Last night we met after work, a whole lot of us, at that terrible place the Cutting Room. A. D. dreamed up the event, a kind of holiday cocktail hour that had nothing to do with the holiday, but not the place – she had wanted to go to Dewey's on Fifth, which was way crowded. So we end up in this place with awful dressed-up and made-up people elbowing and jostling and generally violating the delicate, unspoken protocol which governs the lane before the bar. We were seated on stools some of us, others standing. A. introduced me to Steve, a friend of her boyfriend Michael, and right away, the way he launched into a self-deprecating and not very funny joke about being the guy no one knows, he struck me as somewhat lost and pathetic. He had wide, ingenuous eyes.

There was a sort of running joke between P. C. and Rachel about how all they ever talk about is sex, bodily functions and real estate, and this phrase penetrated the rest of our group by osmosis. I had ordered food and was bringing a slice of precious, overpriced gourmet pizza to my lips when Steve asked, bizarrely, "What category does that fall under? Sex, bodily functions or real estate?"

I examined the pizza for a moment, as though I were searching for the answer.

"Strangely enough, real estate," I stated, then took a bite. I looked at him, my mouth full, and added, "Location, location, location."

This was not terribly funny of course – just weird – but he laughed very, very hard – too hard – and for a long time. 

Later we went down to the Silver Swan, that old-time German beer bar, and it was clear that Steve was totally hammered. At one point he returned from the bar to our table gripping a hard pretzel. He had a manic, strained expression on his face. We all stopped talking and turned to him, warily awaiting his next move. He extended his arm almost ceremoniously and placed – sort of proffered – the pretzel on the red tablecloth, and – mission accomplished – collapsed into a chair, not to be heard from very much again.

We drove to the Presidio and stopped where a street took a right angle right and straight ahead the earth seemed to completely fall away, and in the distance was the Bay. We parked the car and got out and walked down the steps, the Lyon Street Steps, shouldered by ornate, shuttered Venetian-style homes with terra cotta roofs. It was all beautiful and precious and I wondered what it would be like to be one of these joggers, rich healthy San Francisco people, running up and down the steps and stretching against the stone walls of the flower garden.

For all its precious boutiques and pricey clothes shops and restaurants, and its good-willed hyper-liberalism, Haight-Ashbury has a faintly menacing quality. Punk drifters sitting on the curb staring us down as I backed in the car, as though to say this parking space is ours. Hordes of pierced-face, purple-haired youth walking three or four abreast, owning the sidewalks too, everything under the white sky.

We split up and I wandered listlessly, eventually hanging out in an empty radical bookstore and flipping through little stapled and Xeroxed lesbian art mags and tracts by tired revolutionaries. 

To realize that we need new contexts to recognize such values as honesty, and even beauty.

I was walking through Midtown after work yesterday, in transit between train and bus, down the Madison Avenue valley between dark glass buildings with shuttered delis and sandwich shops below. There was something bright and awful splattered in the middle of the sidewalk up ahead. Others walked wide arcs around the mess, which seemed deliberate and meaningful in its placement, like an art installation. I approached it and saw what it was: a plastic container from a deli buffet exploded open, pasta and carrots and barbecued chicken; rice and beans; macaroni and cheese, everything radiating from the center and a single white plastic fork pointing away.

The graffiti tag on the poster in the subway is the grinning boy again but now he's on the surface of the crater-pocked moon, its horizon curving behind him to affirm the otherworldliness.

Later we staggered down Canal in the cold rain to a party in a warehousy building in TriBeCa. It was a lesbian party – a dozen or so in the dimness of a vast, sparse apartment. Some were still celebrating Halloween, looking sort of demented in obscure, indistinct costumes while everyone around them was normal. It was decided that I had come as a man and everyone laughed. We drank some more, some punch with god knows what. There was a microphone and an amp set up for some reason and people would approach the mic and say things or sing off key a bit and step away fast, as though evading a calamity. I spoke to a short and wide-eyed woman named Catherine or something, who said she was 38 but looked like she was in her mid-twenties, and I kept telling her I couldn't believe it until she begged me to stop.

There was a desultory aspect to the party, and I can't even remember if there was music but there must have been, and it was dark like a cellar, yet the mood seemed happy. They were running and jumping on a big inflatable ball, rolling over it on their bellies and landing harshly on the floor on the other side. Gleefully flirting with injury.

Something about B. made me nervous. She was jumpy, manic, impulsive. When she had a thought she'd go "Oh oh oh!" and blurt it out at once. And there was an aura of mischief around her too. There was that time she told me she had the credit cards of her bosses at two jobs where she'd been fired. She told me once, what if I ordered things and had them shipped to your house? No one would ever know. I changed the subject.

Met S. and B. and V. at a bar and then we went to a gallery on Broadway and Canal where some friend of V.'s was curating something. There was free booze there, not just the typical rotgut red and white, so that was good, and I had mandarin vodka and orange juice. I glanced cursorily at the art, pointless painted ceramic pieces like a large white squash. A thin blue wedge emerging from one wall, head-high. A blue pot with its lid resting beside it. There was a makeshift catalog, just one printed sheet of paper, lying on a shelf by the guestbook. The prices began at $10,000 and peaked at $26,000.

There's a graffiti artist in my neighborhood whose tag is great. It's a cartoon of a boy walking, head-on, his right knee bent back and the shoe vertical, his left foot forward; his right arm lifted and the fingers splayed in a bursting wave. The boy's mouth is a wide, rectangular grid of teeth superimposed on his round face – the borders of the mouth are actually outside the borders of the face. He's got a zooey expression and abstract, spiky hair. The image is joyous, positive, affirmative somehow, yet also faintly disquieting (that mouth!). The artist sometimes draws a suggestion of a sidewalk beneath the boy's feet, and usually a "© 2002."

He also sometimes refers to the surroundings in his tags: I see them a lot in the subway, drawn in the white space of an airline poster that mentions foreign cities and seems to change cities from week to week. When the poster said Paris he drew an Eiffel Tower behind the boy and, weirdly, a landscape of snow-covered mountains in the distance. When it said Rome he drew the leaning tower of Pisa.

