not just us, the other agencies—we have to do it, and they’ve been educating everyone at the senior account level about it. It’s really just another form on top of the RLM form. It’s got their own proprietary layout. Their terminology. I pretty much know how to do it.”

Now the time came when it was appropriate—requisite—for someone to respond.

“Julio,” said Jen. “I didn’t understand a single word you just said.”

In the break room at work today, two women sat at a table. Fresh faced, sexy, project managerly types. As I passed by, I heard one say to the other:

"So now who's the douche?"

I Did Not Know You Loved Me

There was a man swinging his kid beside me and Sophia at the park. About a four-year-old, I guess. The dad spoke with an aristocratic-sounding Spanish accent. I could only hear his side of their conversation. It went like this:

"Michael, what would you like for dinner? Pizza? Would you like fries?"

"Would you like French fries for dinner, Michael? Would you like French fries?"

The chains creaked with each thrust of the man's hand.

"What would you like for dinner? French fries? Michael. What would you like for dinner?"

"Michael. Would you like French fries for dinner? Yes? Or no?"

"Would you like French fries, Michael? For dinner? French fries with ketchup."

"Thank you Michael. I did not know you loved me."

"What would you like for dinner, Michael? Answer me. Would you like some French fries?"

"Yes or no, Michael. Would you like to have French fries for dinner?"

I picked Soph up out of the swing and we looked up to watch a plane go by. Then I put her in her stroller to go home.

Pyramids Come From a Million Years Ago

I stepped onto the A train after work, late at night. It was crowded but for one of those deceptive oases of empty seats that always surrounds some offense just foul enough to keep the weary on their feet. A leaking bottle. A pile of puke. This time it was a piss-soaked man. Those nearest him covered their noses with the collars of their shirts, eyed him warily and tittered amongst themselves. One last, intrepid holdout finally got up and walked away, leaving an entire bench to the bum, who stretched his arms up happily, perhaps victoriously, and sprawled across the seats.

I switched to the F at Jay Street and this time there was an angry drunk.

"Never mind, never mind, I'll shut up now," I heard him say to a woman and her two young daughters. There was an Indian man nearby.

"Fucking curry-eating motherfucker," shouted the drunk, who was light skinned but not quite white. Maybe Hispanic, Mediterranean. Could have been North African. His worn jeans seemed to be dotted with dried blood.

He began to conflate Indians with North Americans. "You Indian motherfuckers, we took your land."

The woman and her girls got off and I sat down. I wanted both to be near this man and far away. Everyone else was studiously ignoring him. Trying to do normal things like read the paper. Breathe.

"In Africa, they got pyramids!" he shouted. "Listen to me!" He slid forward on the bench and pounded his soda bottle in the middle of the floor. "They got, they got, they got pyramids no fuckin' nuclear bomb can touch." He laughed a little. "Fuckin' people don't understand. They got pyramids, come from a million years ago."

He sat back and grumbled for a while. My stop was coming up. Seventh Ave. Before I got up he turned to the Chinese guy sitting beside him.

"An' this little yellow Chinese motherfucker right here..." he drawled menacingly.

I got out and walked toward the stairs. A few moments later the train moved again, and I wondered what I'd see when the car came by. One man standing over another, arms swinging madly, onlookers aghast?

I turned around to see. The troublemaker sat alone, apparently silent, looking through the other window at the dark.

I stood in the aisle with the analgesics. Scrutinizing the rows and rows of little boxes, looking for some generic naproxen sodium. Sophia sat in the baby carrier on my chest, her head tilted up at the drop-tile ceiling. I perceived a mild commotion nearby. A bearded man with glasses held out his hands and waved them gently, as though he were expecting to be passed a basketball. He murmured something unintelligible. I stared at him. He turned around and walked away.

On the way out the store he passed me as I fed her a bottle. He said something else. Something else I couldn’t understand. Maybe it was the same thing as before.

The Enterprise - 33

Robyn lived alone in some rundown flat near Port Authority. I imagined a bare room lit by a single, overhead bulb. Mattress on the floor. She got in late one day and I asked her why on instant message. She said she’d been in court fighting her landlord. It was one of those dreary, murky disagreements—a dilapidated building, kept up on the cheap; she got fed up, quit paying rent. He shut off her heat. So she’d taken a cold shower and charged downtown to sue the bastard.

There we were typing at each other, separated by the sculpture and the potted ferns. I knew she was sitting over there at her cluttered desk. Typing at me just as I typed back at her. Words and the spaces in between. I had to admit I was drawn to her purple highlit hair and tired eyes, her mania, her discombobulation. At the end of our exchange I asked her out to dinner.

We went to a chic French bistro on Park Ave. I don’t remember what we talked about. Work. The people at work. We got in a cab together, after. She laid her head on my lap with a sigh, playing it like she was too drunk and tired to sit up. And maybe she was. But there she was. Head heavy on my thigh. Her hair splayed over me, over my arm and the vinyl seat. Purple strands glinted in the passing lamplight. I could smell it—a warm and faintly bitter fragrance. The smell of an unfamiliar woman. Why didn’t I kiss her? Why didn’t I touch her? I don’t know why. But I didn’t. The cab pulled up on 43rd Street and she got out. As we pulled away I watched as she hunched over the lock to her building’s scuffed and dented metal door.

Word Search

From the platform I saw a disheveled man on the G Train. Not too old, probably homeless. He had dirty, dark hair and bore an awful crimson blotch across his face and neck. The sort of mark that plunges you into the margins. But he had something in his hands. A pen and a paper. What was he doing? I saw him draw a loop within a grid of letters. A loop around a word. He was doing a word search.

As I descended to the F Train platform at West 4th I heard a man behind me tell his friend: "You wanna know somethin' funny 'bout this staircase? Once I beat the shit out of someone on this staircase."