I had just finished telling Officer D. what happened to me on that below-freezing snow-threatening gray Sunday last February, less than a week after I moved out to the part of town we were in: Astoria, just over Manhattan’s 59th Street Bridge. I had moved there primarily because it was cheaper than anywhere in Manhattan, the commute into the city proper was shorter than it was from Brooklyn, and I had writer-friends who loved living there. But also because people said there was almost no crime in Astoria.

Around noon that day, as I told Officer D., I went to a part of town where I had never been before—about six avenues away from my place—to look at a 24-hour gym. I asked the girl behind the counter there if it would be safe for me to walk home after dark.

“Oh sure,” she said. “This is such a safe neighborhood.”

After leaving the gym, I turned right onto a nearby block. A sweet-faced man, probably in his early 20′s, with black hair, wearing jeans, walked out of a small coffee shop and looked me up and down. I was wearing leggings and, being a female, I get checked out by men now and then, so I thought nothing of it. He and I seemed to be going in the same direction. I saw an antique furniture store with some cute stuff in the window; outside of it, a guy wearing a black ski mask and orange pants was unpacking some furniture on the sidewalk. I went in, thinking I might find some good stuff to furnish my new place. Baby Face stopped in front of the same store and started helping Orange Pants. They both must work here, I thought.

A few minutes later, I was in the back of the store, the place was enormous, with two or three rooms, when Baby Face appeared and asked if I needed any help. He had a slight accent. I nodded and walked down a narrow aisle.

“Actually, I was wondering how much, this is,” I said, pointing at a bed-side table. He approached me, coming so close that I climbed into an empty bed frame to get out of his way.

After scrutinizing the table, he said, “You have to buy it with the frame.” “Forget it,” I said. I motioned for him to walk out first so I could follow. He gestured for me to go ahead instead. Figuring he was being polite, I went. As I walked the five feet or so down the aisle, I had a very strange sensation in my rear-end. Was he touching me there? That explanation seemed impossible. Why would an employee jeopardize his job like that? So I immediately dismissed it, thinking the long wool scarf I was wearing, or my book-bag, must be hanging low and brushing against my butt.

I asked Baby Face about a love seat I liked next. “Five hundred,” he said.

“Well, thanks” I said, remembering I already had a perfectly fine love seat, and I started to leave. And then I had the strange sensation again. I turned around to find Baby Face hunched over slightly with both hands out, massaging my tail. “I can’t believe you were touching me!” I screamed. “Oh my God! What the hell is wrong with you!”

“Sorry, sorry,” he muttered, and I could smell liquor on his breath.

“Oh my God!” I shouted. “I can’t believe you were touching me!”

I had to get out of there; I was scared. It’s not every day some jerk gropes your behind at twelve noon on a Sunday in the middle of a furniture store, and I wondered what the hell else he might be capable. I walked fast for the door, but suddenly thought I should tell someone what had happened. Suddenly, Orange Pants was in front of me.

“Your employee just touched me back there!” I shouted at him.

“Whaaa?” he breathed.

“Your employee …” Then I realized I was looking for justice, or at least solace, from a face that was still covered with a black ski mask, even though he was inside now. What if he grabbed me? I hurried, shakily, for the door. What might have happened if I had been a high-school girl, or simply a more timid woman? That store was so big; there was no one else in it but me and them …

As soon as I was around the corner, I started asking for the nearest police station. Three people I asked all unintentionally sent me in different, wrong directions. My new neighborhood suddenly seemed much uglier than I had ever thought it. Why hadn’t I ever noticed that barbed wire fence before? Or how much trash there was spilling out from garbage cans?

Freezing and suddenly exhausted, I decided I would try to find the station later, since my dad would be showing up at my apartment in about forty minutes—he was coming to take me to lunch and see how I was settling in. I would try to pull myself together in the meantime. Because the last thing I wanted to do was tell him what had happened.

