The things we say in bars. The way we use the phone. The things we say to teachers and to strangers on the street. Our body language at the museum. The things we say to plumbers and the things we say in planes. The things we write in instant messages. The way we talk to doctors. The things we tell each other when we're standing in the weeds outside a broken-down bus in Texas. The way we talk to children. The way we write in e-mails and the things we write in blogs. The things we talk about when it's time for bed. The way we text. The things we say in elevators and the way we talk to cops. The way we interact with car mechanics. The words we use in conference rooms and the things we say to waiters. The things we write on Facebook. The things we say in court. The things we say to ourselves. Everything we don't say.

I remember observing a couple on their first date at Kathy John's. He was burly, musclebound. She was slim, girlish, attractive. She ordered hot fudge, I'm not kidding. An entire fucking parfait glass filled to the top with hot, brown goo. It was the most disgusting thing I'd ever seen in my entire life and it must have contained 12,000 calories. He ordered a cheeseburger with bacon.

"Bacon on top? Where did you ever get that idea!?" she asked. This was in probably around 1982, before the great bacon cheeseburger revolution of the late '80s and the advent of the bacon cheeseburger era in which we now live.

"It's something I got used to having in the Army," he said. Honest to Christ, that's what he said. Can you make that type of shit up? No. He told her he got used to having bacon on his cheeseburgers when he was in the Army.

She coyly dipped her slender spoon into the chocolate muck and made sure to get a frothy dab of Reddi Wip on top. She plunged it between her pretty lips and pulled it out, leaving a slick, dark stain of goopy residue in the silver concavity. She held it like a lollipop and licked it clean, giggling. It was unclear whether she was laughing at him and his wacky taste in cheeseburger toppings or at herself for being so cute. It was a formidable quantity of unalloyed fudge.

Where are they now?

Medical Equipment I Have Seen

The Gendex GX-770.

We spent Sunday at the horses. Syrupy, golden sunshine penetrated everything. There was a wind, and within it was the ghost of a chill.

"It's almost never like this in LA," Jesse said. "Sunny and windy like this."

Jesse pointed out the art deco magnificence of the grandstand and I tried to imagine how many men had wasted their lives in there, evading wives and children, looking for that one big win. Southern Californian men of the 20th century: migrant farm workers, lowlife barflies, stuntmen and junkie cabaret musicians. But good things happen too.

I drank gin and tonics and bet like a fool.

Suddenly you hear the horses when they turn into the stretch. You're momentarily ashamed that you've been gaping at the mute and sterile screen. You hear the pounding of their hooves and you can almost feel it. The vain and pleading hollers of the crowd.

We were in the infield, where there was a playground. We bet and watched and read the form and bet and watched. Odds shifting on the board. Always a scratch or two. The starting gate reappearing somewhere on the track. The kids held races of their own.

It was over and we walked back out the tunnel. Below the grandstand, men sat in disordered groups and watched the last remaining off-track races. Exhausting all their chances, putting off their journey home.

The flight out of JFK early on Saturday morning had a distinctly LA vibe. A commuter plane of Angelenos returning to their sunny home after the dutiful completion of errands back east. I spotted a woman I knew ages ago, when the band played New York City. She's an actress who's succeeded in the margins; she's just famous enough so that you'd probably recognize her but you'd never know her name. I made eye contact at the coffee stand but she betrayed no recognition at all. It's funny the people you see.

I watched the line to the Jetway, waiting for them to call my group. There was a very fat black man, shuffling and lurching in his orthopedic shoes. He pushed a wheelchair that was loaded with bric-a-brac, bag lady style. He was speaking into a Bluetooth earpiece.

"Sir, are you going to check that?" an airline employee asked.

"Yeah, yeah," he said, and returned to his phone conversation. I listened in.

"Yeah, so listen. I'm with a rapper who's having problems with dem 5150 boys. That's Tony Yayo's crew. He with G-Unit."

I looked around for the rapper. Eventually he sauntered up, a fairly inconspicuous youth, and took his place beside the fat man.

Planes taxied spectrally in the darkness out the window of Gladstone's at Los Angeles International Airport. A montage of NASCAR crashes played in the sky, reflecting a television high above the bar. The woman to my right ordered a gin and tonic. The bartender, a matronly woman who had once tried to act, asked for her ID.

"They make me ask everyone," she said apologetically.

"I'm two and a half times legal," the woman said.

"I'm three times legal."

A knife rested on the floor, blade pointing away from the dirty table where it belonged.

I peered out at the engine through the grated window up near where the Jetway met the plane, the turbine turning in the wind. Coming to a halt. Turning a little more. No one talks to you on airplanes anymore.

The Binoculars

It was sometimes unclear if it was worth it. I peered through the binoculars, trying not to wobble them too much. When I did, they'd suddenly frame some strange and nameless space, a random sector in the field of shadows. Sometimes the view would eclipse entirely, that black circle with the slightly luminescent edge. I finally got a good bead on the screen when Jennifer tugged my arm.

