I was afraid I’d be the only one, eating alone before six, but there were a couple tables taken. Soon after I sat down the late-day sun cut through the rain clouds, catching passersby with umbrellas on their shoulders. The light came in and glinted off the table polish and the goblets and the techno music.

The Indian man to my right orders a biryani very spicy and when it arrives I wonder if it is. Soon I hear him sniffing from the heat. They asked him what he wanted to drink and he said a Coke, a Diet Coke, as if it was the same thing or he didn’t give a fuck. He devoured quickly and even had some kind of fucking dessert. I’d ordered my chicken curry medium spicy and could have stood a little more. It was good but I perceived a terrible sameness in the dish. Why do I always get chicken? Would lamb make me happier, or shrimp? Where is that magic dish out there that satisfies everything?

All I want to be is a good patient, a good customer. Good guest. To say the right, vaguely pleasant thing when called upon. Not to fuck up. I specified the garlic naan and from the look in the waiter’s eye it seemed to go over well. I was proud to remember the name of the mediocre Indian beer when I ordered a second. King Fisher. Is there any other kind?

A young couple came in, she of Indian descent, he a milk-fed American boy. She asked him if he’d ever heard of tikka masala and he said no. You order for us, he said. It became clear they’d just started going out. The tentative jibes, excessive deference. She said she told her parents about him, that he worked in finance. He reacted warily. “Finance but not finance where?” and she said no.

On my way there I passed by the 9/11 memorial and I’d never seen it before, didn’t even know it was there. I just had to look. I didn’t know what to expect as I approached the wall. And then I saw the maw, the water pouring down then down again. It brought to mind a scene in a bad science fiction movie or TV show, the hero in danger of falling to the center of the earth. It also seemed like it had been there a very long time, many decades, a century or two. On my way out the sun was gone and the wind picked up like crazy. I went to see it again.

A woman at the bar has a t-shirt that says Steak Diane.

The Enterprise - 45

You could be among the dead. There’d never be shame in that. You could be among the lucky ones, standing one moment at the copy machine, thinking about lunch or sex or how you have to drive all the way to Rhode Island to see your in-laws this weekend—WHAM!, you’re pulverized out of existence. Now you’re a beloved memory. You’re perfect. You’re a face in a Pulitzer Prize–winning series of memorials in the paper, a sainted name projected onto the walls and rafters of Madison Square Garden during a performance by U2.

You could be among the survivors. Not among we survivors, who’d watched the towers fall on television. But those who’d scrambled out of the ash and debris, ties flailing over their shoulders, personal effects abandoned, heels snapping off. Those who’d gone down 82 floors in the smoke and the darkness just before the floors had gone down, too. They’d been suddenly conscripted in a one-day war. We were the folks back home.

You could also be a rescuer. Official or not. Anyone could walk past the barriers at 14th Street and volunteer for service. You got a shovel. A face mask, maybe. You could dig through the rubble all day, come back and do it all over again the next. The point was to find someone alive. No one did. But as long as there you were digging, you were alright. Many who did proclaimed that they had no choice, that the disaster site exerted a stronger pull than their families or their jobs or any kind of self-concern. Such duty was obviously hazardous, possibly suicidal. (The maw at Ground Zero was smoldering with bones and hair, with glass, paper, rubber, steel, plaster and asbestos; with nylon, vinyl and formaldehyde; with polypropylene, polystyrene and a thousand more of man’s creations; the disintegrated elements of city. The smell of death and poison, sickly-sweet and acrid, hung over the island for weeks.) Who did this kind of work? Not us. Not me. We weren’t among the dead or wounded, the survivors, nor the saviors.

Still we tried so hard to rise to the event. By talking about it, thinking about it. Writing about it. We took some idiotic pride in having been here, in being New Yorkers, in being able to say, yeah, I saw the planes come in, or I know someone who saw the planes come in, or better yet I know someone who died. Well, don’t know them maybe. A friend of my ex’s brother. Didn’t matter who. Someone. Anyone would do. We’d take anything we could. Gimme gimme gimme. I’ll take it. Did you see the wall of tributes in Grand Central? I sure did. So poignant. It was a thing you could say at a bar next time, or at a party. And then we felt foolish, ashamed even, for this pride. In our darker, honest moments we realized none of this had anything to do with us at all. We wished to be implicated. We were not.

