There was just a blast from a foghorn just now, a low, slow honk, all the way from out wherever it is the cruise ships dock. What could be happening at one o’clock in the morning? Is it the call for everyone to come back aboard, after a Monday evening spent touring the anti-New York City downtown: the South Street Seaport, Ground Zero, the Wall Street Bull? Then it’s hurry up to the cash registers at the tchotchke shop, you heard that siren wail.

On a late spring evening in 2000, a boat off Battery Park made a similar sound while the Ornette Coleman Trio played. We all wondered if Ornette would respond in kind. I wanted him to, of course, and anticipated it, and considered how disappointing it would be if he didn’t, and immediately thought it might be great if he didn’t—if he refused to acknowledge it, to indulge us, even as he knew that’s what we wanted—and just then, a second or two after the boat’s moan ended, he punctuated his solo with a few long, low blasts of his own.

If I’m lucky I get a clear view north out the F train window in the morning, riding high above Gowanus. I love the rows of low buildings, utilitarian, industrial. Warehouses for obscure manufacturing concerns, signs faded by the decades, graffiti all over their corrugated gates. Kentile Floors.

There’s a hot dog place down there, in the middle. Must be Ninth Street. “Hot Dogs,” it says in big, blue, glorious letters.

There are vast, weedy fields ringed by fences, elaborately tagged. Some kind of gravel factory. Conveyor belts and cherry pickers. Earth movers. Terrifying metal towers from a nightmare for no apparent reason, with narrow ladders going nowhere.

Then the train dips down and plunges underground to Carroll Gardens. You get a glimpse of whatever’s happening on the street before it does. The other day I spied a scene being shot. A man stood at the open door of a parked car, streetside. He seemed to be holding a phone to his face. A few yards away the camera rolled, the director of photography squinted into the viewfinder, the director peered over his shoulder, and along the periphery were huddled the rest of the cast and crew.

Two Unusual Things I Saw Today

There were two unusual things I saw today. At work, after walking past the enormous, illuminated globe, set halfway into the floor, in the art deco lobby, and holding my wallet over the turnstile scanner to scan my badge. Holding it. Moving it around in a tight little circle until suddenly, the two metal bars swung open with a faint little hum and let me in. I walked past the newsstand that still said “CIGARS” on a sign above the entrance. I turned left and in the middle of the row of elevators on my bank—13 to 26—there was a shock of milky brown coffee on the floor. Full cup. Still hot, maybe. The elevators were gone and no one else was waiting. I leaned across the splatter to touch the button. Up.

After work, when I exited the subway station on Eighth Avenue and Ninth Street, there was a little crowd by the top of the steps. They were gathered around a telescope, perched on a tripod, about six inches wide and three feet long. A bespectacled young man hunched over the thing, squinting in the viewfinder, while others hovered, awaiting their turn. Every passerby looked up. An airplane crossed the sky. Could they be looking at airplanes? I thought that might be funny. Maybe they could glimpse a little scene from the cozy little world inside the cabin: a man fussing with a tiny bag of pretzels. His wife wearily paging through the TV series: drama category of the seat-back touchscreen in-flight entertainment programming. The moon was awful bright tonight. They had to be looking at it. You couldn’t see much else.

At five past three in the afternoon as I was exiting the toilet stall in the men's room on the 16th floor, the wall-mounted TimeMist air-freshening capsule emitted its squirt of sweetly nauseating mist. I gazed at the device while the aerated compound thinned into the atmosphere. There appeared to be sticky orange residue, specked with dust, around the orifice from which the product emanated.

I turned the wrong way out the door, walked the wrong way down the
wrong hall. All of a sudden left was right. West was east and north
was south.

The Enterprise - 34

As the city thawed to reveal minutely wider cracks in the walk and deeper holes in the street, we continued our obstinate and incremental labors.

Odd events took place in our periphery. There was a race riot all up and down 25th, from Fifth to Sixth. Blacks shut out of construction work, apparently. We heard the commotion from the office—sharp cries of venomous hatred, the crack of splintering bricks.

One day on our way to lunch we found twelve hundred dollars in cash. Peter saw it first. Or was the first to point it out. To put a word onto the apparition: that.

