TROOPS

Toward the end of 2005, Cassano promoted Al Frost.

I had management training the entire day at my old office, the main agency, the Mothership, on 42nd Street. As I approached the corner of Third Avenue an ambulance, siren blaring, crept between the vans and trucks stopped at the light. I knew crossing now would be a stupid thing to do, but I knew I might have, if I was a little more mindless than I already was. I sensed the other pedestrians wondering if they could make it; balking for a moment before staying on the curb. Finally it burst into the intersection with about 17 seconds left for us to cross. As I did I looked to my left: a couple blocks up, on the right, smoke poured from a storefront.

TROOPS

The school has been run in a very lax and permissive manner.

We live in the Age of Horror. Beheadings, school shootings, the slaughter of cartoonists. And now an apparently normal young man who turned to the earth to plunge himself, men, women and children to their deaths.

It got warm quick today, from about noon till about mid-afternoon, around the time a gas explosion shook 2nd Avenue at around 7th Street, not far from the old Fillmore East, where other kinds of bombs went off so many years ago.

TROOPS

“He lost sight of what he was supposed to be doing up there. What the priorities were.”

TROOPS

"Payment," Jamie said. "For his nose—plus interest."

TROOPS

All fugitive slaves faced daunting odds

We awoke in the middle of the night to the sound of Jackie singing. I didn’t recognize the song, and I couldn’t really hear the words, but her voice was tuneful and clear. I walked in and asked her what was going on.

“I’m singing so I can remember my dream,” she said. Then she began to cry, because she couldn’t remember it now, because she wasn’t singing anymore.

Last night as we lay sunken into the couch, I heard a car horn somewhere down the street. It honked insistently a few times, stopped, and started again. And stopped, and started again. Sara got up to look out the window but saw nothing. It started again, stopped. Started again. A voice isolated from the angry, insistent din that you hear when traffic is backed up at the Holland Tunnel. But with no traffic, no tunnel.

As I gazed dumbly at the TV I tried to imagine what could possibly be going on. A solitary figure in a car, possibly parked, not even running. This person’s mind was breaking. What kind of grief, what kind of horror, must a human contemplate to lose it like that? To sit in a car and honk into the void—to make this wordless howl of anguish—for the better part of an hour?

Then it stopped.

After I dropped off Jackie yesterday I walked along 23rd Street and noticed a slender young woman on her phone, in the corner where some plywood wall or vestibule met the building side. I knew there was something about her. I slowed and stared. I realized she was sobbing.

“Mom, Mom! It’s going to be all right! It’s going to be all right!” I heard her say.

Who Are People?

Went to the Ear Bar today to meet N. for lunch. As I waited for him I observed the others at tables in the front room. Three men in shirts and ties were seated nearby. The waitress recited a list of soft drinks to one of them: “... apple juice, orange juice, water?” I heard her say. She was evidently at the tail end of a very unappealing speech.

“No, no,” the man responded. “Just water, please.”

“Get a drink,” one of his companions suggested.

“No! No. Unless someone else wants tequila. Ha ha!”

The man seated to his left, portly, in his mid-thirties, said in a serious tone, “Tequila on the rocks can be very, very nice.”

There followed some indistinct banter about alcohol.

“Don’t talk to me, I haven’t had a drink in three months,” the portly one said.

“Why not?” asked the older man across from him.

“Trying to lose weight,” he replied.

Which led me to wonder: Who are people? What the hell are they doing? And why?

The shoelace of my left shoe keeps coming undone. I have no idea why. Usually at work. I’ll get up to go get coffee or something and look down to find the laces flapping around and dragging on the floor. Or sometimes I catch them as they’re coming unraveled. The knot has opened like some kind of flower and the laces are slowly growing free. I can almost see it happen.

I have no idea why. Always the same shoe. The left. The right is fastened up the way it should. I walk by some people, wondering whether they notice my disordered state, whether they remember it from the day before. Then I finally find some chair somewhere to prop my foot on to tie them again, nice and tight this time, hoping somehow this will finally do it.

There’s been that vibrant light the last couple of days, that light in the City when the red lights are bright, deep red and the pink of the sunsets is in all the windows.

I overheard a woman on her phone, walking down Sixth Avenue, telling her friend about a couple they both knew, how the guy keeps taking credit for the woman’s accomplishments. Rich. His name was Rich.

The Enterprise - 49

Bob, Fun and I were on our way to Sunshine for lunch when Bob kicked a can into the street.

“You’ve been doing more work with Tom,” he remarked. “How’s that going?”

“It’s going well,” I replied uncertainly.

“I have strong objections to resources with a given skill set drifting into unrelated roles.”

I told him I could see what he meant.

“I don’t think it’s healthy. It isn’t good for the company. It isn’t good for people.”

We continued wordlessly down Fifth Avenue, hands plunged into pockets at the cold, belching plumes of breath like car exhaust. Was that it? I wondered. Did he expect me to prattle on in response? Would he escalate this topic somehow? To Neil?

It was true my role was drifting. Toward product development, toward coding—not real programming of course but coding with the user-friendly interface the engineers out west had created—and away from whatever dubious thing I was originally engaged to do. Actually maybe I was still doing what I was supposed to do, but really doing it now, instead of typing up some dumb paragraphs in a Word document and attaching it to an Outlook e-mail for someone else to laboriously download, open, copy-paste from, reformat into the gizmo, check for errors, and commit to the repository. Now I was using the gizmo. It was inevitable. It saved me time and it saved everyone else time.

We got our falafel. Walked back up Fifth in silence. Then Bob and Lowell started talking about something. Joking around. And that was it. Bob never said a word about it again.

Twelve to the thirteen to the fourteen to the fifteen.

Sweated and snored last night as I dreamt of a faraway place. On a big rock up in the mountains somewhere.

TROOPS

The two men enter the home and treat Rommel with the utmost respect and courtesy.

I watched and listened on the train today, riding into Manhattan with the family. A rich young man, impeccably dressed and coif’d, stood with his legs planted wide apart in the middle of the car. He was speaking to a woman who must have been his girlfriend, or his wife. I overheard fragments of his speech. “I’m just very annoyed,” he said. “I’m very frustrated. First of all there’s the thing of you getting ready.” I couldn’t hear her responses, which were offered plaintively here and there. “And then you spend all afternoon with someone else,” he went on. “I’m very annoyed. I’m frustrated.” I examined his expensive leather boots and his designer jeans, turned in a single, narrow cuff. His double-breasted pea coat with the strap of his messenger bag slung tight across the front like a belt of ammunition.

Money won’t save you.

We went to the supermarket for the first time in a long time today. A real old-fashioned supermarket down the hill, not the cramped, overpriced one near us. We learned all over again how to navigate the cart around people, how to read the aisle signs, how to tear off the plastic produce bags. Lemons, Cheerios and toilet paper. We could get anything we wanted.

We scrambled onto the train, the weary parents with their little kid. I got on first with Jackie, listing against me the way kids do, and bobbing her head around. She careened dangerously close to the pole, the seat, surfaces surely contaminated with New York City filth.

“Don’t let her put her face on anything,” Sara called out across the car.

I sat down with Jackie and noticed a guy next to me, a young guy, writing something in a notebook. I read over his shoulder.

“Don’t let her put her face on anything,” he wrote.

I’ve had too many dreams about work lately. Not quite nightmares, just dreams where I’m doing what I do at work except there’s a layer or two of dreamy abstraction, like I do it by hand, not on the computer, and my pen turns into a telephone and I have to operate the telephone in order to place a mark on the paper.