He also sometimes incorporates messages. On another poster in the subway he drew the tag and these words above it: REGAIN CONSCIOUSNESS Early in the morning, underground, waiting for the train, I can't help but perceive this as something like a divine command.

I walked back from the bar past J's apartment on 79th Street. Its awning jutted at me from across the street, menacing kind of. I wondered how weird it'd be if she saw me there. What are you doing here? Nothing. I'm walking home from a bar. As the cab curved through Central Park I wondered if A. had been the right girl for me. I thought maybe. The one so far. But so what? When I got home the apartment was unlit and quiet but the air was ripe with the warm, heady odor of a freshly showered body. Soap hung almost cloyingly in the kitcheny darkness. The smell was something wonderful that I wanted to hold up by its arms, its arms against its sides, to hold up and to praise and to glorify.

Slept off a hangover and had a semiconscious sort of day Saturday, taking the bus down Fifth and staring, entranced, at the people on the sidewalks, all ugly and beautiful at once. A group of Japanese women got on at the Met; two sat right in front of me and one in particular was beautiful and I stared at her profile and her hands. She pointed something out on the Plaza, maybe the hot dog guy, maybe the hot nuts guy beside him, maybe the pigeons on the statue or the idle horse-drawn carriages on 59th. The other woman giggled in one breath, one soft convulsion, and I wondered at how similar we all are after all.

The nut guy's nut cart said "Nuts 4 Nuts."

I got a haircut at the barber on 23rd Street, just under the wire – I was in the owner's chair and he kept stopping and unbolting and bolting the door as each remaining customer left. He cut my hair deftly yet deliberately, and I was amazed at how this could be any kind of business at $10 a cut. He spoke some foreign tongue from time to time, seemingly to no one in particular but I suppose to the young barber one chair over who was fussing with a black man's fade. The young man didn't seem to respond but I guessed their communication was supraverbal – no indication was required for a thing to be understood or to be understood to be understood. What the hell was it I wondered, Russian? Hungarian? Albanian maybe. I got my hair cut and my eyebrows trimmed and my neck razed – the hot shave cream he applies daintily with his thumb and the delicious prickle of the flat razor on my nape. He wipes it on the tissue tucked in my collar between each set of downward scraping strokes.

A couple weeks ago I went to Baltimore with Chris and Jim, to see their old friend Jeff play. We drove in the pouring rain, Chris racing in the fast lane and peering over the dashboard to see below the fog on the windscreen.

Down this way the sniper was hunkered somewhere, thinking. Or maybe sleeping or maybe having something to eat. He'd shot eight people by then, or was it nine, and six had died, or was it seven.

We stopped at a rest stop just across the border into Maryland. It was overrun by teenagers who had evidently adopted it as their hangout. Friday night at the rest stop, hanging out in the food court, racing through the main hall, dodging drifters and old fat couples, twisting the knobs of gumball machines. Two boys were languidly wrestling each other, getting in people's way a little and not caring, fully preoccupied with each other but addressing each other only with arms and hands – their eyes looked elsewhere. Tittering girls at a table near us discussed the sniper.

"I heard he shot five people in a single day!" one girl gushed.

Right outside of Baltimore, October 2002.

Extreme unction, what's your function?

"I don't think we'll have much of a fall," the cashier at the grocery store said to one of the others.

The sound of a car door slamming. 

The sky above the hardware store.

An ad for coffee in a magazine.

A seagull on a saturated beam.

A couple of weeks ago at C.'s party I blacked out. Actually it was after her party but during it I could feel consciousness falter and slip away. I was drinking gin and tonic and vodka and tonic and I can hardly remember talking to anyone but I know I must have, S. I think, and G., and K. a bit and P. who was sitting in a chair by the bookcase looking morose.

G. and C. were there with C.'s sister, whose name I can't remember but who was beautiful, long straight brown hair and dark eyes and a small mouth with full  lips, her lower lip perpetually wet.

Everyone left and C. and H. and C. and I walked to Paddy's and this is when I lost it. I think I remember walking over there, dodging the trees in the sidewalk. We played pool of course. I was drinking whiskey but I'm not sure how the glass got in my hand. We played this couple over and over again. Once I looked over at H. He seemed to be looking down at me. He shook his head a little and smiled, amused, sipping his gin and tonic from the stirring straw. I wondered what he saw.

At one point C. and I were telling C. what shot to take and she hates that, and I know it, but she said OK to shut us up and then C. said hit it low, and that freaked her out. She was crying. She said you guys don't understand what that's like. I wanted her to stop crying, I wanted it to all be better. She wanted to leave but we convinced her to stay. I could not attenuate myself to the situation. I said come on, let's play again, and she was still pissed off. I wanted us to forget about this.

The woman in the couple bought me a drink. I think it might have been because I won a game but I think she might have bought me another one. Maybe more.

I think I remember leaving the bar – literally walking out the door – but nothing else. And I don't know how I got home, or how I remembered that K. had my keys and he was waiting for me to buzz my buzzer.

That's all I remember but the day after C. and C. reminded me about things. C. said he was laughing because I had a giant whiskey stain on my shirt that wouldn't dry. I was marked, extraordinarily, like Lady Macbeth. C. said he'd told me to go talk to the woman who was buying me drinks. Apparently I walked over to her at the bar. She was sitting with the guy. I stood and watched for a few moments. Stood there. And turned around and came right back. After we made C. cry she had comforted her, putting her arm around her and squeezing and saying who needs men anyway? We don't need men. At the end of the night she was grasping C.'s hands and kissing them as we left.

Hearing C. and C. tell me what happened gave me a key to this part of my consciousness and I could sort of remember what it felt like to inhabit that state. At the time I think it felt perfectly normal. I was not aware, of course, of the disintegration of my consciousness – how could I be? But I was present, responsive, engaged. And to have all that be disconnected from consciousness is terrifying.

On the bus on the way home from work I was reading an article in The New Yorker, a sort of typically dense economics article, by turns engrossing and numbing, and I began to drift off and I actually noticed the words and phrases losing their meaning until I reached a strange, delicate limbo in which I was not sleeping, not quite dreaming, and yet I began to read a completely different meaning in the text than that which was intended. I mean, completely different. Apparently irreconcilable to the actual words on the page. And yet I was reading the words, and the meaning I perceived was driven by the act of reading those very words. For a while the misapprehension centered on sex. The text was about unscrupulous CEOs and their greedy abuses but I understood it to be about sex, the sex act, and quite violent sex I think, at one point.

