“You’re wheezing,” I say.

“I am not,” he says, and pulls out his asthma inhaler, shakes it, and takes a puff. His lung sounds immediately clear. It’s 4:30 on Thursday, August 14, exactly nineteen minutes after the power went out. I had been interviewing the Captain for a sort of “day in the life” piece. Now I am just taking notes.

First the lights dimmed, then went out completely. Computers stopped. The Captain was annoyed, he had lots of work to do before going on vacation with his fiancee next week. He cursed. “Maybe someone used the toaster oven and the copier at the same time.” Every time that happens, he has to call maintenance. But then some lights flickered on. He looked up. “Emergency generator’s on.” He looked outside. “Traffic lights out. It’s citywide.” He stepped into the hall. Word came down there’d been a disturbance at the Niagara-Mohawk power plant, but nobody knows for sure. After 9/11, anything could happen. I figure PD would know first. Like going through turbulance on an airplane, you watch the stewardess. If she’s not nervous, neither are you. I keep my eye on the Captain.

At 5 p.m. an announcement comes over the loudspeaker: all uniformed members, captains and below, are to report to the park outside 1 PP in helmets, bulletproof vests, gun belts, reflective vests, and escape hoods. There are 37,000 uniformed police officers in New York City. 10,000 are being mobilized, leaving the rest as reserves. Nobody knows how long this thing will last.

The Captain receives orders for deployment. He is to be stationed at one of the major bridges, on the Brooklyn side. Before he and his men leave, he tries to gather provisions. He runs to Dirty Nails Pete’s, but the store is already shuttered. Fears of 1977 run through shopkeepers’ heads. But the crowd is orderly. Everyone just wants to get home. The Captain lives in Brooklyn, with a parrot he’s trained to say “Atchoo! God bless you!” and “Praise the Lord!” The bird will not get fed tonight.

He and his men get into a police van and we are off. Traffic is at a standstill and we go lights and sirens through the emergency lane. Over the bridge I check out the skyline. Nothing too out of the ordinary. The sun is still bright. People stream out of buildings and swarm over the bridge. We park the van and jump out. As the crowd thickens the Captain guides cars and pedestrians off the off-ramp and prevents vehicles from getting on. Some yell. Some whisper. Some cry. Is this terrorism?

“No,” the Captain reassures them. “Just a good old-fashioned NYC blackout.”

But as the sun goes down the scene becomes more and more surreal. Everything gets darker, the bridge, the streets. Only headlights illuminate people and buildings. I can see stars. I point out the Big Dipper.

“Where?” the Captain says.

“There,” I say, and point to the handle. He doesn’t see it. “For a man with a lifetime membership to the Bronx Zoo, you have a lot to learn about nature.”

He chuckles, then does a little dance from foot to foot. He is wearing new orthotics and they’re hurting his feet. He and his men have been working with no relief for five hours now, and everyone is bathed in sweat. The Captain lets his men remove their caps. They use them to fan themselves. He does the same. The only drink he has had in all this time is a half a bottle of water. I had the other half. Now the bodega is closed.

We are short on flares, and the Captain uses them sparingly. They give off an eerie orange glow, and other than the lights of the cars, it’s all he has. Police officers are supposed to carry flashlights, but many aren’t.

The Captain breaks a fresh flare and burns a hole in his pants. “Damn.”

People approach him from the Manhattan side and ask, “How do I get to Park Slope? To Queens Boulevard? To Flatbush?” He directs people to avenues and buses. From the Brooklyn side, people give him stories why they need to get across to Manhattan. He has to discern which are true. Pedestrians can get across. Cars can’t. One man sticks his head out his window.

“Let me across! Now!” He is pushy, and the Captain’s eye grows steely.

“You medical?”

“Podiatrist.” The man flashes his credentials.

The Captain holds up a foot. “Ouch.”

“My 87 year old mother needs medical attention!”

“What’s wrong with her?”

“Bilateral hip fractures. Two weeks ago.”

He turns the man back. “Tell her to call 911. Only emergency personnel.” He sizes up every situation and makes a decision. Sometimes he’s wrong. Sometimes he yells. Sometimes he lets people across. Sometimes he gets snowed. It’s chaos, and he is trying to lessen it. If he does let you past, you’re a fish swimming upstream, so the rules are 5 mph, hi-beams and hazards on. An old couple wants to get to their apartment on the Lower East Side. He lets them. It’s better to have them home than here. But to an irate man with an attitude he says take a hike. “You’re not getting across.” The Captain majored in psychology. He is using every skill he has to look inside of people. The city demands it.

As it draws close to midnight the crowds start thinning. There are fewer headlights, and the last of the flares are dying down. The Captain is bone-tired. His men lean against any vertical surface they can find.

They hear something and look up. An ice-cream truck rolls by, the jingle uncanny in the pitch darkness.

The Captain runs to it. “Stop!” He pulls out his wallet. “Gimme everything you got.”

You never saw so many cops so happy.

The Captain comes into the dimming circle of flickering orange with a hole in his pants and a grin on his face, arms full of ice cream for everyone.

“Pardon me, but would’ja help me up?” she said, holding out a gloved hand. The stains on the polyester were yellow, the rest of the glove so white it was vein-blue, the color of cheap wedding dresses. I rose from the bench I’d been sitting on for the last hour in the chill November air wondering if I should marry Carlos, the Ecuadoran plumber I’d been dating. I took hold of her hand. She was tiny, but she hopped onto the bench so blithely that we both came to sit simultaneously on the worn wooden slats. I folded the paper I hadn’t really been reading and placed it prudishly on my lap. She sat close to me, then fidgeted.

“It’s still damp,” I said, meaning the bench. It had rained that morning.

She shifted a fraction and slid a wrinkled paper bag under her. Squirmed, and grinned. “I’m sitting on my medicine bottle.”

“That can be uncomfortable,” I agreed.

