Another morning under the invented menace of Level Orange Alert.

Or is it Alert: Level Orange?

Orange Level Alert.

Level level alert level orange alert level level orange alert orange level orange level alert alert level orange orange orange alert level orange alert orange level level alert level alert alert orange level.

Played chess again with George in the heavy sidewalk air. He beat me but good in one game and I came back and won the second, my pawns marching inexorably, two abreast, toward the scared-out king.

There's a picture of B's cunt on my computer and I see the tiny thumbnail for it when I start up or shut down. It's there in a folder of other miscellanea: my password for eBay, frequent-flier codes, an address for a long-lost friend. I took it on her digital camera one night. The following day she titled it "Close Up" and e-mailed it to me. Though it's tiny the image is incongruous, conveying rosy voluptuousness in the dreary list of icons for plain text files.

She was raised in Christian Science.

M. got laid off and wanted to take me to the Indian casino overnight. Like nothing, out of nowhere: in the spirit of spontaneity, that word we batted around when we made our first date last year as winter's feral freeze spied distantly upon torpid August. In a burst I imagined us marching arm in arm, aglow, down the turquoise and lavender carpet between rows and rows of roulette tables and blackjack and pai-gow. We'd laugh the impervious, giddy laugh of losers with nothing to lose.

Maybe catch a show.

Drink, gamble, inhale the heady, judiciously modulated atmosphere of pure oxygen and chlorine. And awake to our senses, we'd retire for two or three hours of fucking, the intensity and erotic thrill of which I am not likely to ever experience again in all my dwindling days.

"I can't make it," I said. "I have to work."

I noted the moon hanging above the brownstone backdrop looking down Amsterdam. It was big and bright but appeared ponderous and glum.

Some girl talked about her roommate getting hit on by gay guys and she was picking out tunes on the jukebox, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. I went over to help her select. She was bursting out of her halter top. Then there was the predictable back and forth but then we left.

Optimized charging – optimized charging – optimized charging.

I spent the first part of the week in the grip of a subtle and infernal nausea – never quite so bad that it made me vomit but not mild enough to ignore. It started on Sunday when I was sort of hung over I suppose and what did I do the night before... what did I do... Oh I went out with Stephanie and I fucked her and we slept a long long time and then I got up at eleven or so and went home, went to the gym all late and everything, only time for a draining schwitz. And then empty and dehydrated I met Geoff and Claudia at that Brazilian place on Houston and Claudia said the rice and beans are great, really great, she went on at some length about the deliciousness of it and of the hearts of palm they put on top and the boiled bitter-green leafy things on the side. She described it all with the extravagant effusiveness of certain kinds of vegetarians, who, like anorexics, veil their anxious disappetite by claiming that they love a particular thing they happen to tolerate a great deal because it's so delicious.

So I ordered it.

And it seemed OK but really bland and I tried in vain to make eye contact with that sexy beautymarked waitress so she could rescue me with Tabasco. So I gamely forked it all in the old foodhole. And what's more Claudia went on about the chocolate bread pudding and how delicious and she was going to have one and before you know it Geoff and I were ordering it too. And it came and it was about half a cup of melted butter mixed with custard and buttersaturated bread. And I ate it all.

The memory of the gummy, mealy mouthfuls and the heavy, bland tastes repulses me still and provokes in me the visceral dread of a food-poisoning sufferer.

Played chess with George in the heavy air outside the chess club on Thompson with air conditioner raindrops falling on the board. I won an early advantage but he clambered back for a draw. The carnage  was complete: only our kings remained. As we walked away we talked about how it's good to get our heads in that space; we can't think straight most times, can't read without our minds flitting about like butterflies – and chess sharpens the attention, forces it upon the abstract pieces and the black-and-white. We agreed we needed practice thinking like that.

M. rode in on a gust and ordered a martini and before she sat down she accused me of a strange mood and she was right. I had intended to pose as circumspect, aloof, but had succeeded only in appearing abstracted. We talked about how she passed the bar exam and how that was and what a mindfuck and everything. We wandered out into the Chinatown cold and she stopped to buy handfuls of bootleg CDs and DVDs from a Chinese girl at a table, REM and "Finding Nemo."

The Meer seeps with scum, I can smell it as I cross Fifth Ave. I walk down the path past the kid on her scooter and a boy with his dog and the school group with all the same t-shirts that say something. Park employees in carts and pickup trucks navigate the path gingerly, giving a bump of the horn if you don't know they're coming.

The odor clogs the nostrils, like wheat grass or echinacea. It smells of life in its awfulest fecundity, teeming and unbound.

There's some kind of boat in the corner of the Meer, something like a Louisiana swamp boat, and there are two park employees in it, a man and a woman. There's a slanted conveyor belt dredging algae from a hole in the bottom and depositing it in great wet clumps at the fore. She sits beside it on a chair perched ludicrously high, like an African river queen athrone. I pass another worker on the path, shouting to the woman on the boat: "That all you want? A hot chocolate? HOT CHOCOLATE?"

Just at the time that on the far track, from uptown, was the sad sound of an arriving train I could not take, someone peered down our tunnel and I figured it couldn't be, he's manifesting my most hopeless wishes, a light shone and it was the train come to get me.

