As I sat in my boss’s office I noticed that the windows in the building across the way reflected our windows, but bowed them like fun house mirrors so they all looked like giant eyeballs peering back at us.

I leaned against the train window as we went express from Jay Street to Seventh. Tired.

Outside the Coney Island haunted house the operator, a big guy about forty, leaned on a rail and spoke to a couple of ticket takers, high school guys on summer jobs.

The cars were mostly empty. Here and there a mother and daughter, a father and son, darted around the corner to be plunged into the black portal, grimacing with apprehension.

“Open a checking account and a savings account,” the man said.

The boys nodded.

“Start a credit card. Open a line of credit and buy some shit.”

A few moments passed and a few more empty cars rattled past the gates of the inferno.

“Don’t buy too much shit. You’re establishin’ credit.”

One of the boys murmured something I could not hear.

“One-fifty, one-fifty. One-fifty in checking an’ one-fifty in savings.”

The group fell silent. All the cars were gone now. The stretch of track that ran out front, past the turnstile, glinted in the August sun.

We thought we were all so clever defying the man, doubting reality. Denying the existence of moral absolutes. Look atcha. Like a rolling stone.

This is what we get and I still don’t know what to do.

The cough is back. Dormant for hours sometimes, other times spasmodic to the point where I wonder what will happen if I don’t stop. I see myself pounding on our bedroom door, rousing Sara and wordlessly directing her to dial 911. But this has all happened before, and before, and before.

There’s a new guy panhandling on the F train lately. You can tell he’s coming. It starts with a little commotion, a spasm in that gauzy atmosphere that unites and separates us all on our way home from work. Is it a fight? A lunatic? A few heads turn. Most don’t bother. But then he appears, marching down the car and shouting: “I’m HUNGRY. Can SOMEBODY HELP ME OUT? I’m HUNGRY. Can SOMEBODY HELP ME OUT?”

The choice of words. The emphatic, urgent declaration. Then the more delicate question—not “Can someone give me money?” Not “Can someone spare some change?” Can somebody help me out? Could mean anything, really. Up to you. The words lie there on the floor, inviting us to pick and poke at them.

I thought he’d walked by when I realized he’d stopped his litany and taken a seat across from me. Like any other rider I suppose. He was eating a slice of chocolate-frosted cake from a clear plastic single-serve container. The kind you see at the deli and never, ever buy. When he was done he cast the trash beneath the bench and pulled out a wad of cash. He tossed it in a heap on the empty seat beside him. A mound of bills, some balled up and some in clumpy piles. Then he gathered it all up again and began to count. Singles, some fives. There must have been, I don’t know. Thirty dollars, forty?

TROOPS

No way they’re paying admission, so they’re either tunneling in or coming in over the retaining wall.

TROOPS

And he was like, “If you could take care of Chet. He’s in the stairwell. And he’ll be hungry.”

You enter a new realm when you walk down that jetway to the plane. From the unhappy bustle of the terminal, the lines for bad food, the flatscreen watching over all to remind them of the even greater misery outside, to the hush of the carpeted, windowless, downward slope, reeking of jet fuel suddenly, an uncivilized odor—no one would ever tolerate it for more than a minute but it’s intoxicating—to the independent nation of the plane, where there’s an otherworldly hum and colored lights glow from nowhere, and you can’t get reception now for some reason, and there’s a Muzak version of “Every Breath You Take” playing soft and low.

TROOPS

No way they’re paying admission, so they’re either tunneling in or coming in over the retaining wall.

A rat scurried along the far wall at Canal Street station, looking like the shadow of my train pulling out.

We spend our lives avoiding taking care of others and then no one’s there to take care of us.

The red light signaling a new message on the phone on the empty desk in the vacant cubicle.

And here comes the snow.

TROOPS

“Sir, Professor Oda is still on the premises here, of course,” said

As good a time as any.

TROOPS

this was how long she could hold it. But this half minute

You're Not Funny

Overheard on the Houston Street platform, a woman on the phone, walking through the turnstile and past me:

“You’re not funny. You’re not funny. Nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah. Lemme tell you something. You’re not funny. You’re not funny. You’re not funny. You’re not funny.”

And on and on into the distance.

TROOPS

However, as small as the actual number of wrongdoers might be, they can have an outsized effect on the economy—

Into the Mouth Again

When I was in fourth grade at Northwest Elementary School there was some event when old people came to visit. They must have been from a nursing home nearby. Were they invited to tell us their stories growing up, about schools and teachers long ago? Or were we meant to entertain them, to lift their spirits on their long, dull slog towards death? All I can remember is lunchtime, when they joined us in the cafeteria. They sat segregated from us—for their comfort, or for ours, I don’t know.

The menu that day was grilled cheese sandwiches. For dessert, canned peaches in syrup. I stared at a sclerotic man with unkempt white hair. He wore a tan windbreaker. Why didn’t he bother to take it off? His spotted face hung low over his food, as though he were scrutinizing something unfamiliar. Like the others he ate silently, mirthlessly, paying no attention to his tablemates.

He speared a peach wedge and lifted it out of its pleated paper cup. Luscious drops of golden syrup ran down along the edges of the technicolor fruit, and down the white tines of his plastic fork, and onto the institutional pale-green tray. He placed it into his mouth and chewed. The sight was jarring. An old man eating little kids’ food. Accepting something designed for juvenile appetites. Was it humiliating? He didn’t care. Was it delicious? No. But I’ll never forget his air of duty, of determination. Into the mouth. Chew, chew, chew. Into the mouth again.

TROOPS

—one of those the locals called a harbinger—pushed off from its icy eyrie and floated in the thin air,

The tedious progression through the day, the sitting down, the getting up, the walking past strangers in the hall, the yanking of paper towels crookedly from the men’s room dispenser. The afternoon punctuated by another active shooter, on time like a clock.

In the kitchen, a man was telling another about some work trip he’d been on, where he’d expensed a crazy tasting menu.

“One of the dishes was like, this truffle jelly with a straw,” he said. “I was like, what the fuck is this?”

“Ha ha,” said the other.

“But it was fucking awesome,” he continued as I turned my back and walked away.

TROOPS

What did old Eva mean by you watched? How could she help seeing it?

TROOPS

The Third World becomes a reflecting pool that gives a Western Narcissus back his own pale reflection.