She was quiet, staring at the Manhattan skyline as though it had suddenly snuck up and surprised her. Then her face fell. “I’m singing today.” She took off her gloves, finger by finger, and folded them in her lap. “In the choir. If you can call it a choir.” She gestured over her shoulder in the direction of St. Francis College and gave me a knowing look. “Senior citizens. I used to be a soprano.” She shook her head. “Not any more.” She kept folding her gloves. I noted her tiny feet, beige woolen pillbox hat, and brassy clip-on earrings, one of which was sliding off. “You get older, your voice changes. It’s more an alto now. But I won’t learn the alto parts. No sir. The soprano’s the melody.” She unclasped her handbag, fussed among wadded tissues, and brought out a dark-looking sandwich. Pulled apart the ziploc baggie between shaky thumbs, folded the plastic back like a banana peel, and took a bite. Then she brought out a small bottle of apple juice and unscrewed the cap. It made a popping sound. “Pepperidge Farm cinnamon-raisin,” she explained.

I knew that bread. “That’s good with melted—”

“I lightly toast it, and then put cottage cheese.” She took another bite. Her orange lipstick had been applied outside the lines and her cheeks were chalky with beige pancake makeup intended to cover age spots the size of nickels. I touched my cheek, then moved my hand to my neck. Pinched the skin. Pulled it.

She looked across the promenade at a group of St. Francis College students moving briskly along the geometric woodwork of the boardwalk. A few professors walked slower, more stooped, like lost souls wandering among a mob of curiously speeded-up movie extras. She coughed lightly, then a little louder. Then she hacked, sending bits of cottage cheese flying. Her light-blue eyes were mucus-y, the pale lashes stuck together in spears. “Damn bronchitis,” she said, and took a sip of apple juice. “I was born in a cold-water tenement, no heat. You put quarters in to get the gas. Took baths at the bathhouse.” She gazed across the water as though she could see the Lower East Side from here. “Two brothers. Older one an investment banker. Younger one sailed boats.” She smiled at the memory, and peeled back more of the Ziploc baggie. “Both dead,” she said, and with a shaky fingertip flicked away from the bag a small black insect that had landed there.

I nodded, then let the nod peter out. Sat upright, then collapsed a little. “Men are unhealthy.”

She chewed. “Heart attack the one.” She swallowed. “Stroke the other.” She knocked on her chest. “Me, I’m fit as a bone.” Bits of cottage cheese rolled daintily down the front of her yellow wool coat. She brushed them away. “Born at home. That’s how it was. You saw birth. My mother was a farm-girl. From Russia. My father was a tailor, the best, could make any garment. Anything you could wear, he could make.” She chewed. “Ended up a labor organizer.” She looked at me, steady as a horizon. “I’m Shirley.” She didn’t hold out her hand. We had already shook. “My Jewish name is Sarah, but all my friends in high school called me Shirley.” She gave me a full-blooming What-are-you-gonna-do look. “That’s the way it was,” she said. “Ach, what’s in a name? A name by any other would still smell as sweet, right? That’s Shakespeare.”

I smiled, my own Shakespeare about as accurate.

We studied the way the Manhattan skyline clashed with the Brooklyn Bridge. The old and the new.

“My granddaughter recently gave me a book about lesbianism,” Shirley said. “She thinks I don’t know about it. But I read books, oh let me tell you. Last one was about two boys and a girl, just a…regular girl”—she made her sound like a grade of motor oil—”who wanted to get pregnant. One of them was going to help her. You know. As a friend. Then something happened…” She shrugged. “I got halfway through.” A chunk of cottage cheese tumbled out of her mouth. She picked it off her lap, looked at it, and and ate it. “But I finished that other book. You know. Whatsit. Memoirs of a Geesha-Girl.”

Memoirs of a Geisha, I thought. Memoirs of a Geisha. I panicked. I didn’t want to get old. I wasn’t used to it. Young was all I knew. But I looked in the mirror mornings and could see it happening. I spent small moments like these saying goodbye to myself.

“The Japanese. They sell virginity,” she said, raising the apple juice bottle. “Imagine that.”

I looked at her wrinkled face and wondered if she had a husband.

“So this geesha-girl, she opens a tea-room after the war.” She shook her head. “But it wasn’t the same.”

“No,” I said. “Things change.”

“My granddaughter lives in Seattle,” she said. Then shrugged and gave me a Hey-you-try-talking-that-girl-out-of-something look. “I visit sometimes. Hate to fly, though. Oh, that going-down gets me every time.” She chewed the last of her sandwich, crumpled up the baggie, and placed it on the bench between us, where it slowly unfolded like a flower. “Married a half-Japanese. Once, when I visited, he made that Japanese food, that…” she searched for the word. “Rice. Rolled up in leaves.”

“Seaweed.”

“Huh?”

“Seaweed,” I said. “Sea. Weed.”

“Seaweed,” she said, stood up, and farted, easy as pie. “Can you imagine?” She looked at me so intensely that I actually spent a moment imagining seaweed. Then she sat down. “I like plain food. But they were lapping it up.” She smiled, allowing them their strangeness. She reached underneath her for the small paper sack she had been sitting on. Her fingers described a lump inside. She nodded, satisfied, and put it back beneath her. “When they saw I wasn’t eating, they made me a special spread. Bagels, lox…” She thought for a moment. “Cream cheese…”

“Weather’s bad there,” I said, then quickly looked at her. “Isn’t it?”

She stared at me evenly. “It rained every day.”

The wind whistled along the iron railing and the autumn sun twinkled off the office buildings. That morning, I had made a birthday resolution. To have more fun in life. I wanted to walk down the streets and straight into red DON’T WALK signs because I am too busy laughing to notice. I used to do that a lot. This was my one true resolution. To be more happy.

Shirley shifted and slid the paper sack out from underneath her. Opened it and grinned. “Look where my pill is.”

I peered inside. Jumbled at the bottom of the sack was a medicine bottle, a safety cap, and one blue oval pill. “Want me to get it?” I said.

“Yeah, wouldja?”

I reached inside. She held the orange bottle firmly in her gnarled hand while I dropped the single pill in. It flipped over like a Mexican jumping-bean. She snapped the safety cap quickly on, like she had just caught a junebug. “Gotcha.”