“Look at that!”

There it was: a tight, rubber-banded roll of sixty twenty-dollar bills, green against the gray cement blotched with petrifying gum. It was a dense and powerful object, exerting a dark, magnetic force. You looked at it and you just knew it was twelve hundred dollars in cash. Had to be. You wanted to touch it but you didn’t want to touch it. You wanted to grab it. But you didn’t.

Two passersby, young men from some indeterminate European country—possibly Switzerland—or maybe Belgium—saw it too. For the merest moment we all—seven of us—stood in a circle to behold the radiant thing.

Finally Peter picked it up. He unfastened the elastic and began to count.

“Whoa,” we murmured.

“Wow.”

“Jeez.”

“Holy shit.”

The two men grimaced and gesticulated. It soon became clear that they were not laying claim per se. But they were clamoring for some kind of recognition. They had seen the money on the ground. Now here it was in this man’s hand. These were the facts. Perhaps they were due a token? A witness fee, of sorts? Peter peeled off two hundred dollars and handed it to them. They accepted the money with grandiose shrugs, Europeanly, as if to say: We’re not asking for it, you know. We’re not even really accepting it. But we’ll take it. Since you insist. They went on their way with waves and smiles.

Back in the office, we sat down to eat at the conference table. Peter had the money in the kangaroo pocket of his nylon windbreaker. He opened the discussion with a vow to respect the group’s suggestions and concerns. A subtle rift began to form between those who felt we should divvy it up right here, right now and those who felt that morality dictated some other course of action, or at least a decorous exercise in delayed gratification. I didn’t know how I felt.

“Hey Peter, keep it. Come on, you found it. Keep it,” suggested Rob, perhaps hoping to flatter Peter into sharing.

“My dad’s a minister,” answered Peter. “I should bring it to the police.”

“They’re going to put it in their pockets,” Kevin howled. “They’re cops!”

“Cops are different now,” I volunteered.

“The right thing to do is the right thing to do,” asserted Peter. “It doesn’t matter what they do.”

“You wanna give it to the cops, call the cops. Give it to them. Give it to the cops,” Kevin said. He got up and gathered his trash. “Walk over there with the money. Like a fool. Hand it over.”

Later that afternoon, by email, Peter reported that the police at the 13th Precinct barely cared. Come back in nine days, said the lady desk cop. If it’s here, it’s yours. Nine days later, Peter circulated among our desks and handed each of us $200 in cash.

Julio was speaking. Others turned their heads in his direction, looking for eye contact. Looking away the moment it was granted. Seeking it again. The way you do. Jen, a junior account manager, peered over with a pleasant smile. Her chin rested on her fist, which clenched a fine-point Sharpie.

“... and they said they have a new process in place, and we all have to adhere to that,” spoke Julio. “We all—not just us, the other agencies—we have to do it, and they’ve been educating everyone at the senior account level about it. It’s really just another form on top of the RLM form. It’s got their own proprietary layout. Their terminology. I pretty much know how to do it.”

Now the time came when it was appropriate—requisite—for someone to respond.

“Julio,” said Jen. “I didn’t understand a single word you just said.”

In the break room at work today, two women sat at a table. Fresh faced, sexy, project managerly types. As I passed by, I heard one say to the other:

"So now who's the douche?"

I Did Not Know You Loved Me

There was a man swinging his kid beside me and Sophia at the park. About a four-year-old, I guess. The dad spoke with an aristocratic-sounding Spanish accent. I could only hear his side of their conversation. It went like this:

"Michael, what would you like for dinner? Pizza? Would you like fries?"

"Would you like French fries for dinner, Michael? Would you like French fries?"

The chains creaked with each thrust of the man's hand.

"What would you like for dinner? French fries? Michael. What would you like for dinner?"

"Michael. Would you like French fries for dinner? Yes? Or no?"

"Would you like French fries, Michael? For dinner? French fries with ketchup."

"Thank you Michael. I did not know you loved me."

"What would you like for dinner, Michael? Answer me. Would you like some French fries?"

"Yes or no, Michael. Would you like to have French fries for dinner?"

I picked Soph up out of the swing and we looked up to watch a plane go by. Then I put her in her stroller to go home.