Maybe this was a test. Not by design but anyway. The event that determined once and for all who we were. And we were the consumers. The watchers of TV. We were just like everybody else.

Oh no. Way more than that. Two hundred thousand.

There were a few things that people like us could do. We could give blood, everybody said. My sister and I dutifully presented ourselves at the nearest donation center. A line of like minded souls stretched out the door and around the corner of 67th Street and Second. Inside, perplexed staff members scrambled to manage the influx. We were turned away. Plus: no one needed blood.

So here we were, some coworkers and I, traipsing down Chelsea on a sunny weekday. Kevin towed a Radio Flyer filled with provisions we’d earnestly assembled and purchased at a Duane Reade. Boxes of PowerBars, a case of Gatorade, Bounty paper towels, Advil, Slim Jims, M&Ms and Visine. We were told they needed Visine most of all.

Many years later I passed the Memorial by chance, on my way to a bar downtown. I wasn’t even thinking about it, didn’t remember it was there. And there it was. I had to look. The scene was quiet, inconspicuous. A few people along the railing, no more than you’d see in any little square. I approached the wall with no idea what I was about to see. The ground opened up into a vast, square space and opened up again into a smaller one into the void. Water poured down and down again from every side into the middle. It brought to mind a scene in a sci-fi movie on a barren planet, or maybe Earth post-apocalypse. A structure built outside of time by a civilization not our own. You were scared the hero might fall in.

The Enterprise - 44

It felt strange to return to work. But what was the alternative? Some reappeared on Thursday, others on Friday. Still others waited. The solemnity of their empty chairs and darkened screens had the effect of a reproach. What are you doing here? The world is burning. Think of the dead.

Conversation arose fitfully, all of it concerning the Event, its aftermath, and corollary concerns. The well-being of friends, of former coworkers. Of acquaintances. Everyone knew a victim—or a missing person, anyway—or knew someone who knew one, or knew someone who knew someone who knew one. The closer you were to such a person, the louder and more animated you had license to be as you told their story. The prouder you could be. This was understood to be a rule.

It occurred to me that I knew no one. I told myself that was a good thing.

I tried to do some work. Tinker with code, scrutinize error logs. To get the least bit done seemed to require enormous concentration. What was work? It now seemed absurd. Had civilization itself not just been uninvented?

We all thought they were coming for the rest of us. Wouldn’t they? We also thought we could never tell the same old jokes again. On both counts we were wrong.

We reprogrammed certain aspects of the Product’s algorithm in order to reflect the new reality. We made it—him, it really was a him now—in equal measures mournful, dignified, outraged and steadfast. All the proud, new American qualities.

In the news, authorities had yanked a Sikh off a commuter train, citing precaution. His turban, it appeared, had rattled the nerves of fellow passengers.

Messages arrived from out west, expressing bewildered sorrow and sympathy. Yet among them was the following note from Judy to the creative team, cc’ing Neil and Sam:

All,

As I’m sure you’re aware, there remain several outstanding action items from our conference call on Thursday the 6th. I think we all need to make sure nothing falls through the cracks.

Judy

Upon reading it, Bob smacked the metal surface of his desk five times, hard, in quick succession. Soon a small group had gathered behind him to read the offending e-mail over his shoulder. There were howls of disgust and disbelief, of derisive laughter. The message was forwarded around the office, annotated in turn by each recipient with a suitably scathing remark. But once we all had seen it, a silence fell upon the room. We began the Enterprise anew.

The Enterprise - 43 - The B-Thing

I arrived at Melissa’s to find my sister, red-eyed, sitting on the crimson Persian rug, gazing at the TV. A vodka martini sat before her in its iconic glass.

“What’s yer poison?” asked Melissa.

These were her first words to me after I crossed the threshold. There were funny things about that question. Among them was this: there was only one poison on offer.

“I’ll have a martini,” I replied. She popped the cork of her beloved Belvedere to pour me the first of many.

With each iteration the narrative onscreen further coalesced around a set of themes: Al Qaeda, the Taliban, Osama bin Laden. The planes, one, two, three, four; the Pentagon, the Pennsylvania field. If the whole story could be told at the top of the hour, just once, perfectly—with all the names right, and the times—maybe everything would be OK.

