TROOPS

"You didn't hear. My father died."

As I ran this morning by the park I noticed a familiar object on the sidewalk, nearly lost in the pebbled concrete: a Scrabble C. About twenty feet later, there was a D. Then a K. A Q. Two upside-down tiles now. (Or were they blanks?) Then nothing.

I considered the likelihood of seeing another letter. As there had been a few, wasn’t it likely there’d be more? I scanned the pavement beneath my lumbering feet. Nothing.

Suddenly, there they were in one big, vomity splatter. All the letters, B and X and E and everything. I swerved around them. A few steps further, I saw a single letter tray, resting upside down.

TROOPS

Don't you speak to me in that tone

We're people. You're supposed to treat us good.

I had just returned from giving our Christmas tree to the wood chippers. As I put my key in the door, I heard someone on the sidewalk behind me shouting in a bitterly angry tone:

“This isn’t FUN. We’ve been here for an HOUR.”

I turned around to find a woman facing the driver-side window of a car parked in front of our building. I could see another woman in the driver’s seat. She sat still the whole time, staring out the windshield. There was someone in the passenger seat too, but I could only see their legs.

The woman on the sidewalk began again.

“Listen, Frankie. We’re PEOPLE. You’re supposed to treat us good!”

After a few moments she opened the back door and got in. They both sat there now, just looking straight ahead. I waited to see if anything more would happen. Shouting, maybe. Gesturing. Tears. But nothing happened. They sat there, saying nothing.

I let the door close and went upstairs.

There was a fire on the sidewalk. Something ablaze beside the park. I thought about those self-immolating monks. The guy under McNamara’s window. A cop car had pulled up to the conflagration, shining its lights on it, and a hook and ladder stood in the middle of the street. Soon a jet of water arced over the parked cars and onto the flames. The smoke grew thicker as the fire died. Finally it began to dissipate. The fire truck left. I thought the cops would back up into the driveway behind them and get back on the street. Instead they drove right past the smoldering remains and down the sidewalk. The following morning I passed it on my run. It was a tree branch, made thin and smooth, completely black.

During the General Assembly of the United Nations last fall, 42nd Street around my work was lousy with diplomats in tinted-window cars. Many stayed at the Helmsley Hotel next door. Often, as I walked out to lunch, I found motorcades double parked on the street, waiting to ferry their charges the two blocks to UN Plaza. One day there was a particularly large one, composed of black Mercedes and SUVs. Bodyguards and handlers lined the path between the hotel entrance and the open door of a car. They turned their heads toward the hotel, and I did too. The sliding glass doors opened. A man in a burgundy suit and tie, South Asian, heavyset, with straight, dark hair and gold-rimmed glasses, proceeded out at a funereal pace. He held his chin up a little and appeared not to fix his gaze on anything whatsoever, not the ground before him, not his destination. His bearing was impeccably formal but otherworldly, too, as though he were accustomed to never touching anything. Never addressing anyone. He looked like he’d been dressed and groomed by a machine. The secret service guys signaled us to stop and wait for him to cross. He continued at the same deliberate pace, not turning his head, not looking, not seeing, until finally his driver eased him into the back seat by the elbow.

My dad was driving a white Peogeot 202 on a hilly road in France, through the fields, between the trees, on a hot day in July. My brother sat in the passenger seat and I sat in the back. I was five.

I stared at the speedometer needle, urging it higher with my mind. It said one hundred nineteen kilometers per hour. One hundred twenty-three. One hundred twenty-seven. This was the highest I had ever seen it go.

We found a spot on top of a dusty little hill of beaten dirt and gravel. Behind us was a trove of trees. A little way down men stood along a wire fence, clutching the mesh with their fingers and peering through the diamond gaps. I stood between them and saw what they saw—an unpopulated expanse of patchy grass, rolling up from the left and back down over the horizon to the right. It was bisected by a ribbon of gray asphalt, edged in white. Two low barriers of corrugated steel traced it, from a remove, on either side.

I looked left, where the asphalt bent away beyond a hill. A candy-striped lip of concrete sloped up from the inside of the curve and extended a few feet in the grass. In the distance the track rose again and disappeared around a corner to the left. I looked right. A man in a white jumpsuit, backlit by the sun, stood on my side of the metal barrier, facing away, his left fist resting on his hip. Beside him was a bright red fire extinguisher.

I heard a sound I’d never heard before. A low, mechanical moan, reverberating in the hills and growing louder. I looked to the left, from where it came. Suddenly: a swarm of shiny, sleek machines appeared, in rough procession, some alone, some side-by-side. They settled into single file and snaked up the little hill to where I stood. The one in front was red. The sound rose and rose and peaked as the cars passed me: the red one had a 12 on it and then there was a black one with gold letters and a black number 1 on a golden square and then there was a white one, a blue one, a red-and-white one and another black one, and I was surrounded by noise and I could feel my stomach quaking, and with each car the sound changed; it faded quickly, and lowered; it became the sound of disappointment, or pity; a sound made again and again and again.

In a little while the cars came back around the bend, and again, and many more times after that; sometimes in a different order, sometimes the same; one at a time or in groups of two or three, and finally there was no interruption in the din. Some of their wheels were silver; some were painted. I liked the painted ones. The prettiest ones were painted green.

I got lost in the cars. I turned around and I was lost in the crowd, the forest of grownup legs. I saw rocks and dirt below me, some grass. No faces. No Daddy, no brother.