Pyramids Come From a Million Years Ago

I stepped onto the A train after work, late at night. It was crowded but for one of those deceptive oases of empty seats that always surrounds some offense just foul enough to keep the weary on their feet. A leaking bottle. A pile of puke. This time it was a piss-soaked man. Those nearest him covered their noses with the collars of their shirts, eyed him warily and tittered amongst themselves. One last, intrepid holdout finally got up and walked away, leaving an entire bench to the bum, who stretched his arms up happily, perhaps victoriously, and sprawled across the seats.

I switched to the F at Jay Street and this time there was an angry drunk.

"Never mind, never mind, I'll shut up now," I heard him say to a woman and her two young daughters. There was an Indian man nearby.

"Fucking curry-eating motherfucker," shouted the drunk, who was light skinned but not quite white. Maybe Hispanic, Mediterranean. Could have been North African. His worn jeans seemed to be dotted with dried blood.

He began to conflate Indians with Native Americans. "You Indian motherfuckers, we took your land."

The woman and her girls got off and I sat down. I wanted both to be near this man and far away. Everyone else was studiously ignoring him. Trying to do normal things like read the paper. Breathe.

"In Africa, they got pyramids!" he shouted. "Listen to me!" He slid forward on the bench and pounded his soda bottle in the middle of the floor. "They got, they got, they got pyramids no fuckin' nuclear bomb can touch." He laughed a little. "Fuckin' people don't understand. They got pyramids, come from a million years ago."

He sat back and grumbled for a while. My stop was coming up. Seventh Ave. Before I got up he turned to the Chinese guy sitting beside him.

"An' this little yellow Chinese motherfucker right here..." he drawled menacingly.

I got out and walked toward the stairs. A few moments later the train moved again, and I wondered what I'd see when the car came by. One man standing over another, arms swinging madly, onlookers aghast?

I turned around to see. The troublemaker sat alone, apparently silent, looking through the other window at the dark.

I stood in the aisle with the analgesics. Scrutinizing the rows and rows of little boxes, looking for some generic naproxen sodium. Sophia sat in the baby carrier on my chest, her head tilted up at the drop-tile ceiling. I perceived a mild commotion nearby. A bearded man with glasses held out his hands and waved them gently, as though he were expecting to be passed a basketball. He murmured something unintelligible. I stared at him. He turned around and walked away.

On the way out the store he passed me as I fed her a bottle. He said something else. Something else I couldn’t understand. Maybe it was the same thing as before.

The Enterprise - 33

Robyn lived alone in some rundown flat near Port Authority. I imagined a bare room lit by a single, overhead bulb. Mattress on the floor. She got in late one day and I asked her why on instant message. She said she’d been in court fighting her landlord. It was one of those dreary, murky disagreements—a dilapidated building, kept up on the cheap; she got fed up, quit paying rent. He shut off her heat. So she’d taken a cold shower and charged downtown to sue the bastard.

There we were typing at each other, separated by the sculpture and the potted ferns. I knew she was sitting over there at her cluttered desk. Typing at me just as I typed back at her. Words and the spaces in between. I had to admit I was drawn to her purple highlit hair and tired eyes, her mania, her discombobulation. At the end of our exchange I asked her out to dinner.

We went to a chic French bistro on Park Ave. I don’t remember what we talked about. Work. The people at work. We got in a cab together, after. She laid her head on my lap with a sigh, playing it like she was too drunk and tired to sit up. And maybe she was. But there she was. Head heavy on my thigh. Her hair splayed over me, over my arm and the vinyl seat. Purple strands glinted in the passing lamplight. I could smell it—a warm and faintly bitter fragrance. The smell of an unfamiliar woman. Why didn’t I kiss her? Why didn’t I touch her? I don’t know why. But I didn’t. The cab pulled up on 43rd Street and she got out. As we pulled away I watched as she hunched over the lock to her building’s scuffed and dented metal door.

Word Search

From the platform I saw a disheveled man on the G Train. Not too old, probably homeless. He had dirty, dark hair and bore an awful crimson blotch across his face and neck. The sort of mark that plunges you into the margins. But he had something in his hands. A pen and a paper. What was he doing? I saw him draw a loop within a grid of letters. A loop around a word. He was doing a word search.