I remembered a night I’d been here, two weeks before, maybe three, and spotted a story in the Times on the kitchen counter. It was about four members of a Viennese art collective who had stayed up all night in their studio on the 91st floor of the World Trade Center. At dawn, they put on climbers’ harnesses, affixed suction cups to the inside of a window, unscrewed it from its mounting, and pulled it into the room. They installed a cantilevered balcony and each, in turn, stepped outside. Accomplices circled in a helicopter taking pictures; a grainy enlargement appeared in the paper. It depicted a human form, sheathed from the waist down by the makeshift structure and framed by one of the tower’s unmistakable columnar striations.

One of the artists was quoted as follows: The amazing thing that happens when you take out a window is that the whole city comes into the building.

No one could confirm that it had happened. No verifiable evidence was found. The Austrians turned mum and the event quickly lapsed into myth. Only its name remained: The B-Thing.

The Enterprise - 42

I picked up my overnight bag at home and headed out to Melissa’s, jumping on a crowded bus that crept down Fifth. I stood in front, near the driver. Everyone was talking about it. Nervously, I suppose. But their chatter had a tone of eerie glee. They seemed eager to outdo each other in hyperbole, like kids at recess. Was it vanity—unbridled, like our other basest urges, by the trauma? Or was it a tactic? If they made it worse in their heads, and made it worse out loud, mere reality might not be so hard to bear.

“I heard forty thousand people died," a woman said.

"Oh no. Way more than that," said a man. "Two hundred thousand."

Then the driver told his story.

"I was down there," he began. "I looked out the window and I saw what you call it. Graffiti. I saw graffiti comin’ outta the sky." We all knew what he meant. "But then I realized it ain't no graffiti. It's pieces of paper.” He shook his head. “Eight and a half by eleven."

I got off around the Metropolitan Museum and crossed Central Park with the crowd. Everyone’s pace had slowed by half a step, as though in a dream. With nothing left to escape, our bodies moved with processional solemnity. In a way, it was just a beautiful day in the park. There were lots of children—acting like children, skipping, swinging their parents' arms. But they knew. I heard a little boy say:

"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.

The Enterprise - 41

It occurred to me that I ought to do some work. I was at the office, after all. Everything around me—computer, desk, chair—had been set in place to facilitate my productivity. Besides, it might be useful to lose oneself in labor at a time like this. Therapeutic. But after I opened the document of code I’d been working on the day before, I got the eerie feeling the earth was trembling and sliding under me.

There was nothing left to do but go. A few of us set out onto Fifth Avenue, must have been one o’clock or so. Every building downtown—those still standing as well as those that weren’t—had disgorged its contents onto the streets, and now a great tide of corporate humanity, of minions and executives, some blasted with ash, some weeping, many women in their stocking feet, was rising like bile up the gullet of the city.

Julie muttered that she’d heard from her Israeli fiancé’s cousin that Yasser Arafat had taken credit for the attacks.

“The Sears Tower is next,” she said. “Mark my words. Lev told me so. He knows. Arafat won’t stop until he’s made us bleed out every drop of blood.”

After a few tries I managed to reach Mike in Chinatown.

“You heading uptown?” he asked.

“Yeah. What are you doing?”

“I’ve been on my roof. I took some Super 8 of the towers before they fell.”

“Wow.”

“You know what this means, don’t you?” he asked.

“No. What?”

“From now on there’s a before and an after.”

“Yeah.”

“From now on there will always be before. And then there will be after. And there will always be this.”

“This here right now,” I said. Then we got disconnected.

A pickup truck drove slowly up the street, its bed crowded with men. Still one more ran after it and clambered up the bumper, the others grabbing his arms and pulling him aboard as to a life raft.

I contemplated the Empire State Building, radiantly naked in the sun.

I heard something behind me and turned to find that it was a woman, crying inconsolably. I expected her to look up, to offer me the opportunity to express my sympathy. But she did not.

On the Upper East Side I happened to pass a posh restaurant. It was open. I peered through a pane of its French window. Inside, the space seemed cool and dark and quiet. Two couples in late middle age, the men broad-shouldered, wearing jackets, the women delicate and thin, sat knifing and forking as a waiter hovered at the ready. A bottle of wine rested in a dewy bucket in the middle of the table, ringed by four glinting glasses, each a quarter filled.

The Enterprise - 40

We think words mean things. But they really mean ideas. This is by design—this is how we want them to behave. If we don’t like something, we can change its name. Or pretend its name means something else. We’re in control. But the thing is: we don’t live in truth. We inhabit a brokered, dubious realm, situated in the gaps between words and what they represent. We are insulated by language—most of the time. What happens when it fails to protect us?