Sitting here at six in the morning a familiar sound erupted behind me: the hiss and gurgle of the radiator. They put the heat on.

My job is winding down in our new office in a strange part of town, at the crux of TriBeCa and SoHo, facing that striking public works building out on the Hudson. Each day I walk down Canal to get there, from Chinatown past the watercolor letterists and shops of knockoffs. The street is intimate; I get a sense of it as a distinct, self-sustaining community. A Chinese woman swept dust from out of one store and emerged to return the dustpan and broom to a store a few doors down. Businesses sit on top of each other and you don't know what's what or who you're supposed to buy anything from but someone will step up to sell. Shops with "electronics" and "audio" in their names sell nothing but fake shoes and handbags.

I hardly do any work. I show up and greet the few remaining people and we hang around and talk and we go out for long lunches and when Steve isn't there we play the guitar, we sing, we erupt in mad fits of cursing. It occurs to me what a weird and wonderful time this is. I will likely never have another time that is quite like this. In spite of the gloomy circumstances and the industrial grimness of the office (Jason said yesterday, "I hate coming into the office") I know that I will look back on this fondly. I'm in the middle of it and I know all too soon it will be over and I'm just trying to grasp it a little.

Listening to old tapes of my song ideas I feel like Beckett's Krapp listening to the tape of his diary. Disconcerting and absurd. At one point on a tape from '98 I heard Aimee's chimey voice in the background and I was plunged back into that cozy world I'd lost, or given up.

I was ironing a shirt and the steam liberated the scents that had been trapped in the fibers: a bar – cigarettes, other people's cologne, booze, wood tramped on by tens of thousands of shoes and boots. It smelled great and it made me want to be lost.

Friday night I fell asleep on the uptown bus after Christina's roof party, drunk and sated from salty sweet McDonald's hamburgers, and I awoke at 120th Street and Adam Clayton Powell Boulevard. The walk back down was strangely delightful. Adam Clayton Boulevard, a tree-lined corridor bisecting the top of Central Park, was a dream of old New York, of New York in 1925 or something. The beautiful old buildings seemed more intact than I'd expected, preserved somehow, not by renovation but by some invisible benign envelope. The walls were bathed in yellow glow. There was street life here and there, people on stoops or gathered in groups on the sidewalk. Looking down, the street disappeared into the blackness of the park aglitter with lamplight. I took a left onto 110th Street. I passed a blue awning that said DENTIST'S OFFICE and a plaque beside the door that said DENTIST'S OFFICE too.

We left at dawn with all the Japanese kids, all of us sweating, them in their tight racing-striped tees and platform boots and hair dyed blonde, hair dyed blue. There was a locker room where we all had checked our bags and it really looked like a gym locker room and for a moment I fantasized I was one of them in a Tokyo school. I liked to stand among them, their titters and glances dancing around me.

Roger and I went into a train station and a British couple approached us to chat. They'd been out celebrating his birthday – happy birthday, we said. He'd had "quite a few beers, mate, quite a few tequilas." Turns out they were there teaching English; they lived in a tiny apartment somewhere and had this strange ex-pat life. They were ordinary working-class British, down to earth and fast-talking. We asked them what it was like and the guy riffed about Japan and the Japanese. He was funny and I liked him. He said it was right strange living here, mate. The Japanese do not feel shame the way we do, he noted. For example, they are not the least bit disinclined to stare straight into your eyes for a long while simply because you're white. It happens to him all the time, he said. He'll be on a train and he'll sense something a bit off and look up to find the commuter across the aisle staring intently at him and, rather than looking away in embarrassment upon being caught, unflinchingly continuing to stare, every bit as intently. And also the customs, you have to be careful. It's quite taboo to eat while standing up. Very taboo. Don't eat a piece of pizza or something standing on the platform of a train or walking down the street. And don't blow your nose in public. You may just as well be wiping your arse.

What do you eat?

Lots of noodles mate. You get used to noodles. You have to get used to noodles if you want to live in Japan. Food is bloody expensive but noodles are fucking cheap, mate. And a bit of seafood now and then yeah? But the shop is very strange here too. The way prices are for things. For example you can go into a shop and find a mini-stereo, speakers, CD player, radio, the whole lot, for 3,500 yen. And then you go to the fruit section of the store right? And you pick up a package of red apples, three polished red apples packed in clear wrap on a green styrofoam tray and you look at the price and it's… 3,500 yen.

The girl was quieter but funny too and I liked them both. She had brown hair tied back severely in a ponytail and bright red lipstick and lots of mascara and a sexy sort of form-fitting leather jacket. Roger said are you a Jordy then? She smiled and said yeah, she's from Newcastle, can you tell? And Roger said yeah, you got a Jordy accent.

I took a great picture of the two of them on the train, her head on his shoulders, and then they got off forever and there I was with Roger on our way back out through the suburbs, gray and dewy this time, schoolgirls staring with their white socks up. We got off in a little town near the airport and took a walk, and he wanted to go see a monastery or some fucking thing and I just wanted an excuse to leave him so that's where we parted, him walking down the road, me hailing a cab back to the hotel. I took a shower, numb and nauseous, and took the bus to the airport and flew back around the world.

There was a huge crowd in a U-shaped space around the bar, everyone dancing in place, like everything else in this city. A DJ was spinning up-to-date hip-hop. I waded from one side of the room to the other, watching people, stopping to dance awhile, hoping to really feel lost. It was mostly young Japanese but there were Westerners here and there. There was a magnificent sight all along the bar: ten or so beautiful young Japanese women all dancing in a row, their hips and arms in counterpoint. I approached and faced one and danced before her for a while, aware of myself as a sort of worshiper or supplicant. She occasionally graced me with her gaze and smile. Eventually it was just too much and I had to move away, and I danced before another one, and another.

When I saw Roger again he had gotten a hold of two glow sticks and was dancing ostentatiously raver-style, his gaze intent, wildly waving his arms in the space he'd created around him. I wandered away again, hoping to perhaps never see him again.

