At the birthday party in the park on Saturday I tried a piece of cake and the frosting was the sweetest thing I’d ever tasted in my life. It was supernaturally sweet, sweeter than a spoonful of sugar. Like that sweetest substance on earth from the Guinness Book of Word Records, 1977. It convulsed me like a shock.

Later in the afternoon I drifted off to sleep in the armchair. After a few minutes I awoke with a start, not sure who I was, where I was.

TROOPS

"Please," Pasquale rasped to Tomasso. "Go."

Do we participate in medical rituals superstitiously? Are they doing us any good, or are they merely fulfilling some ancient, neurotic need? We have all the equipment in the world, the drugs, the antibiotics. But what if we’ve really just come all the way around again to treating our ailments the way we did in the Middle Ages?

The ophthalmologist told me my eyes were fine but I still needed to take the drops.

“You’re still showing characteristics of pre-glaucoma,” she said. “So that’s something we still need to manage and still need to follow.”

I had taken the peripheral vision test, where you look into a scope and click a clicker every time a little white light blinks somewhere in the field. It always seems more like a test of reflexes, or of honesty. Sometimes I just click mindlessly, thinking a light must have blinked, however faintly, and so why don’t I just guess and hope I got it right? Never mind that it does more good, in a medical exam, to do honestly poorly than to do luckily well. It’s nerve-racking and fraught; it’s a performance.

At one point the assistant said, “Sir?” I was vaguely aware that she must be talking to me but I was somehow reluctant to respond, lost in my blank, blurry world with its occasional pinpricks of light.

“Sir? Do you need any help?”

“No, I’m fine,” I said finally. It occurred to me that I probably had missed an entire series of flashes and got her worried. And it further occurred to me that I hadn’t reacted to them not because I hadn’t seen them but because I just didn’t want to for a little while. I didn’t want to play along.

I finished the test feeling I must have done terribly. Not clicking for stretches at a time, clicking spasmodically for others. The assistant told me to return to the doctor’s examining room. As I waited there I imagined her concerned expression, her suggestion that further investigations were in order. Perhaps deeper and more time-consuming examinations at a better-equipped facility in a hospital annex uptown. I imagined having to explain to her that I really was fine, I just didn’t want to click the clicker sometimes, you know? Even when I saw the light. And other times I clicked it again and again for no good damn reason, I’m sorry. Can I please, please take the test again?

When she came in she pulled up my results on her computer and said they were fine.

“Your pressure’s fine. Your peripheral vision is fine. Come back again in four months and we’ll do it again.”

“Keep taking the drops?” I asked.

“Yes,” she replied. “Of course. Keep taking the drops.”

In the long passageway that leads from the ACE to the 7 at Times Square I began to notice how people swing their arms as they walk. Everyone does. Young, old, short, tall. Nobody realizes it but they’re swinging their arms the whole time, like they’re paddling through the ether.

Crossing the Gowanus

The bell made the sort of sound that’s not too loud when you’re near but you can hear a mile away. It rang dully and not quite evenly, almost like someone was working it by hand.  

A thin boy sat on the concrete riser that ran along the sidewalk, cradling a snare drum and tapping his foot. I wondered whether he was trying to keep time with the bell. It was hard to tell. An older girl stood nearby, wheeling a scooter back and forth in short jabs.

Now a line of cars had formed, and bicycles too. More pedestrians gathered on either side of the street. Some lifted their phones to take pictures. Past the double barricades and the no-man’s land there was a mirror world: cars, bikes and people waiting to cross the other way.

The bridge rose slowly in one flat segment, along tracks in four columns. All the time the bell kept ringing. It was still hot but the sun was sinking low.

A horn sounded and a barge passed through. All you could see was the top of a massive gravel pile. Finally the tugboat came and went. You gotta be patient in that line of work.

The din was over and the bridge restored. I peered down at the poisoned Gowanus as I crossed, and on the other side I glanced into a strange, semi-sheltered space. It was unclear whether it was part of the bridge’s structure or if it belonged to the adjacent construction site, a patchy-grass lot with trailers and Port-o-lets. Inside there were hundreds upon hundreds of mannequins, some standing, some lying in stacks, and rows and rows of bathtubs with feet.

When we went out this afternoon the rain was still falling and all the leaves down 7th Street glowed as though it overflowed from the street to the dirt to the roots and up the trunk, into the branches, out the stems and into them. I had seen the street so many times, not thinking much of it. The dreary cars, the ramshackle sidewalk. Houses of neighbors we didn’t know. But there was something in the contrasting light, and in the alley of trees, and in the way the street opened at the intersection with 8th Avenue, that reminded me of a place I’d seen in dreams.

A petite, young Asian woman stood in the middle of the 7 train platform with a guitar, the case open at her feet. She had a mic too, and she was amplified, ready to go. She played quick, jabbing chords as she tuned up and adjusted her volume. Commuters flowed by on either side. A westbound train left the station. An eastbound one came in. Still she played her tense, little chords. Someone bent over and left her a buck. I wondered whether this was her act. All preparation. No singing. No songs.

