There’s a part of the block by the hospital where suddenly there’s a sickly-sweet smell, like cough syrup mixed with bleach. It feels like you might get high just walking by, or die a little sooner. I wonder whether it’s the smell of medicine or cleaning supplies or embalming fluid or maybe it’s what they use to flavor the dessert.

I flip to the DVR and there’s a new Anthony Bourdain episode, like he’s still alive, or like he’s haunting us. It’s like there’s somewhere new to go, new experiences to be had, especially if you’re dead.

I like when the project manager reviews the key dates and they’re deep into the future, dates like February 9, or April 27, far away but specific, with benchmarks and deliverables associated. It feels like we have lots of time, but that’s not really it. We’re connected to a point in the future. A time when god knows what will be going on in the world, but there we are, gathered safe and sound again on the MS Project timeline. What it really means is that we believe we’re going to survive.

TROOPS

“You’re dead and don’t know it,” he said with a grin that couldn’t help but be evil.

TROOPS

What Newman and her fellow candidates were challenging were the structural realities of patriarchal power in its purest form

Drag

When I awoke I had a fleeting feeling that I wasn’t me. Or I wished I wasn’t me. Then it came back to me in a rush. The shame. The pleasure. The bemused expression on the bouncer’s face. Finally Dan and Terry, each taking me by an arm. The violence of it.

And I knew this: I would do it again.

My phone was all lit up with texts and calls. I knew what they’d be asking. I turned off the screen but put it in my pocket anyway. By reflex.

At the coffee shop later. Same thing. Felt the chair against my back, the wood. Not comfortable but did not care. Not care. My ass on the seat. That’s more comfortable. That little concave part. That nod to the human body.

I crossed my legs sometimes. Uncrossed them after a while. The hours passed.

“Sir, it’s closing time.”

I heard these words.

“Sir? Sir?”

I heard the man speak.

“Sir.” He was leaning over me now, peering into my face with some concern. “Are you OK? You have to leave. I’m leaving. I’m closing up.”

Then he figured I was deaf. He said it all again a little louder, in front of me this time so maybe I could read his lips or gestures.

“I’m not going anywhere,” I said finally. I made the words sound flat and dull, so they could be heard any way you wanted. Defiant. Resigned. Reassuring.

A tense quiet ensued. Then he disappeared out back.

Through the picture window I watched the sidewalk and the street, people passing by. A woman in a long dark coat. A woman wearing a flowered backpack. Running for some reason. Ordinary life in its perfect unpredictability. Two police officers walked past, one black, one white. Now they were inside the café. And they were walking toward me. The black one leaned down into my face while the white one consulted with the employee.

“Sir, it’s time to go. Time to leave,” he declared, thumbing in the direction of the door.

I watched him blankly. Crossed my arms. His tag said Harrison. The other one said Wirth.

“What the fuck did I just say, huh? You have to go,” Harrison continued.

“I’m not going anywhere.”

The employee produced a worried sigh. I stared at them all. Finally the cops glanced at each other. Wirth gave a little nod.

“Sure you aren’t,” said Harrison as he took me by an arm and Wirth took me by the other. They heaved me up and the chair fell backwards with a clatter. I hung limply, heavily between them now. As they dragged me toward the door I felt that sweet, hot pain in my shoulders again. Daydreamed that my arms would pull out of their sockets and let my body pour onto the floor.

Outside they tried to get me on my feet but I refused.

“You fucked up? Huh? Huh?” Wirth yelled in my face.

They conferred with each other as though I wasn’t there suspended in the space between them.

“He don’t actually seem fucked up to me,” Wirth told his partner.

“Nope. Can’t smell nothin’ on his breath.”

“He don’t seem high.”

They put me on the sidewalk, propped against the wall.

“What’s your name? You’re not gonna tell us your name?” asked Wirth.

I stared at the sign above a laundromat across the street. Lucky Laundry the letters read. The letters were red. The red letters read.

“My name is Lucky,” I declared.

Wirth made a dark little chuckle.

“Where do you live, asshole?”

And so I found myself again staring down, my dragging feet bent out of view below my knees. Shoes getting scuffed and scraped. I did not care. Ankles banging on curbs. I did not care. My body pulling down, down, down from my arms, each in the grip of a cop on either side of me muttering curses and jerking me up now and again in spite and frustration at his absurd burden.

Harrison rang the super’s bell. He emerged from his ground floor apartment and stared at me, stupefied. At Wirth’s direction he found my keys in my pocket and went on ahead up to the second floor. The cops carried me upstairs head to tail like a corpse.

I awoke on the kitchen floor.