The music was hot and I was drunk, a mass of dancing youth around me. Everything vertical, up up up! Time raced for the sunrise. A particular bar dancer caught my eye because she was wearing a t-shirt that said something. I could tell from afar that it was English and I knew that if a beautiful Japanese woman dancing on a bar was wearing a t-shirt in English, then what it said had to be remarkable. I made my way closer to have a look. I felt hot and short of breath in anticipation. Finally I could see it. She was dancing, knees pumping up and down, arms swaying. The t-shirt was white, with a rainbow on it. Above the arc of the rainbow it said this: COMMUNICATION. And below the arc, on three lines: GOOD JOYFUL HAPPINESS.

I wanted to cry it was so beautiful. Then I danced in front of her like a fool.

We got out at Shinjuku Station and found a place to eat, a sushi restaurant on the second floor. Everything in Tokyo is up stories; it's a vertical city. Bars, shops, restaurants: 2F, 5F, 7F. What's on the ground floor? Banks.

We took our shoes off at the front door and sat cross-legged at a low table in the back. I had sake and Roger had tea and we ordered sushi that was no better than it is in New York. We talked about where we were from and then about girls and relationships and he said he was in love with some girl but he cheated on her or something and pissed her off and now he wants her back. Outside it began to rain.

There was nothing happening in the neighborhood so we took a cab to Roppongi. As I gazed through the beaded water on the windows I wondered, this place could be any city, it's like all the cities I know: What makes it Tokyo? I searched for something that would evoke magnificent, strange difference but found only pleasant residential streets lined with trees and shrubs and walls around parks, streetlights and crosswalks and cars and parking meters.

When we got to Roppongi the rain was pouring in thick, warm ropes. It was maybe the hardest rain I'd ever seen; a choking, blinding deluge that soaked all the fabric on my body. We walked up and down the main street and finally decided to go to the Gas Panic Bar, just down a side street. We spent a couple of hours in the second-floor bar, Club 99, a relatively subdued place with an American-looking bartender and lots of young Japanese. We sat at a small table, drying off and drinking beer and looking around. I took pictures in the red-lighted semi-darkness. And then we went to the bar on the third floor.

Lis and I drove into San Francisco from the airport on Thursday, with time to kill before picking up Mom and Viv in San Jose. It was beautiful and breezy. We headed north on 101 to the hill that said SOUTH SAN FRANCISCO THE INDUSTRIAL CITY. I was struck by all the Spanish names, San Mateo, San Bruno, San Francisco, and I thought of how good they sounded in American, in sunny California American, and I was happy that we had kept these Spanish words for towns, though it hardly occurs to us they are the names of saints.

With nowhere to go we headed directly to Haight-Ashbury.

Went to a bar to see my coworker DJ, with my other doomed coworkers, and we talked about what it was like to be on the way out and we talked about our dream jobs, not just our fantasy dream jobs but our realistic dream jobs, and we talked about seeing art in a museum and how the context is fucked up. Howie DJ'ed good and he played a great slow version of "Heart of Glass." 

We talked about outsider art and the creative process. Geoff has tried to write but he's sure he can't do it. "Yes you can," said Chris, "No," said Geoff, "Trust me. I write a paragraph and a half."

We told him we'd really like to read those paragraphs and a half.

Denis appeared to be high. "Life is beautiful," he blurted out at one point. We turned to him. "Don't you just think life is beautiful?" he asked. He described how important it was to him to escape the mundane.

Thump thump thump thump thump-bash thump thump-bash thump went the music.

Newton was a bit like Columbus. He made a big discovery, but he didn't know exactly what he had discovered – or how momentous his discovery really was.

When Newton discovered gravity, he discovered God. What is God – what could God possibly be – if not gravity? Without gravity, the entire universe would be completely empty and there would be no reality of any kind whatsoever. Think about it.

This view is consistent with other notions of God – or suspicions as to the nature of God, anyway. We are often tempted to assert that God is love. This sounds "right" in a sort of abstract, instinctive way – we like to imagine God as a ubiquitous, positive force. Well that's right. God is a ubiquitous, positive force. Literally. And it is love. Everything that binds or draws one thing to another, everything that staves off entropy, the single thing that has enabled matter to coalesce into worlds and higher and higher forms of life – it's simply gravity. And to the degree that we feel that God must be an agent in the life of the universe right down to the minutest elements in human affairs, well… that's true, too. Perhaps not in the way that we would like to think (God does not answer prayers, let's face it), but God – gravity!- is unquestionably the agent of everything that happens in the universe.

It's deceptively simple. We have overlooked it perhaps because it's too simple, and not satisfyingly romantic or spectacular to our overstimulated imaginations. Also, we have a foolish – tragic, sometimes – tendency to believe the greater the question, the more complex the answer. Often the opposite is the case. Good scientists and mathematicians really appreciate this paradox – when faced with a difficult problem, they know to look first for the simplest answer. And it's a law of troubleshooting, expressed in the owner's manual of practically any gadget: Not working? Make sure it's plugged in.

Looking for God? It's everywhere. 

The city train was more crowded and I felt people staring at us, not in any kind of antipathetic way but out of naked curiosity. We were so obviously different. Their gazes followed us in and out of the car and almost every moment in between.

The train was full of somber, inconspicuous commuters; working people; young pigeon-toed women clutching their handbags, paunchy men with their arms crossed. After we shared perfunctory background information about ourselves – he's "going to university" for physics, I'm starting a new job – Roger managed to steer the conversation to Her Majesty the Queen: she has more power than you might think actually, and I thought, what is it with the English and their queen? Here we are in Tokyo and I have to hear this. I looked away during a pause in the conversation and perceived a wild burst of fiery red light in the darkness right outside the window. I turned to see a hovering, laser-projected logo on the tunnel wall and it said:

Yahoo!

The ride took about an hour and a half and we still weren't there. We got off at some arbitrary station that seemed deep in the city but then we realized it was the business district – a forest of office buildings with corporate logos on the top, empty for the night. A sweaty man with glasses offered to help. "Where are you going?" he said haltingly. We tried to tell him and he said OK, and he made some strange remark about girls, were we looking for girls, and we said ha, no no, but he did tell us what connection to make to Shinjuku Station. We thanked him and he bowed and nodded and thanked us.