A few of us were going to the game on Monday night. Kevin, Rob. Maybe Peter, Jimmy. Maybe Steve. It was going to be Yankees-Red Sox, Roger Clemens. But a hard rain started in the afternoon and didn’t let up. After work we went to the dark bar around the corner to wait and see if the game got called. In the cozy barglow we felt a little lazy, like we were playing hooky. But on TV we saw the tarp get rolled out over the infield. A few intrepid souls in garbage-bag ponchos huddled in the stands. We began to drink in earnest then, shooting pool, insouciant. Outside the rain was grim and unforgiving.

The following morning I awoke later than I wanted to. As usual. Coffee, shower. The whole routine. At my bus stop all was quiet and serene, the sky a limpid blue pierced by a column of black smoke from some building on fire downtown. As the bus progressed along Fifth I had that thought that everybody has: I wonder if it’s my building that’s on fire.

It probably wasn’t. Hundreds of buildings down there. Thousands. But still.

“The last stop on this bus will be Fawteenth Street,” the driver suddenly announced. “Fawteenth Street will be the last stop on this bus.”

There was a French couple near me, young, eager to see the sights. Qu'est-ce qui se passe? she asked him. What’s going on? He translated the thing about 14th. That’s all anybody knew.

A fire engine passed us and one of the firemen, in a rear-facing window seat, leaned his head out, looking back. He bore the smile of a man who knows exactly where he’s going and what he has to do.

I got off at 23rd, the smoke still far away. The building super, an older Hispanic man, was sweeping the little foyer by the elevator. He stopped and looked at me, resting his hands atop the broomstick. He seemed a bit alarmed to just be clearing out the dust.

“The towers!” he said. “Plane hit towers!” He made a swooping gesture with his hand by way of illustration. “Twin Towers! Yes? Plane!”

“Really?” I replied. I tried to strike an appropriate posture of concern. “Wow.”

“Two!” he added, eyes wide, holding up his fingers in a V. “Two plane hit!”

“What?”

“Two plane hit towers! Two!” he insisted.

It seemed like he’d doubled the number in dissatisfaction at my response. What on earth could he actually be talking about? I imagined a little prop plane wobbling off course, bonking into the side of a building; another somehow following suit. (Didn’t a bomber do that after the War? Stick into the side of the Empire State? Then a giant ape came along and tore it out?) I tried again to pitch my voice to the urgency of his outlandish assertion.

“Two planes?!” I said. “That’s incredible!”

I got off the elevator to find most of my coworkers on the other side of the sculpture and the plant, staring dumbfoundedly at the television. The same plume of smoke was on the screen, bigger and closer, a little less real. Newscasters were gravely reciting the facts as they were known: airline names, flight numbers, emergency response activities. Origins and destinations. Times to the minute. Speculations as to the dead and injured. Each of the twins bore on its face a crooked maw with a tongue of fire inside, vomiting torrential sheets of slate-gray smoke into the sparkling, baby blue sky. Down below, safe in the valley of shops and streets and sidewalks, many stared up at the conflagration with hands over their mouths. Police waving stand back, stand back. Nothing to see here, folks.

A blizzard of documents—reports, charts, memos, contracts and faxes—animated the air and fell, confetti-like, upon the living. There went our paperwork. There went our records.

The rest of the office looked normal. The same walls and floor, desks, lamps and chairs. Yesterday’s coffee mugs sat upside-down in the rack beside the sink.

Were we now living in a new world, different than the one before? A world of smoke and death, where nothing can be trusted?

Neil paced between his office and the TV, murmuring a word or two of consolation when it appeared to be expected. He suggested we all go home if we like. This is so bad, you don’t even need to do your jobs. Brett embraced Julie in a comforting, older-brotherly fashion, his leather jacket muffling her sobs. It was like we were in high school and a friend committed suicide. It was hard to say what it was like.

I wandered over to my desk and placed a call to Melissa. She was up on the roof with her binoculars. While my voice was worried, tense, aggrieved—all the things it was supposed to be, I thought—hers was weirdly calm, detached. Like it always was, in fact. Why shouldn’t it be?

“I can see it from here,” she said. “I can see it really well.”

“You can see the towers?”

“I can see the smoke.”

“You can see the smoke?”

