On the terrace the black birds descend on plates of leftover food moments after diners get up, their brittle feet clambering over forks and plates like nothing, their beaks stabbing at breakfast sausage and crusts of French toast. You can shoo them away but they come back immediately. They hide in the bushes and wait for people to leave, the waitress tells me.

It occurred to me while reading by the pool today that I never realized womb rhymes with tomb. Am I the last English speaker on planet earth to discover this?

I fell asleep very briefly and woke up breathing fast, adrenaline flowing, fight or flight. I examined my surroundings. Sun, attendants in polo shirts and khakis. The looming concrete facade of the hotel building set against a partly cloudy sky. All was as I’d left it a minute or two before. I picked back up the book.

The waiting area by the gate, one flatscreen showing a storm surge lashing Florida’s coast, another showing golf, white men hunched in a green expanse, the tedious unchanging leaderboard displayed. Plus. Minus. Even. The bar and grill across the way is closed but already at this early hour you can glimpse a server behind the screen of idle taps, getting things ready for the coming onslaught of anxious, booze-mad fliers. The agent at the gate informs us that boarding will begin at five forty-six, one minute past schedule.

Man he really is concentrating on that putt. 

Last call for San Francisco from the neighboring gate. The others in our seating area are utterly unremarkable. No defining features, mannerisms. No intriguing conversation. A terrible torpor has set in; they barely reach their hands up to their faces. They’ve been reduced to this: travelers. When they get back to where they come from they’ll reinhabit themselves. People with jobs, friends, hobbies. Secrets. Features that define a life. But for the time being they’re in a state of grace: they’re nothing.

In fact the TV screen with golf has been frozen all along.

You wonder whether the wax figures are thinking of you. Resenting you for your mobility, your ability to dart in and out of their personal space, taking endless selfies and family portraits with them as props, objects of reverence or lust or derision. You walk away into the next room of the exhibition and they stand prone as though frozen in time. Maybe there’s something they know that you don’t know. You sense it from their sly smiles and unblinking gaze.

After the pop stars and the Royal fam you get a bit of history: in the Reign of Terror Madame Tussaud was enlisted to make death masks of aristocrats by clutching their freshly severed heads between her knees. I guess someone had to do it. Exit through Star Wars and the gift shop.

I couldn’t really comprehend it all so I decided to focus on random details: the wording of a billboard, the arrangement of furniture in a living room spied from the top of a bus. It seemed to help.

At the bus stop at night I was suddenly gripped by the impulse to take a picture of the street sparkling from the rain. It was a humdrum scene—parked cars, kebab shops, delivery guys on bikes. Traffic lights on red. When I first tapped the button it didn’t take. Almost like it wasn’t meant to be. The light turned green, I tried again. It worked.

There was a red form through the frosted glass of the loo. It had a human quality, like someone’s head cloaked in the hood of their anorak. It was probably something nothing.

The hot water came out cold and the cold water came out cold.

I noticed all the wines on the pub menu were high in alcohol, fourteen, fourteen and a half. It’s a sure sign of global warming if there ever was one.

There were two aging portly men at a booth talking about how they’re fucked, they don’t know where the money goes, there’s not enough to last. One said, “I ask myself, can it get any worse? And it gets worse.”

The pub beside Trumper’s, full of yuppies drinking after work. A man walked stiffly on his prosthetic legs across the street. I made a point not to stare but of course I did after he’d passed by. Then I thought, he must feel everyone’s eyes on his back too.

What I saw through the lens of my phone didn’t resemble what I saw through my eyes. It was duller and flatter of course but also it didn’t seem to feature the charming little village off in the distance to the left. I took a picture anyway and put it down. Now there’s just poles and fields and low forests racing by.

Writing is exploring undiscovered territory. The text prediction on the smart device is a tool like a helmet lamp in a cave. It sees everything a moment before you do but it doesn’t care.

It must be said it offered me the word “care” a bit reluctantly there.