"It's my turn," she said.

I handed over the binoculars. My eyes needed a rest anyway.

"What's on next?"

"Seinfeld."

"Oooh! I love Seinfeld!" she said.

I got up off the couch and walked toward the other end of our railroad flat, where the fucked up RCA TV sat blaring on the torn foam cushion of a kitchen chair. I found it on the street a while back, took it up and plugged it in. We couldn't wait to know what could be wrong. Sure enough the volume knob was broken, stuck on ten. But we were too mad and lazy not to watch it.

I was about halfway down when I thought I perceived Jennifer addressing me. I turned around and there she was, mouth in motion, binoculars in one hand, waving with the other. In the din I imagined her complaining that I blocked her line of sight. I sidled to the wall theatrically, like a housebreaker in movies, or an escapee. I glanced over my shoulder to verify this satisfied her.

"Come back!" she yelled. "Come back!"

I walked back and sat back down and put my ear up to her mouth.

"Can you make me some toast?" she asked.

"Some English toasting bread toast?" I said. English toasting bread was the only type of bread we ever bought. And bread was the only food we ever bought. And sometimes strawberry jam.

"Yes. With jam if we have some."

I walked back toward the kitchen and the television's ceaseless, angry din. I put the toasting bread into the toaster and went to take a piss. When I emerged I saw down to the two glass eyes in darkness, gleaming slightly from the distant screen. The broken-ass TV was so loud I thought it might explode. I scraped the bottom of the jam jar and got just enough to cover one slice. I took the plate back out the kitchen, through the den and through the study, to the bedroom. Jennifer sat cross-legged on the bed, binoculars to her eyes.

"I dunno if it's worth it anymore," I told her as I handed her the plate of toast.

"Thank you, honey. Worth what anymore?"

"This. With the TV and the binoculars."

She took a bite of toast and thought for a moment.

"What are we supposed to do?"

"I don't know."

"Let's do the rest of our junk," she said.

"OK. After dinner," I said.

We finished our toast and I tapped the rest of the open bag out on the jewel case. Then I opened up our last bag and emptied that one, too. Kramer made a grand, swooping entrance. I cut the heroin into two little lines with my license and handed it to Jennifer to snort through a cut-off straw. She did hers and handed it back to me and I did mine. We pinched our noses to trap the flakes against our membranes, directing them to eager capillaries. We wiped up all the residue with the tips of our fingers and licked them, and we each tore open one of the little glassine bags and tongued the inside, making sure to get the creases, to savor each and every tiny bitter speck.

I began to relax fast. Was it the drug's effect or the anticipation of the drug's effect, and if it was the anticipation, was the anticipation better than the thing itself, in this as in so many other things?

"Do me a favor," I said.

"Yes?"

"Every time I walk in the door, laugh uproariously and applaud."

"I'll do anything for you."

"I'm going to vomit."

I made the long walk toward the light and sound again.

I took a knee by the toilet, here we go again. A pleasant, cooling sweat formed on my brow. My mouth, my face, my arms aglow with pleasure. I was pretty sure I must be in the very arms of God. Suddenly, the chyme flowed up and out my mouth, not erupting so much as emerging. I directed it into the bowl: good, loving, beautiful vomit. Such sweet nausea. Such a soft, cool hand on my back.

I brushed my teeth.

When I got back to the end of the apartment, Jennifer was high enough to talk about kicking again.

"I'm pretty sure I want to kick tomorrow, Jim," she said.

"I do too, baby."

"You promise? Let's promise."

"I promise."

"I promise, too."

She got up.

"Wow, it feels good to stand up."

"Feels good to sit down, too," I said.

She laughed and climbed onto my lap, her knees wobbling precariously on top of my thighs. We clasped our hands together and she tried to balance. Soon enough, she fell.

We sat awhile in the dark. I had a half dream we were on a train. I knew where we were going but I didn't know. I knew it would be beautiful, that we'd have jobs we loved and we'd have friends; we'd have a big back porch that faced the woods and river. But I didn't know where it was.

When I came to I realized Jennifer had been speaking.

"Sorry, what?"

"I said what did you mean before, it's not worth it?"

"I guess I mean the TV. And the binoculars. Don't you think?"

"I think."

"I've got an idea, check it out. I could tear the speaker out from the fucking thing."

"And watch silent TV?" she asked, intrigued.

"And watch silent TV. Or -"

"Or?"

"Or. I could put the fucking TV back on the sidewalk."

She let some facts and figures play in her head.

"Put the TV on the sidewalk," she said after some time.

"OK."

In the morning I did what I said I'd do, feeling a strange sort of sadness but proceeding all the same. When I got back upstairs Jennifer was sitting at the kitchen table, eating a piece of plain English toasting bread toast.

"You know what I was thinking?" she said.

"Yeah?"

"Now that we don't need the binoculars, we can pawn them and buy some dope."

"You're right. That's great. That's a great, great idea," I said.

