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 - 36

Melissa lived on the Upper West, in a grand old Manhattan building with an awning and a name on it in cursive. In those first, giddy weeks of spring one of us would cross the park to see the other nearly every day. One morning I watched her from the Fifth Avenue bus as I rode to work and she walked home. She couldn’t have known I did. She angled up a little path that led into the trees and toward the meadow. She walked slowly, deliberately. No one and nothing awaited her on the other side. She seemed beautiful. I could not believe my good fortune.

We clasped hands across the table at Big Nick’s. She said, I’m so in love with you. For a moment I thought to myself: I’ve never been this happy. In the next my soul was shot with dread. How could I ever justify what she had said?

As our relationship progressed I discerned within myself a growing obsession to please her. I adopted an ingratiating persona. Why not? Was this not what she expected? Was it not what she deserved? Things seemed to be going well. Still, the effort to please her, to charm her, to seduce her left me exhausted, sometimes nearly out of breath. I became exquisitely self-conscious in her presence. When I opened my mouth to speak, I calibrated every word of every phrase, running a nonstop, internal commentary: Is this funny? Is this interesting? Is it what she wants to hear?

Deep down inside I apprehended a dark, dark truth: The harder I try, the worse it gets.

I ran on Monday and I ran on Wednesday too, and in the interim the patch of the Central Park Loop I'd taken had been transformed from pavement to coarse, tarry gravel, as though some great finger had come down from the sky to scratch it off.

I ran by the Tavern on the Green, shrouded behind its shrubs and trees. It always catches me by surprise that it's there, the Tavern on the Green. There it is. Dumb place.

I ran past a woman running and pushing a baby carriage. Is there nothing people won't do?

The dishwasher churns and whistles, stops and hisses. Starts again. There's something I can hear in there, tick-tick, tick-tick. A glass or something buffeted on a pot. Dishwashers are erotic.

We went to the Summerstage show tonight. In the long lulls between acts they played music on the PA, much of it from live recordings. The special guest Rufus Wainwright was introduced at a certain point, provoking furrowed expressions throughout the throng that had stretched out upon the AstroTurf before the slowly setting sun. A lot of crowd noises of another crowd; a phantom, unseen, rival crowd taunting us from the dark beyond which is inhabited by all such artifacts, be they records, films or photographs; from the mysterious world of mirror, from anti-place and anti-time.

In the Park, on our backs, with the multilingual murmur of the crowd around us. There was a strange cloud like a claw mark, soon absorbed into the night. And then planes and planes, some high, some low. Helicopters. People stepped single-file along the narrow track between the blankets, deliberate, like mountaineers. Out of nothing there arose the hum of strings and the opera being performed drifted over us like haze.

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This morning at the snack stand in Central Park.

The Russian snack stand.

With display case: Seran generic muffin; German candy, also Czech; cookie chocolate-chip and black-and-white.

A taste of heaven on earth.

I ask for a plain bagel. Toasted, a little cream cheese.

"Yessir! Bagel. We got a plain bagel, poppy seed and uh, everything."

"I'll have a plain bagel."

"You got it!"

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A few seconds pass. He saws at the invisible roll.

"Do you have iced coffee?" I ask. It's goddamned hot by the way. 95 degrees or whatever.

"No, no ice coffee."

"OK. A coffee, plain, black, no sugar."

"You got it!"

He takes the bagel out the oven and spreads the cream cheese from the vat. He sets it upon a paper plate and tops it with a clutch of napkins. Like I'll be taking it across the lawn to Aunt Matilda.

"Three twenny-fife."

I put a fiver down and rustle up a quarter too.

"Fife twenny fife!"

He lays out my two bucks change.

"Thank you!" I say. And lift the plate and bagel and goddamn napkins and balance it all on the coffee which is hot as fuck and I do mean hot as fuck. I put one of the fucking napkins around the coffee cup but still.

"You welcome! You got it!"

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On my way to work through north Central Park I was briefly blocked by a man and a woman, both elderly, but somehow clearly not a couple. They were well dressed and smoking cigarettes. They had the presence and bearing of people walking down the sidewalk to sneak a smoke in opera intermission.

Perhaps they were amicably divorced.

I gave the wrong directions to an attractive young woman on the Canal St. Uptown ACE.

"You can take this train to 59th St. and change there," I proclaimed. I didn't know what the fuck I was talking about. I was speaking to her over my shoulder as I entered the train. She froze in the doorway, shuddered with disgust, turned around and walked away. I turned to face what she had seen: a copious splatter of beige and red vomit on the floor beside the opposite door.

As the train lurched it occurred to me, she's in the car next door now. I can switch at Spring and right my wrong. I did so and found her sitting there, making me a face like, Wasn't that gross? I told her she would have to change earlier; this train doesn't go to 59th. At West 4th she looked over to me. I nodded. She nodded back queryingly. I nodded resolutely, urging her off the train with my head and eyes, and she disappeared out the door.

The kitchen with its mop and bucket, rickety dish rack, magnets. Its calendar and mail-strewn table. The tidy grove of bottles in the bar.

We were in Central Park on Sunday, we'd walked through the Ramble to the lake, and we were sitting on a rock, right over the railing from the path, that was dappled in shade. We looked at the couples in their boats. Always the man takes the oars. A Japanese woman leaned over the back of her boat to take a picture of a duck.

Near us people lay on a big rock on the water.

