How many paunchy businessmen have indulged in sticky, volleyball-sized Cinnabons in the departure terminal before boarding a doomed flight that's exploded in midair, sending seats and bits of fuselage and bodies plummeting into the ocean? Struck another plane on takeoff and somersaulted hideously across the airport's perimeter to come to rest on the interstate? Been taken over by a team of swarthy terrorists barking allahu akbar?

There's a shot of sunshine coming in from the window for the seat in front of me. It's reflecting off my watch and projecting an abstract splatter of golden light all over the wall beside me and my lowered window shade.

Plane tickets are disappearing into immateriality. It used to be you booked a flight, you got a dossier of printed matter: the multi-copy ticket itself with the receipt and the ticket that's not a ticket and the copy for your records. The separate, somewhat redundant itinerary specifying meal and entertainment provisions. A brochure of travel information in the style of a sexual hygiene pamphlet or coffeemaker manual. Car rental and hotel coupons. The requisite airline branding and marketing materials, complete with slogan and mission statement. Fine-print customs and luggage policies, warnings and indemnifications. All sheathed in a glossy, half-size portfolio you might need to fasten with a rubber band. And the volume and self-importance of these documents seemed measured to equal the grand, nearly miraculous nature of what you had contracted the airline to do: fly you somewhere. In the sky. With the introduction of e-tickets you still got something like a ticket, a printed description of the imaginary ticket – it's as though neither airline nor passenger trusted the other to have faith in a thing you couldn't keep close to your heart in the breast pocket of a leisure jacket and produce ceremoniously upon official request. More recently the e-ticket has been represented, appropriately enough, only by an e-mail, which you were advised though not required to make real by printing it out and bringing it to check-in. Which leaves us with the boarding pass as the only tangible document required. For a long time these were still made of sturdy, reassuring card stock, the kind you're warned not to bend, fold or mutilate. But today when I checked in the electronic kiosk spat at me a curl of the thinnest, flimsiest paper. Perhaps someday we'll fly on but a whisper or a promise.

On the way to check-in there stood the entire South African women's gymnastics team, or maybe tennis – glorious in green and yellow nylon, some wearily holding trophies half their size upon their hips.

Casual Encounters

1. Just moved to the city, sleeping on friend's couch. May I watch you breast feed? (Serious.)
2. Hot SWF, 26. Take me shopping and wining and dining. Beat off and I will cup my hand for your splendid goo.
3. Still up, been masturbating for hours. What do I do now?
4. JO BUDDIES. Come over and have a beer. Watch from my vast selection of heterosexual pornography. Just a coupla guys, drinking beers and beating off. DISCRETION REQUIRED.
5. Daddy me.
6. DO NOT respond to this ad if you have not read the text.

(Found on Craig's List.)

I turned into the kitchen and gazed upon the mountain of dishes I'd be doing in a few hours, most likely with my bath towel unfastening around my waist and the kids in the building across the way, clamoring at their cafeteria tables. Then I entered the bathroom and lifted the toilet seat to reveal its paint-peeled underside.

It rained ropes all day long and by the time I left work at a quarter past nine the sidewalk along Canal had receded under puddles ankle-deep and cold.


Mom has some kind of lump under her arm, or shoulder. Unbeknownst.

"Will you go to the doctor? Mom?" I asked.

"I won't go until after Lis's wedding. I don't want them taking me, you know, to the hospital and everything. Chemotherapy, you know. All that. Until after the wedding."

"Mom. That's seven months away. Lis's wedding. If it's nothing, you leave, half an hour, you leave the doctor just like that. If it's chemotherapy, it's. Chemotherapy doesn't take seven months."

"I know." She exhaled the word know, she didn't really speak it.

"If this is something you need chemotherapy. You. You can't wait. Will you go to the doctor please, tomorrow?"

"I'll go. I may not go tomorrow. But I'll go."

"You don't have to go tomorrow but you'll go, you'll go the next day."

"Well, I may not go the next day. But I'll go."

There's a little book and pencil icon at the bottom of Word, and the pencil moves across the pages of the book as I type, it's doing it right now, I'm looking at it right now, and when I stop it stops and then moves off the page behind a red cross, like a teacher's incorrect mark. There, it just did it. And it's like some kind of mocking mechanism: If you're writing, it writes too, in a little make-believe book, but when you stop it says bad, wrong, angh. Don't stop.