We went out to dinner that night with Jo and Michael and his wife and the kids, at a good French restaurant. We sat at a long table in the back and had spicy Australian wine and I had the lamb and it was all very good, and we talked about this and that and I admired Jo diagonally, in vain.

Then the next morning it was time to go, just like that. Kevin had to go to work and so Kate drove me to the airport and walked around the terminal with me a little while, killing time. We browsed a clothes store – it was odd to be engaged in such mundane behavior so soon before our separation. But finally I had to pass through the gate and we embraced and like always Kate said, "You're shaking!" and I said yes I know, I'm a trepidatious man.

I landed back in Tokyo nine hours later, at about 7:30 at night, went through customs, took the shuttle to the hotel, checked in, and there I was, in Tokyo with the night ahead of me. I went down to the lobby and noticed a line of taxis outside. I got in the back of a taxi and told the driver I wanted to go into Tokyo. He didn't understand a word. I wrote "Shinjuku Station" in my little notebook and tore out the sheet and gave it to him. I had read about bars and nightlife at Shinjuku Station.

He scribbled something and handed the paper back. It said "25,000." That was like, $250. I briefly considered giving it to him but figured there had to be a better way. He gestured with his hands and said something in half Japanese, half broken English, articulating how far away we were, how that was a normal price. I said no thank you and slipped out of the cab.

I was asking someone at the front desk how to take a train to town when a young English guy sidled up to me.

"You going into town?"

"Yeah."

"So am I. Let's go together."

"Sure." I didn't want to say no. How do you say no to a complete stranger in a place that's strange to both of you? But I had fantasized about being alone in Tokyo, of having a solitary and unpredictable experience. And I was sorry to give that up.

We got our directions and took the shuttle back to the airport and descended to the lower levels of the terminal, where the trains were. The deeper you went, it seemed, the less English there was. At the bottom there was nothing anywhere but Japanese characters: exit signs, train schedules, poster ads, everything was a colored blur of lines and squiggles. I had a sense of truly entering a different world, where my reference points had vanished. We went to the ticket booth and with difficulty got the man to understand what we wanted, and we found a train to take. We could take the express or the cheaper local commuter train and the English guy, Roger, said he wanted to save money so I said OK fine, and we took the slow train, and I already began to regret having met him.

After the fights Kevin and I walked through the downtown Olympic Park, the strange mass of international tourists, the tents and kiosks with pins and other souvenirs. We looked for a place to drink but everything was crowded and awful so we took the monorail out of the neighborhood. We got out and walked up a steep pedestrian street with young street life, musicians and people sitting in the middle of the pavement watching. We walked across a big empty green bordered by office buildings and lit by just a few lamps and there was no one in sight.

On Friday, my last day, we went into town in the car and ate breakfast at a chic café, the kind with wooden chairs and flowers and everything written on a chalkboard. We had parked in a cul-de-sac near steps that led down a steep hill facing the city and someone put the baby down on the top of the steps and I took a picture of her from above and beside her on the pavement there was a junkie's discarded needle.

We drove around more, went to Kate's parents house again, went to a great big shopping center out in the country somewhere with a long escalator up to the supermarket. The aisles and aisles of packaged food, the weary people stopping on the way home from work, the inescapable light, it always makes experience immediately mundane. I strained for evidence that this was still exotic in some minute way, as I was far, far away from home, but I could not, and felt hollow and tired, infected with the petty melancholy of something idly pleasant reaching its end; like a child on a Sunday night.

Last Friday I went out after work just like always, liberated, with limitless possibilities and mysteries ahead. Jason and I met up with Christina in front of the Ciel Rouge on 7th Ave., and it wasn't open yet of course, so we walked down to 14th Street and found an old Irish bar with a long green awning. "It looks like they might have beer there," said Christina.

Inside it was dark and cool and it smelled dank and dead-flowery somehow, a sharp, rich stink from industrial-strength cleaning agents and hundreds of man-years of bad cologne. It seemed like we were in some other city in a faraway state – when we left I said maybe the Southwest somewhere – the place was too cold and spacious and empty for Manhattan.

After one drink there we went up to the Ciel and sat in the back garden and P. C. came too, and Jake, and Jason's friend Ed and Lis and Nora finally, and I drank mojitos and picked wet mint from between my teeth, and everyone talked and had a good time. Christina went to the Knitting Factory and Jason and Ed left, then everyone else got up to go and it was dark now and I hadn't even noticed. Jake and P. C. and I met P. C.'s friend Bret and this other guy Tom and we walked to a pool hall nearby. It was some weird new-looking place with a bar upstairs and tables downstairs and everything was chromy-clean and slick and awful. Jake left and the four of us played, Tom and I beating Bret and P. C. in a few games, and I guess I drank Heineken, I'm pretty sure. 

The interior architecture seemed to preclude conviviality or even the most incidental human contact.

We walked farther east now, to Paddy's. I want to describe how we knew upon walking in that we had to leave but I'm not sure how. The crowd was not precisely unfriendly but sort of leeringly territorial, flush with the idea of themselves. We turned on our heels and walked uptown to some other place, a place I'd been, and ordered drinks and sat like assholes in chairs by the wall, waiting for God knows what to happen.

Finally Bret left and Tom and P. C. and I met Christina back downtown at Bar 81. We sat around the corner of the bar and drank and talked and I was starving so I went with Christina to get pizza and we got back and drank some more and played pool. I was unhinged, dancing around the pool table. In fact did not play so badly. But I wish I had been more conscious.

After the first few hours of blackness I got hit hard in the morning. I craved sleep but it only seemed to come in fitful spurts punctuated by agonizing nausea. There was no comfort anywhere. I got up once and took some Advil and water and assessed the true scope of my misery.

Then I woke up at 4 o'clock and felt fine.

Yesterday it was the hottest day of the year so far, and the heaviest with humidity. In the middle of the afternoon there was a cloudburst and rain fell in great big drops. Chris opened the back door of the office and went out on the fire escape.

"It's raining but it's still just as hot. Check it out," Chris said. Denis and I stuck our heads out. It was true. It was pouring but the air was still thick and hot. It occurred to me that I had maybe never felt that before.