"It's just that, I know I'm not ready to kick. I know that in myself. I'll know when I'm ready, and I'm not ready."

"You sure?" I asked.

"Jesus, I don't know," she said.

"Because I agree," I said.

"Let's make this the last dope we buy," she said, suddenly brightening.

"That's a very good idea, baby. The last dope we buy."

I went back to the bedroom and got the binoculars. I brought them back and wrapped the leather strap around the middle section and set them on the kitchen table. Gingerly. Guiltily. I went to pour some coffee. When I turned around again, Jennifer had the binoculars and was looking through them out the window.

"Do you see anything out there?" I asked.

"Hmm... not much," she said, scanning slowly from left to right. What I saw was a gray and blighted burrough, roofs and windows, cars and trucks below.

"Wow!" she said suddenly.

"What?"

"Now I see something!" she said.

I was settling my father's estate in the assistant manager's office at the Chinatown branch of the very big bank. The assistant manager was scrupulous and cheerful. Resting on his credenza were a number of framed certificates from marathons he'd run: Atlanta. Philadelphia. Three hours and forty-seven minutes something. Signed by Mayor Street.

There was also a pile of pamphlets promoting the very big bank's credit card customer loyalty program. There were three messages in italics on the front of the pamphlets:

Shop online and watch as your savings add up.

Save automatically as you spend.

Use your credit card to earn cash back.

I was struck by the oxymoronic nature of these commands. We like to think we've come a long way, baby, since advertisers told us cigarettes were healthy. We like to think we once were treated like children - or worse, rubes - but that now they'd better all watch what they're doing, boy. In fact, we might've regressed to a yet more infantile state. They once had the gall to lie to us about what we didn't know - that smoking kills. Now they have the audacity to lie to us about what any child would know.

Shop online and watch as your savings add up.

Now they realize they can dispense with such subtleties as the spurious argument, the logical fallacy, the bogus expert. No more straining, no more unseemly exertions: someone had the bright idea that it'll all go better if they boldly, unblinkingly tell us the craziest nonsense they can.

Save automatically as you spend.

This, somehow, is what we're can't resist. Try to reason with us in bad faith and we'll shame you, scold you, ride you out of town on a rail. But tell us something crazy, something obviously totally fucking wrong and we're suddenly mesmerized, slack-jawed and drooling.

Use your credit card to earn cash back.

For Christ's sake.

We sat in genteel postures around the conference room table. We had the Avenue of the Americas up and down outside and 52nd Street from side to side. There was something on the screen, a spreadsheet or a slide. There was text, and maybe numbers, too. We spoke, mindful to employ the syntax of white-collar politesse, with its tortured, passive-aggressive locutions.

Suddenly an electrical worker barged in, stood near the foot of the table, and fiddled with the wiring in the center power module. He was utterly oblivious to us or to the facts and figures now projected on his navy jacket. He appeared to be operating within another dimension, a figure from dreams or myth. The very molecules of his being may well have been vibrating in and out of reality at a different frequency than ours and it seemed entirely possible that we were invisible to him.

Protocol dictated that the owner of the meeting acknowledge the curious disruption with a disfluency of her choice followed by a clearing of the throat and, optionally, a smile accompanied by a goofy widening of the eyes, and she obliged.

The worker held a device of some kind, wires dangling. He probed the depths of the table with sensors and scrutinized the readout screen. Once satisfied, he left the room without a word or so much as a glance.

Medical Equipment I Have Seen

The Den-Tal-Ez AS3000.

It starts out like a little, wheezy cough. It grows into an apprehension of frailty, a faint dizziness. My face and forehead are hot now and when I feel them it feels good and it feels good and suddenly I feel my pulse from inside and from out; I feel it beating on my hands and fingers.

I Was the One Who Left Open the Door

The elevator stopped and the door opened for a young Asian woman to walk in. Without thinking I walked out. I did not recognize the lobby as the same place I'd entered two hours ago. The hallway seemed unfinished. Walls patchily painted, floor scuffed and plaster-dusted. An undulating plywood sculpture lay on its side before me. A sign on a gray door bore a curious word I can't remember. Oxygen? Imagine?

I walked to the exit door down the hall and pushed the bar, expecting to emerge in an alley or on the street behind the building. Instead I was surrounded by the city, buildings up and down and in the distance, cars and people far below between the black slats of a fire escape. I tried to close the door again but couldn't. It stuck against the jamb and wouldn't latch. I left it like that and walked back to the elevator. I wondered if the elevator wouldn't come. I wondered if I'd been thrust sideways out of time and space, never to reenter. The elevator came. But I was the one who left open the door.

Hey Joe

While watching "The Future Is Unwritten," Julian Temple's documentary about Joe Strummer, it struck me to what degree rebellion, expressions of anomie and so-called countercultural movements are actually collaborations between the oppressive and the oppressed, between tyranny and freedom, between the mainstream and the margins. To think of these forces as antagonistic is almost absurd. They rely on each other, they desire each other. They need each other.