“I can totally see the smoke.”

I told her I’d probably head up to her place in a little while. I called my sister and my brother. Then I wandered to the TV just in time to see. It came as a surprise, at least to me. How does a burning building crumble to the ground?

I returned to my desk and watched the calamity as it was haltingly presented online. I expected some reassurance from the words arrayed in different sizes on the screen. Not from the words themselves—the words were UNDER ATTACK, TERROR, STUNNED—but from the fact that they were words. Our words. We had typed them into a machine. The machine displayed them back to us. This was still the world as it should be. Was it not?

Instead I felt a greater unease, almost nausea. The words, the phrases, they only pointed feebly—cravenly—toward the meanings that they would contain. I perceived the awful intrusion of something raw and powerful—something unnameable—into our insular domain.

“Oh my God,” I heard Lucy wail across the divide. “Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh my God.”

“What?”

“The second tower just collapsed.”

Interesting new graffiti I've been seeing around town. First on the base of a lamppost, then on the wall of a stall in the men's room of the Upper West Side branch of the New York Public Library:

9-11-01



HA HA HA

The All-American Witch Hunt

The increasing venom of crowds at McCain-Palin rallies indicates that a certain segment of the population has taken the innuendo and slanderous accusations of unscrupulous Republican campaign strategists completely literally. In other words, they believe that Obama is a Muslim terrorist. They imagine that through some strange and cruel chain of events, the evil "other" represented by 9/11 hijackers and by Osama bin Laden is now incarnate in the Democratic nominee for president of the United States. Many of these people already hold some form or other of Biblical apocalypse fantasy alive in their imaginations, so it is not hard for them to believe that God is testing, or Satan is tempting, the good people of our country in this election as some necessary step in a process that also includes the breakdown of our civilization (i.e., economy), a war with heathens in the Middle East, the End of Days (global warming?) and the Rapture. Considering this point of view, it's not terribly difficult to understand why some people consider Obama's identity as the Antichrist to be a matter of fact beyond any question whatsoever. So it's even sort of poignant when, for example, a woman tells McCain how terrified she is of Obama because he "is an Arab." She really believes Obama is an Arab and is terrified that the United States will be ruled by an Arab terrorist. It's easy for us - the "reality-based community" - to dismiss a lot of the Republican lies and smears about Obama as laughable and obviously untrue. Of course, that's what they are. But the mistake we're making is to trust that while some are laughing and others are keeping a straight face, everyone is in on the joke. That even if McCain supporters want to believe them or pretend that they're true, they must know they're lies. The chilling fact is that many people believe them wholeheartedly, sincerely. They are terrified to the core of their souls that Barack Obama, an Islamist terrorist, will be elected president. "Kill him!" "Off with his head!" they scream. This election is an all-American witch hunt. That's what we're up against.

The news that W. is sending Special Ops to Pakistan without the approval of the Pakistani government can mean only one thing: This is the October surprise. Mark my words: There will be an announcement in mid- to late October that Osama bin Laden has been captured. It will be a moment of pure vindication for Bush, allowing him to strut and preen and prattle on a bit about how history will view this moment, how our sacrifice has been great but our cause just, etc., etc. There will be the implication, as there was in the capture of Sadam Hussein, that one man - our man, our president - has humiliated another man for the sake of the clan. And the corollary of course is that only tough talking, Republican men do that. Sure enough, McCain will glide into office. He'll have a stroke in early 2012, making Sarah Palin president and ushering in a dark decade of warmongering, religio-fascism and economic mayhem that future historians will marvel at the way an avid mortician scrutinizes a bludgeoned corpse, but that's beside the point for now.

These hideous, corrupt, power-mad and murderous cocksuckers have waited seven years to the day to play this card. They could have picked up bin Laden any damn time. But why waste a trump? It's akin to the 3/11 Madrid bombing. Hit them when it hurts. Hit us when it hurts.

If you're inclined to, pray that this doesn't occur, as it surely can't be God's plan.

We should be ashamed of how we reacted to 9/11, all of us, with the exception of those who did the dirty digging in the immediate aftermath of course, suffocating on air the government deemed safe. But as for those of us who merely wheeled shopping carts of PowerBars and Gatorade to 14th Street; who stood in line in the sun to give blood when no blood was needed; who invaded Afghanistan and then Iraq; who detained dark-skinned innocents for no reason, then deported them for torture, all the while satisfying our incipient craving for chipotle and wandering the winter City as the cold, still-acrid air stiffened our coke-white iPod cords: shame.

