Create, the application says. The interface.

On the way to get a vaccine on the bus today, a woman got on. It was going to be trouble. Something about you owe me a transfer. You owe me a transfuh. The driver remained placid, staring at the street. You owe me. 

She went on like this a couple stops. I wondered where it all might go. At which point does the driver bark back? The woman seemed volatile, unchained. Would she appeal recklessly to the four or five of us in back, get shouted down? At what point, emotion rising through her limbs, would she flail at the driver?

Instead she quieted down and got off.

Summer is the time for sickly drinks: white beer that tastes a bit like puke; thin, acidy rosé. These aren’t my favorite drinks but they must be drunk abundantly in summer.

We took the bus back down to the beach after dinner, to go to Funny Land. A big family got on, grandmother, mother, kids. A loud, misbehaving girl; a quiet, sweet one. Another with a wooden leg. I wondered what their lives are like.

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 traipsed through Midtown yesterday, on a mission to complete some dreary chores. Sweat poured off my scalp in rivulets that ran down my forehead and into my eyes.

A few fat drops of rain fell before I got on the 42nd Street crosstown bus, just enough for everyone to catch one on the flesh. It was one of those hybrid buses with the elevated platform in the back; the front was crowded but a man sat alone in the middle of the back row, legs apart, regal. I made myself small and sat in a window seat beside him.

I got on the 5th Avenue bus and he was already talking, across from me in the front seats facing in. He had a white beard, a kindly face. Decent pants and shoes but a bum's telltale posture, hunched and jerky. He was telling a young black woman, androgynous in a North Face coat and knit wool hat, about black music.

"See, black people make the best music," he asserted solemnly, nodding and watching for her reaction, drawing assent from her. She nodded almost imperceptibly. "They always did make the best music." He lifted his chin and gazed off in a professorial pose. "The Cadillacs," he said. "The Eldorados," he added confidently.

The girl nodded, bored, patronizing. She got up at the next stop. He said, "Oh you're getting off?" and wished her well and told her, "You're very beautiful," just to hook her into more talk. And she said, "You're beautiful too," just to shut him up.

Then he shuffled around the bus, looking for someone else.

"Mind if I sit here?" he asked a middle aged black man.

"You can sit anywhere you want. I'm, but I'm. I'm not in a very talkative mood right now."

The old man moved on, settling in the middle of the bus, where he eventually drove two white women away with who knows what he said. I wondered what he'd do next and by what unfathomable logic.

After a few quiet minutes he sprang up at a stop in the 60s. "Got to get off... this train..." he mumbled as he opened the door and stepped down uneasy. He stood on the sidewalk a moment as though he were trying to remember why he left the bus. And then he walked up to the wall and pissed.

The date sits over these babbling half-formed thoughts in silent, cool reproach.

She wants this and-a she wants that. Electric, she's a feral cat.

Save.

Save!

Hobbling across Second Avenue and cross Third. Beyond all glowering cab lights – immune to the mute testimony of the paper box, the overflowing pail; the essentially distressing street.

Waited at Park Avenue with my elbow on the pole. And then I looked and saw: 2:22 next bus, 2:22. And it was 1:36.

So then I headed underground.

The shadowing, creeping blimp, the Goodyear Blimp.

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.

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.

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.