That girl at the gym in the Jacuzzi had wide doe eyes and a thin cute mouth. She started off saying how much will it cost her for me to swim her laps. I said I dunno, I'd still have to swim mine. She said she swims 20 laps most times, I said I go by time. I don't swim fast though. She said she didn't know if she'd do all her laps today, maybe 15. She just got back from Washington, D.C., where there's nothing to eat. Upon arrival at Penn Station her sinuses were filled with the odor of fried food from the many concessions – she thought it was pizza with garlic but who knows – and she was compelled to eat. Immediately. She had an omelet, fries. Pizza. Brownies. And now she made herself go to the gym.

We talked about the availability of foods and in particular specialty baked goods – blondies to be exact – in New York City and Washington, D.C. She was clearly involved in some arcane aspect of political lobbying but I thought it'd be more interesting not to know.

She said years ago when she moved to Washington she didn't cook and everything closed at six and the closest store was a train ride away and she literally cried. She cried.

I got in the pool and eventually she got right beside me and she did some quick, crawl laps and then stood up. She waited for me to swim up.

"Twelve," she said.

"Twelve, huh? Twelve laps," I replied.

"Yes," she said. "It's the final solu... It's the final answer."

PC got some badass food poisoning from Chinatown, an issue of soup dumplings containing small, nefarious shrimp. In spite of this he was hunched over a bowl of fried chicken wings.

"I gotta eat something!" he said with a note of desperation.

"You know how guys can write their names in the snow?" Steve said as I stood before them, gleaning details.

"Yeah?" I said.

"Well Pat Canavan can do it with his ass."

The last time I got food poisoning was from Chinatown too, years ago. I had some tomato and beef dish from a place PC liked that was open all night and where the walls were papered with dollars. It tasted fine but I was shitting torrents of liquid for the whole day after. I like Chinatown but there's a deep funk there. An indelible Third World blot. The piles upon piles of fish left out all day, pickled and salted only on the very precipice of decay. Garbage piled on the sidewalks, drifting in the streets; stacks of empty crates and, underfoot, the shucked leaves of some strange, skunky green. And up behind the windows, by the ancient Jewish tailors' signs. Who knows what. A family of fifteen sleeping and fucking in shifts. White men ejaculating between the flat breasts of an aging masseuse. Sullen gang boys smoking crystal meth.

Just when the world seemed hopelessly, overwhelmingly normal I looked above the fence around a scaffold and saw the helmeted head of a construction worker moving like a thing on an assembly line, on someone's unseen body standing or perched on some moving thing.


I remember when Betsey and I started having troubles. It became clear that we had different tastes, different habits.

"You're a night owl," she said. "And I'm..." She really seemed to struggle for the words. "...I'm a day owl."

I'd been fucking Janet already, what an imbecile. She was, I was. And Betsey too. She looked like one of those letter-sweatered blonde angels from about 1957, clutching her books against her tits and hopping into the bad boy's Little Deuce Coupe. Her dad was an airline pilot and her mom was the long-suffering, lonesome, alcoholic wife, haunting her own home while he jetted the Cairo-to-Paris.

I went out with that Scottish girl who looked like Keith Richards a couple of years ago but I never fucked her. That ivory skin pulled taut around her skull put me off, her pirate's teeth. Still I kind of liked her and feel a pang of regret.

I stayed late at work as usual, picking the guitar and singing an old Appalachian tune. The Hudson wind buffeted the west-facing windows.

Before long I was slapping down the three light switches and waiting for the elevator in the spooky dark.

At the ground floor the doors opened and as is my obsessive custom I verified our floor was locked by punching the button and watching the light blink reassuringly and punching it again for good measure.

I could hardly open the front door against a gust. Then I was nearly swept out into the street on the exposed corner of Greenwich and Canal.

The tinny concussion of too many TV bullets came through my bedroom door then one solitary, authoritative Pop! came from outside my window in reply.

She knocked on the back of his hand with her knuckles for the purpose of assessing the degree of his incredulity.

In the sauna I sensed the unexpected heat of a stranger's gaze; before I knew it he'd opened his mouth.

"I've never seen a tattoo of a chair before."

"No, I guess not many people have."