The cars were very, very beautiful and very scary. I wondered: Could one of them hurt me? They were so beautiful and scary. Beautiful things hurt you the most.

Cops Out by the Park

For a while in December—maybe a couple of weeks—a cop car would sit out by the park, half a block away from us. It would arrive around sundown and stay for three or four hours, reds and blues flashing the whole time. Occasionally we’d peer out the kitchen or study window.

“It’s still there.”

“Cops still there?”

“Cops are still there.”

One night it didn’t come. We haven’t seen it since.

Colorful Things on the Ground Today

Beyond the turnstile at Seventh Avenue this morning the floor was strewn with gummy bears: red, orange, yellow.

When we emerged on Eighth Avenue and Sixteenth Street on the other end of our trip, there was a splatter of pointillistic, multicolored vomit, like regurgitated confetti, where the sidewalk met the wall.

In the breakfast room all the men looked fat and tired, prematurely old; the women upright and sober; their daughters bright eyed and alert, and sons mildly retarded. A middle aged couple sat at the table next to ours. She spoke in soft, woeful tones, sometimes breaking into sobs, as he reached across the table to hold her hand.

I'm at this hotel in Pennsylvania I don't even know the name of. Country something. Inn whatever.

That hallway on the ground floor between the back parking lot and the front desk. There's the pool behind a row of windows, the sheen of its warm surface unperturbed. The adjacent hot tub is empty and ringed with yellow keep-out tape.

The ice machine makes an awful clatter. Who stays in the room next door?

It was cold when we pulled in. The side road it's on extends to nowhere: a dim and windswept landscape that rises in the distance. There's a stack of bright red, horizontal bars halfway up, like a house made out of light.

TROOPS

"Why did God do that?"

Geminids

The sky was alive. Every so often you’d perceive it moving—something in it moving very fast, out at the edge of vision. And you knew there might be something moving where you couldn’t see.

Windfall

Sometimes a dirty old sack full of money just falls into your lap. You open it up and whoa, there’s twenties in there. Fives, a whole lotta ones. Some quarters too, even pennies. You don’t know where it came from. There’s nowhere to return it. You’re just sitting there with it pressing gently on your groin, half concealed below the lip of your desk. You’re kinda worried someone might see it—there’s no denying it’s there. But you gotta take it. You gotta open it up, remove the contents. Let the light shine in so you know you got it all. Organize the bills a little, put them in your wallet. Take the coins, let them hang heavy and stupid in your pocket. Then you crumple up the sack and throw it in the trash. You can feel guilty about this if you want. Or not. It’s yours.

Let 'em Off!

The Times Square platform where the 7 starts and ends was unusually crowded, with no train on either side to board. Finally one pulled in and everyone clustered around its doors.

“Let ‘em off! Let ‘em off! Let ‘em off! Let ‘em off! Let ‘em off! Let ‘em off!” the conductor shouted over the PA.

What Happened at Work So Far Today

Our morning meeting takes place in the reception area because all the conference rooms are booked. There’s a couch, a big ottoman, two tables, some chairs. People walk through the middle, heading in or out the door or along the hallway from one side of the office to the other. Some hurry their pace a little, as though crossing the sight of a tourist’s camera. Some give a little smile that says: There you are in your meeting, and here I am walking through it.

This morning most of the seats were taken. I sat at the high table by the wall, in the corner behind the electric Menorah. I beheld the four fake, flickering flames as account executives discussed this and that. I studied the bearings of the people who walked through. Their various gaits. The meeting broke up and I knocked out the plug while stepping off the stool. The Menorah went dark. I furtively restored it and looked around. No one seemed to notice.

In the men’s room, someone in a stall was engaged in a conference call on speakerphone.

In the middle of the afternoon a colleague suggested we go to the Christmas event that was taking place in the lobby downstairs. The Nutcracker emanated from some unseen string trio and mingled with the din of the assembly. White-clothed tables, festooned with tinsel, ringed the famous globe and lined the marble walls. They bore trays of gingerbread cookies, cake lollipops with red and green frosting, urns of cider and hot chocolate, pitchers of eggnog. A black-clad attendant stood at each, offering to shake nutmeg, to apply aerated cream, to spoon mini-marshmallows with a little plastic spoon. Their faces strained with the discomfort of doing for people what they should do for themselves.

TROOPS

He had been afraid

TROOPS

his life wasn't horribly ordinary

In my memory La Ciotat, the town on the French Riviera where we spent summers in the early ‘70s, is small and compact, like the town in a children’s book: a road leads down from our house and suddenly you’re on the beach; take a right and you pass some cafés and hotels, a marina, a rocky cove where you can fish or dive or even tie a boat. A little farther off there’s a shipyard, set apart in a maze of docks, where one enormous oil tanker sits on stilts, its hull in patches, as unseen workers pound it with their hammers to break it down for scrap. Clang! Clang! Clang!

I looked at the satellite photo of it today in Google Maps. The coastline conformed plausibly to my image of it but the town itself was vastly more complex and sprawling. Roads in all directions. Schools, museums, parking lots. Major avenues leading into roundabouts and squares. I tried in vain to find the road we lived on. It could be this one, or that one. None seemed the least bit familiar. They all were too urban: heavily populated and girded with infrastructure.

Did the town develop that much over time? Or did my imagination tear it down?

Early this morning, as I stood in the kitchen, I saw a bright white, flashing beacon through the trees.