* * * * *

“Anybody ever lays a finger on you, Maura Kelly, you just let me know and I’ll kill him!” That line has been one of my dad’s favorites as long as I can remember—up there with “When’re you going to do something about that hair?” Whenever he would say that first one, I would roll my eyes—Nothing like that is ever going to happen—and smile. Because I knew that was my dad’s way of showing his love to me: indirectly, with ferocity and machismo.

But I also knew that if he was exaggerating, it wasn’t by much. A construction-working Irish immigrant, my dad is real-deal tough-as-nails. I’ve seen him punch a guy out. I’ve seen him come home bloody from fist-fighting. The point is, I knew if I told my dad about Baby Face, he would really do his best to hunt the guy down and kill him. And I didn’t want to turn my father into a murderer or a crazy vigilante. Nor did I want the news of what had happened to me hurt him more than it had hurt me, as I knew it very well could.

“So, you like it here?” he said, first thing when he showed up at my place on the afternoon of the ass-grab, after he hugged me. I nodded, took a second to fake a big smile. I was still very shaken up.

“Sure. It’s great,” I said. Over an omelet and a turkey club half an hour later, I tried to regale my dad with my usual goofy anecdotes. Like the one about Badal, the Indian guy who runs the health-food store down the block from my new apartment, whom I had met a day or two earlier. After I told Badal I was thinking about dyeing my prematurely gray hair, he thought about that for a second before telling me I looked like a movie star.

“Who?” I asked him, eagerly. I’m vain as hell and flattery will get you everywhere with me.

“Richard Gere,” Badal replied, in all seriousness.

But I wished I didn’t have to fake the conversation—fake my upbeat mood—with my dad. What I really wanted to do was tell him what had happened and have him just hug me. Maybe even let me cry a little on his shoulder. Not stalk the streets. I found myself wishing for my mom, who died twenty years ago. I wanted someone to console me.

It was after Dad left that I finally made it to the police station. I half-expected the cops to raise their eyebrows mockingly, laugh, and say it happened all the time. But instead, Officer D., who was at the front desk when I walked in, said he would be happy to help me file a complaint.

“I don’t mean to sound cynical,” I said, “but what’s the best thing that could come of this?” I asked.

“One of our detectives finds the creep, you I.D. him, and we throw him in jail for a while.”

“That would be great,” I said.

* * * * *

In my apartment that night, I had trouble sleeping; I kept thinking I heard someone at the door, or one of the windows. The next day, I wore frumpy clothes and instead of putting my contacts in, I wore my glasses. Maybe if I hadn’t been wearing those tight gym pants, I kept thinking, maybe then it wouldn’t have happened…. I couldn’t look any guy I passed in the street in the eyes. Maybe if I had insisted the guy walk out in front of me…. I knew I shouldn’t blame myself for what happened, but still, I did.

When the usual suspects wolf-whistled at me on the street over the next few days and weeks, I wanted to scream at them to fuck off, though I’d never paid them much notice before. I will cover my ass with a skirt over my leggings every time I go to the gym—no, I will stop going to the gym and wear nothing but muumuus. I will gain 20 pounds—no, 100. I will never again concede to doing anything that makes me the slightest bit uncomfortable. And I will never go into a furniture store by myself again. These were the resolutions that went through my head as I thought about how I could prevent anything like what had happened to me from happening again. Of course, I knew none of them would have the result I really wanted: to erase the memory of the damn groping business from my head.

* * * * *

Most of my closest friends are male, and I told a few of them what happened. They all had different reactions. The first boy, who reminded me of my dad, said he “knew some people” and all I had to do was say the word, and they would try to find the guy and “mess him up.” Which made me smile, though I declined the offer.

Two others—both guys that I have had flings with—half-jokingly said they could empathize with the perp; my ass was so tempting, they said, it’s no wonder the guy couldn’t control himself. The compliments helped a little, and made me laugh.