“When did it happen?” I said.

She looked up. “Huh?”

“Your brothers.”

She blinked at me. “About the same time the freckles across my nose turned to age spots.” She tucked the medicine bottle into her handbag, then spotted the book sticking out of my bag.

“What’s that?”

“Oh this…” I pulled it out and displayed the cover. “It’s called Housekeeping.”

Housekeeping?” She sounded appalled. “I think cleaning, I think mopping…”

“It’s…” I flipped the pages and tried to think how I might explain. It was about a little girl who always felt a bit lost. “It takes place near Seattle,” I said. “Cold. Floods. Frost on the grass, even in summer.” I turned the book over and stared at the back.

“It rained every day I was there,” Shirley said, eyes flat, fishlike. Then she gestured at Manhattan in general. “So what about men?”

“What about them?”

“You’re young.” She looked at me.

“I’m thirty,” I said.

“Just a baby,” she said. “People are marrying older these days.” I checked my hands. Still freckles. “You’ve got time. You’re still pretty, a girl like you.”

That made me uncomfortable. I had never had the kind of face anyone would call “pretty.”

“The other day I was walking around. From the expressway clear to the water. There’s a pet store I go to.” I imagined Shirley pressing her nose against the glass. “The puppy had been sold, but a young girl, about your age, started talking to me. About the puppy, I don’t know what kind…” She waved her hand. “A mutt with floppy ears.” I caught my reflection in the crystal of my wristwatch and realized I’d be looking into those same eyes when I was eighty, when I’d get a call saying someone I knew had died. “The cage was empty, just full of newspaper. So we started talking. Then walking.” Shirley paused. “She comes over to my house once a week now. We make dinner, play Scrabble. She takes me to the doctor…” She raised an eyebrow and gave me a Just-betwen-you-and-me look. “I think she’s got a little nervous problem.” She leaned back. “That’s okay.” In Shirley’s universe, nervous problems were allowed.

I stared at her dyed hair and false teeth and wondered if I’d be like her someday, Master of the Universe, wandering around picking up people. Everyone I had once known dead. Tonight Carlos would make me a special birthday dinner. I thought about how easily he made me laugh, and how that would stop someday.

Shirley stood. Her face came to only five inches higher than mine. I studied this tiny crest-jewel of non-discrimination. “Get up,” she said. “I have to go.” She had already put on her white gloves. When I stood, I found I could see the entire crown of her hat. I took her hand and together we started along the promenade, then along another path that angled out like a ray towards Cadman Plaza Park.

“I was married once,” she said, taking my arm more firmly.

“Forty-five years.” I pressed her tiny gloved hand between my elbow and ribs, worried she might slip away like a square of paper on a windy day. “The world’s full of eligible men,” she said. “They all don’t have to be a…” she gestured back at the promenade, “…college professor. What’s wrong with a plumber? A carpenter? It’s nice that counts.”

I glanced at the Brooklyn Bridge, at the office buildings towering over it that, if you looked really hard, didn’t really clash at all. And I felt a sudden aeration in my heart, like chocolate mousse. It was nice that counted. In my universe, I would allow plumbers.

I looked to Shirley for confirmation, but she just shrugged. “I’m singing today. I need a donut.”

I guided her across Cadman Plaza to a small coffeeshop on the other side. We entered into well-lit warmth and the chatter of multiple conversations. I raised my hands in greeting to everyone I didn’t know. It was the first real birthday party I’d had in years.

Risa got in, slammed the door, and stared at me. “What are you, the princess and the pea?” 

Ever since I found out I was pregnant, everything seemed to make me uncomfortable. Especially Risa.

Joseph rattled the canister. He lifted the lid, peeked inside to check how much was in there, then set it back down. Cleared his throat and adjusted his mirror. It squeaked. “Where to, ladies?”

“Anywhere,” Risa said. “Use your good judgment.”

He shifted into gear. “Ah. Voyagers.” And pulled away from the curb.

“Snack bar’s in the back,” he said. I looked around. “I see no snack bar.” Saliva rushed in my mouth. I desperately needed a saltine. Or at least a chiclet. I twisted all the way around. Glued to the back dash were three wicker baskets. A swan-necked reading lamp was duct-taped to the ceiling. I clicked it on. One basket held a heart-shaped box of chocolates, the empty spaces replaced with balled-up wrappers. The next, a bottle of water. And the third, a can of mushroom soup. “Where’s the hot-plate?” I said. “Where’s the can-opener?” I looked into the rear-view mirror but could see only Joe’s forehead, deeply furrowed, five wavy lines like a stave of music with warts for notes.

Dangling from the mirror was a heart-shaped leaflet that matched the one on the canister, The Lonelyhearts Patrol Group emblazoned across it in red.

“Where’s Mr. Right?” he asked me back.

“Hoo-boy,” Risa said. Joe made a sharp turn. I closed my eyes and saw the box of saltines on Risa’s kitchen table slide to the left. We’d spent all morning discussing what I should “do” about “my condition.”

“I just don’t know…” I mumbled, again.

“Well you better give it some thought,” Risa whispered. “Or you’ll end up on welfare.”

I said I needed something to remember him by. I said I needed time. She looked at her watch. “You have one hour.” Then she leaned forward and whispered to Joe. I felt nauseous. A chiclet would help. I clutched the heart-shaped box of chocolates. Lifted the cover and licked one. Bad move. “Feel sick,” I said, and hung my head out the window. Watched asphalt go by. When I looked up, the clouds were splitting and the setting sun was shooting bolts of fire at the buildings.

“Tis the season for dumping people,” Joe said, and pointed. “Mr. Wrong, Mr. Wrong, Mr. Wrong.”

I squinted. They looked alright to me.

“Winter sets in,” he sighed. “That’s when people give up.” He shook his head. “It’s all in the toothpaste cap. All in that stinkin’ little cap. Men don’t do what women ask. And it works both ways. Women too. They don’t know how to behave either. It’s amazing we even exist. It’s not give-and-take anymore. It’s take-and-take. Until there’s nothing left.”