Kevin and I went to the downtown Olympic Park to watch boxing that night. The arena was really an elaborate circus tent built around steel scaffolds and bleacher seats, ready to be taken down and forever disappear. Inside the vibe was edgy and mean – I wondered why and then I realized there were virtually no women at all in the entire place. Starving, I got in line for more of the awful, bland food they were serving at all the events. And beer. 

We watched a succession of semifinal fights graduating up the weight classes: tiny, wiry light flyweights giving way to bantamweights, lightweights, bigger, slower, stronger. We struggled to make sense of what was happening in the ring and sometimes the outcome was obvious and sometimes it was not, and sometimes the judging seemed arbitrary and maybe unfair. Many boxers were from former Soviet Republics: Russia, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan. It was hard for American boys like us not to root against them in a "Rocky IV" kind of way. With their unpronounceable polysyllabic names and machinelike demeanor they seemed immediately forbidding, their humanity calloused by years of tortuous nationalistic training.

In the audience men shouted at each other in different tongues. They cursed in Russian, Spanish, English and everyone understood everyone else perfectly well. Several times I thought men might wade furiously through the crowd to grapple with each other. We sat directly behind fans of the British super heavyweight Audley Harrison, a black family – maybe his family – carrying a Union Jack. Evander Holyfield sat at ringside and got up between each bout to greet fans across a partition. He posed grandly for pictures, signed autographs. Kevin went down there with his camera and it was funny to look down and watch him stare dully at Evander and the clamoring throng.

The peeler clattered in the sink. 

I remember when I was a kid, I would watch sports on TV with a ravenous passion. I didn't much care who was playing. I had teams I liked but it was enough to watch the formal green expanse of any field fill up the shimmering screen and to see things happen on it; balls bouncing, flying; officials at their marks, measuring, assessing; cleated players with uniforms bearing bold, block digits. A numerological world of ineffable mystical representations. Formal chaos.

I once watched, enrapt, an indoor soccer game on the dining room TV of the Colbys' apartment in New York. It was me and Lis and Lenny, the parents had gone out. What delight there was to be visiting this manic, thrilling place; and within it to be safe at a table looking up. Watching the ball careen ferociously around the curved boards, to be cleared or kicked on goal with momentous urgency by this player or that one or the other; the ones in lime green or the ones in orange, it didn't matter, it was happening.

Lenny's mom had left us a pan of brownies with Swiss milk chocolate bars melted on top.

The little gasp the microwave gives when you turn it on.

 Off to the discovery of somethin', on a Friday night.

I walked from the subway, 1:30 in the morning, and P. C. was up, tip-tapping away at his computer, playing Scrabble online or God knows.

"Hey," I said.

"Hey, Campesino."

It had been a longer night than I expected, hustling out of work at six and going to dinner and then going to the one-woman show by my co-worker's sister. It was quite good and funny, she talked about how their dad had a mail-order bride from the Philippines. Later we asked Geoff how much of it was true and he stuck his tongue between his teeth and laughed. 

We all went out drinking after that and talked about seeing celebrities, how they seem small in person, how they disappoint us, how we want to connect with them and how they fill us with rage.

On the way home from the train my mind was preoccupied with a fantasy rant against religion: ALL these doctrines, I thought: Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Shinto, Nazi, Buddhist – all of them, right? – they all distance man from God. All their mechanisms for piety, for, rationalization, for redemption, they can only serve to distance us from God, and what insanity that is! What reckless, awful insanity. Because out of that you get all the strife, the killing, the hatred, the torture. That's what you get when you deny the one truth: everybody knows. Let them know. Let them feel.

Long after we broke up, she used to send me letters with confetti inside.

We went to the New South Wales Art Gallery and saw some Australian abstract art, lots of it earth-toned and sandy-looking, as if such pigments were the only ones available in this desert continent. Then we walked through the Botanic Garden, where plants and shrubs and flowers and palm trees strained the margins of our path. We had lunch on the veranda of a café in the middle of the park. It was incredibly beautiful, tree flowers at eye level, birds chirping. Kate and Kevin were still sort of fighting. We had a bottle of wine that tasted like blackberry, and I had steak, and Kevin ate almost nothing but buttered bread. After lunch we wandered to the harbor and the Opera House, through the weird international throng of Olympic tourists.

When we got out of the train Kevin didn't know which way to go. It was raining even harder and I was wearing a thin wool sweater that got soaked through and that stifling wet-wool smell filled the air around me. We got on a bus going the wrong way and finally we got off and got in a taxi cab.

The casino was disappointingly similar to every other casino everywhere else: a vast room with muted gold light, a ceiling high like the sky, the faint stink of cigars, a carpet with a tessellated turquoise and purple pattern. People from all over the world but a prevalence of Pacific Islanders and Asians; businessmen from Hong Kong, Bangkok, Kuala Lumpur. I had some noodles with greasy duck from the noodle shop on the concession floor downstairs. Everything there was sad and ugly in harsh white light. Dazed families, packs of bored teenagers, not quite knowing what they were doing but doing it anyway. We lost at blackjack for awhile – I think I lost about a hundred. And that was it, we went home to Kate and the baby.

Thursday was strikingly beautiful. We went walking with Julia sleeping on Kevin's chest and Kate and Kevin arguing: Kevin was meant to get swimming lessons at the gym; he said he would but he hadn't and Kate was hectoring him and Kevin was snapping back at her defensively. I walked a few paces behind them, between them, watching them keep a mean little distance from each other. It seemed they had always fought like this and maybe always would and that's not necessarily bad, as long as they stay together – maybe it's worse the day they stop.

That night Kevin and I went to the casino in the pouring rain. I had taken a caffeine pill to counteract jetlag and now I was wired to the point of agitation; on the train into town I desperately hung on to Kevin's words, scouring them for meaning. I confessed to him how wired I was and he laughed.

The other morning on the bus to work I was in a mildly hung over reverie, slouched in my seat with my forehead leaning bumpily on the cool glass. I became vaguely aware of a man in front of me barking loudly into his cell phone. An older man, with a gruff Brooklyn accent.

Suddenly a woman in the front yelled out, "Sir! Would you please stop that?"

"What? I can't talk? Mind your business," he protested. And at the same volume as before he said into the phone, "I don't know, some woman is telling me to quiet down."

