Overheard at work, a woman’s voice emanating from the open door of a conference room: “I’m having a hard time opening my mind to what this could be if it isn’t this.”

The F train got hung up at Carroll Street for some reason, some train stuck up ahead or something. I kept watching the woman sitting across the way from me, nodding in and out of sleep.

The conductor made some announcement how this was a signal problem, or the emergency brake on the track was on. I don’t know. Nothing he could do. The doors were open; every now and then some fool would hustle in, thinking how lucky they were to catch the train. Then stand around and look at us. Realize we’re going nowhere.

A woman ran down the platform, yelling and screaming. She seemed to be wearing very little, maybe a bikini and a T-shirt, flip-flops. No one could tell what she was saying. She ran past and everyone looked up and looked out the window at the space she’d run through, as though that would tell us what the hell was going on.

We got stuck again between Smith-9th Streets and 4th Ave. Perched way up high, in the open, with the heatwave sun going down at last. And then we started to roll for good.

New York's Proudest

If you look up the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority Police it says they’re New York’s Proudest. But that’s bullshit. Bartenders are New York’s proudest motherfuckers.

Whenever a bartender doesn’t know how to make a drink, this is what he says: “It’s been a long time since I’ve made one of those.” And he doesn’t ask you how to make it. He waits for you to tell him, or to order something else. And as you’re telling him, he pretends to remember.

Last night I drank with Jim, in Midtown, at the bar of a restaurant I think I’d been to many years ago, with Aimee. The food back then was terrible—overpriced, butter-saturated. This time the drinks, at least, were fine. Jimmy ordered a negroni and since I’d been drinking scotch at a work party all afternoon, I ordered a Rob Roy.

“It’s been a long time since I’ve made one of those,” the bartender said uncertainly.

“It’s scotch—”

“Scotch, triple sec...”

“No,” I said. “Scotch, sweet vermouth.”

“Right! Right.”

“And a dash of bitters.”

There are five plastic forks arrayed on my desk at work: one tan, one white, one gray, two clear.

The sun was angry today on Third Ave. There seemed to be pockets of extreme heat, as though it emanated from springs in the atmosphere.

Baseball fans in town for the All-Star Game stake out the hotel, next to my work, where the players stay. There’s a little barrier on the sidewalk, with a cop at one end. Dutifully, unthinkingly, the fans form a little line along it. Maybe twenty people or so, mostly grownups, some kids. They peer at the revolving doors, waiting for someone to emerge. Taxis and limos pull into the semicircle and they crane their necks: Who’s that? Nobody? Nobody. For hours, nothing. Nothing. Some leave. Others drift by to take up the vigil. Something’s bound to happen if they wait. But how long?

Overheard on the corner of 23rd Street and 8th Avenue this morning, between an older man and a teenage boy:

"How often does she call you?"

"Not that often. My dad calls more."

"Oh yeah?"

"Yeah. But he's really paranoid."

"Really? About what?"

"About everything! You name it."

At the base of the long escalator into the Grand Central 7 stop there was a fat, middle aged lady, sitting on the cement. Legs out. Whimpering softly. She held up her hand as a trickle of blood flowed from her palm. A small group of good Samaritans stood by, vaguely tending to her. We all turned our heads toward the little scene as we disembarked. Wondering what to do. Hoping it was nothing. Then, on the stairs to the platform, a police officer climbed against the rush-hour stream to find her.

TROOPS

slapping the tree trunk with frustration

At the birthday party in the park on Saturday I tried a piece of cake and the frosting was the sweetest thing I’d ever tasted in my life. It was supernaturally sweet, sweeter than a spoonful of sugar. Like that sweetest substance on earth from the Guinness Book of Word Records, 1977. It convulsed me like a shock.

Later in the afternoon I drifted off to sleep in the armchair. After a few minutes I awoke with a start, not sure who I was, where I was.

TROOPS

"Please," Pasquale rasped to Tomasso. "Go."

Do we participate in medical rituals superstitiously? Are they doing us any good, or are they merely fulfilling some ancient, neurotic need? We have all the equipment in the world, the drugs, the antibiotics. But what if we’ve really just come all the way around again to treating our ailments the way we did in the Middle Ages?

The ophthalmologist told me my eyes were fine but I still needed to take the drops.

“You’re still showing characteristics of pre-glaucoma,” she said. “So that’s something we still need to manage and still need to follow.”

I had taken the peripheral vision test, where you look into a scope and click a clicker every time a little white light blinks somewhere in the field. It always seems more like a test of reflexes, or of honesty. Sometimes I just click mindlessly, thinking a light must have blinked, however faintly, and so why don’t I just guess and hope I got it right? Never mind that it does more good, in a medical exam, to do honestly poorly than to do luckily well. It’s nerve-racking and fraught; it’s a performance.