A road with a new black surface and bright white stripes darting from below the tracks into the woods.

Gravel piles, always gravel piles.

And the French have businesses with names like Crea Concept, the stenciled name reaching from the darkened picture window into your addled brain. What do they think they’re doing to a people at night tossed on red wine with a word like that. Concept.

TROOPS

Poe squinted, his small eyes peering out beneath thick eyebrows.

Dappled sunlight shone on the sloping street, occupied for now by grills and folding tables and kids drawing in chalk. People sat drinking beer, most on the building side but some, like us, by the graveyard. There was a space allotted for music: mic stands, speakers, drums up on the sidewalk.

Right now a duo played: a sax player in a dandyish leopard-skin suit and fancy hat and a guitar player dressed normal. They were pretty good. When they were done I spotted the sax player hovering around the food table as I got a hot dog.

“Mind if I… grab a…?” he said uncertainly.

I said of course, of course. Though nothing was mine to give.

“Nice playing,” I said. And really meant it. You don’t always mean it when you tell someone nice playing. It feels good to say it and mean it.

He made one of those ass-backward acknowledgments, “Thanks much to you” or something. It was a bit weirder though. Like maybe, “What you said I appreciate.” Might have even ended with “my man.”

I stood there for a moment wondering whether he actually understood that I wanted to pay him a compliment. Then he spoke again.

“You just wait for the next band. There’ll be LOTS more people,” he declared, pointing. “And that’s a PROMISE.”

And the next band played and he was in it. And they weren’t quite as good actually. And there were exactly as many people as before.

I awoke gradually, hearing the radio play dimly over the air conditioner. Some tune or other and then a voice intoned: What is jazz?

I stay in bed through the six-thirty news read by Gary, or Bob, can’t remember now, one of them’s the DJ and the other does news. When I hear their names fresh out of my dreams they’re obvious and recognizable but in later, lucid hours it’s all a blur somehow.

It ends with the scores and weather. And when a tune starts up again that’s when I rise.

The artificial intelligence took us through unfamiliar streets, the types where bashed-up cars are parked and weeds grow through the sidewalks. “In one thousand feet, turn right,” she says, and we obey.

At a stop light I observed a used car lot. CROWN FORD PRE-OWNED, it said, and all the letters were immaculate blue and white, the logo we all know below. I marveled at the correctness of it all, the font, the kearning. The folks at headquarters must be hands-on. But then as I rolled away I noticed the entire block of text was off-center on the concrete facade. Not by much. Only by an inch or two. But enough.

On the Belt Parkway we watched as the planes came in. There’s always one that surprises you, that appears right out of the trees and blots out the sun.

At the party she didn’t speak to us except to say excuse me. But at least we stayed until after she left.

At halftime I ate the pizza like a, what? Animal. Sure. But what? Like a dog, maybe. Like a rat. Then it occurred to me the reason that rat with the pizza video went viral is because deep down inside we’re all the rat. Snaring a cold slice and running away furtively, desperate to make it descend our throats before someone or something intervenes to tell us: No, you can’t have that.

I walked up the ramp to leave the 4th Street station, lost in my earbuds, Winterland 1974. A man waved to me frantically, imploringly. I scrutinized him and tried to assess the situation. He seemed stuck in the turnstile somehow, straddling one of the tripod arms in mid-rotation. Did he need my help? In a flash I decided not. But of course that assessment was self-serving. I didn’t want to approach this wide-eyed stranger and disentangle him from the teeth of this machine. If that’s even what he wanted. I thought in fact he wanted something else. The mechanism seemed to be turning a bit. And even if it wasn’t, it was absurd to think he couldn’t clamber over it, or under. Yet he still appealed to me fiercely, arm outstretched. I turned away to exit one of the other gates a little farther down. I looked over my shoulder. He was still there and seemed to be watching me. If he does get free then surely he’ll run up behind and clobber me in the skull, I thought. Kill me. Surely he’ll kill me. What else could he possibly want? Before I reached the stairs to the street I turned around again. I didn’t see him anywhere.