“Well,” I said, grimly. “That’s something I don’t have to worry about.”

Joe caught my eye in the rearview mirror. “A cynic.” He checked his blind spot for traffic, then cut across two whole lanes. “Once the sparkle is over, people think it’s all downhill.” He put on his blinker just as he finished rounding the corner. “If you meet a guy at a bowling alley, why shouldn’t you still go bowling? Why should things end there, on lane 6 and in funny shoes?”

When the cab straightened I was in Risa’s lap. “I don’t get the bowling metaphor.”   

She shrugged. “Neither do I. Have a chocolate.”

“Men. Women. Until they get their act together there’s going to be nothing but trouble. I don’t know the psyche of the woman, but the man’s is pretty simple. He thinks about women thirty-seven times a day. He can’t help it. Take the caveman. He died young. And why?”

Risa rubbed her temples. “Wait. I know this.”

“Raw meat. It was diseased. He just didn’t know any better.”

I looked at the chocolate. “Raw meat killed the caveman?”

Joe nodded. “That’s why women started cooking. Fire. Then came the casserole. It was all her idea. To try and save the people. But it failed.” I bit the chocolate, then spat it back into the wrapper.

“Casseroles killed the caveman?”

“The caveman killed the caveman. Well, cavewoman. Dragging her around by her hair, her furs falling off. Very erotic. He tried to get as many cavewomen as he could pregnant.”

“Cavepeople,” I said, and cracked the seal on the bottle of water.

“But if they all lived in the same cave how could he get all those women pregnant?”

“He moved to a different cave. There were lots of them. Like condominiums.” Joe fell silent. We drove past a manhole with steam coming out. Joe shook his head. “But it didn’t work.” I leaned back. The rain started up again and Joe flicked on the windshield wipers like crab’s claws. “The thing you should never do,” he said, “is greet your husband in a hairnet and one of his old shirts. There’s nothing worse than that. Take my wife.” I thought about Mrs. Fayerwether in a hairnet and one of Joe’s old shirts. “It takes two,” he said. “For the cruise.”

Outside, a man stumbled by clutching a broomstick, his overcoat in tatters.

“Muh-fuh…Muh-fuh…” he mumbled. Passing the bright fluorescent lights of an electronics store, he was suddenly a dark cut-out, a portal to another universe. One I could imagine stepping into if things continued like this. We lurched to a stop. Gridlock. I covered my mouth.

“My friend has to vomit.”

“Plastic bags in the back,” said Joe, and Risa produced a box of Ziplocs from the pocket of the back seat and fumbled one open. I heaved. She zipped it shut, leaned out the window, and tossed it into a wire garbage basket. Two pigeons lifted their chins and watched it fly over their heads.

Risa pointed to the chocolate in my lap. “Get rid of that.” I flicked the bitten square overboard. One pigeon pecked at it, stump-legged, his feathers greasy like anthracite. He shook his head and flung the square onto the other pigeon busy puffing herself up in shades of lavender and gray. She ignored the chocolate hat she now wore and adjusted herself over a crumpled hot-dog wrapper, parchment eyelids at half-mast. It looked like she was nesting.

“Maybe she’s ‘with egg,’” I said.

The bird cooed softly. Risa squinted. “That’s a man-pigeon, and he’s talking in his sleep.”

Joe said, “If it’s not the toothpaste cap, it’s the talking in their sleep.” I wanted a chiclet. Or at least some ginger ale. I took another sip of water. The man with the broomstick stopped, sat down on the pavement, and began talking to the pigeons. He looked familiar.

I nudged Risa. “Remember that mental guy who used to sweep all the storefronts?”

She recognized the memory slowly. “Thin, bald, always talking to himself?” I pointed. A cloud passed over her face. “Mind totally gone.” The cab moved and the pigeon with the chocolate hat opened a sharp eye to watch us go. The broomstick man picked the chocolate off her head and ate it.

“Poor baldy-headed man,” I said.

“And that’s another thing,” Joe said. “Hair.” He scraped something off the windshield with a fingernail. “You know what you should look for? A boring man.” I thought of television and a blue digital clock, me lying awake under the comforter.

“I don’t want a boring man.”

“Or pick a workaholic. Career has a lot to do with it. Take me. I lease this cab twenty-four/seven. I’m in here all day and half the—”

Risa sat up higher. “Stop the cab.”

“What is it?” “Just stop the cab.” She lowered her voice. “Three o’clock.”

Joe and I looked. A middle-aged man was picking through a heap of trash bags. A cap pulled down low revealed only a ravaged nose and grizzled cheeks.

“What, that nut?”

Risa pointed to the heart-shaped cutout hanging from Joe’s mirror. “He’s a Lonely.”

Joe shook his head. “Now, I have to disagree.” He was right. The man looked perfectly normal. Just afflicted. Like the rest of us.

“He lives in that apartment building over there. Throws his own stuff out, hauls it back in. I see it every day.” Risa squinted. “He has no teeth.”

Joe flicked his dentures at us. “Lots of people have no teeth. What are you, twenty? Twenty-two?” He gestured the length of his body. “Preview of coming attractions.”

Risa tugged at my sleeve. “He’s a holy man. He’ll help you figure things out. I guarantee.” But once I had seen her sit for three days at the feet of a drunkard in Washington Square Park she believed was her guru. I folded my arms across my chest.

“There’s no such thing as guarantees, and I’ll have nothing to do with the Lonely guy, thank you.” Risa slitted her eyes and suddenly looked stoned. “You’ll do as I say, little sister. Joe, keep the meter running.”

The grizzled man extended a hand to us. “Solomon,” he said, then he nodded once and shrugged with an easy kind of poker-playing familiarity. “Sol.” Risa bent to inspect his garbage. Some bags were torn, the insides tumbling out. Ladies’ clothes, different fabrics jumbled together. Three tangled wigs. An assortment of medicine bottles. “An estate,” Sol marveled. “Her estate, out here on the sidewalk.”