Hey Joe: Those dilapidated council flats - they weren't boarded up to keep you out, they were boarded up to invite you in. Society's inequities beg for the cleansing fire of scorn and ridicule, and society created you for just that purpose. The bourgeois in their cozy little homes, they know they're in for it. They wouldn't open up the paper if they didn't, dontcha know. They'd hardly recognize themselves but for you. They're grateful, though this little game does not permit them to admit it. Look how vital and alive the dreary city seems when a clutch of punks animates its ghastly, concrete paths. The cars, the cops, the buildings. The money and the food. They're not your antagonists in this play, they're your props. Downpressor man? He invented you to kill him. It's the ugliness in the world that lets you make it beautiful, the horror that lets you be the hero, the evil that lets you do good. This world was made for you, and you make it whole. But I think you knew that anyway. I think you found it out. I think you thought it was a bad thing, and that's why you ran away. But maybe it wasn't a bad thing.

Chuck Berry's Sense of Humor

One of my favorite Chuck Berry songs is "Promised Land," a succinct tale of pilgrimage to the West as experienced by a modernized "poor boy" of American folk myth. The poor boy yearns for California. He leaves Virginia and makes his way there by bus, train and airplane, assisted at each obstacle by strangers. Here are the first two verses:

I left my home in Norfolk, Virginia
California on my mind
I straddled that Greyhound and rode it past Raleigh
And on across Caroline

We stopped in Charlotte and bypassed Rock Hill
And we never was a minute late
We was ninety miles out of Atlanta by sundown
Rollin' 'cross Georgia state

I've always thought "bypassed Rock Hill" was a particularly great, and intriguing, lyric. Why mention a place you don't go? And why did they bypass Rock Hill, anyway? There's a note of mystery there. It works on a lot of other levels, of course - the contrast between a place you stop and a place you don't adds to the propulsive rhythm of the song; it foreshadows coming obstacles; it supports the theme of a perilous, uncertain journey. And there's a breezy, whimsical quality to it: bypassed Rock Hill, just like that. Troubles may lie ahead, but not there. It was bypassed.

Why might the poor boy want to avoid that particular bus depot?

I was reading David Remnick's recent piece in the New Yorker about Barack Obama and John Lewis, the civil rights leader and Georgia congressman, and was stunned to find this:

As Lewis walked around the Mall last week, shaking hands, posing for hundreds of photographs, a young African-American introduced himself as the police chief of Rock Hill, South Carolina. "Imagine that," Lewis said. "I was beaten near to death at the Rock Hill Greyhound bus terminal during the Freedom Rides in 1961. Now the police chief is black."

I wondered whether "Promised Land" was written after 1961. Well, turns out it came out in 1964. The way songwriting goes, I'd say that means Chuck wrote it in '62 or '63. I'd like to commend him on his sense of humor.

The hotel was about a mile down a pitted, dirt road that wound around construction sites and through a brambly wood. The sites were in various states but all seemed incomplete, perhaps abandoned: a condominium complex, advertised by banners along the road that promised happiness or riches; a foundation, ringed by surveyor markers, waiting for its walls and roof; elsewhere, piles of plastic-wrapped concrete bricks sat unattended in a clearing.

The grounds formed a drowsy enclave, a place where you're not meant to know what day it is. People drifted from their rooms and to the pool, and from the pool and to the beach, and from the beach and to the bar. Waves sighing as they broke upon the sand. The main reason people love the beach is for the sound.

A hippie couple. An older woman at the bar, eating deliberately. A loud, young French family, kids yelling at each other from across the pool. A stout woman with curly hair, two pre-anorexic girls in tow.

Dinner under the thatched roof was strangely muted, an obligatory episode lacking joy. Sara said the staff seemed a little bit unhappy.

Our last morning it rained hard. As I lay in bed I wondered how anything could happen after this, how the dining space and bar and pool could possibly remain intact. But when we went out it was as though the rain had never come. Waiters were clearing breakfast tables. The bartender was getting ready to open. The French kids occupied the pool. People came and went the way they did before.

No Bullshit on the Train

When I got on the downtown train I perceived a vague commotion at the end of the car. An exchange of words, bodies in contraposition. But there was no shouting and there were no blows; soon the man who seemed to be the subject of it all turned and walked my way bearing an airy, warm expression. Well dressed. Clean. White guy in his forties with a mustache of some sort. He hit a mark right by the door and turned to address the car as best he could. I pretended to listen to my iPhone but I was dying to hear.

The first part of his rant concerned the Stimulus Bill and I wondered whether this was my first encounter with an anti-Obama nut. It soon devolved, however: "They say the stimulus has a fifty or somethin' percent chance of workin'. How many people you know who work a hundred percent at their job? Huh? Insteada talkin' to their girlfriends on da phone, talkin' to their friends when they's supposeta work. Huh? How many of you right here give your all to your job?"

No hands shot up.