Music had been promised between two and five and here we were two-ten and they were still tuning up and fucking around, some sitting on folding chairs in the street, 5th Ave revelers strolling by with their grilled corn and mozzarepas. I really didn’t mind. The plunks and blurps from their instruments faded nicely into the hubbub of the fair. I didn’t want the music to start.

The radio said there’d be violent storms, a tornado even. Watch out for flying branches. But instead it was beautiful, just a little cloudy. It got weirdly bright and silvery midafternoon and then big, fat drops of rain fell straight down like they were dripping from a sieve.

When you’re watching your team it doesn’t matter how good they are, they seem plagued to you, forever vulnerable, unlucky. Because you see yourself in them maybe. I was so sure they’d lose the penalty shootout I braced myself. Clenched my stomach against the inevitable sorrow. Then they had a chance to win, and missed. Now for sure it’s all over. How can it not be over? But they won.

In my slight abbreviation. Sorry, my slight inebriation tonight I remembered that S. said she wanted to watch a documentary about a famous comedian. I know his last name: Carlin. I’m pretty sure it’s Carlin. A very famous, legendary comedian. But I cannot now, and haven’t for some hours, been able to remember his first name. Bob? Joe. Jim?

Bill Carlin. Is it Bill? I’m pretty sure it’s Bill. It’s not Jeff, it’s not Tom. For sure not Tom.

We’re not even going to talk about Adam or Andy or anything like that. It’s a one-syllable name for sure. Of that I am sure. In fact there are very few male names that are not, or can’t be reduced to, a single syllable. Think about it.

It’s not Mike. It’s not Dave.

Bill. Bill Carlin?

A strange, quiet evening when dinner’s too early because Jackie was at the dentist and they brought back Shake Shack. Now golden sunlight streams across the space and birds are chirping and there’s nothing to do, not even a kid to put to bed.

On my morning run I thought of writing a play about the tragedy. Why not after all? As I turned around at the end of the park I thought of a cutely poignant little ending. Then I thought no. Now I’m not sure.

Sunday before last we had dinner in a covid enclosure on the street, a neighborhood Italian on Sixth Ave. We took our time, had dessert. Everyone so nice and friendly. I observed a shadowy figure pacing a living room on the second floor above the restaurant. A drizzle began to fall but not on us.

On our way back we passed another restaurant. Their street tables were bustling. The food looked good. We thought we’d like to try it sometime. Just past its perimeter, where cars again occupied the parking spots, there was something strange. You could feel it before you saw it. A nice SUV parked beneath a tree, dotted with fresh rain. The windshield was smashed in by a pipefitter’s wrench that remained nestled in the breach, radiating a web of cracks across the glass. It seemed staged, theatrical. Like there was a hidden camera capturing our reactions. A performance art installation, maybe. The wrench was just too perfect. Weighty, industrial. Everything else was just so pretty. The dusting of pink blossoms on the cars and street. The lamplit walls and stoops. We scrutinized the wrench for a minute. Peered at the front seat of the car, apparently unaffected. We thought of taking pictures but we didn’t.

I read the police report off my phone, glasses up on my head so I could get up close and see the print. Witness #1, Witness #2. The alleged perpetrator’s unlikely alias, Hugh. By one account he was Puerto Rican, by all the others Italian. White. Heavy-set. 5-11.

One passage described the blood as magma-like.

I peered away from time to time to watch a documentary about an extraordinarily successful singer from the nineties whose song may or may not have led to the suicide of the man who coined its title. She collapsed in tears in her interview on her rickety wooden chair.

He was described as having a widow’s peak. Upon his arrest out of state he had been using “some sort of cane.”

The perpetrator and one of the witnesses arrived at the victim’s house in the perpetrator’s thirty-year-old pickup truck. Something was broken and the victim and the perpetrator spent a few hours troubleshooting. Then they came back in the house together.