"You're very loud, sir," she continued.

"I'm not bothering anybody. Am I bothering anybody? Everyone raise their hand if I'm bothering you. See? No one raised their hand."

Another woman, sitting across the aisle, said to him, "You know, it really is annoying."

Things more or less calmed down after that.

There is no God and there is no devil but there is temptation. And there is righteous resistance to temptation borne of an instinctive apprehension that to succumb is wrong. Not wrong because God says so. Not wrong because man says so. Wrong because on a deep level, an unconscious level, we all know this: When you harm another you are harming yourself. Why? Because there is no other. "Other" is an illusion. We are all manifestations of the same being. And in spite of ourselves, in spite of our desires, in spite of our religious delusions, we know this is the only real truth. Though I deride all organized religions, the Christian notion of "do unto others" comes close to expressing this. The thing they got wrong, once again, is that the dictum does not come from God – it's much simpler than that. It comes from pure logical truth. To harm another is not sinful; it's perverse.

Somewhere in the course of the development of civilization we forgot this simplest truth, oneness. (Animals, incidentally, have not forgotten. They never do anything that is not morally justifiable. Animals do not – they can not – "sin." And it's not because they wouldn't take pleasure in doing so. It is simply not in their nature to violate nature.) And we had to invent an apparatus to maintain order in the face of this fracturing of consciousness. We had to invent God. How foolish – and foolhardy – to imagine that God is something outside ourselves. Because if it's outside of ourselves we can never be fully reconciled with it, and so our religions themselves become elaborate means to rationalize and support our transgressions. And in many cases, to exploit them.

The current wave of child molestation and denial in the Catholic Church is a clear example of the failure of religion, and religious orthodoxy in particular, to save man from temptation. These men who seduced young boys, young girls – who violated their vows but did much worse of course – are not inherently evil. Banish that facile interpretation from your head. They were sorely tempted, and the gravity of their temptation was proportional to their piety. These were not cynical men who entered the priesthood without faith, intending to rape the mouths and asses of the first altar boys they got their hands on. Of course not! They were religious men. Their faith – not just the hierarchy of the Church itself (though that counts for a lot) – actually enabled them to repeatedly molest children.

The Christian notion of forgiveness is to blame. Sin and redemption – that magical, compelling moral narrative that seems to invest every Christian life with meaning – actually provokes terrible deeds by the faithful. Original sin and inherited sin mark believers as sinners and they live down to that expectation. But there is no original sin – there is only original sanctity! And it's by denying our sanctity – and embracing our "sinfulness" – that we have gone so far astray.

"Look in your sister's room," P. C. said, as he walked past me to the kitchen.

"Look in my sister's room?" I said.

"Yeah."

"You want me to look in my sister's room."

"Look in her room."

I got up and walked over uncertainly and peered in the open doorway to find her slumped sideways on her bed, shoes on, face buried in a tangle of bedspread and pillow.

"She came home earlier and I said how are you and she said, ‘I'm shitfaced'," P. C. explained. "She went into her room."

"Did she tell you why she was shitfaced?"

"She went in and I expected her to come back out and tell me but she just like that, went down and that was it. Like that."

She winced a bit. "The things you do for fun in India you can't do here. I don't know, I read," she said. She ate tortilla chips in tiny bites. Sometimes a piece would crumble off and fall in her downy drink and she would pluck it out and pop it in her mouth. "I see how people live on television," she said, "and it's very different from life in India. I wonder what it would be like to live like that. I think I would like to try."

"But life on television isn't like real life," I said.

She looked across the room for a moment. "People going out to bars and drinking, and laughing, and doing things like playing pool," she said. "I think I would like someone to show me what that is like."

And I realized she was right: life in America is like life on TV. She was describing my life, and it had more in common with a beer commercial than with anyone's life in India. And I also realized what she really wanted from a man, an American man, and I realized I could give it to her if I wanted but I knew that I didn't and it was sad.

We sat at a table in the corner and she ordered a strawberry daiquiri and I ordered a scotch. I asked her if she had just ended a serious relationship and she acted a little surprised that I would ask, but she said yes, and we talked about that. The romance was gone, she said. They'd been together for nine years, almost since she'd come over, and they had done everything together. He was Indian too and he was practically her only friend in the States. She teased the frothy surface of the daiquiri with her straw and bent her head down when she went to drink.

"You've met other people though, right? At work?" I inquired hopefully.

"No. It is a very big problem with immigrants. They come over and they never fit in. They try to but they cannot. They stay with their own kind always."

We talked more about her ex, and about mine. She still lives with him, she said. He's a writer, he's trying to sell his novel but he hasn't and he's depressed. But she kept returning to this sad theme of being lost in the New World, of longing for what was all around but out of reach.

"What do you like to do for fun?" I asked, hoping this idiotic and banal question would lighten the mood.

Everything is quiet and gray-dark in the apartment. There's a half-filled glass of water on the coffee table but no one's there.

She waved to me from across the street and pointed we're going this way, across the avenue. Before we'd even crossed she asked me what do I do – oh you write? What kind of writing? If you write about your experiences, how does the reader know you're not lying? These writers who do this, they're vain, they only want to look good. Yes I suppose it's a problem, I said. We walked a few blocks, turning here and there, and she stopped across from a Mexican Restaurant.

"Do you want to go there?" she asked.

"Sure."

It was a generic blonde-wood margarita place with a basket of chips on every table and twinkling Christmas lights for décor, a sad and futile place to suit the nature of our encounter. Like me, illegitimate.

From a dream, yesterday morning: May freedom melt in your throat like ice cream.

I went to 28th Street and walked up and over to the uptown side and I waited. I watched as waves and waves of commuters got off trains and filed through the turnstiles, disappearing upstairs to leave the station quiet again. I scanned the crowd for any dark woman's face. I was calm but not serene; all I could think of was how strange this was, this dreadful anticipation. I was about to see her.

Finally she appeared. She was slender, with a long black coat and her hair tied back. She had thin lips, high cheekbones, a bit of an overbite. She looked good and I was relieved. Pat, she said, yes I said, and she smiled and we stood wordless a moment, and I said would you like to get together later and she said sure. I said what about tonight and she put her hands up to her head and said I don't know, I'm so pressed for time and I said that's OK, how about tomorrow and she said yes. I said we'd talk later and it was good to meet her and I shook her hand.