"Exactly!" he exclaimed, with all the emphasis that vindication might permit.

I steeled myself for an accusatory diatribe, but his speech took another curious turn, more consistent with his sunny demeanor.

"Dontcha realize how important love is? I want you all ta jus' hug each other right now. Turn to the person next to you and give 'em a hug."

Two young, black men were sitting across from me, swathed in oversize, bubble-padded North Face. The younger one was sitting to my left, leaning back across two seats. He sat up a little and opened a wary eye.

"I ain't givin' no hugs."

The man was undeterred.

"Hugging, tender compassion, love for the neighbor," he pleaded. "They say it's perverted, but it's not!"

The other black guy was stirred from his reverie too. He sat up and looked straight ahead.

"C'mon. No bullshit on the train, son. I wanna chill." He shook his head. "I don't want no bullshit, son. No motherfuckin' bullshit on the train."

75 Varick

They sit at desks or stand around, sucking on Life Savers. The woman at the front who pointed me to check-in. The woman who verified my name and pointed me around the corner. The standing man who said, "Down the hall and to the left."

A haphazard group of adults, a focus group for nothing. We sat at several institutional tables with a gross of pencils at each end. 4099-Y yellow hexagon golf pencils. I thought this didn't seem to be the right kind of pencil for the occasion but someone must have thought the other way.

They had a little bit of trouble with the projector.

They showed a PowerPoint with a male voice dutifully narrating every last, bullet-pointed phrase, enunciating a bit too clearly, laboriously spelling out e-mail addresses and URLs.

There was the distribution of materials: some stapled, others merely collated. The taking of one and passing all the rest along. Thank you. Thanks. Job workshops and their descriptions: How to outclass the competition: turn a "No" into a "Yes." The 3 secrets of communicating with confidence. 5 traits of highly effective networkers. Sad printouts from the Web with all the links turned ghostly and inert. There was confusion regarding pages one and two. I had a two but not a one; others had a one but not a two. We played the game of requesting missing pages and acting satisfied when they were given.

A kindly, absentminded old lady took questions, if there were any. Someone in the back didn't get his benefits last week. We sat fidgeting with golf pencils. Some looked down into their laps as though they were introspecting deeply and despondently, the telltale pose of surreptitious BlackBerry or iPhone use.

There was a younger woman with dark hair. "You won't get credit for attending if I don't get your forms. Make sure I get your forms."

After some time there was a tremor of unrest. The old lady was talking to the man in back. She turned around to face the room with a lost and airy expression.

"Oh, you can all go. You can go now."

We gathered our handouts and got up. The rustling of coats, sliding of chairs and burble of elated small talk formed the familiar, elated cacophony of class dismissal.

The dark-haired woman appeared in the doorway with a clutch of papers.

"You can't go yet. No one can go yet. We're going to be calling names."

We sat back down with the chastened resignation of those who knew it must be too good to be true. Names were called.

"It ain't necessarily a bad thing if your name gets called," a black woman sitting next to me said to the woman across the table. "Sometimes it's like, there's something wrong on your benefits and you won't get more until they fix it." The other woman did not seem convinced. One by one they went.

A paunchy Hispanic man walked in to recite the list of names of that were not on the list.

"If I say your name, let me know you heard me. You're free to go."

He did not call my name. More were called by counselors, leaning through the door. I hung my head and read my phone. Eventually a young, black woman and an Englishman remained. She was a lawyer; he was in "finance." They chatted flirtatiously, ludicrously pledged to stay in touch, and wished each other luck. Finally, I was alone. They called my name.

Another older lady led me to her desk. I spent most of the time trying to tell her what I did.

"Project managing, for software products."

"Is that the Internet?"

"Yes, on the Internet. Products on the Internet."

"Do you call that e-commerce?"

It went like that for a quarter of an hour. I realized that my role was to make her feel like she was doing her job. I tried hard to think of things to say that might accomplish this. She printed out an editorial job description from some jobs site and I thanked her profusely. I asked her for the name of the site; she told me and I thanked her again. From a stack of papers on her desk, she found a faint Xerox of a job resource for writers and handed it to me. Thank you, thank you, thank you. And when I thought I'd finally made her happy I thanked her once again and left.

April 23rd, 1985

The era in which we now live began on April 23rd, 1985. On that morning, word of a momentous event spread through the halls and classes of my high school like a virus: New Coke was here.

It was a Tuesday - how could it not be? And April - of course. And it had to be 1985. The day, month and year bespeak a radical mundanity. April 23rd, 1985 is a date that wanted to be forgotten even as it loomed. It's a date we all might have skipped by accident. Tuesday. Nothing day. Neither Monday nor Wednesday, neither fish nor fowl. The day of low blood sugar. A day not to be lived so much as endured. April. The month of cold, gray rain; of ambiguous, uncertain spring. The doldrums in every pupil's odyssey to recess. 1985. A year in which it might well be said that nothing whatsoever happened. April 23rd, 1985 was the sort of date that was in danger of falling off the calendar. And such dates, of course, are ideal for mass exposure and response to a seismic event, be it glorious or cataclysmic.

