The woman ahead of me at the wine store stood a little crooked - not necessarily drunk but precarious, tilted one way at the hips and the other at the shoulders. Like she'd been stacked wrong and this was how she kept from falling down. The man told her the total and she fumbled absently with her wallet. She held it open before her face and considered it a moment, the top of a twenty dollar bill visible above the pocket. She turned to me.

"I'm sorry I'm holding you up."

She'd somehow left a Starbucks cup on the left side of the counter, out of her reach. She stood in place and extended her upper body languorously to drag it over with a wwssshhhh. Finally she was gone and it was my turn and the man made that slight, knowing smile and thanked me for my patience.

When I walked outside she was standing by the door, just standing there beside the door.

I watched an old lady sidestep a splatter of tomato sauce on the sidewalk and stop to gawk at the Pioneer Supermarket window where it said White Rose Muffin Mix, a dollar twenty-nine.

After months of worrying that Obama would not get elected, now you get the unnerving sense that he can't possibly be President - can he? It's not just the tedious, stubborn challenges to his citizenship, or that, of all things, the fucking swearing in was flubbed. It's this: Can all the pomp and ceremony and ludicrous, fawning deference that's reserved for American presidents really coalesce around him now? Over the past 16 years we've grown accustomed to the President as exalted clown - with Bush, the emperor had no clothes; with Clinton, the emperor had no pants. The elaborate ritual surrounding the office seemed more suited to these farcical figures - they were both versions of the grandiose, infantile King Ubu. It made sense that they had a special airplane, an outsize kitchen staff and guards outside their bedroom door. Part of what Obama brings to the White House is a seriousness, sobriety and prosaic approach - much in evidence in his inaugural address - that we might expect of a great college football coach but not of the occupant of this most curious perch atop our politics. In his life experiences, too, there is more for most Americans to relate to: community organizing (odiously disparaged by Rudy Giuliani at the Republican National Convention), teaching, dropping off the girls at school with a kiss. He is "a guy of the street," but not in the sense the McCain campaign intended. And now he is our president. Can it be true?

The headline on CNN reads: Sky on Fire.

Good Lookin'

I stood in the corner of the locker room pulling clothes onto my damp body. Two men were talking near me, a light-skinned black guy and a darker skinned one, young guys. The light-skinned one was animated, holding forth.

"Man, it's cold out there. I left a bottle of water in my car. I come back and it be frozen solid. Solid!" he said. "I kid you not."

"Word?"

"I ain't even frontin'."

The light-skinned guy's iPhone had fallen out of his gym bag and onto the bench.

"Ya phone," the other one said.

"Yo, good lookin'." He picked it up and thumb-tapped its slick, black monolith-screen a time or two before putting it away.

"How you get home?" he said.

"I take the train. Down at sevenny-deuce."

Among the many great things about Obama's inauguration speech today was his recognition of atheists: "We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus, and nonbelievers."

No Such Animal

Scott was a compulsive liar and a fat fuck besides. He had straight, brown hair in a bowl cut, bangs and braces. The rosy cheeks and skittish gaze of the serial dissembler. He wore corduroys and big, striped polo shirts and carried around an Adidas bag all the time. Back in the seventh grade we said it meant "all day I dream about sex."

Scott would sooner lie than tell you the time of day. He had a famished ego and he'd scramble and claw like an urchin in Calcutta for the least appetizing scraps of social advantage.

Anything. I been to Sweden. My dad owns a Porsche. Anything at all. I touched a girl's nipple. I was outraged. If someone lies like this, what good is it for anyone to tell the truth? I developed a burning desire to call him out on it some day. I wanted to see him stammer in denial, his protests growing more strident and absurd until the only path remaining was to accept his humiliation - the Truth! - in a baptism of tears. I thought this would be good for him, good for the world; I felt justified and righteous.

One day Scott sidled up to me in the hallway.

"Hey, you like Jimi Hendrix, right?"

"Yeah." I loved Jimi Hendrix with a mighty passion.

"I've got a really rare Hendrix single at home." Everything was always at home.

"What song?"

"No Such Animal."