Later she called me and left a message. "It's Sajita, I want to make sure everything's all right." She was afraid I had changed my mind, I realized. I called her back and said everything's fine and she said why don't you come out to Brooklyn tonight, come out to Grand Army Plaza and call me when you get out.

I waited on the corner on Nevins Street, waited for her to come and find me, watching people walk home in the cool spring dusk. Two women, one black and one white, walked up.

"Excuse me," the black one said.

"Yes?"

"You speak English!" she exclaimed with goofy, exaggerated delight. "Do you know how to get to Park Slope?"

"I'm sorry, I'm not from around here."

"Oh."

I motioned toward the subway entrance with my head. "You could go down and ask the, uh, the tollbooth guy."

"Good idea!"

"The token booth guy."

"Good idea!"

They nodded to each other, eyebrows raised.

"Good idea! Thank you!"

And I was left to stand and wait again.

P. C. found a walk-don't walk sign on the street somewhere – just the flat part with the words on it – and put it on the wall in the kitchen. In its new context it is quite striking. Here's what it looks like, in big bold block letters:

DON'T

WALK

WALK

It is a poem, a piece of found art. Stare at it for a long time and see where your mind goes.

Last night I couldn't remember whether it was 2001 or 2002. I saw 01 on a computer file I thought was recent and I thought, damn, is it still 2001? Then, is it 2002? Hard to say which was more baffling. And in the morning I was chilled by the looming date on the milk carton – it seemed so far away at the store.

We are well into the future. 

The last day at Les Frauds is when Mom and I got to talking about September 11th and it was curiously contentious; she found the picture book moving yet maudlin too, and she was right, and it was exactly what I feared she might think, and what I feared about everyone's reaction to the whole thing too in a way, but I found myself growing defensive anyway. The elevation of the towers themselves as iconic vehicles for the projection of grief and rage, which was fascinating to me (those smooth facades, those beautifully square corners, so abstract, could bear anything in their unreality – after having collapsed in reality under the burden of the attack itself), seemed alarming to her. Those were our worse tendencies, she thought. The vigils reminded her of Lady Di's death, and the exploitation of a moment of genuine national tragedy for such self-indulgent melodrama was sick. Yeah, yeah. I knew she had a point. But I wished I'd articulated something else, a different view, but instead we moved on and talked about Israel and Arab anti-Semitism. I ranted about the eventual decline and disintegration of all major world religions, starting perhaps with Islam. I was inspired toward exaggeration and extreme rhetoric. We talked about the Arabs who would deny that September 11th was the work of Islamic terrorists, what a terrible portent that was. I drew comparisons between the hatred of the Arabs for the Jews with all the other great racial hatreds of modern civilization. And she said it goes the other way too, and remember, the Israelis have so much and the Palestinians have so little. Religion is racist, I said.

There's a pair of black shoes strewn ten feet apart on the rain-spotted sidewalk outside our door.

A prostitute on an HBO documentary said she tells abusive pimps this: Don't you have no respect for your mother? You came out of a pussy just like what I'm sellin'.

A man was wandering crosscurrent to the crowd, shouting into his phone: "I want everyone in the E.R. now!" At that moment what was so disturbing was the idea of a parade of the wounded, the burned, filling overwhelmed triage centers; of course what ended up being more disturbing was the idleness of hundreds of doctors waiting for nothing. 

We walked up Fifth Avenue with everyone. The Empire State Building looked vulnerable and naked in the sun. There was a fierce charge in the air, like anything might happen. You couldn't get a phone signal. We dropped off Daniela with her boyfriend Guy, who was waiting across from Grand Central. Guy held Daniela in one arm and told us they hit the Sears Tower in Chicago. I parted company with Brian and walked up Madison. 

People were generally calm. Some seemed strangely cheerful, like the guys hitching rides on flatbeds and in the backs of pickup trucks. I walked alongside a middle-aged woman with glasses and curly hair who was weeping so uncontrollably she was choking on her tears. I passed a posh Upper East Side restaurant and noticed people inside eating and drinking, seemingly oblivious. They had to know. It seemed outrageous that anyone could be doing anything so indulgent at such a time but then again, maybe no one could take the measure of this event and respond accordingly yet. Still, it was jarring to see their faces dimly through the glass, the glint of silverware before them and glasses on their lips.

The first call I was able to make on my phone was to John. We talked about how it would always be before and after from now on. He said he saw the towers burning from the roof of his apartment in Chinatown and ran down to get a camera, and when he came back upstairs one of the towers was gone. He took some film of a police officer who had helped people escape. While the camera was rolling the cop realized that other guys in his squad had been crushed in the collapse and he broke down. John wondered what he could do with this footage but confessed to feeling guilty for his "mercenary" inclinations. He never did say anything about it again.

Back home, Jill called. She said Lis was over at her place and did I want to come over. I said I did. I got on the downtown bus at Fifth Avenue. It was crowded and I stood near the front. People were talking animatedly about the disaster. There was an eerie glee about the talk. People seemed to want to outdo each other with stories of horror, to be the bearers of worse and worse news just for the vain thrill it gave them. Or maybe if they made it worse in their heads, and asserted it, the reality would not be quite so hard.

"I heard 40,000 people died," a woman said.

"Oh no. Way more than that," said a man. "200,000."

The bus driver told his story.

"I was down there," he began. "I looked out the window and I saw what do you call it, graffiti coming out of the sky." We knew what he meant. "But then I realized it ain't no graffiti. It's pieces of paper. Eight and a half by eleven."

I got off around the Metropolitan Museum and walked across the park with a crowd. Everyone's pace seemed slow by half a step – with nothing left to escape, our bodies had been suffused with a processional solemnity. In a way, though, it was just like a beautiful afternoon of families in Central Park. There were lots of children, acting like children, skipping and swinging their parents' arms by the hand, but it was clear that they knew. One inquired naively about the thing: 

"Daddy, did the airplane really hit the building?"

"Yes."

"What happened to the people inside?"

A roaring fighter jet pierced the empty sky above us.