Yet another incredibly beautiful woman on the subway the other day: a young thing with a practically shaved head, dark hair and olive skin, a wisp of feathery hair along her arms. She wore a pouting, faintly feral expression; the righteous insolence of emancipated urban youth. Her shirt bared a bit of convex brown belly, a gooseflesh expanse humming with sensuality and hinting at her hips and pelvis. She had a mole on her right cheek that Boticelli might have painted.

She was standing above me.

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.

Outside some alarm has gone off; at first I'd imagined a car alarm but it did not ring insistently. It bleated out a few loud tones in a babbling, singsong melody and stopped. Perhaps a police alarm gone haywire. It rang in oddly organic fits and starts – at one point I wondered whether it was the whooping of a lunatic, wandering off the avenue and into the darkened street to rattle the dozy citizenry.

It has stopped now.

The soldiers at Abu Ghraib prison, it is said, filmed themselves, in the words of military officials, "acting inappropriately with a dead body."

Who knows what the fuck that means but it's worth noting in connection with our revulsion at how Iraqis in Fallujah tore apart the burned bodies of the ambushed Americans a few weeks ago. Even those among us who are critical of the U.S. surely felt a pang of racist, all-American disgust: Look at these animals. We're not like them.

Oh, but we are quite like them. And this leads me to a strangely, under the circumstances, reassuring realization: We are them and they are us.

I've been thirsty for months now, thirsty in the middle of the night, thirsty in the morning, thirsty now. That terrible choking rasp in my mouth, a thought bubble thick with crosshatching hanging over me. And the water, this thing with no savor is so curiously delicious: cold, frustratingly viscous at first but then exquisitely fluid. It shoots up into the center of my brain just as it enters my belly and I am saved.

The echoic, chlorine ambiance of the pool. The roiling foam in the Jacuzzi. The woman who stands in the steps to the shallow end and lifts her leg in the water again and again and again.

A couple weekends ago I was sitting on the train on the way back from somewhere late at night, I don't know where. Had to have been the 2 or 3 ‘cause that's my train.

I think it was at 14th Street, the train stopped. Well of course it stops at 14th but it stopped a long time. The doors were just wide open there like nothing, like the end of the world had come and gone.

There was staticky babble on the intercom about a police action.

The passengers sat all New York impassive in the glow of their inebriation or the gloom of their late-shift blues.

A cop walked by on the platform, his gait urgent but two steps short of a jog. It's like he was in a hurry to get somewhere but not that much of a hurry when you think about it. Then another went by, and another. And another. And then cops in twos. And another. Then one with his hand on his holstered gun, snaking around like Pecos Bill. Then two with nightsticks in hand. More.

By this time the younger guys were leaning out the door to look. Some stood brazenly on the platform and tiptoed around. A guy returned to the train and told his girlfriend, I've never seen so many cops in my life.

I went out on the platform. Cross-current to the cops and curious stares, there walked an elderly, dignified man in tweed, expressionless.

Something incredibly bad is going on down there, said the girlfriend guy.

We could not see the end of the platform where the cops had disappeared. They just kept striding on down until you couldn't see them anymore and you got a sense that the dimensions of space itself were distended there and some vortex might be swallowing them up. For all we know the earth dropped off and they were tumbling without complaint into the void.

There was no shouting and there were no shots and you could not see a thing.

Then the conductor said next stop Penn Station and we got in and finally the doors closed.

I've looked the way I change at you. I change at you differently now.

Heard a terrific industrial horn blast outside on some street somewhere, reverberating between the buildings, and it seemed to beckon me out into the city. The signal defined itself in the city spaces like foam in a mold. I heard it but I saw it too. And I want to be in that space.

Overheard cell phone conversation on 56th Street between 7th and 6th, a paunchy man standing still and facing the street: That is our modus operandi.

   

It's raining, it's boring.

Two white kids in the train, maybe from out of town, maybe 13. Their shirts hang a bit voluminously on their scrawny frames but otherwise they have not completely adopted ghetto chic. A black kid gets on, a bit older, accompanied by his girlfriend with a big round butt in tight jeans and a long dyed-blond perm. He looks very street, a baseball cap over a do-rag, a shirt with an airbrushed black cartoonlike figure on it. He's on the phone with the wireless earpiece in his ear, speaking brusquely and somewhat officiously to a friend: Where you at? I'm on the train. Where you at? Fourteenth? I'll be there in five minutes. I'm with my girl. I'll be there in five minutes.

The white boys have been watching him as I've been watching all of them. One white boy gives a nod to the black guy, that upward only nod, a complicated gesture meant to summon attention but also evincing tones of recognition and admiration.

"'at's… awesome!" the white boy says, and the other white boy nods and says, "Yeah!" self-consciously touching his fingertips to his chin.

The black kid plays it stone cool, acknowledging the others only by glancing at them momentarily and giving the ghost of a nod. Next stop the white kids get off and the couple remains, he scrolling through the numbers on his phone while she faces away and stares at the darkness out the window or perhaps her reflection in it. He puts his phone away and nuzzles into her leonine hair.