I'd never heard of this song. Of course, I didn't want Scott to know that. If he knew I didn't know a song he knew, it didn't matter if he'd lied about owning Hendrix's exhumed skull. He'd have beaten me somehow. The title, I figured, he couldn't have invented. I recognized the ring of authentic Jimi Hendrix-title truth. Scott must have read about it somewhere and drummed up this obvious fib. I was a hunter with a big, dumb buck in his sights; I was nearly trembling with eagerness.

"Bring it in."

"What?"

"Bring it in."

"Bring it in where?"

"Bring it in to school. Jesus."

"Why, dontcha believe me?"

"Yeah, Scott. I just wanna see it. Bring it in."

"When?"

"Who the fuck cares when? Tomorrow." I was feeling good about this.

"OK, OK. I'll bring it in." Scott's face seemed a little ashen now. I felt like I'd landed a good first shot. The kill would come soon, and it was gonna be sweet.

I badgered Scott about it later that day. When he didn't bring it in the following morning I reminded him that I absolutely wanted to see it. Why? he asked again, and I just told him I wanted to and that was that.

"You don't believe me," he said.

"I don't know, Scott. If you have it, you can just bring it in, right? I wanna see it."

"You can't borrow it."

"I don't wanna borrow it. I just wanna see it."

This went on for a few days, until I decided to inflict the death blow.

"Scott, let me come over to your house after school. We can go play video games."

"OK," he said warily.

I got off at his bus stop with him that afternoon and walked into his house behind him, through the screen door to the dark and cluttered kitchen. There was no one home.

"Hey," I said, "where's that Hendrix single?"

"Oh, hold on a sec," Scott said, and disappeared upstairs. He walked back down a minute later. "Here, check it out," he said, and handed me a 45-rpm single in a tattered paper sleeve. I scrutinized the label in the sleeve's circular window. Here's what it said:

Jimi Hendrix
NO SUCH ANIMAL
(Hendrix)

I handed it back to him without saying a word and I've never been the same since then.

I stopped at the stop sign getting on the Henry Hudson Parkway headed north and the fucknik right behind me honked his horn. He drove around me as soon as he could and I made sure my middle finger was pressed to the middle of the window as he did. He stared straight ahead, disappointingly. That was the right thing for that type of asshole to do when you think about it. I got on my horn, lamely. Desperately. But he was gone.

The headline sat at the top of my screen and I read and reread it a few times.

"A plane just crashed into the Hudson River," I finally said to no one. Kind of blithely, the way you'd say, "Cold today, boy," or "You know what? I haven't been getting that much spam." The way you say something when you don't know if it should be said. Is it momentous when a plane lands in a river? When an earthquake kills a million in a vague, untouchable place, no one reads that out loud. Is this more like a subway getting stuck, or two planes crashing into towers? I can't tell. It's the fifteenth of January, 2009, and I don't know what's significant anymore.

Murmurs of puzzlement and curiosity. We all navigated to the news, like boats to the wreckage: the fuselage immersed in cold, gray water; tugs and ferries circling 'round. New Jersey's pale horizon in the distance. We gathered at John's screen and watched the streaming video: the reports emerging both dubious and true, the breathless eyewitness on the phone, the peculiar mix of tedium and prurience that attends TV coverage of aftermath. The spectacularization. The titling. The font. Miracle on the Hudson. The eager canonization of Chesley Sullenberger. The transmutation of charismatic survivors into perishable celebrities. It was all happening and so now we could relax.

It Was Something You Ate

Pinkas Lebovits, my new dermatologist, walked in and took a quick look at my arms.

"It was something you ate."

"Really?"

"Yes. What did you eat last night? Pork?"

"No."

"Seafood, shellfish?"

"No."

"No? Fish? No?"

"No."

"Spicy foods? Tomatoes?"

He broke off to take a call in Polish. The black cord hung across the door as he stood at the counter and faced the glass cabinets. Dobrze, dobrze, he said. Dobrze. Finally he hung up and turned around.

"So are you sure that's what it is? It's what I ate?"

"Yes. It comes from the inside."

He took his pad out of his lab coat pocket and began to scrawl.

"It will go away. Eat simple foods, simple."

"OK."

"No spicy foods, no pork. No fish."