“Whose?” I said. Risa picked up a paperback, flipped through it. “Some broad.” She dropped the book and rummaged further, extracting a long cloudy IV tube.

“I’ll tell you what kind of woman she was,” Sol said. “Middle-class, well educated. Saw Vanya on 42nd Street sixteen times. Not a career-woman, but no housewife, either.” He picked up a powder-blue bathmat with suction stickies, and let it drop. It clung to one of the plastic bags, then slid down, slowly, over and over itself, like an organism from outer space. Another wave of nausea hit and I sat down on the curb and sipped water. Wondered what time Sol would haul all this stuff back in.

Risa dangled the IV tube from her fingers. “You sure she’s dead?”

Sol studied the garbage. “Oh she’s gone.” He put a ladies’ shirt over his own and buttoned it wrong. Then looked at my face. “The girl is unwell?”

Risa studied me coolly. “She’s just…busy thinking.”

“Ah,” Sol said, and kept buttoning. “Good work, that. Don’t expect any answers, though.”  I really needed a chiclet. Or a saltine.

“Come on, Suki,” Risa urged, lovingly but impatient. “Throw up.” She said it so sweetly I actually tried, just for her. Then pulled my finger out of my throat. Sol was staring.

“Do you always do what people say?”

I was about to say something in self defense when Risa spotted a splintered boat sitting in the crabgrassy no-man’s-land between two tall buildings.

“Hey, what’s up with that boat?”

Sol scanned some distant horizon in his head. “A seafaring people…”

“Who?”

“The Vikings. They came on that boat. Then it went charter.”

Risa stared at him. “Where do you live?”

Sol thought about it. “Everywhere. I’ve metastasized.” He dangled a peach-colored prosthetic brassiere in the air and squinted. “A traveling island, a rhizome, a globule.” Then he set it on his head, foam cups sticking up like cat’s ears, and looked straight at me. “Take my advice. Build a rubber wall. Between you and the world. So you can bounce off people, and they can bounce off you.” He smiled, no teeth. “The ultimate prophylactic.” 

I swallowed. “Our cabdriver said the caveman got all the cavewomen pregnant.” 

“Listen to your cabdriver.”

“Then they ate casserole and died.”

Sol looked shocked.

“And here I am. And I don’t know what to do.”

He adjusted one of the cups on the bra, possibly to receive radio signals. “That’s easy. Pass right through the wall. Like a sperm. Fertilize that egg.”   

“What egg?” I shouted. “Who said anything about an egg?”

Risa took a chocolate out of her pocket and popped it in her mouth. “How high?” she said. “This wall and all.”

“High enough to keep out marauders. Oh they’ll sneak in.” Sol stopped a moment, to ponder sneakiness. Then held up a calloused finger stained amber with nicotine. “Remember: everybody’s out to get you. In some way. But don’t let that make you paranoid.”

Risa thought about it. “A rubber wall would come in handy.”

“Exactly. And the last thing, and this is very important.” Sol pressed his hands together in prayer position. “If a porcelain vase falls off the roof”—he covered his eyes with his sleeve and crouched—“Don’t look at it.” Sol lay unmoving, curled up on the sidewalk. Risa covered him with the blue bathmat.

We left him there and got back into the cab. “Well?” Joe said.

“Step on it.”  Joe made a wrong turn and came to an abrupt halt behind a delivery van. He twisted to look out the back. Two more behind him. “Ah shit,” he said, and turned on the radio. The van’s doors swung open and Risa waved to a figure in blue coveralls. The man looked confused, but waved back. “See?” she told me. “It’s simple. You make things complicated.”

I was adamant. “I’m not getting out of this car.”

“You don’t have to. We’ll let the world come to us.” She looked at me. “It will, you know. Sol’s wrong. There’s no such thing as a hiding place.”

Joe agreed. “I didn’t buy that rubber wall theory. What malarkey is that.”

Risa leaned forward. “He said we should listen to you. I thought you were in cahoots.” 

Joe shook his head. “I work for myself.” He patted his steering wheel. “Twenty-four seven.” Metal clanged, and two men came out of the van lugging a cardboard box the size of a refrigerator. One was skinny, one fat. Their t-shirts said Dubicki’s—The Boiler Repair Guys.

“Hold it up!” the fat one shouted. “Keep your end up!”

Risa watched, chin in her fist. “We need popcorn.”

I handed her the tray of chocolates. She shook her head. “Ick. No.” The men set the box down by the curb. The fat one wiped his face, first with a beefy forearm, then he ripped off his cap and used that, replacing it backwards. The skinny one sliced the sides of the box with a razor blade. The panels fell away revealing a cylindrical boiler with a bright EnergyGuide sticker plastered to the side. They tried lifting it. “Bonehead. Keep your end up.” They dropped the thing. The fat one looked up with infinite patience, then cupped a hand to his mouth. “Yo! Chunky-Boy!”

Risa nudged me. “See? He doesn’t get angry or overwhelmed. He seeks out a solution. You can learn from this.” I watched him operate. “Plus he’s cute. Lose the ponytail, get rid of the cap. Look at that face.” It was nice, but on his arm was a tattoo. Risa squinted to read the blue fuzzy script. “Something something something …together.”

“You can read that far?”

“I have good eyes. I have my father’s eyes.”

I looked at her. “Your father has glasses.”

She tapped her cheekbone. “Built in.”

“This is absurd,” I said. “I’m surviving on saltines and chiclets, which, Joe, you don’t happen have back here in your snack bar. And now we’re trapped by the Dubicki guys.”

Joe spoke quietly. “She has nobody to blame but herself.”

Risa agreed. “You’re a backseat kind of person, Suki. You let the people in front figure out where you’re going. And half the time they’re lost, too.”

Joe looked offended. Risa didn’t care.

“Life is not a cab-ride, Suki.”

“Life is a cab-ride,” said Joe. “She just needs to climb into the front seat a little.”