The wall clock proceeded through the minutes and the hours, sometimes quick and sometimes slow.

Light reflected off the cars below and shone on the ceiling by the windows. Little shapeless entities drifting by to nowhere.

Shouts from the street. A jackhammer. A woman laughing.

My phone buzzed in my pocket now and then. Texts, calls. From concerned friends and family and automated scam operations. Buzz. Buzz. Buzz.

Day turned into night. Headlights now shone from the street, amid the ambient glow of lamps and signs.

I was hungry. I did not care.

Deep in that second night the street grew still and quiet. That’s when I began my incantation.

You’re gonna die if you can’t stop being a drag.

I startled myself when I first said it. What a dumb, weird thing to pierce this holy silence with. And yet I said it again. And again. And again. And again. And again.

You’re gonna die if you can’t stop being a drag.
You’re gonna die if you can’t stop being a drag.
You’re gonna die if you can’t stop being a drag.

I think the sun was rising. Maybe that’s what woke me up. I wasn’t even sure I’d been asleep. My body ached everywhere, inside and out.

I rolled over on my side and wondered if my free arm was strong enough to steady me. I remained there a few minutes. Then I bent my other arm at the elbow and braced against the floor, lifting myself up so my upper body was finally off the ground. I felt a wave of dizziness and was just about to collapse back down. But I didn’t. I held steady for a while and then sat up, leaning forward with my hands flat on the floor. I was stunned at how difficult this was. But finally I got up on my knees, and then on one foot and, steadying myself on a dining chair, on the other. I stood all the way up now, still leaning my head down so my blood wouldn’t rush away.

The floor before me was dark and blurry. I did not quite know where my foot would land. Or if it ever would. But still I took a step.

TROOPS

Some might even look more seriously at solar and wind power

Where Are They Now?

Ken was a cool kid, a jock. He had a nonchalant bearing that I envied, that I knew I could never replicate. It’s as if he was incapable of ever appearing awkward, and yet was utterly unconcerned with not appearing awkward. These paradoxical characteristics were not in tension. They potentiated each other.

To this day when I’m in the kitchen late at night, all alone, trying to wrestle the recycling bag full of old newspapers out of the plastic can, and failing miserably, instead lifting both the stuck bag and the can by the drawstrings of the bag, I think to myself: Ken would never look like this.

One day in science class we were all sitting cross-legged on our tables to view a demonstration Mr. Pinkston was giving of a dissected frog. Except for Ken. He was lying flat on his back.

Mr. Pinkston had been a military man and liked to bark like a drill sergeant.

“Ken!” he shouted.

Ken lifted his head drowsily and rested on his elbows, a little sheepish. Somehow this flash of self-consciousness did not appear self-conscious. It appeared calculated—and it appeared not calculated at all.

Mr. Pinkston asked Ken what part of the frog’s anatomy we were presently discussing and by some miracle, or obviously, Ken provided the correct response.

“It seems to me, Ken,” Mr. Pinkston declared, “that you do some of your best thinking in the reclining position.”

We all laughed. Ken laughed. I laughed. All I could think was: Did Mr. Pinkston just make a joke about Ken getting laid? We were twelve years old, maybe thirteen. But if anyone was getting laid it was Ken.

Some time later Mr. Pinkston was fired for groping a student.

Ken spent the rest of his life skiing in a rich and secluded Rocky Mountain resort town.

Or so I heard.

The Enterprise - 56

It took me hundreds of elevator trips to realize. I’d share a ride up with a dad and his twelve-year-old son, wide-eyed, beside himself with anticipation. The door would open on the third floor and the boy would race into what appeared to be a harshly lit, rundown showroom. I’d glimpse paunchy men in their fifties chatting up customers over display cases that ran along the perimeter. I perceived the scene as less than ordinary. I was on my way to the floor above.

Finally I heard the word. Don’t you know what that is down there? No. That place downstairs? It’s a magic shop.

Turns out people came from all over the world to see the place. It was one of those old-timey New York things that you can’t believe is still around, like the watch repair guys above Grand Central, the bric-a-brac dealers on Canal, the peking duck places with the white tablecloths. And yet there it was the whole time, unchanged since 1937 or 1951 or whenever the fuck. Same old magic guys shooting the shit with each other, blowing kids’ minds with the same old tricks.

We went down there one time to have a look around, me and Steve and a couple others. It was exactly what you’d expect it to be. A place where you could buy a pop-out snake or a top hat with a false bottom. It was utterly unmysterious.

I had a feeling it would be there long after we were gone.

