Another state of mind

There is no grief in Jersey, where "everything is two feet from each other."

"No one gets in love," there. A man does not ask his wife, "Do we know anyone with absolute pitch?" Schoolchildren do not say, "The system works best when it doesn't work at all." Housecats do not watch documentaries about Big Cats on public television.

If you lived there, the words in your Google search bar at the end of the day would be: "too much remembering, not enough drinking." If you lived there, you would be a flight risk, trying to cast off from the Jersey shore and always coming back with the tide.

She saved a child in Bouley.

In the City of Light and Dark, her throat was a chapel, and it was also the bellows. She fell into habits and came into ideas. She mapped out her life in Venn diagrams.

She saved a child in Bouley. The child knocked over a chair and the chair fell on the child. She lifted the chair off the child with a single hand, while talking on the phone. The errant mother came running then. She crooned to the child, "Say thank you. Say thank you." And the child wept, "Thank you."

Her husband told her, "You have a steve about you." He had invented the expression. Neither he nor she knew exactly what it meant, but it sounded good. One day someone called her Kashopolous and she began to answer to that, too. "How are you," people insisted, and she said, "I'm doing triple Sachow-double toe combinations one after the other." She dreamt she was being pursued, but she ran with a tiny origami rifle in her fist, and got away.

Search & ye shall find

To the Italian gent requesting "a quotation for two rooms in Manhattan," take heart, someone else was looking for "a Rubik's cube to cure depression."

To the person seeking a cure for depression: talk to the fella looking for "Uma Thurman in Nova Scotia," or the one searching for "Yulia Tymoshenko legs," or the one asking for "an explanation of first love." 

Perhaps the most tortured soul is the one who asks, "Who is that lady in the Ricola commercial?"

Imaginary London Tour

Seen in Kiev, Ukraine, in October 2005.

Feet first

A seagull touching down in the Jardin des Tuileries in Paris in January 2006.

Photo: Ilya Nikhamin

Switzerland

"Everyone in Switzerland smokes indoors - in offices, bars, anywhere," she told me. "They don't have that law yet," she said with a reformer's eternal optimism.

"We ask you not to give."

"We ran out on the peppermint," said the man mixing drinks in the Starbucks on Worth & Lafayette. "It was cheating on us," you said to me out of the side of your mouth. The bobby pins dropped into your upturned hand.

"It's hard to catch a fish," a mother told her child, "because the fish want to be free." They were peering into the pond behind the Audubon House in Prospect Park.
 
Aggravated harassment sounds like harassment you engage in when you are aggravated. No doubt you would be aggravated if you were a stowaway in some gentleman's checked bag. And if that gentleman always ordered first and rang twice. And if he said, "Asked and answered," when you asked him why or why not.

With stilted intonation, the voice of the MTA public service announcement implores, "Kindness is contagious, and it begins with you. We ask you not to give."

Work-Study

When Francisco (which was his middle name) erased four months of the whiteboard attendance calendar without making a permanent record of the latenesses and absences tallied there, Frank said, "His intentions were good. They always are." He paused. "What Columbia doesn't understand," he said, "is that these kids are paying forty thousand dollars a year to be here, meanwhile, they get paid nine dollars an hour to work eight hours a week. That's a pittance. Where are their heads? Copy this on bypass, get C.'s glasses, she left them in Milbank, she forgot her child under a desk. No," he said. "It doesn't add up."

"I think this is us."

"I think this is us," said the man as the F train pulled into the Carroll Street.

"And if it's not," said the woman good-naturedly, "then we'll go for one of our famous walks."

The wonderful world of Bohan

In the wonderful world of Bohan, there were no winners. Nevertheless, Frank tried. He reviewed the phone bill carefully each month and found that Columbia was billing the Institute for lines we no longer used. He highlighted those charges and disputed them. It was a stakeout, a war of attrition. Frank was ready. He had his nosh in the mornings - a danish to bolster him. He had a crack staff to aid and abet. "Don't walk to talk," he told us. "The meek shall inherit the earth, but not in New York City." When I proposed an overly ambitious idea, he said, "Don't be daft," or "Let's not get carried away."

He ate breakfast and lunch off a Christmas-print plastic tray. Perhaps this was a habit his wife taught him. All the women in his family loved to clean: they straightened the tassles on the rug, and if he were drinking a glass of water, they would whisk it away as he was setting it down on the table between sips. He said he had grown up on Pathmark orange juice, canned and frozen. As a kid he had a paper route on Ocean Avenue between Foster and Avenue H. He had some elevator buildings and some walk-ups. He said he often crossed between buildings via the roofs, but sometimes the doors were locked and he had to go all the way back downstairs.

"Did I tell you this," he asked. "Well, hear it again," he said. He asked his twins how their SATs went; they answered, "We were the cutest girls there." He said they worked one summer at LaGuardia, screening luggage; he said he never recovered his faith in airport security after that.

Labor

"How much wood would a woodchuck chuck," you wondered, "if he belonged to a union?"

Of our loud downstairs neighbor, you said, "I hope he doesn't get fired, otherwise he'll be home everyday drowning his misery in video games."