The news itself hung in the air like a vaporous mist - it seemed we began to talk about it before we'd even heard. "Hey, New Coke." "Did you try New Coke?" "I heard Mark had some already." "Some what, New Coke?" "New Coke." The marketing really was brilliant, if it wasn't completely disastrous. New! Coke! What melodious and sunny syllables to set upon the lips of a nation.

There was another aspect of our reaction to the event, and this is why I know it was the moment in our history that became now: we didn't really care. Even as we chirped the brand message, there was a wryness in our voices, sly smiles on our faces. For this virus had a second, unintended component: irony. Perhaps it was a product of the phrase itself: New Coke. Or perhaps it just happened to be hanging in the air that morning too, also waiting for this non-day when there'd be a break in our defenses. In any case, we now knew two things: New Coke was here, and New Coke was here. These two truths were antagonistic but not incompatible; they were the manifestation of a nascent reality. Yes, we bought it; yes, we drank it. But not the way we did before. Not automatically, but knowingly. Not with alacrity, but nonchalantly. Coca-Cola thought they were the mama bird and we would be her babies, letting her belch into our eager gullets. In the past, we'd given every indication we would play that role. But not on April 23rd, 1985.

The Day the World Turned Upside Down

There was some kind of parade going on outside.

"What is it?" she said.

A muffled cacophony of whistles, drums and tubas.

"I don't know. Italian Day?"

"There's no such thing as Italian Day."

"I was only joking."

From their perspective on the bed they saw the Star-Spangled Banner floating by. A little jumpily so you could tell someone was holding it up.

"There goes the American flag anyway," she said.

A moment passed.

"Should we check it out?" he said.

"I can't move," she said. "I'm full to bursting with banana pancake."

Another moment. Then –

"Do you think –" he said, but then and there they were plunged toward the ceiling that they had for many months beheld together; they fell heavily upon it, the plaster cool and hard beneath their naked flesh, and the futon and frame bounced once on their backs, and came to a smothering rest upon them. He hit his nose and mouth, unable in his bewilderment to put his arms before his face. She fell a bit more on her shoulder, as she'd been facing him a little in their bed, her hand on his chest. They thrashed and cursed beneath their burden.

"Jesus!"

"Fuck!"

They managed to crawl out either side and face each other above the bottom of the frame. A deep murmur of dismay and terror emerged within her and rolled into a moan. The sound of someone sliding over a precipice.

"What the fuck just happened?!" she said.

He got up on his knees without an answer. She crawled around the mattress to him and was momentarily distracted from her dread by the sight of blood dripping down his chin and falling in rich drops upon the milky white ceiling, wispy with webs.

"Are you OK, baby?"

"Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah."

"Baby," she said, "we're upside down."

He shuffled to the window and stood up to it, terrified by what might have darkened the morning. He looked up at what he thought would be the sky and saw a ceiling of grass, ornamented with bands of cement and wider ones of tar. Trees and bushes hung down, their leaves and branches reaching toward the dark.

He looked down. There was an immense chasm, a vast, gray maw; it made a sound everywhere like a great inhalation.

He turned away from the window and walked back across the ceiling toward her. His legs shook so badly he had to get down on his knees. He crawled the last few feet to where she sat.

"Baby, I think the world turned upside down."

"What?"

"Everything is upside down."

"What do you mean, everything is upside down?" she asked, sobbing.

"I... I..." he stammered, searching for words he could never have imagined saying. "Everything that's down is up," he said finally.

"Are we dreaming?"

"I don't know. I don't think so. I hope so."

"We must be crazy, baby."

They held each other, shaking and crying. The gasping sound outside had gone away and now there was a strange, new quiet everywhere. They laid down together, closed their eyes and willed themselves to sleep.

---

He awoke to a faint, familiar sound. A voice. He turned to look through the window. The terrible darkness had gone and left behind the ordinary light of day.

"Hey!" went the voice. Urgently. "Hey!"

He walked to the window and saw his neighbor John across the way, upside-down too, leaning out his window under a ceiling of bushes and grass.

"Hey!" John said, waving. "Tom!"

Tom pushed the top pane of the window up toward the floor.

"Hey John!"

"What happened?"

"God... I don't know!"

"My God."

"Are you OK?"

"I guess I'm OK. Are you OK?"

"I'm OK."

"How's Annie? She OK?"

"She's OK. She's asleep," Tom said. Asleep seemed to be the best place to be.

"OK!"

They stared at each other in silence for awhile. Tom felt as though he'd never seen another human being before.

"I'm going to listen to the radio," John said.

"OK. Good luck."

"See you in a while."

Tom turned and looked at Annie on the mattress. He didn't want to ever wake her up.