"OK."

"The poison is leaving your system. No shellfish."

"No shellfish."

"Sometimes maybe you feel uncomfortable, but you don't worry." He made a circular gesture with his hand. "You gonna be fine."

"Good."

"Come see me in two weeks. It goes away already, cancel."

"Sure."

"If you cannot breathe, you call the emergency room."

"Right."

"No shellfish."

"OK."

"No pork, no fish. No red wine."

"Oh?"

"No eggs."

"OK."

He turned to open the door.

"Thank you," I said.

"You're welcome," he said.

"Thanks," I said.

He walked ahead of me back down the hall.

"My name is Dr. Lebovits," he said. He didn't turn his head.

There was an old man in my lane at the pool today who was swimming slower than I've ever seen anyone swim. His crawl had the automatic, unvarying quality of technique long ago passed into muscle memory; an old man's swim. But also his body'd stiffened along the way, as though by the premature onset of rigor mortis. He swam like a ghost ship.

I slept off the hangover from the baby shower but awoke woozy and out of sorts. We'd spent the day before at M. and A's, drinking, darting out into the darkening afternoon to smoke on the patio, snow swirling down between the buildings. We smoked pot and as I drank the world dissolved around me. Today I looked out the window: The snow had stuck but now the sun was shining.

Writers often point out that writing is hard work - much harder than people give them credit for, they seem to imply. This is true, but this is even more true: It's not so much that writing is hard; it's that not writing is so easy.

Matthew was interviewing me when his partner, Joe, entered the room.

"Joe, meet Pat!" said Matthew.

Joe extended his hand and watery spit erupted from his mouth, splashing his chin and sweater and dripping upon the carpet.

"Sorry! I was just brushing my teeth!" he declared.

You have to lapse into a kind of death when you become president. You've gone abstract; you've become an idea. You can no longer live in your house or cook for yourself or drive a car or go to the movies or sit in an airport bar drinking bloody marys. You can no longer send or receive e-mail either, evidently - is there any surer sign that what I say is true? E-mailing in 2009 is akin to inhaling and exhaling the air. When you're not allowed to do it any longer, you know you've reached a different place. It could be a nursing home, where your few remaining days will consist of being administered medications, drifting about in your wheelchair in a baby-blue bathrobe, eating soft, bland foods, and watching television in a common room. It could be prison, where life consists of reading, lifting weights, and parrying the efforts of rapists by periodically exploding with brazen, heedless rage. Or it could be the presidency of the United States. How could such a person be a person, when you think about it? I believe any presidential acceptance speech, any inauguration, must be tinged with this: the solemn aura of the condemned man, the designated one, the sacrificial lamb.

The Serif

I'm taking my first swim at my new gym today, the Jewish Community Center right around the corner. I know you're not supposed to, but I feel like a stranger. No good reason to, but.

I swim, mostly mindless, faintly aware of the woman teaching her kid to swim; the red-shirted lifeguards - three or four or five of them, a surfeit; the purposeful, solemn swimmers in the fast lanes. A black cross on a white pennant hanging right above me on a line across the pool. For two or three stuporous laps, I swim past and take it at its face: a cross, a Christian cross. Christ crucified. Then, in the following order, I realize that:

It's actually the number "1" printed on both sides of semi-translucent plastic so that both serifs are visible at once, extending to the left and to the right, forming a cross.

They wouldn't have a pennant with Jesus Christ's cross hanging over this pool.

A simple incongruity drew my eyes from my book on the subway today as we waited at 14th Street. A perfect scrap of white paper floated from out of sight, right down the middle of the opened doorway, and to the platform. The doors closed and then we left.

We went to the Luxembourg Museum and there was a fairly arbitrary exhibit of modern art there called "From Miro to Warhol." That's a lot of ground to cover, when you think about it. And all they'd really done, it seems, is borrowed some art and picked from it a big, early name and a big, later name and themed the whole thing as a progression between the two. PR it, postcard it up for the gift shop and - voila! You, too, can be a curator.