I blinked at them both. “I can’t believe you guys are using such stupid metaphors.” Chunky-Boy came out of the basement hugging the old boiler. It looked used and spent, and he gently lay the rusted thing by the curb, stooping so that we got a good look at the crack of his ass. He lifted one end of the new boiler. Bonehead grabbed the other. The fat guy, who was starting to look very nice to me, wiped his hands on his jeans and got ready to lift the middle.

“Hey!” I called out, and they all dropped the boiler. Always dodgy, this. I pointed to each Dubicki guy. “You’re Bonehead. You’re Chunky-Boy. Who’re you?”

My man pointed to his chest and looked over his shoulder. Then readjusted his cap and looked proud. “Snapperhead.”

“Well Snapperhead—” I tried to think what to say. Are you and the girl on your tattoo still together? Everyone waited. The old boiler dribbled a thick reddish substance onto the concrete.

“Boiler’s leaking,” I said weakly, and sunk back into my seat.

Snapperhead adjusted his belt on his hips. “That’s a water-heater.”

Risa rose to my defense. “How are we supposed to know that? That’s your job.” She looked beautiful and fierce, so Snapperhead gave it a moment’s consideration.

“True.”

I sighed. There was no justice in the world. Risa sat back and twirled a finger beside her head. “It’s psychological. A little self-confidence goes a long way, Suki.”

Joe nodded. “Listen to your friend.” Now they were ganging up on me. Slowly, the cab started to move past the van, past Bonehead, Snapperhead, and Chunky-Boy dancing the boiler into the building like a fat lady, their hands all over it.

“Let’s leave ’em wondering,” Risa whispered.

Joe said, “I approve. Always leave ’em wondering. I take my hat off to you.” He lifted his toupee.

Traffic on Broadway bottled up again, and we lurched to a stop before a line of Con Ed men marching out of a hole in the street like ants. “Stop and go. Stop and go. Goddam city’s trying to suck the money out of me.” Joe pulled out his wallet and held it out the window. “Here! I’ll make it easy for ya!” I reached behind me and found the can of soup. Hugged it. Coming down the street was Broomstick Man, extending his arm to passing cars like a zebra-gate, oddly hinged. A human tollbooth.

Joe reached past the partition. “Hand me one of them chocolates, would you?”

Risa grabbed one. “Here—”

Joe handed it to the man. “Here buddy.”

“Hey. Thanks.”  Joe rolled up the window and let out a huge sigh, as if some vital life force had just been punched out of him.

“There’s too many Lonelies. Half a million Lonelies. What a Christmas.”

“Hannukah,” Risa grumbled.

“The city’s dead,” he said, and looked at me. “Have you noticed?” I had. Like when the thermometer drops a few degrees, or woman is first disappointed in a man. Everything’s the same, just that much lower. I studied the photograph on Joe’s license, head and shoulders and toupee. A tiny hostage, held captive.

“Doesn’t make sense to me,” the Joe in the picture said.

“Me neither,” I said, and shook my head and sank deep into the seat until I could hardly see out the window. Closed my eyes and thought of the last time there were hostages. All over the city, an array of flags flying at half-mast. But flying.

Joe sped us to where the streets were quiet. The meter said fifteen dollars. Risa handed him a twenty. “Thanks,” she said. “For everything.” Then she hopped out and disappeared inside the building. Joe twisted around, rested an elbow on the partition, and gestured at my stomach.

“Don’t worry so much. When you make up your mind, you’ll know exactly what to do.” I thought of Sol lying on the sidewalk, his wife’s brassiere on his head. Joe patted the can of soup in my arms. “You keep it. For when you get your appetite back.” He reached above the visor cluttered with rubber bands and pens and handed me a Lonelyhearts Patrol Group leaflet. “Care to make a contribution?” I reached into my pocket and passed him three dollars woven loosely in my fingers, like ribbon. He pushed the money into the canister.

“You decide what goes in the basket next.”

The cab windows were trapezoids of light. I got out and shoved my hands deep into my pockets. “Chiclets,” I said, knowing that in a couple of days this would all be over. “Chiclets, and saltines.”

Joe’s voice crackled like dust in the grooves of a record. “Fine. Now do what you have to do. Take your cab into your own hands, and cruise it.” He shifted gears and was gone.

I stood at the curb with the leaflet and unfolded it. It came apart like a valentine.

Well, that’s it, Noppi, I’m up early again, I can’t sleep. My throat is killing me and I’m coughing. I think it’s the smoke because everyone else has it too.

The subways are quiet. People bump into each other and don’t apologize. A woman slips in through the closing doors and takes the seat beside me. Opens her newspaper, and stops. An advertisement for a community college, the same ad duplicated along the upper edge of the subway cars—the twin towers all dressed up in pinstripes, two spiffy columns rising above a man walking briskly down the street. The woman looks confused.

They’re gone, Noppi. Zapped, like in a sci-fi movie. Collapsed in a single instant as if thoroughly exhausted. I can see you shaking your head.

“Twin elegance,” you once said. “A radical idea.” And you unrolled study-blueprints your first year of architecture school and smoothed out the scrolls like they were some high-tech Torah. For you they were holy, and, “God,” I said, “do I have to listen to this again?”

The newspaper ad is grainy, the black and white dots in pixilate, and my eyes sting like they’ve been flung with sand. I press my fingertips to my lids and the towers vaporize, leaving blank spaces I quickly fill in with a mental crayon. I didn’t love them for their grace, Noppi, just like I didn’t hate them for their ugliness. What got me, what punched a hole in me, was that I now bracketed their existence. I was born before they were. I saw them go up, and saw them come down. And behind them only blue and empty sky.

The woman turns the page. The subway slows and she looks up mid-turn. We’re bypassing the station directly underneath, rolling quietly in reverence, or to not further shake an already shaky sub-structure. White dust coats the tilework. A few years ago it was renovated—mosaics of eyes went up, huge eyes everywhere. They watch silently now.

Outside, Chinatown is quiet, the dust settling on the ground like fresh snow. Ladies walk with tissues to their noses while men squat in clusters of threes. Few stores are open. A man offers me an apple, another a fish. Everyone is shell-shocked and weird with nerves. They flit like butterflies, powder on their wings. The tenements are unrecognizable in a veil of light-brown ash, the façades sepia photographs of themselves. A touch, and they’d fall away like flats on a stage set.

