I lay recumbent in the faux Eames with a plate of cheese and crackers balanced on my belly and I was watching Nightline with that fucking inordinately cheerful guy Chris Bury and they showed the video of the Islamists with the Korean captive right before they cut his head off and there he was on his knees, the three ski-masked men behind him, and he was moaning and wailing for his life, I don't wanna die! I don't wanna die!

I don't wanna die.

Woke up this morning my mouth feeling cankerous.

D. at work yesterday had hiccups and they would not go away. He'd be over at someone's desk, talking to them, crouching, HOOP. And then he'd talk more in his deliberate, measured way, with his disconcertingly penetrating eye contact, HOOP. The hiccups sounded androgynous, animalistic, tinged by some vaguely foreign accent. And then it would be him again. HOOP. The old lesbians tittered at him. Some offered some fabled remedy or other and he'd politely – HOOP – listen and say I know, I've tried everything. It lasted all day long with virtually no interruption.

D. grew sexier as time went by, though by time I mean minutes not years.

There were things she wouldn't talk about. Those eight days in Paris. Her last relationship and its impact on her family. She was writing about that and she told me she was writing about it but she wouldn't talk about it.

She was slender with round cheeks and a smart smirky mouth and she was nearly gorgeous but something in her very molecularity kept her plain.

This morning there was yellow police tape across the entrance to the Park and a police car parked behind it. And silence, and nothing but beauty in the Park: the path around the Meer, florid; dewy swings and seesaws in the playground. I wondered what it all meant and peered pruriently over the old, low wall for signs of something strange and awful. All was utterly calm. At the corner more cop cars had gathered. A man surveyed the northeast corner of the Park through the lens of a Channel 5 news camera. Photographers wandered the sidewalk, their beige telephoto lenses bouncing on their haunches. A couple of cops were chatting with a young black man – could this be a witness, a suspect, some agent of the invisible, enfolding drama? But he said goodbye, reaching out his hand – they took it happily, eagerly, and he was on his way.

The perimeter ended. The perimeter ended with more yellow tape and more cars. More patrol cars where I turned to get on the train, Lennox. The train at Lennox Avenue.