Once I had a vision, or was it a dream. A street sign in an unremarkable part of Manhattan, let’s say 28th Street, in the limpid atmosphere of autumn night. Set against gray and brown buildings and perhaps a tree. In this image were all my failures and all my grief and hopelessness. Like I’d arrived at my bleak destiny. I saw this in my head many years ago, before I’d even moved to the city, and I did not know why. I didn’t feel hopeless and I still don’t. But I remembered it from time to time.

I drove around Atlantic Terminal looking for a spot to double park, creeping around the crooked streets and hoping not to knock into vans or pedestrians. I found an anonymous street where a few others who had done the same and stopped next to a beat up car. I put the flashers on. No one else had. Was I some type of fool? Surely I’d marked my car to be towed or stolen.

The guy at Men’s Wearhouse opened up a minute past ten and told us to bear with him, he was all alone and all his staff were sick. He brought out my tux and I walked back out, trying not to drag it on the sidewalk. Around the corner and the other corner the car was still there, blinking.

It was obvious when you observed Robnoxious with his wild eyes, rockstar hair, and verbose posturing that he’d perish one day of a heroin overdose.

He ran an arts collective out of an old fur vault in the depressed, decrepit mill town down the road from the state college with its drunk and horny boys and girls and disaffected townies with moms and dads who taught and their bitter counterparts with moms and dads who ran the garage or the cleaners or the package store. It was a fire trap, a dark and dirty hole; it was the only place in fifty miles where anything unpredictable or new was happening.

He held a photography exhibit on the theme of dog feces. I stood with Rob and the woman whose work was on display. “What I’m saying is, art is the same as the shit that comes out of a dog’s ass,” she explained. Robnoxious nodded approvingly.

My band played there a few times. Once we opened up for a herky jerky prog-rock ensemble. Or did they open up for us?

“Everybody’s gotta die,” sang the singer. “Everybody’s gotta die.”

For the longest time I thought he was saying everybody’s got a dime.

Up the road I was still taking classes in the vain hopes of a degree. Rob was in an American lit seminar with me. He was loud, argumentative, disruptive almost. Always had to disagree. We were reading Henry Miller. I remember him saying the word bourgeois with his punk American sneer: bore JWAH. No one in class liked him much, least of all the teacher. But you know? He said something. He opened up his mouth. And now he’s dead.

At Grateful Dead shows at the Hartford Civic Center I remember gazing across the expanse between my upper level and the other side. The roiling mass of people on the floor, blurry in a haze of smoke. The soundboard twinkling and blinking in the dark. I’d look straight across to my twin up there, another dumbass schoolkid with a friend or two and a hit of blotter on his tongue. But I could not discern the faces in the gloom. What I saw was silhouettes, backlit in the passageways. Utterly anonymous, shadowy figures, impossibly far away in every sense.

The jet at rest on the tarmac with the light blinking on its belly. The steady pulse, dull-bright-dull, seems like code from benevolent higher beings. But it’s really just some dumb thing we made, the same shit that makes the lights work on your dryer and alarm clock.

The weird bottoming out right after the plane takes off, like everyone on board subconsciously doesn’t want to fly.

I stared a long time at the dollar off coupon for mouthwash that came in the little plastic pouch she gave me, with the soft-bristled toothbrush and the travel size paste. One dollar. I imagined walking into a CVS or Walgreens, clutching it in my sweaty palm, bringing the bottle of turquoise fluid up front, presenting it to the cashier. Terms and conditions apply. The charm of olden days, when Mom would clip them out of the Sunday paper and you could only watch what’s on TV.

The hygienist was new, a little overzealous, manic. She’d giggle after saying something: You’re not flossing properly around this implant. Giggle. I recommend the Philips Sonicare. Giggle. I grew up in Greenpoint. That’s where I grew up. Giggle. She gave me advice, too much advice. Floss in the morning, don’t just floss at night. Get three cleanings a year. Not two. She was like, fuck it. More, more, more.

Then I threw it away.