Sunlight glints off a policeman’s star. “She’s back again,” he tells his partner. A paper blows by. I catch it with my foot, then let it go. The air is sickly sweet, more than just burning concrete, and I need to get closer. I stop by the blue barricade and ask the policeman if this street is open. I clear my throat and try again. I’ve lost my voice. The ash has taken it away.

2.

When we were ten years old they were completed. “Finally,” you said, as if you’d been waiting for ages. And you had, tracking their development in the Sunday paper, comparing it to the erector-set view from our Brooklyn window. You pointed to the newsprint diagrams. “That’s a retaining wall. Those are sub-basements.”

I stared over the rooftops. It looked like a mess to me. Now the retaining wall. Now the sub-basements. The foundation took the most time, the towers themselves going up quickly, almost as an afterthought. People in the neighborhood scoffed. “Atrocious,” they said. “Monstrosities. Blocking out the sky, those hideous things.”

You grinned and dragged me up to the roof and lifted your chin. “I’ll be the architect,” you announced. “You be the lowly ironworker.” And you made me move Mom’s flowerpots, dry and barren, and place them wherever you said.

When the observation deck finally opened you pestered Dad until he took us. “Save your tickets,” he said, and we did, tucking the lavender stubs into our pockets. The elevator took forever to reach the top, our ears popping as we watched the floors light up. The elevator man gave us sticks of gum. “Chew,” he said.

Outside, the wind whipped our windbreakers, and you ran right up to the railing to look for Brooklyn while Dad held me firmly in his arms. I spat out my gum and watched it tumble overboard. You turned to me, hair blowing, and said, “You probably just killed someone.” But the next day you dragged me back. You said if we lie at the base and look up we could get dizzy. We lay at the base, looked up, and got dizzy. Watched for falling gum. You said if we went to the top and put our toes right up against the glass, it would feel like we were falling.

It did. It felt like we were falling.

3.

“Gravity,” you said, about the grace of razed buildings, and I knew your affiliation with disaster. Impressed to learn they could sway three feet from center, you did your architecture thesis on a building that could go up as easily as come down. Movable Permanence you called it, and graduated from Columbia with honors. Dad took us to dinner at Windows on the World, and boy did I hate you. This stupid view.

“Your mother would be proud,” he said.

And you hugged your diploma and looked at the glimmering cityscape, the lights twinkling, and whispered, “…Top of the world.”

“How boring,” I said, and glared at the table. I had gone to art school—no money in my future. I wished Mom were here. She’d stand up for me.

“She’s being annoying again,” you said as I got up from the table and pressed my hands against the plate glass and looked at the view. Empire State Building, Brooklyn Bridge, Statue of Liberty. This was our town, and we knew it intimately. The sidewalks, the ugly of it, the absolute gorgeousness. Unlike those bland Midwesterners taking over our neighborhood, we didn’t choose this city, didn’t migrate in. We emerged from inside, two Athenas from a Zeus’s head, able to gauge the city’s mood just by how people jostled each other on the sidewalk.

“You okay?” the bartender said with a flat Midwestern accent, and I thought, Where did all the Brooklyn go? Where’s home? I was pissed when you landed that job at Yang & Fermoile. It bothered me, Noppi, how lately everywhere I looked I saw every new office space filling up with people who chose New York for its restaurants, its stores, its career opportunities, for what they could get out of it, a means to an end. All usury. Like seeing an elegant woman and wanting to fuck her, not love her.

I can hear you say it: “She’s being annoying.” But I can’t help it. I’m defensive.

4.

In a little park in Brooklyn flagpoles clang like halyards in the seasick silence. The flags flutter at half-mast, and I look across the river at the skyline. Familiarity revoked. I lean over the railing. Waves lap the docks and Look, I tell the water, look at that absence. Reflect that.

You always said my head was in the clouds. “Buildings go up,” you said. “That’s what they do. Form over space.” And suddenly I want to ask you a million architecture questions. What you think of this strange transformation, the towers plummeting as if through a trapdoor. If hell is the absence of reality, then they had indeed gone there, not changing the entire scenery, just pulling two very important curtains. I’m afraid to look behind the others, afraid I’ll peel back this sham skyline and find the silent blue of a Magritte painting, wind whistling.

I take out something I’ve been carrying around with me. A tarnished copper oval. That day we visited, Dad had brought us downstairs to the indoor observation deck and was waiting on line for t-shirts while I looked at a spinner-rack of postcards: our brand-new supermodern skyline in garish 70s technicolor. There were people everywhere, and when I turned around I had lost you.

I found you in a corner staring out the plate glass and flashed you the postcard. You pushed me away. “Shh,” you said. “I’m thinking.” You would do this, a quiet retreat to someplace I couldn’t follow. I sat, stared at the postcard. Turned it over.

“Okay,” you said, smiling. “Done.” It was always something small that brought you out of it. This time a one-armed-bandit standing by the water fountain that could squish a penny into a souvenir. You begged Dad for a shiny one. The shiniest, you insisted, while he searched his pockets. You dropped the penny into the machine, cranked the handle, and out popped a copper oval embossed with the twin towers, Top of the World cresting the single spike sending out tiny electric zaps. You stared at it, then quietly slipped the oval into your pocket.

I was furious. We were supposed to share. I stepped away from you and lined up the different horizons out the window. The smokestacks in Queens. The Verrazano Bridge. Kids crowded the plate glass, standing in the dugout around the perimeter, two steps of increased vertigo with a strangely rubberized floor. Some held back. Others ran right up to the void. You stood apart with a very Noppi look on your face, and the whole subway ride back I refused to speak to you. You didn’t care. When we got home you went right up to the roof. I stomped up after you and watched you stare at the single blinking antenna like it was giving you secret signals.