This building stands farther from the street than it should, farther than the others, as though preliminary blueprints had called for a moat. It’s distinctive but dated. Someone must have thought it beautiful, once.

You walk in the lobby and there’s towering art on every wall, semi-sculptural art, huge frames erupting with geometric shapes and colors. Art that comes out at you. Shiny marble floor, pearly white and maroon. Workers crisscrossing to their respective elevator banks in the morning. At night, when you leave, the floor is dotted with delivery guys standing immobile in their caps and white jackets, white plastic bags at their feet, waiting for their overworked customers to scurry toward them with a fistful of bills.

As I descended to the F Train platform at West 4th I heard a man behind me tell his friend: "You wanna know somethin' funny 'bout this staircase? Once I beat the shit out of someone on this staircase."

I was browsing the chocolate on my online grocery store when I found a new product: unwrapped mini Reese's peanut butter cups. That's right America. We're now officially too lazy  to unwrap our peanut butter cups.

I entered the massive main space of the Armory Y, gave my card to the security lady, walked toward the hallway to the exercise rooms. “Cold Sweat” was playing from some speakers somewhere, on the other side of the track with the basketball court inside. There didn’t seem to be anyone anywhere.

I passed the main desk by the wall and observed the woman sitting there, a young black woman. She looked up across the room and her face lit up with glee.

“That’s right!” she shouted.

I looked where she was looking. A man had emerged from one of the corridors and was dancing on the parquet floor, tight little steps, a spin. And then he stopped and turned away, gave a little wave, and walked back into the dark.

You Never Take Candy from Strangers

There was a quick storm that left beads of rain on the office windows. There’s a hole in the sky up on the right where the sun was shining this whole time. But the clouds are moving fast. They cover it up. They let it shine again.

I can see 14th Street from here—from 26th. Just the intersection with Eighth. All the way Downtown the rising Freedom Tower glitters from behind a shroud.

I’m in an odd little annex to the main room on the floor. The 13th floor. 12A if you want to know the truth. There’s a glass partition between us in here and everybody else, as though we’re exhibits in a diorama, or they are.

In the front corner of our space two steps lead to a door that opens upon a strange space behind a parapet. A walkway, except it’s not for anyone to walk. There’s a gutter there, and two industrial air conditioners. It’s the sort of door that no one’s ever meant to open, leading to a place that no one’s ever meant to go.

It reminds me of being about five or six at JFK Airport. We were going to France. I was excited—as usual. The clean and modern, formal space. The candy stands and restaurants and bars. All the people walking by so resolute.

My mom and I ambled through the passageways, looking at the planes. There was ours, a TWA 707, in peppermint-stick white and red stripes in the sun. I saw a door that led to the graveled roof of the concourse below. A door you should not open. A door you must not open.

An old lady with lipstick on appeared. She leaned over me, saying what a cute boy, what a nice boy. She handed me a Jolly Rancher. I took it.

“What do we say?” Mom said.

“Thank you.”

And the lady was out of sight. My mom demanded it from me.

“Why?” I protested.

“Because you never take candy from strangers.”

Jobs Plan

There's a sinister irony in the fact that Steve Jobs is being extravagantly mourned by many of the same people who are participating in the anti-consumerist, anti-corporate Occupy Wall Street rallies, and by many more people who are at least sympathetic to their cause. The purposeful and righteous text, tweet and shoot video from the crowded parks on iPhones and we all view them on iPhones, iPads and Macs. But Apple is an enormously wealthy international corporation. And was Jobs not perhaps the single most powerful promoter of consumerist lust in the history of civilization?

To slug a document is not to scan the text itself, not the words and sentences and their meanings, but rather the contours of the text, the shape it makes on the page. The justification.

I spend hours slugging at my pharmaceutical agency jobs, usually comparing the new round with the last, sometimes reading the words that begin and end a line and reading them again on the backup, thinking about the bad, accidental poems that they make:

Call
Allergic
treatment
chest
or
Your
of
if

Sometimes I abandon the meanings of the words completely—they're too distracting. I see them only as curious arrangements of bent and twisted little lines. I see them as they really are.