There was a metal sculpture there by Jean Tinguely called "The Indian Chief" and every 20 minutes or so it would shake and vibrate like the dickens and scare whoever happened to be scrutinizing it at the time half to death. It made a godawful racket and anyone who hadn't experienced it yet would start like they'd just heard a stack of dishes collapse in their kitchen.

Swept Away in a River

We were buckled in and waiting when the captain came on and sighed. He said the water doesn’t work. We’d have to use a different plane. (Are they so interchangeable? Is it like when you get in a dud bumper car and the acne-scarred attendant directs you to the purple one that’s parked against the rail? Wasn’t this plane blessed and prepared for us, expertly calibrated to the rigors of our journey? Loaded with our luggage and victuals from Gate Gourmet? How is there another one which we may fly instead?) He instructed us to return to the waiting area to await further instructions. Faint grumbling broke out amid the rustle of clothes and carry-ons. Back in the terminal, I went to get a coffee. On my way back I was swept in the exodus of my fellow travelers trudging to the new gate: 48B.

A woman in her late fifties wept inconsolably as a stewardess peered at her and frowned, holding her hand up in a gesture both soothing and defensive. Do you speak Spanish? she asked. It happened that she spoke French. I found myself approaching and volunteering to interpret.

"What does she want?"

"Qu'est ce que vous voulez?"

She wanted to know when the flight was leaving.

"When's the flight leaving?"

The stewardess turned around to face the counter. "Bob, when's the flight leaving?"

"In an hour," said Bob.

"In an hour."

"Dans une heure."

"When's it boarding?" I asked.

"Bob, when's it boarding?"

"Half an hour."

"Half an hour."

"On part dans une heure et on embarque dans une demi-heure."

I was pleased with the simple, emphatic quality of these answers but the woman continued to stammer and weep. I suggested lamely to the stewardess that she might be scared.

"Does she need anything?"

"Avez-vous besoin de quelque chose?"

The woman must have sensed we were frustrated and so tried to gratify us with an answer of some kind.

"De l'eau," she said, almost like a question. Whisperingly. Water? It's what you say when someone asks you what you need but you can't tell them what you really need.

"Water," I said.

"Can you ask her what's wrong? Why is she crying?"

"Qu'est ce qui va pas? Pourquoi pleurez-vous?"

"I fly from Papeete," the woman said, in halting English.

"Long flight," I said to the stewardess.

"That is a long flight," the stewardess said.

"Maybe she's tired."

"Must be tired."

The woman broke in. "I go to New York. I must go to the funeral of... of --" The syllables expanded in her throat and she succumbed again to sobs.

"Tell her to have a seat and I will bring her water."

"Installez-vous quelque part et elle va vous ammener de l'eau."

We finally seemed to reach a sort of resolution. She turned and walked unsteadily toward the chairs. A few were empty but she did not seem to distinguish them from those that weren't. As she hovered nearby, the stewardess thanked me and we broke off. I went to look at planes awhile. When I came back I saw the woman from afar. She was sitting as the stewardess and some other airline people tended to her. Talked to her and touched her. Helped her manipulate a cell phone.

Later, on the flight, the stewardess served me drinks.

"I hope she's all right," I said.

"I think she's OK."

"Good."

"Her husband died. In that country where she --"

"Papeete?"

"Yes, Papeete. He was swept away in a river. So she's going to the funeral. And his body's on the plane."

"Wow. That's... disturbing." Right away, I regretted saying disturbing. I wished I'd said a warmer word. Sad, maybe. Even awful.

"I know. It is," she said.

Isn't the verb "to die" a little too active? It oughta be passive. It oughta be "to be died." The moment you die is the moment of utter passivity. Whether you're a frail, 94-year-old financier in his last throes of renal failure, swathed in fine linens and resting on plump pillows, breathing your last and then softly expiring as your wife holds one hand and your mistress the other, or whether you're a testosterone-maddened 17-year-old at the wheel of his father's Prius, half in the bag from Everclear and grape soda, trying to take a hit off a bowl and it's wobbling between your teeth and your friend Matt's trying to light it but fuck these childproof lighters, man, they won't just light, and WHAM!, you hit an oak tree and it's all over in a fraction of a second, the actual passage into the void is utterly automatic, unwilled, indeliberate. Dying is the only thing we do that we don't do.