At one point the assistant said, “Sir?” I was vaguely aware that she must be talking to me but I was somehow reluctant to respond, lost in my blank, blurry world with its occasional pinpricks of light.

“Sir? Do you need any help?”

“No, I’m fine,” I said finally. It occurred to me that I probably had missed an entire series of flashes and got her worried. And it further occurred to me that I hadn’t reacted to them not because I hadn’t seen them but because I just didn’t want to for a little while. I didn’t want to play along.

I finished the test feeling I must have done terribly. Not clicking for stretches at a time, clicking spasmodically for others. The assistant told me to return to the doctor’s examining room. As I waited there I imagined her concerned expression, her suggestion that further investigations were in order. Perhaps deeper and more time-consuming examinations at a better-equipped facility in a hospital annex uptown. I imagined having to explain to her that I really was fine, I just didn’t want to click the clicker sometimes, you know? Even when I saw the light. And other times I clicked it again and again for no good damn reason, I’m sorry. Can I please, please take the test again?

When she came in she pulled up my results on her computer and said they were fine.

“Your pressure’s fine. Your peripheral vision is fine. Come back again in four months and we’ll do it again.”

“Keep taking the drops?” I asked.

“Yes,” she replied. “Of course. Keep taking the drops.”

In the long passageway that leads from the ACE to the 7 at Times Square I began to notice how people swing their arms as they walk. Everyone does. Young, old, short, tall. Nobody realizes it but they’re swinging their arms the whole time, like they’re paddling through the ether.

Crossing the Gowanus

The bell made the sort of sound that’s not too loud when you’re near but you can hear a mile away. It rang dully and not quite evenly, almost like someone was working it by hand.  

A thin boy sat on the concrete riser that ran along the sidewalk, cradling a snare drum and tapping his foot. I wondered whether he was trying to keep time with the bell. It was hard to tell. An older girl stood nearby, wheeling a scooter back and forth in short jabs.

Now a line of cars had formed, and bicycles too. More pedestrians gathered on either side of the street. Some lifted their phones to take pictures. Past the double barricades and the no-man’s land there was a mirror world: cars, bikes and people waiting to cross the other way.

The bridge rose slowly in one flat segment, along tracks in four columns. All the time the bell kept ringing. It was still hot but the sun was sinking low.

A horn sounded and a barge passed through. All you could see was the top of a massive gravel pile. Finally the tugboat came and went. You gotta be patient in that line of work.

The din was over and the bridge restored. I peered down at the poisoned Gowanus as I crossed, and on the other side I glanced into a strange, semi-sheltered space. It was unclear whether it was part of the bridge’s structure or if it belonged to the adjacent construction site, a patchy-grass lot with trailers and Port-o-lets. Inside there were hundreds upon hundreds of mannequins, some standing, some lying in stacks, and rows and rows of bathtubs with feet.

When we went out this afternoon the rain was still falling and all the leaves down 7th Street glowed as though it overflowed from the street to the dirt to the roots and up the trunk, into the branches, out the stems and into them. I had seen the street so many times, not thinking much of it. The dreary cars, the ramshackle sidewalk. Houses of neighbors we didn’t know. But there was something in the contrasting light, and in the alley of trees, and in the way the street opened at the intersection with 8th Avenue, that reminded me of a place I’d seen in dreams.

A petite, young Asian woman stood in the middle of the 7 train platform with a guitar, the case open at her feet. She had a mic too, and she was amplified, ready to go. She played quick, jabbing chords as she tuned up and adjusted her volume. Commuters flowed by on either side. A westbound train left the station. An eastbound one came in. Still she played her tense, little chords. Someone bent over and left her a buck. I wondered whether this was her act. All preparation. No singing. No songs.

A deeply hunched vagrant drifted by erratically, looking straight at the space right past his dirty shoes. People took note of him as they do in New York City: as the wild card in their midst. The performer eyed him with a trace of concern. Two more chords: jank-jank.

As people got on and off the train I heard him bark at someone. People turned to look in his direction. When I did, too, he was gone.

Life Today

Our devices, force-fed by the desperate, hyperactive media industry, keep us constantly connected to the horrendousness of the world, never knowing whether, sitting on the desk chair, the subway seat or toilet, we’ll see something that will make us choke back tears, or vomit, or both.

Ernie Is Bert

I was dropping Jackie off at school, taking off her jacket.

“Ernie,” she said.

“Who’s Ernie?” I asked.

“Ernie is Bert.”

TROOPS

“I’m exploring various funding options.”

TROOPS

However, much to his surprise

A man said to a group of friends as they walked along a path in Prospect Park, “She was like, ‘All I can say is that it was absolutely agonizing.’”