At Aetna in Middletown, Connecticut, they had cake for everyone’s birthday and every day was someone’s birthday. A bigass building in a maze of parking lots and looping drives off Interstate 91. Thousands of employees. Of course it was someone’s birthday. There was a fucking cake shop right outside the cafeteria for the express purpose of selling cakes to people in order to celebrate their coworkers’ birthdays. The manager would go down there, maybe an executive assistant. Order up a chocolate or vanilla cake and pick a color frosting. Personalize it please. Then at some point the work team would gather in one of the very many conference rooms and declare surprise to the birthday boy or girl, here’s your fucking cake, look at this beautiful cake. I can’t believe you got me a cake! Then we’d each get a slice on a wobbly Dixie plate and plastic-fork the mealy sponge and too-sweet vanilla creme into our unhungry gullets, everyone, everyone on the work team, even temps like me. Every single fucking day. Cake. Like it or not. You could not refuse the cake. To say no would be an affront to the celebrated one of course, but even worse to everybody else, all who dutifully choked down a wedge of angel food at ten fifteen in the morning on a Tuesday. It’d be a bigger violation of the place itself, not just this corporation that benevolently made this space within which we may toil and magically deposited funds into our banks on a semimonthly basis but the society, the structure, the institution, America in the fullness of reality and dreams. We were the army of  the nauseated, the reluctantly obese. On the verge of ecstasy and diabetes.

I was thinking of eating and drinking and all, how you might as well you know, life is short. The image of my old schoolmate crossed my mind, the one who was once a slim and manic boy in braces and is now a portly Bob Vacant, autocorrected from bon vivant. At our high school reunion he spoke at length of his travels in Asia and his fondness for smoky Islay scotch. Anyway life is short and we all die. I lingered on that thought a moment, wanting it to sink deep into my psyche. Maybe there could be a sign. And just then a glitch in the broadcast of the Tour de France I was watching warped the image of bikes on a country road into garish psychedelic blurs and streaks: red, green, turquoise, white.

There was something about the sky the other night. A long dark streak cutting through the dusky blue. I thought, is this something to write about? Right away I thought no. Of course. Stupid, shallow. Pointless. The thing would be to write about writing about it. To describe not just the thing but the question of whether to write about it. 

A solitary plastic fork on the low wall down the block.

They say the suspect has been tearful, emotional. Appearing in court in a dark suit, not entering a plea. That sounds like remorse, or bewilderment and grief. Could he have done it on purpose? I was imagining it was all a dreadful mistake, the guy got lost and stuck in a drunken, angry crowd and panicked. And the more he panicked and tried to get away the more people he hurt and the angrier everyone got and the more panicked he got and the more people he hurt. Was it not a tragic mistake? But no. They say he did it on purpose.

Here I am because I said I’d be here.

A day of avoiding news and watching unused credits return to my account. The gentle timing out. A misting rain in this park this morning, making a wide arcs around the other runners. The grass in the ball fields a little overgrown and too green.

In the evening thinking drowsily of the dreams I had this morning when I went back to bed: a performance in a peculiar theater, strange insects scurrying about.

Getting to the bottom of this beer I thought of Kris Kristofferson and his having one for dessert. There’s something wonderful about the smell of a cigarette carried by a cool spring breeze. Waiting for a late-game goal.

Driving the highway past my old hometown I remember the exits, the ramps, the secondary roads. But I’m not sure I remember which way to turn. And I wonder why we never stopped back then to discover the surroundings, to walk out into the rough grass that slowly turns to woods and get down on our knees and touch it, feel it; to really know where it is we live.

The Enterprise - 66

Alan had made an arrangement with some guy who had a little ad sales business or something, maybe an old friend from a past career. He occupied a desk to the side of our main room, set apart but audible and visible in the spacious loft. You could hear him on the phone, his booming adman’s voice. Sometimes saying fuck. He’d make small talk about the Yankees to me.

Forty-nine Russian miners trapped as water enters mine.

Tom and I went to a new-tech telecom provider in an industrial park in Cranbury, New Jersey. The main artery to the parking lots with its thin, grassy median. Uniform shrubbery surrounding low-lying buildings with names like Building 7 and Building 9. We sat in a series of conference rooms. Met some people. Gave a training. It began to rain and by the time Tom dropped me off at the PATH station in Hoboken it was pouring down hard.

Josh had scored us a deal doing automated customer support for a major cable company. I spent days copy-pasting FAQs from their website into our output code, testing, tweaking. The endeavor had a cold, prosaic quality that I liked. Its essential dreariness made it seem practical, vital even. Everyone needs to reset their password sometimes.

We walked the same gray path to lunch each day, to the nearest outpost of the giant sandwich chain. Past monthly parking lots, service entrances and loading docks, through passages that tunneled under scaffolds.

Through it all I kept working on the Product. It was still wildly popular, the object of hate, scorn, ridicule and come-ons from every adolescent in the country. The raw numbers dictated we couldn’t shut it down. Repeat visits, session length, uniques—all the metrics remained garish. Start-up common wisdom says you can’t ignore such numbers; you must respect them, even if you have no idea how to convert them into money. In desperation Alan decided fuck it, we’ll make it subscription-only. For $9.99 a year, the kids or whoever the fuck it was out there could curse and threaten the Product all they want. Everyone else would get shut out after one free month. I worked closely with Jacques and Julien from out West to button everything up codewise; we’d set a timer per user and shunt them into a death loop if they didn’t cough up the cash by day thirty.