At the Halloween parade, as puppets swung over the heads of the crowd, people climbed up on the traffic light posts and entwined their arms around the fixtures for the walk/don't walk signs. To get a better purchase. To get a better view. Their faces would glow red awhile, and then bluish white. Men and women in skeleton body suits. Figures from the comics page and figures from the screen.

I came home to watch some of the "The War" on PBS. It occurred to me for the first time that the 9/11 bombers were nothing more – nothing less – than kamikaze pilots. This was nothing new. Nothing no one'd faced before, you think about it. They're vested with the curious, solemn authority of the sacrificial rite, all the more daunting as they're sprung from another civilization, another, more ancient, mode of thinking. But in the end it's just a pile of ashes and debris to sweep into a pile and a dead body, or a few, that you need not mourn.

What's Your Poison?

On fucking 9/11 we met at her apartment late in the day to watch TV. The general hysteria served to deflect the malaise that had infected us, it seemed. She welcomed me with a Mona Lisa smile. My sister had preceded me and was on the phone, distraught, crosslegged on J's ancient, thinning rug.

They were drinking – it was inconceivable not to drink, of course – but J. said something weird to me. Under the circumstances. She said, "What's your poison?"

I guess she meant, gin or vodka. I paused and gamely made a choice, whatever it was and for whatever it was worth. But it struck me funny that she said that. On any other day I'd appreciate the weird juxtaposition, intentional or not, of hokey cliché and wry morbidity. But on that day, it was - weird. And I didn't even want to be all reverent or nothing. Far be it from me.

But still.

What's your poison?

I followed the lope of Alan Alda's feet playing Shelly in "Glengarry Glen Ross." They'd scrape and arc around the office floor, really the stage floor, and I wondered if he was thinking of hitting marks and to what degree those were his pigeon toes or Shelly's. And that an actor doesn't think about his feet if he's any good, and that consequently that's why we should think of them.

This morning on the way to work, on my way into the Park, a young, ill-shaven man approached me. He looked fine, no crazy in the eyes or nothing. But the deliberate way he appealed, I figured I was in for something. He clutched an uneven sheaf of paper, what appeared to be Web page printouts.

"Can I ask you a question?"

"Sure," I said, not stopping but looking right at him, letting him know I'm not dismissive.

"How far away is Ground Zero?"

It was such a strange question on 105th Street. And not "Where is Ground Zero?" mind you. How far away. For a moment I wondered if he meant it figuratively, or if he was taking some odd poll and comparing the different wordings of the responses in the pursuit of some linguistic or sociological edification,.

"It's all the way downtown," I responded, jerking my thumb backwards over my shoulder. He nodded briefly, made the faintest grunt of acknowledgment, and moved on. Apparently satisfied.

We arrived at the track on Saturday at around one, at the start of qualifying, after riding with Michael's friend Michael and his son David and Eric and Michael and Andrea, and meeting them in the parking lot of the Marriott where we didn't know, did we have the right place? We had wandered inside where breakfast was just being cleared and the doormen were changing shifts, exchanging chummy words, and when we walked back out Michael, that is Michael's friend Michael, Canadian Michael, was standing by the open sliding door to his van. Waving.

The night before we'd gone out to a party Sylvie had for former coworkers at one of the courtyard beer gardens that are all over Budapest, accessible from inconspicuous residential-looking doorways and a couple turns around cobblestoned alleys. CK and I had drunk wine at Sylvie's then we drank wine at the party and more wine and then whiskey and someone bought a round of Unicum, the bitter, bitter traditional liqueur that is now drunk only as a ritual gesture of festive self-punishment. And I talked to Janet who was married to Eric whose name I thought was Nick. We talked about the importance of proper sun protection for terribly fair-skinned people like us. Someone bought a round of polinka, the traditional spirit that is now drunk with pleasure and relief that no one decided to buy Unicum instead.

Writing this in Paris, the waiter just walked by me holding his serving tray lazily at his side like a sheaf of papers and then stopped and said, "Putain, mon gratin!" which means, "Fuck, my gratin!" and he turned on his heels to retrieve it from the kitchen and serve it to some long-suffering tourist. And I lit a cigarette.