The Enterprise - 55

In my dream Bill was still in charge of the office out west, all these years later. The place was dilapidated now, the chairs ratty, computer parts and cables disordered everywhere.

But he was still running the Product. And some of the French guys were still around, tweaking the algorithms. Their determination was poignant—heroic, even. Still there was no plan. No viable path to profitability. But there was hope.

And I wanted to help. I wished I could help.

The requisite guys in windbreakers doing reports from the hurricane, the sea at night behind them, waves coming in ominously fast.

Breaking news.

There was a young man seated on the bench in the middle of the Seventh Avenue platform, perfectly still, gazing in my direction. There was something on his forehead, a kind of starburst pattern radiating down. I thought it had to be makeup, a tattoo, something deliberate. As I approached I saw that it was blood—dark, drying, oozed from an unseen wound.

He made no sounds, not of pain nor anguish, nor anger, nor despair. An MTA employee stood guard beside him, also still, unconcerned, maybe just waiting for someone else to come. I glanced around for telltale objects—a weapon, debris, a skateboard. There was nothing.

What happened? I wondered as I walked away.

A man steps out of the post office into the rain and brusquely opens his umbrella.

The crossing guard stands in the middle of the avenue in his garish yellow rainsuit, doing nothing. Until the light’s about to change and he wanders to the corner yet again.

On my way to dropping off Jackie at camp I thought of something to write about—nothing great, but something. An event in my everyday life, possibly a recurring event. It occurred to me: of course that’s something to write about. Why wouldn’t it be? It’s exactly the sort of thing to write about: mundane yet amusing, emblematic of city life, or modern life. And I can’t remember it at all.

On the Roof

The planes flew overhead as usual, maybe a little low on account of the clouds. In the distance the city trembled ever so slightly from all the noise you couldn’t hear.

A few houses down a family was having a barbecue. Dad at the grill. Mom and the little ones up some steps, sitting on a fancy outdoor couch. Look at them, eating at a proper time. With the nice grill and the good outdoor furniture. How much richer they must be than us, I thought. How much better. And then I thought, how could you think a thing like that?

As I drove a nail diagonally through the table, hoping finally to fix that part that’s always breaking off, I became aware of a din across the street. It was a woman screaming. I paused to try to make out what she said.

“You tell her! You tell her! You tell her!” she howled, on the edge of articulation.

Then: “You’re killing me! You’re killing me!”

No one seemed to reply. Or if they did, they did so quietly.

In Birthday Room #3 there was pizza and soda for the kids, pizza and water for the parents.

As their photos played on the screen on the wall they all shouted “Me!” when it wasn’t them and “Not me!” when it was. Like they’d all just discovered irony. Like the apes at the beginning of 2001, using a bone for a weapon. Evolving.

You look on the internet a minute and you find that the guy in the ape suit from that movie was a friend of John and Yoko’s and he wrote a book about his years hanging out with them except now he’s battling with Yoko about can he ever put it out, and anyway now is 2008, so who knows anything, really? For the love of God.

I yelled at a car again, someone driving at me in that tricky intersection of 7th Ave and West 4th. But see, I had the light—the walk signal. All the cars think it’s like an off ramp from a highway ‘cause it’s at an angle but it’s just like any other city intersection where you have to constantly remind yourself not to kill people—they have the right of way.

I held my hand up at him, the universal signal for stop right there. He was still coming and I was walking slow. He slowed and steered behind me, reluctantly, obviously enraged, flipping me off and shouting whatever from his hermetic, upholstered realm.

“It’s a red light, asshole!” I screamed, loud enough for him to hear, which felt good, but it wasn’t exactly true, which felt weird—he did have a green light, but he had to stop for me—but all in all it felt good all the same.

Unlikely memories keep coming back to me. Like when I was on a plane out of Vegas, maybe ten years ago, maybe twenty. That sad flight when you’ve probably lost more money than you should, and there’s a part of you that wishes you could stay longer and lose some more. In that state of mind I was struck by a conversation in the row behind me. Two young men were talking—friends or maybe cousins who’d been in Vegas together for a family reunion or bachelor party or something. One was cheerily talking about his dad, how they’d left him at the bar sipping Johnny Walker Blue, and that he knew he’d be perfectly happy there while everyone younger went gambling and clubbing. He sounded proud of his dad—proud that he was there, proud of what he drank, proud of what he did and didn’t do. The happy family scene he depicted, of the patriarch indulging his brood, maybe living vicariously through them, was annoying and poignant in equal measure, somehow.

TROOPS

Sam has been in love with Sally all along.

TROOPS

It’s true. It’s undeniable. He was wonderful at it and so was she.