After that, you studied the towers daily, those two pillars hovering over the rooftops and watertowers in the pink glow of dawn or the red blood of sunset, sometimes shrouded in fog, sometimes etched with a fine steel nib in the brilliant sun. Cast in an endless palette. Reflecting clouds. Or a plane.

From that day on you went up there every day on your way home from school. You said the elevator man always had gum. I’d cover for you, making Dad dinner, and you’d rush in at six o’clock breathless, ladle the soup, and whisper to me about the top of the world.

“You’re such a Nopscicle,” I said. “You’re nuts. Right Dad? Isn’t she nuts?”

He slurped a hot spoonful. “Takes after your mother.”

5.

There’s something I really have to tell you, so I go downtown and wander among the people drifting shell-shocked through the lunar landscape. The dust is an inch thick, like what you’d pull out of a clogged vacuum cleaner: heavy powder threaded with long fibers. The adaptation of bone. I rub the grit between my fingers and touch my finger to my tongue. Slow convoys roll down the dry slush of Broadway like a funeral procession. City buses move National Guardsmen. You wouldn’t believe it, Noppi. Broadway is…where those crystalline structures used to be is now a distortion of flashing lights and sulfur, a cavern of fire and brimstone. I inch closer and the pit gets larger, the laws of perspective temporarily suspended. It’s not something you can catch in one glimpse, from a single view.

It’s…remember when Dad took us to Yankee Stadium and we came out the wrong chute into the expensive seats and the field opened up almost under our feet? It’s dizzying, acres large, with smoldering ruins around it and half-toppled buildings around those. The façade of one tower stands like lace, a cheese grater, a filigree Colosseum. The wind whistles through it. When the sun goes down the floodlights filter through it, casting moonbeams.

Men emerge in heavy gear, beaten, cleansed by ash and fire. They wade like intergalactic stormtroopers through granulated glass and steel as their replacements jump off trucks and disappear into the lights. With the streets gone, winding roads form naturally, like dirt tracks on a farm. Ground Zero is a town within a city. People stand watching. Family members, I guess. I stand apart, distance myself. I know they’ll never find you.

I spit the ash from my mouth and move on.

They fell correctly, the newspapers said. They could have toppled, setting off a domino effect. Or they could have spread their skirts and smothered all of Lower Manhattan. Somewhere it said the architect should be praised.

One Halloween you said, “That’s you. And that’s me.”

I compared them. “You have the antenna.”

My first kiss on the rooftop with Arthur Levine, the lights of the towers twinkled like solid blocks of stars, and Arthur had to nudge me to pay attention.

They were twins, Noppi. If one fell, the other had to. Like us.

6.

And here come the candlelight vigils. All across the city people hold hands and weep because they can, because they aren’t numb. The sun comes up and all along the West Side Highway people buy lighters and cheer like they’re at a rock concert. A woman eats an ice-cream cone, a white swirl with black sprinkles, as tourists pose in souvenir T-shirts, a shattered twin towers with the words I Can’t Believe I Got Out! “Did you get the smoke?” they say. “Get the smoke.” And the flags. They’re playing patriot, just like they played crisis, looking for a thrill, for the biggest thing New York can give them. Just more usury.

A mob cheers each changing shift of rescue workers. “Thank you!” they shout, but with attitude, like they’re thanking the guys on behalf of everyone else too lazy to drag their asses out there.

A fireman stops, his face like a mask. Reporters rush him. He takes off his helmet, runs his hands through his hair. “It’s not a parade.”

Before all this aftermath, when the event was still fresh and swirling, when three thousand people had vanished off the face of the earth, I loved you, Noppi. I walked at a brisk clip, got three hours of sleep a night, living on adrenaline and air. Three thousand. A miracle, of sorts. You should feel blessed.

Now, I can’t get out of bed. I stare at the wall, at the tiny pattern the paint made as it came off the roller. I click off the news. Click it on. Dad makes his own soup and sits quietly staring at nothing while I watch you go from a reality to “an event”. The crowds pull off their white dust-masks. “It’s safe,” they say. That’s when I stopped coming. When I couldn’t breathe you in anymore.

7.

I close my eyes and see you at age ten, looking out of the plexiglas toward Brooklyn. You point. You swear you can see our rooftop. “Where?” I say, and you hook your arm around me in a half-nelson and jam your knuckles up my nose. “—There.” I inhale your summertime skin and make strangulation sounds until Dad orders you to liberate me. I close my eyes tighter. Your face is an oval I confuse with my own. We were twins, Noppi. You died exactly the way I would have.

I go back downstairs. Dad’s soup has gotten cold. I reheat it and watch the steam curl around his face. And on the TV the sun comes out, sharp as the day it happened, glinting off the twisted wreckage as the TV pans to a scattering of street vendors selling buttons and ribbons. Tourists stick flags in their hats and eat sandwiches. They come from all over the world to make this pilgrimage to Mecca.

Dad pushes away his soup and goes into the living room. I stare at the TV. You’ve become a spectator sport. Or is it a spectacle? It’s happening all over the country. In Europe, too. Which surprises me. I thought the towers were ours. I never felt that close to the Parthenon, the Eiffel Tower, Big Ben. I asked you once why someone in Spain should care so much about our towers. “What’s wrong with them? Don’t they have their own monuments?” You said that’s how some structures were, they become part of a landscape. You didn’t need to be from Egypt to appreciate the Pyramids. And you didn’t need to be from Moscow to love those onion minarets. “Okay,” I said. But it’s still our New York, Noppi. You should have seen the firemen, with their big hats and handlebar mustaches. They came for you. They were coming.

I crawl into bed. Dad stands in the doorway. Friends come over and touch his shoulder. “Shell-shocked,” they whisper. “It’s only natural.”

They lower their voices. “She took it like a hit to the kneecaps.”

At the window, sunlight hits my eyes as if glinting off a thousand panes of glass.

“Shell-shocked,” they say. But you’d understand, Noppi. How crisis-mode makes more sense than regular life. Veterans know this, men who would rather squat than sit in a chair. The void is real.

Once, Arthur Levine pricked you with a pin and asked me if I could feel it.