Sylvie got everyone together and said let's go to Buddha Beach which is not in Buda but in Pest, right beside the Danube. Buddha Beach is a dance club in the open around a big golden Buddha. We snaked into the crowd and danced for hours to American hip hop and English pop, drunk on booze, sure, but maybe really pure kinetics. Everyone moved in a big roiling mass.     There was this German woman Kirsten. She had long dirty blond hair in a pony tail and perfect arms out a sleeveless black dress. She did this funny dance with lots of moving her arms in formal gestures, rigorous movements, not out of time or graceless by any stretch but deliberate. Categorical.

We all danced in our spot with the leaves of some tree brushing our heads. All the Hungarians knew all the lyrics to the American tunes better than me.

I got in line for the bathroom out by the river and I noticed a young woman behind me in line and I guess I gave her a good look before turning back around. A few moments and she tapped on my shoulder.

"Szia!"

"Szia. Hello. I'm American, I don't speak Hungarian." I shook her hand. She said OK. She introduced me to two bashful friends standing behind her who emerged out of the line to greet me.

Now as I write this, a day after I started, there's a violent cloudburst and though I'm protected by the awning, mists of rain blow in my face and dot these pages with water.

My notebook. Mon cahier. That woman last summer at the cafe on Republique, the waitress, she said she liked my notebook. My ordinary all-American black-and-white Mead composition pad. That says "square deal" in a square inside the cover. I told her thanks. Where did I get it? In the U.S. And I knew not what else to say so I smilingly turned away and saw her again only when she emerged to watch the parade of striking cops chanting a protest of their own. She shook her hips and waved her arms in the air, waved them like she just don't care. Reflexively a sister to those who shout and sing in the street.

I told the young Hungarian chick I was from New York and she asked am I here alone. No, my friends are in there somewhere, I said, indicating the bobbing throng. I told her I loved Budapest and was having a great time and then we were at the head of the line and I let her go first and when another stall opened I went in; when I emerged I wandered away, wondering if I should wait. Went to the bar for beer. Rejoined the others. Periodically scanned the crowd, in vain, for her shortish red-brown hair and freckled nose.

Somebody bought a round of sweet syrupy Jagermeister and we all gathered in a gleeful circle and took the small glasses and toasted but there was not one for the older woman who was with us, the dark haired woman who had been an accountant at the company, and she danced beside us like it didn't matter but it seemed terrible.

Eventually we all wound our way back out the crowd.

If nothing is to be excluded from this writing then I write about Sylvie's hands on my shoulders on our way out, and the fact that we had danced, and she was dancing sexy, unrestrained,  and how odd because since I'd arrived she had seemed remote and abstracted, unfriendly even. And so I felt her hands and I thought, let her hands rest there and don't shake them off.

On the walk along the Danube it was me and CK and Gerzson arm in arm talking about sex somehow, and the conversation ended on some non-sequitur I can't imagine let alone describe.

We walked to some cafe, a lonely beacon on a darkened avenue, and ordered beer and I was talking to Kirsten and I think I made fun of her for being German and I comically declared to everyone around the table that I'd have a similar thing to say to each one of them just you wait and see. And it was good and we all were laughing and then the guy across from me leaned over and said he wanted to talk about September 11th. The United States has never really suffered he said, wasn't it about time for the U.S. to suffer? You needed to learn to suffer. And I was protesting drunkenly and I don't know quite what I said but I remember we were inevitably interrupted by the boisterous cheer about us and I declared civilly that this was an interesting discussion and I'd like to resume it. I'm not sure why I said I wanted to resume it. I think what I meant was I'd like to end it.

   

How many other people's pictures are we in? Japanese family videos. We hover spectrally in the back somewhere or walk furtively through the foreground. Unknowingly replicated again and again, bit players in countless narratives.

Kirsten was gonna drive back to Vienna in her tiny car. Put that car on the train to go home to Hamburg the next day and so she needed to leave and like an idiot I'm trying to get her to stay.

"Stay!" I said.

"I have to leave!"

So she left and I grandly poured the rest of her beer into each of our remaining glasses.

They were playing "Born in the USA" at the Paris Cafe I'm at and that's funny. On the occasion if you think about it of the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Paris. And now it's "Seven Nation Army" by the White Stripes and I guess that's funny too.