A deeply hunched vagrant drifted by erratically, looking straight at the space right past his dirty shoes. People took note of him as they do in New York City: as the wild card in their midst. The performer eyed him with a trace of concern. Two more chords: jank-jank.

As people got on and off the train I heard him bark at someone. People turned to look in his direction. When I did, too, he was gone.

Life Today

Our devices, force-fed by the desperate, hyperactive media industry, keep us constantly connected to the horrendousness of the world, never knowing whether, sitting on the desk chair, the subway seat or toilet, we’ll see something that will make us choke back tears, or vomit, or both.

Ernie Is Bert

I was dropping Jackie off at school, taking off her jacket.

“Ernie,” she said.

“Who’s Ernie?” I asked.

“Ernie is Bert.”

TROOPS

“I’m exploring various funding options.”

TROOPS

However, much to his surprise

A man said to a group of friends as they walked along a path in Prospect Park, “She was like, ‘All I can say is that it was absolutely agonizing.’”

A man says to his female companion as they're walking down the street, "You get what you want, dontcha?"

Pedro's Back From Jail

We exited wearily into the arrivals terminal at JFK and walked that weird gauntlet of disregard, the rows of other peoples’ families and limo drivers holding up names in magic marker. Almost as soon as we entered the main space, gypsy cabbies descended upon us: Need a taxi? Where you need to go? Taxi? Taxi? Where you go? I had anticipated this little ritual and had fantasized about telling them Fuck off. But I didn’t. This is what they do. Let a man make a dishonest living, after all.

Outside, we got in the long line for Yellow Cabs. On the other side of the railing the non-licensed guys ranged up and down the median, trying to rope in their marks. We watched with some amusement as a young Asian woman talked one down from sixty-five bucks to thirty for a ride to Nassau County, only to leave him twisting in the wind.

Suddenly one man’s voice cut through the rest.

“Yo Pedro’s back!” he bellowed. “Pedro’s back motherfuckers! Y’all can go home now,” he told his rivals. “Pedro’s back from jail!”

TROOPS

Eventually, after he shakily made it to his feet

TROOPS

look different? I feel different

The map they show you when you're flying, that pixelly view of the plane's progress, deepens the sense you're in another world, with place names you've never heard of—Haworth, New York; Godthab, Greenland, Timmins and Chicoutimi—and sideways views of the planet, where north is west and south is east.

On my way out of work the other day I spied a peculiar object resting on the gleaming off-white marble floor of the elevator foyer: a brand-new, shiny little nail.

The Nonwriter

Huge, beautiful expanses of time. Quiet, cold, serene—like clean, untrodden snow on the rolling lawns of a pretty college campus, twinkling in the moonlight. Awesome stretches of time: seven months, two weeks and three days. One year, four months, two weeks and one day. Three months, three weeks and six days. Each period—containing events momentous and minute, from the universal to the personal, calamities, births and deaths, droughts, weddings, military coups and shooting sprees; crossing the seasons; calendar pages flying into blackness—had its own quality, its characteristics. Sweet, peaceful, sad or angry. Some were green. Some were dark purple, or opalescent blue.

These were the periods when he didn’t write.

He was a great nonwriter—maybe the best there ever was. An exquisite craftsman of the empty page, a master story-not-teller. What other people wrote was good or bad, maybe great sometimes. Probably not. But what he didn’t write was transcendent. Others slaved at their screens, sullying the page irretrievably with a single twisted, tortured glyph, then a lonesome, woeful word, and—when they still might cut their losses by shutting their laptops and seeing what’s on TV—deepening their ignominy by following the first word with another and yet another after that, a dreary sentence even, then a hopeless paragraph, a tragic chapter, and ultimately, a lost and irredeemable novel.

While he didn’t write window washers made their glacial progress down the facades of great buildings, reached bottom, and started all over again. Young couples moved into their first apartments, painted the walls in trendy pastels, bickered, and wondered whether they’d made the right decision. Two people were shoved to their deaths on New York City subway tracks. All this time he didn’t write a word.

Some strove to write about some of it, or all of it, even. Nothing they produced could possibly do justice to the beauty, the horror and the chaos. Only one thing could: not writing. And he was not writing powerfully. Poignantly.

Wasn’t most of the world not writing too? Yes—but no. He wrote from time to time. He had to—that was the only way to frame his true work, his anti-performance, his agraphic state of grace.

Thanks to experience and great determination, he found that his periods of writing grew shorter and farther between. Finally, he resolved to create his masterpiece. He would never write another word as long as he lived.

For years he kept at it. Nothing, silence. Nothing but the purest void, the essence of the universe, indescribably beautiful—and duly undescribed. Even as his body began to fail him—aches and debilities, minor at first and then a little worse, like everybody else—his spirit grew stronger, glowing within him like an ember that couldn’t die. He was the elderly master in his glory, like deaf Beethoven, like Picasso holed up in the south of France. Except death wouldn’t interrupt his work. It would prolong it into eternity.

Then one morning something happened. The garbage truck had come and gone. A crust of toast remained on a saucer on the kitchen counter. Everything was still. And he did something he immediately regretted. And he knew he would, but he did it anyway. He hated himself for it. But there was nothing he could do. He began to write.

I told Jackie I love her and she said, “I know.”