Every day I came in and checked the running total. Ten dollars here, ten dollars there. It was in the low hundreds after a few weeks. Maybe it would turn a corner, reach some kind of tipping point. An avalanche of users suddenly terrified of losing their digital punching bag, or nemesis, or lover. A couple months went by. We totaled just over a grand. The interactions with users who’d just been informed—some after using the Product for years—that they only had one month left for free were brutal, exceptionally abusive. We pulled the plug. One day the Product said nothing more about money or subscriptions and no one was ever locked out again and life went on.

The smartphone has been such a gift to the reject, the loner, the socially awkward. You can always disappear into it from the outside world.

The Enterprise - 65

Josh and Tom and I walked out drunk and dropped Tom off at the ferry for Jersey. Josh and I walked back uptown. The city was naked, unprotected from the dusk. A woman sat in Battery Park reading a paperback by the glow of a generator-powered searchlight, as though some breach in reality had beamed her from her couch. Posh Tribeca restaurants had been turned inside out onto the streets; the patrons standing with their wine, the workers playing cards by candlelight. In the tight maze of West Village streets cars rolled gingerly through intersections. They seemed human somehow, deferential, alive to the rights and needs of other cars and pedestrians especially. In my inebriation I wondered: had we, as a race, transcended traffic lights? Had the remorseless rhythm of green-orange-red, green-orange-red, beaten so deeply into our psyche that we’d finally developed the instinct to yield? People sat on stoops and drank, or stood outside of bars and drank. Josh was supposed to go to a party but what did that really mean anymore? He made some calls and plans were made to meet in Union Square. At Lafayette and Spring we came upon the darkened stairs to the subway, suddenly neglected and irrelevant. Yellow caution tape stretched across the entrance.

"Let's go in," Josh said brightly.

"OK."

It was hot down there, and quiet. Stupefyingly quiet, the way only a very noisy thing can ever be. Yet something beat gently at the silence. What was it? Something that hadn’t ever been heard. Water dripping somewhere, echoing out the tunnel. 

It was dark too, very dark, but for a faint glow: by some pointless quirk of backup power the green circles with the yellow arrows beside the turnstiles were lit and pointing, like it was the morning rush.

I took out my Metrocard and held it in the pale light. I looked at Josh for a beat. And I swiped it through the slot like any other day.

BING! went the machine. GO said the little screen. The punch line to a nonexistent joke. 

Josh went through and ran up and down the pitch-black platform, yelling to wake the dead.

While I waited for the show to go on I noticed the discreet atmospheric light on the wall of the movie theater flickering and I thought it’d make a good little video and I imagined an employee scolding and forbidding me but of course that wasn’t going to happen and I was about to press the button when I noticed the light wasn’t flickering through my phone and I thought maybe it’s one of those things, the light registers a different way, the frequencies or something, and in my disappointment I lowered the phone and looked back at the light and saw it wasn’t flickering in real life and I thought something’s wrong with my eyes or maybe my mind.

I was at work texting with a friend back home and he let it be known our other friend’s in a bad way. He has some kind of complication related to his Lyme disease medication, a neuropathy, a numbness in the arms and legs. The cure is worse than the disease. And plus his dad is dying. I got in a group chat with some others, what’s going on? It was unclear to me whether he was waiting to take steroids that would cure him or getting off of steroids that would kill him. There was talk of a special diet and botanicals. He may be in the hands of hippie witch doctors, I don’t know. I sighed and returned to my workflow dashboard.

The Social Security Place

I love the long, zigzagging hallway, the barren decor. The beige linoleum floor and the outlets saying do not use. Each number called starts with a frightening burst of feedback. I was 987. 

The man on the other side of the window looked so bored I thought he was going to turn me down and send me home. For no reason. Only that it was the only appropriate gesture for someone so radically detached from what he’s doing. He asked me for this, he asked for that. Jackie’s passport. Mine. I sat at the edge of the chair and wondered if this was a mistake. I need to recalibrate my posture, my speech, I thought, to better match his affect. I eased back an inch or two.

“Here’s your receipt,” he said suddenly. “I suggest you keep it. You’ll get the card in seven to ten business days.”

I thanked him, what’s the word. Not warmly. Emphatically. I gathered up my things, the birth certificate, the passports. Trying not to linger. And then I turned around and walked away.