There was a commotion among the bushes and reeds beside the water to the right, below the bridge. A black boy, about 10, emerged trudging shin-deep through the shoal. He walked heavily, languorously, more and more impeded with each step by the soaking of his shoes, his socks, his pants. A group of boats that had gathered to observe some geese now dispersed, their occupants bewildered by the boy. He seemed to be trying to say something in a sort of moan. "Boat," I think he said, stretching out the O. Boooat. The men rowing rowed away, trying not to seem to eager to depart. The boy trudged farther in, water knee-high now, still so much shallower than you'd expect amidst these ducks and boats – he seemed to be performing some sort of half-miracle, heedless, upright and mostly dry.

He caught up with one couple's boat, the last to have turned around and slowly leave. They scrutinized him quizzically but did not shoo him away. He grabbed the back. The woman stared at him and might have said something, but it did not seem unkind. He muttered something about don't leave me, don't go without me, don't go. Then he said something like pusssh and he gave their boat a little push.

Eventually he crossed to our shore, to the stone beach to our left. Though he reached the water's edge he seemed oddly reluctant to get out. I thought, Get out. He kneeled in the water and reached up to the rock, at the feet of two women who were sunbathing there. They seemed intent on ignoring him, or at least not being disturbed or antagonized by his behavior. Alligaaaator! he said. The one woman right near him sat up and looked at him but said nothing as far as I could tell. Aaaligaaator!

He crawled out of the water onto the sunny, hot rock and walked away. I scrutinized his gait for indications of illness, injury, intoxication or dementia. His posture seemed insouciant and also weirdly listless. Nowhere to go sort of thing. He reached the path and I thought he'd disappear behind the bend forever.

A minute later we noticed he was still lurking, farther down the path where more rocks gave out on the water. We turned away but soon heard urgent splashing: a man had removed his shirt and jumped into the lake. A moment later he waded back with the boy, now completely soaked, heavy in his clutches. I found it amusing, yet somehow alarming, perhaps even outrageous, to think this poor Samaritan imagined he had saved the boy's life. But maybe he had, who knows? We got up and left, and walked by the boy, now sitting on a rock. There was a gaggle of people near him, all looking a bit stupefied. None were tending to him directly but it was clear that they were involved in some way with making sure he was all right, fretting about his fate, puzzling over his intrusion upon their idyllic afternoon, its portents and ramifications. I took a good, hard look at him as we passed by. He held two dollar bills aloft, before him, in his left hand. I imagine he wanted them to dry but he held them like a charm and I'm not sure why. S. made the point that this was perhaps not all a bad thing; he was playing, he was good-humored. Kids do things. I agreed but he worried me again when I took one last look back. He had spit onto himself and a thick strand of spit now hung from his lip to the front of his still-soaked shirt.

On my way to work, on Central Park North, there was some poor goose that had somehow leapt the wall and was now walking along the sidewalk. I tried to take some pictures of the bewildered and incongruous beast – nothing good, couldn't get one where it faced me. I had some imbecilic thought that it would be oh so clever to have a picture of a goose scrutinizing a fire hydrant, a goose waiting for the light to change. I wondered, too, what would become of this thing, if it would find its way back to the safe, grassy shores of the Meer. It walked out into the street. A bus pulled to its stop then pulled away slowly, waiting for the goose to go. The driver gave a little honk. Eventually the goose was on the other side of the street, standing still as cars crept up and gingerly drove around. Some guy walked out of a building on the north side and examined the scene sternly. He wore some kind of security guard uniform. "Yo!" He shouted at the goose. "N— betta get outta da street!"

I ran around the Jackie Kennedy Onassis Reservoir, winding between bored kids and their parents, being overtaken by many runners but overtaking some. Rows of people stood on the concrete base of the fence and stared across the water at the Upper East Side, some taking pictures. I looked where they looked and the cityscape seemed unremarkable and strangely low – nothing seemed to be over 10 stories or so besides Mt. Sinai in the distance. But there was the Guggenheim, half-shrouded by trees, and the grand old faces of Fifth Avenue apartment buildings, and I saw where I was after all.

The Gates make sounds. I was walking through them late last night and was startled to hear a weary creak, as of a porch screen door on a rundown house in the middle of the muddy Delta. With a Big Wheel on the lawn and laundry strung from fence to wall. A floral sheet and baby clothes. It was a venerable creak, belying the brand newness of these edifices. And it came from the joint where the orange metal leg met the slate-gray foot. When the wind picked up the Gates creaked and their fabric snapped and twisted.

Matters of fact.

I returned home from Rocky's with PC. It was a decent night; we won the drunken Irish trivia contest and discussed sickening American jingoism in his mother's car up Mad. I sank into the faux Eames and switched between CNN and ESPN. The oblivious, fickle manner in which CNN will transition from a story of deep tragedy and disaster to one of mundane, idiotic human interest – cute pets, let's say – is debilitatingly surreal, disturbing and depressing. This is saying something. It's exceedingly bad, utterly symptomatic of the American condition of the early 21st century and a key to why we are reviled as a society and deserve to be reviled.

The Gates are going up in the park, earnest men and women of all ages wearing their Christo & Jeanne Claude vests and hoisting and steadying frighteningly heavy poles. Like the intrepid settlers of the Old West. Building a home or a work of art, but really an abstract barrier against chaos.

It's going to be incredible, the Gates, I already know it. The saffron color is utterly surprising against the wet gray trees and sky. It evokes candy, sun, pleasure, comic books. And the incongruously happy hue of industrial machinery sometimes: bulldozers, backhoes and cherry pickers. It unites the worlds of childish sensual delight and grim adult labor.

At least it will, I think.

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.