The long walk

They felt as if they’d just built the city and were running a cursory eye over it, to make sure that it was standing, full at the hips. They began within earshot of the M, under the unblinking eye of the golden lady atop the Municipal Building. They admired the Brooklyn Bridge: how the cables touched here and moved on, like runners in a relay race. Near the Winter Garden they asked a man mooring his yacht how much the yacht had cost, and the man, taking them for kids, answered merely, “A lot.” In the Village Kasia saw trees in the distance and asked Il’ya if he knew what park it was. He answered, “Isn’t there a forest at the edge of every village?” They made a foray into that forest. They emerged on Union Square, to find Critical Mass underway: dozens of howling cyclists had swarmed, like cats coming out of the alleys to harmonize. “The city is under siege,” said Il’ya. “The city is took,” paraphrased Kasia. They followed the crowd to Little Italy, where the windows brimmed with strapping youths in white undershirts.

They did not tire. As the night tucked its blanket under the buildings of the city, they hunted for a seller of oranges, and engaged him in chatter. Il’ya put the fruit into Kasia’s hands to remind her of fire and light. In Columbus Circle they stood over the lit panels in the sidewalk. Believers tipped their hats to these haloes from below. In Whole Foods they reveled in the barrels of coffee beans, in the array of colorful bottles. They ate fistfuls of bread and chunks of cheese and then they returned home by a different way: they took a long cut through Central Park. The sprung orange Gates were abloom in the moonlight, heralding spring. The statues were wet from the spray of fountains. Two starlings gossiped in the crook of Juliette’s arm. They crossed into a play performed by a roving Shakespearean troupe. They mistook the play for The Tempest; it turned out to be Much Ado About Nothing. They contributed applause and furthered their own heartbeats as well as those of the actors.  Kasia’s harried braids teemed with remnants of winter and spring’s burgeoning smells.

Whole Foods

"The cashier at Whole Foods gave me credit for three canvas bags," said Nixon. "I only had one bag, but she said it was so big, it was worth three."

"You elicit corruption," said Nikolai.

Nixon sneezes

Nixon sneezed something fierce. He drew out the "Achoo" as if he were the yodeller in the Ricola commercial.

"Out of courtesy for our neighbors, please keep the noise," Nikolai told him, quoting a sign he'd seen in front of a bar downtown.

Redeem the day you rued!

In the women's bathroom at the Union Square Whole Foods, she read such enlightened graffiti as:

Obama was here.
In the ladies' room? Really?

and

Make love not water.

She was ungathered.

She was ungathered. Much like raspberries in the bramble. Much unlike unionized workers. And the season - it was riddled with hot spells. Every week there was a day that felt like a second coming: unnaturally warm, but gusty. Those days opened with the clatter of shampoo bottles blown off the windowsill, into the bathtub.

She had a tiny budget of time in which to gather herself. To begin, she spliced two classic titles, which yielded, "The sound of the wind." Which was a howl that cut to the chase.

When she was a kid and the hour was midnight and her mother chided her to sleep, she said, "I'll sleep when I'm dead." Sometimes she stayed awake to do nothing but conduct exit interviews with her stuff. She was always parting with books, dresses, shoes. She wrote down whatever she could remember about the thing: who gave her the book and where she read it, what she had seen and with whom she'd danced while wearing the dress or shoes. Afterwards - weeks later - she loved to remember the thing and realize that she did not miss it at all. Which was satisfying because it meant she had used up all that it had to offer.

How long

"How long have you been here," said Frank.

"Twenty-one years," I said.

"Not on earth," he said, exasperated. "I meant, here, in the office, today."

"Too long, clearly," I said.

Both of us were incorrigible.

Within earshot of BAM

"I just got out of a serious relationship with someone I'm still in love with," said a girl on Lafayette and Fulton. "I'm not about to go out with a security guard from the Museum of Natural History." She did not know her voice carried to the couple standing still, breathing, among the fir trees lined up for sale at the intersection.

"I don't want people to think that I'm not an Aries," said another girl. She did not know that the couple wolfing down pulled pork sandwiches at the next table in The Smoke Joint had fine ears and a keen appetite for strangers' statements.

Wintering

You were the kid who learned all the lines in the school play. One character was not enough. You wanted to wear every shoe; grind your elbows in the grit of every windowsill. You didn't like to choose. You let everyone set up shop in your heart until it teemed like a black market in an Olympic stadium in a former Soviet Republic.

One day you unwittingly come to the office wearing two different shoes. You compliment a friend's boots. She asks, "Do you want to borrow one of them?" There are half a dozen coats slung across the wall between your cubicles. She has a hundred foot roll of "Everything is okay" barricade tape stashed in a drawer. She plans to cordone off your cubicle so that people stop asking you.

Now the vacant lot on Caton is a forest: fir trees felled upstate and hauled here. You are addicted to the scent. You stick your head out the window for a fix: while talking on the phone, while brushing your teeth. You bring home all the coats that have accumulated in the office throughout the turning of the seasons. You put them on and sleep, layered, on your fire escape, because being outside makes time last longer. You always knew that was true for daylight: as a kid you stomped about the Park, getting close to birds to see their hearts quiver. You wore a red coat so you would not lose yourself. Your stomach knotted with the dying of the light. This was grief, daily as bread; no one else seemed seized by it. Now, sleeping on your fire escape, you draw out the night. Your shoes match, the coats become you. If you cast your lines, the fish will bite.