In the living room, the TV had fallen hard but the screen seemed intact. Tom turned it over and plugged it back into an extension cord that hung from an outlet, now high up on the wall. He made sure the cables and the box were still connected. No clock. No reassuring lights. He found the remote and pressed the power but no warm, enchanting world appeared onscreen. No test pattern. No roiling haze of static. No nothing.

His clock radio had backup batteries that he'd never had to use. He walked back to the bedroom and found it hanging from the wall above the clutter of clothes and dresser drawers, shoes, night-reading, trash and toiletries, the disordered artifacts of a reliable and cozy world. He clicked the dial on and turned it up. Static. He spun the tuner up and down the spectrum but the sound was uniform, the terminal hissing of a dead world. He clicked on AM and heard the same dreary sound at a different pitch. He spun past the old, familiar frequencies, the news with the traffic and the weather on the eights and the news with the traffic and the weather on the tens. The all-day sports. He finally found a spot where hopeful silence held out against the noise. He adjusted the dial a bit and heard a signal, a steady beep, beep, beep, beep, beep. He listened for a few minutes but that's all it was. A beacon warning nobody of nothing.

Tom stepped over the doorway to the kitchen. Piles of plates had slid off of shelves and lay splayed upside down in a rubble of broken glass, spice jars, sugar and fruit. The fridge leaned across the narrow space and rested on the cupboards. He turned to the door and reached across to the doorknob, chest-high and to the left. He opened it and looked up at the wooden porch and the stairs that led into the back yard, a sight he'd seen a thousand times that now seemed sinister and strange. He lowered his head slowly. There was a pale patch of grass where the sandbox had been; the swing set had completely vanished. All that remained of the playground was the seesaw, its board now parallel to the ground above. The patch of forest behind the yard remained but all the branches bent the other way, revealing the pale undersides of leaves. Occasionally things came loose - rocks and leaves and weak, old trees - and plummeted away. Finally, he looked down. There was nothing there. An infinite, pale chasm. A white void.

He drifted to the bedroom like a ghost and lay back down with Annie. He shut his eyes and held her, hoping to escape from nightmare into dream. And after some time he did.

He was in the house where he grew up, a split-level ranch in Wilmington, Delaware. But he wasn't. It was then but it was now; it was there but somewhere else. It was his home but it was someone else's. He was a child but he was a man.

He was late for school.

He looked out the picture window to the front yard and the road and saw the yellow tail of his school bus disappear behind the trees.

"Mom!" he called out. "Mom! I need a ride to school!"

He tried to gather his books and notebooks from the chair beside the door, but one or two kept sliding to the floor. As he picked one up, two more would fall. The pile grew and grew, hopelessly unsteady; books kept falling off the teetering top and landing awfully, faces open, pages folded, pages pressed into the dust. They kept falling, falling; he'd pick them up but they kept falling.

Finally, he replaced the last book without incident. There were now way too many to fit into his backpack. He knew his mom was coming and she'd scold him if he wasn't ready. Panicking, he stuck as many in as he could. He envisioned the complications that would occur in each class if he turned up without texts; he furiously tried to calculate which ones would bring him the most grief and recrimination if he left them home. So now he had to empty his backpack and start again.

His mom was there. He perceived her stern presence before he saw her. When he turned around she was standing on the ceiling, upside down. Right away he remembered she was dead; in fact, in his waking life she'd died about a year ago. He realized this is what it meant to be dead: you walked upside down. They could not speak to each other. He detected an air of impatience and mild scorn in her, emotions familiar from childhood. But she also seemed to be preparing him for some momentous journey. She wanted to advise him. He found that the only way he could communicate with her was by drawing hats. He drew a bowler in blue ballpoint on a piece of blue-lined notebook paper. She followed each line he made like she was reading. Someday she'd say something in return, a message that was all he'd ever need to know.

Tom awoke in a jolt of noise and pain again - and darkness - and wondered whether consciousness was worth the trouble. Blood pooled between his nose and mouth and some familiar but forbidding surface. Still, he began to realize that something new had just occurred, something important. What was it? They had been upside down. Now what? He felt the same, strange, suffocating weight as he had felt before. The mattress. Annie, where's Annie? Suddenly there she was beside him, kneeling. She pulled him by the arm. He slid out and struggled to his knees to face her. The entire room seemed to shake and heave. He held her by the arms to fix himself in time and space. Now what?

"Baby!" she said. Tom observed blood streaming down her chin onto her shirt. "Baby! We're back on the floor! We're on the floor!"

"What do you mean?"

"I mean it's over! We're back!"

"We're back on the floor?"

"We're back!"

"It's over?"

"It's over!"

They held each other for a minute, trembling. They were back on the floor and so were the dressers and the broken mirror, the books and lamps and clothes. No scene of devastation ever made someone as happy. Of course there would be things to fix. Things in their world and the world outside. But at least they could live lives like this, feet planted on the ground and sky above.

He perceived a faint whistling and thought it might be in his head. It grew louder.

"Honey, do you hear that?" Annie said.

"Yeah. I'm glad it's not just me."