The Enterprise - 32

Once the Product had been loosed upon the world we found we were mostly powerless to affect its course, to guide its adoption, even to define it. We’d crafted for it the persona of a genial boy-robot, whimsical, wide-eyed and heroic. Yet our audience—our unintended audience—generally treated it as a semi-moronic younger sibling fit for extravagant, humiliating abuse. We also observed in the reports prolonged sexual interactions. Some had a naive, poignant quality suggesting they were conducted by preteen girls, discovering and exploring the erotic nature of the query, the reply, the silence in between. Some seemed to be farcical. But maybe not. In other interactions the Product appeared to play the role of confessor, of an interactive diary. Sometimes, some of the things I saw in the reports—raw cries of pubescent rage, of anguish—anonymized though they had been—I was not supposed to see. No one was supposed to see. I’d read until my shame took hold and forced my hand to close the window.

As a group we were bemused. A little worried. And so we escaped into minutiae. For weeks we debated the issue of help. As in: how should the Product assist a user in need of help?

“We need a help domain,” asserted David.

“Why? It is help already,” said Tom.

“What?”

“It is help. ‘What can I help you with?’ ‘I’d like to know the weather, please.’ ‘Here you go.’ Help is what it does.”

“But what if you need help getting help?” David persisted.

“Then we don’t care.”

“We abandon the user? We give a bad experience?”

Tom shrugged and made his grimace. Conversations went on like this for days, in formal and informal meetings, across e-mail. When one area of concern was resolved, or abandoned in frustration, or forgotten altogether, another was seized upon, invested with significance, raised above our heads to be examined from each angle. We were afraid that if there wasn’t any problem with the Product, there wasn’t anything at all.

One day I happened by Tom’s desk as he was furiously typing code for an application that was to be deployed on a limited basis for a well known e-commerce portal. A demo for the client via teleconference was scheduled for the following morning.

“The only thing I care more about making this thing work is my wife. And my son,” he declared. Never taking his eyes off the screen.

Bob and Fun developed an elaborate mini-site, skinned with the prospective client’s branding, to support the application. I was called upon to provide the copy. Meanwhile Tom coded late into the night, coordinating with the hosting department out west to get the thing up and running.

The demo occurred—I supposed—as planned, behind the closed conference room door, live voices alternating with tinny ones on the speakerphone, query, reply, silence, query, reply. It ended in less than an hour and I never heard a word about it again.

The curious hush in which we normally operated deepened with the passing weeks. We wore headphones, listened to Pandora on the Internet. We communicated with each other primarily by instant message—even with our neighbors. Our work, our interactions—our very lives—we conducted from pixelated sanctuaries, outposts in the increasingly bewildering realm of objects and emptiness, of floors and ceilings and walls. For the better part of the day we fell into the interface. Not quite present. Not quite gone.

What might we look like to a race of aliens? What might we look like period?

I perceived the heat of human gaze upon my shoulder. David had spun his chair and taken off his headphones. Presently he glared at me.

“I know what you’re doing, Paul. And I don’t like it.”

“What?”

“I know what you’re doing!”

“What? What are you talking about?”

“You’re undermining me, Paul. You’ve been doing it all along!”

“Jeez, David. What?”

He threw his headphones and they bounced off his keyboard with a plastic clatter.

“I know more about this than you do! I’m the information architect!”

I assured him that I respected what he did and had no idea what he was talking about. Still, I felt a chill of guilt. What was going on? Was it something? Was something going on?

David stormed out for a cigarette. When he came back he informed me, in the coldly formal tone of the officially aggrieved, that he’d soon be writing a complaint to the human resources department—Sally—his boss—Tom—and Neil, the CEO.

“OK,” I said. “I understand.”

I didn’t understand. I pretended to go on working, my trembling fingers jumpy on the keys.

The following day Tom sat us in the conference room. He’d received some kind of message from David, evidently, but made no mention of its contents.

“I think you guys need to go out and have a beer and work things out,” Tom said.

I nodded agreeably. David was still and mute throughout. Later, at our desks, I sent him an instant message saying: Yes, we should go have a beer. Work things out. He said he thought that was a good idea. We never communicated with each other again.