We staggered home finally, me and CK and Sylvie and that guy who said the thing about 9/11. We sat on Sylvie's bed and he rolled a joint. I sat there saying nothing. He said you're awful quiet and I said well I'm fucked up. He seemed to me a faintly Satanic presence, this guy who'd tested me with anti-American talk and here he was with dope and obviously designs on the women. But fuck it, they're not my women, and maybe he's right after all and that's why I had nothing to say. I got high and went over to my couch in the living room and passed out face first.

For sure the Hungarians have suffered.

A man just left the cafe, a young slender man, speaking in some vaguely Euro accent to his sort of frumpy, short-haired female companion: Two years ago they started the Euro.

God you feel like you can do anything when you're a little bit drunk. You can peer into the eyes of passersby.

So I went off to bed and last thing I knew it was 6:30 so it was maybe 7 I passed out. And then I feel a tug on my toe, a terrible delicate tug that is full of meaning and implication. Awakened to the awful present. It's CK coiled at the foot of the bed and she's saying it's 10:30 and do I want to get up and go to the qualifying. And through a veil of confusion and still-drunk grief at the light of day I balked a moment but said yes.

A man with clothes the color of the street.

I drag hands across my weary body in the shower.

We got in the cab unsteady yet resolute. That shameguilt pulse that drives you forward at times like these. Arrived at Marriott. Funny there's shit like a Marriott everywhere in the world. You go to the ends of the earth and there's a Marriott. Marriott, Marriott, Marriott.

We saw Michael then we sat on the terrace and ordered coffee and water and things were better somehow. Then Drea showed up with a McDonald's fried chicken wing and I ate it with surprising desire and I was amazed how good the world already was. Something I was afraid was dead had been revived inside me. CK and I walked to McDonald's and I had to order the Royale with Cheese.

Children have to play all the time. It's not merely a psychological preoccupation, the preference of idle and unlearned minds. They're physically compelled. To fidget or fuss or beat two sticks together. Working their new bodies into tune.

We met everyone back at the car, Michael and David and other Michael and Drea and Eric. And we got in the family van and drove out to the track. We drove around and around looking for our parking lot, past stands of bullshit merchandise, beer tents, Ferrari fans, Raikonnen fans with blue painted faces, Ferrari fans, impromptu strip joints and bloody seas of Ferrari fans. A curious pageant of macho Euro-weirdness.

We went around twice and finally stopped in a vast field, Hungarian agrarian glory just about to the horizon, a foreground full of cars. We heard the solitary, strident whine of a race car circling the track and I knew it had begun.

We walked down toward the track with the first corner in our sight, at the bottom of the hill, and then suddenly a car emerged and swung around, a blue and yellow Renault, black tires tracing that ribbon of storm cloud asphalt, showing its shadowy engine with the solitary brake light. My head swam with pleasure.

We entered the gate and tromped up the little hill to our grandstands, plain rickety grandstands in the sun. We climbed the wooden stairs and found our seats. And the Renault came ‘round again. Fernando Alonso. If that's not the name of a race car driver. The car howled down the front straight at 190 miles an hour, you could see it in a quick glint. And then I heard and felt something I was not prepared for, perhaps did not remember from my childhood forays to the races. It was this: the engine's complaint as it downshifted for the turn. Traversing the staccato path from seventh gear to second in about a second and a half, from 20,000 to 1,500 RPM, the engine voiced its agony in a series of bestial yelps as each successive gear fell fast upon the shaft. But it was more than bestial – it was humanesque, eerily intelligent. It was the sound, I'm not kidding. It was the sound of a human being experiencing torture. You're tempted to call it the sound of a beast, that's the obvious and perhaps less troubling analogy. But it was closer to the sound of a human in agony from multiple blows and frightening climaxes of grief. And because it was coming from a car I'm not sure I've heard anything more beautiful. Eeow! Yow! OW! UNGG! it said. ANGG! Oww, OW! Syllables of extreme and poignant urgency signifying absolutely nothing. Other cars passed with variations upon this strangled cry. And maybe backfired pop! pop! pop! or loosed a breath of smoke from heated brakes.

And the colors and the words, the colors and the words. Red and white, yellow and black, Vodafone. West. Green and blue, Shell, made up words and real words. Mild Seven. Green and red and white. Allianz, Petronas. Black and silver, IMG. Blue and white. Yellow, Marlboro and blue. Black and white, HP. Red.

On planes we're not just infantilized; we're like patients, enfeebled. We must return to our seats and be fastened, officious men and women doing rounds to check on us.