"Where's it coming from?"

"I don't know. Outside?"

"What is it? A siren?"

"I don't know. Let me go look."

He staggered to the window and saw the grass below, the trees and houses and the road. He lifted the window and leaned out. The whistling seemed to come from everywhere. He noticed something else, something disconcerting: the afternoon light was dimming perceptibly. Too fast for the sunset. He looked up, expecting to see a storm expanding through the sky. Instead he saw a uniformly dull and darkening gray. As he stared longer, the expanse resolved into discrete points. Some grew larger, some remained the same. Something like a shooting star struck somewhere past the line of trees. And another, then another. Something tore through the roof across the way, leaving a smoking hole. A ball of fire crashed into the lawn, shot dirt in every direction, bounced fifty feet into the air and came to a rest, aflame, between the houses. It was a car. For on the the day the world turned upside down, the world turned right-side up again, and everything that had departed now returned.

The Day the World Turned Upside Down - 7

Tom drifted to the bedroom like a ghost and lay back down with Annie. He shut his eyes and held her, hoping to escape from nightmare into dream. And after some time he did.

He was in the house where he grew up, a split-level ranch in Wilmington, Delaware. But he wasn't. It was then but it was now; it was there but somewhere else. It was his home but it was someone else's. He was a child but he was a man.

He was late for school.

He looked out the picture window to the front yard and the road and saw the yellow tail of his school bus disappear behind the trees.

"Mom!" he called out. "Mom! I need a ride to school!"

He tried to gather his books and notebooks from the chair beside the door, but one or two kept sliding to the floor. As he picked one up, two more would fall. The pile grew and grew, hopelessly unsteady; books kept falling off the teetering top and landing awfully, faces open, pages folded, pages pressed into the dust. They kept falling, falling; he'd pick them up but they kept falling.

Finally, he replaced the last book without incident. There were now way too many to fit into his backpack. He knew his mom was coming and she'd scold him if he wasn't ready. Panicking, he stuck as many in as he could. He envisioned the complications that would occur in each class if he turned up without texts; he furiously tried to calculate which ones would bring him the most grief and recrimination if he left them home. So now he had to empty his backpack and start again.

His mom was there. He perceived her stern presence before he saw her. When he turned around she was standing on the ceiling, upside down. Right away he remembered she was dead; in fact, in his waking life she'd died about a year ago. He realized this is what it meant to be dead: you walked upside down. They could not speak to each other. He detected an air of impatience and mild scorn in her, emotions familiar from childhood. But she also seemed to be preparing him for some momentous journey. She wanted to advise him. He found that the only way he could communicate with her was by drawing hats. He drew a bowler in blue ballpoint on a piece of blue-lined notebook paper. She followed each line he made like she was reading. Someday she'd say something in return, a message that was all he'd ever need to know.

Tom awoke in a jolt of noise and pain again - and darkness - and wondered whether consciousness was worth the trouble. Blood pooled between his nose and mouth and some familiar but forbidding surface. Still, he began to realize that something new had just occurred, something important. What was it? They had been upside down. Now what? He felt the same, strange, suffocating weight as he had felt before. The mattress. Annie, where's Annie? Suddenly there she was beside him, kneeling. She pulled him by the arm. He slid out and struggled to his knees to face her. The entire room seemed to shake and heave. He held her by the arms to fix himself in time and space. Now what?

"Baby!" she said. Tom observed blood streaming down her chin onto her shirt. "Baby! We're back on the floor! We're on the floor!"

"What do you mean?"

"I mean it's over! We're back!"

"We're back on the floor?"

"We're back!"

"It's over?"

"It's over!"

They held each other for a minute, trembling. They were back on the floor and so were the dressers and the broken mirror, the books and lamps and clothes. No scene of devastation ever made someone as happy. Of course there would be things to fix. Things in their world and the world outside. But at least they could live lives like this, feet planted on the ground and sky above.

He perceived a faint whistling and thought it might be in his head. It grew louder.

"Honey, do you hear that?" Annie said.

"Yeah. I'm glad it's not just me."

"Where's it coming from?"

"I don't know. Outside?"

"What is it? A siren?"

"I don't know. Let me go look."

He staggered to the window and saw the grass below, the trees and houses and the road. He lifted the window and leaned out. The whistling seemed to come from everywhere. He noticed something else, something disconcerting: the afternoon light was dimming perceptibly. Too fast for the sunset. He looked up, expecting to see a storm expanding through the sky. Instead he saw a uniformly dull and darkening gray. As he stared longer, the expanse resolved into discrete points. Some grew larger, some remained the same. Something like a shooting star struck somewhere past the line of trees. And another, then another. Something tore through the roof across the way, leaving a smoking hole. A ball of fire crashed into the lawn, shot dirt in every direction, bounced fifty feet into the air and came to a rest, aflame, between the houses. It was a car. For on the the day the world turned upside down, the world turned right-side up again, and everything that had departed now returned.