He asked a few more questions, the typical asinine ones, how did that come about, were you drunk, what does it mean. I gave him my stock replies, not unfriendly though. After a few more minutes of sweating I prepared to leave and thought of what to say, should I say Have a good night? But I looked over at him and he'd gone palms up, lolling his bespectacled head in an earnest and showy display of meditation. I was off the hook.


Snow's been falling in wet flakes all day. They say six inches, eight. I cut across a somehow virgin blanket of it on 56th Street after meeting Eevin and discussing sex, relationships, her upcoming trip to Paris.

Remember when water fell from the sky in drops the size of grapes.

It was a minor insight and it's gone now.

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.

I did not realize the row of waiting cars on North Broome had been loosed by the light just as I'd stepped onto the street. So I stopped and doubled back as they streamed past me, and again I cursed my inattention.

At the dentist all hell was breaking loose. Hygienists were wandering from room to room, attending multiple patients. On this my second visit I noticed the "Forgive our appearance, we're under renovations" sign. They all seemed harried, short-staffed. The sexy dentist from the first time was nowhere to be seen. Instead I was treated by a man who introduced himself and shook my hand as I lay prone in the chair. He wore a ridiculous clear plastic germ guard resembling a flea-infested dog's head protector.

"You're here to get fillings," he stated. But with the faintest question mark at the end.

"Yes."

"Do you know where?" he asked, unbelievably. I told him lower left and he consented, verifying my chart. I had an unnerving feeling he'd been hired for the day, like a cop on the beach in summer. He excused himself precipitously, saying he had a cleaning down the hall.

When they were at work over my face, the dentist and the hygienist bumped arms and made jerky motions suggesting they had not established the division of labor. He seemed competent enough, and I admired the effort he made to maintain a quasi-normal interaction and to avoid referring to the surrounding catastrophe.

The thing slipped and sucked my cheek and she said Oops!

I Don't Care What You're Thinkin'

Played chess again with George inside the chess club this time, no kind of weather to be on the street. It was good, we each won a game, and I felt less adrift than usual.

There were guys playing backgammon, regular guys for sure, who were making a racket, especially one guy. He had some edgy game with a guy who eventually left pissed off, and then he was playing some new guy but he was still wound up from the game before.

"I don't care what you're thinkin', I don't care what you're drinkin', but if you get outta line I'm gonna set your ass on fire," he said, apparently by way of explanation to the new guy of what had transpired before. The new guy grunted in vague agreement. And then he said it again. "I don't care what you're thinkin', I don't care what you're drinkin', but if you get outta line I'm gonna set your ass on fire." And then again. He said it again and again. And silence. And then he said it again. Sometimes he'd flip around the thinkin' and the drinkin'. "I don't care what you're drinkin', I don't care what you're thinkin', but if you get outta line I'm gonna set your ass on fire." He said it again and again and again. It took on semi-comic overtones, then seemed to reach the status of mystical incantation. The rhythm always the same, the accents on the same places. A sermon-like cadence. It got to be where it stopped making any kind of sense at all, and then it got to be where you were pretty sure this was the only utterance that any human being would ever need to make, ever.

"I don't care what you're thinkin', I don't care what you're drinkin', but if you get outta line I'm gonna set your ass on fire."

Eventually the new guy grew a little bit irritated, not so much at this ceaseless, carping chant but with something in the game or something else about the guy in general. Things were said like fuck off. Other people came in, voices alternating quickly in mood and tone. Like no one could sustain ill will for longer than a breath or two.

And then the rolling of the dice.

At the gym pool tonight I perceived that the lifeguard was doubled over in his chair, asleep face-first in a tabloid paper. He didn't even seem to be on duty; he was wearing street clothes and had a knapsack beside him like he'd just dropped by, exhausted and seeking a few minutes' respite in the course of some unfathomably long journey. He was a young black guy with a matching baggy gray-and-black outfit. I got out of the hot tub and walked by him. The paper was open to a double-page article bearing a headline in huge type. His head covered the second half but the first half said:

GIRL, 14,

Let me tell you something, and trust me: The sound of a City pigeon cooing is exactly the same as the sound of a Duane Reade bag full of boxes of things scraping against the back of a chair on an uptown bus.

I was contemplating my mortality and deteriorating flesh when the bottle of Listerine seemed to spring from its perch atop the mirror and fell into my hands, blue fluid sloshing foamily inside.