A fourth said: “It could have been a lot worse. It’s really not such a big deal, you know.”

“It is to me!” I shouted.

One woman I mentioned it to seemed almost appalled that I was ready to go so far as putting the guy in jail.

“Do you really want to do that to him?” she asked. Hell yes! He’d ruined my sense of security, safety and well-being. Maybe a few weeks in jail would make sure he never ruined anyone else’s.

The days passed. I called the cops to see what was happening. A detective hadn’t been assigned to the case yet. I put the phone down dejectedly.

Then I decided to take matters into my own hands. I called the store where it had happened.

“Can I speak to the owner please?”

“This is her,” said the female voice on the other line. I told my story again.

“Well, the guy you are talking about—no one like that works here,” she said when I was finished. “The kid with the ski mask, yeah, but not the other one.” Then silence.

No “I am so sorry.” No “I am going to do whatever I can to make sure nothing like that happens here ever again. No justice!

“Well, the guy who did this thing to me must have at least have been friends with the ski mask kid,” I said. “So you should tell your employees to be careful about who they associate with. You should tell them to watch out who they bring around the store.”

“How can I tell him what to do if I don’t know who he is!”

“I mean your employee! The guy in the ski mask! He knew the guy who touched me!”

“Listen, how do I know you’re even telling the truth?”

“Call the police station! I’ll give you the complaint number.”

“Why should I go to all that trouble?”

“Because I was sexually assaulted in your store and if I were you, I wouldn’t want something like to happen again.”

Something—I think it was the power and legitimacy of that official phrase, “sexually assaulted,” which I hadn’t used before—made her relent.

“Listen, these guys come here from other countries and don’t know how to act the way they are supposed to in America,” she said.

I have encountered millions, I am sure, of foreign men in my lifetime but not one had ever touched me uninvited before.

“How does someone who does the wrong things learn he is wrong if no one tells him?” I said.

“Why don’t you come down to the store and we can talk this out face to face?” she offered.

“I am never setting foot in your store ever again,” I said, my voice cracking through tears. “And you are lucky I am not the kind of crazy person who would tape fliers all over the neighborhood warning everyone else about what happened to me there.”

I realized I was never going to get the response from her I wanted—an apology, an acknowledgement, some sympathy. I hung up. I realized that I was probably never going to get the response I really wanted from anyone–not my dad, not my friends, and not even from the cops, no matter what happened.

All I could really do was start coming to peace with all this on my own. And that didn’t mean getting fat or ugly, or curtailing my activities. It meant telling myself that I was not to blame just because I walked in front of Baby Face, or because I wore the pair of Lycra gym pants that I have been wearing for years without incident. I hadn’t done anything to deserve what had happened. Stupid, crazy people don’t need reasons to do stupid, crazy things.

A few weeks later, I got a call from a detective. “I had to go down south to apprehend a criminal,” he said. “But I’m on this now, and I am going to go down to the store on Monday and see if I can’t find the guy. I’ll call you after I get back to the station.”

That was months ago, and there hasn’t been any progress. But—though I am prepared to identify the guy if the time comes—I’m not waiting by the phone.

I am getting on with my life, and wearing leggings again.

I was introduced to Smalls by a guy–let’s call him Andersen–with whom I had a very brief bi-city fling in the winter of 1998 and 1999. During my first trip from D.C. (where I was living) to visit him in New York, he took me to Smalls–the perfect place to bring a girl if you wanted her to think you knew all the city’s best, secret, most quintessential places.

When we arrived at Smalls late that baptismal Friday night, a perfectly bald middle-aged man whose wide eyes and crocheted hippie beret knocked a few years off his appearance, was standing outside the entrance at 183 West 10th, flipping through a well-worn poetry collection–Yeats, I think–reading from it occasionally, and talking to a burly, bearded young dude. They were looking out at the street more than at each other, and it seemed like they were waiting for someone. Godot? The Man?

Customers, as it turned out. Andersen and I chatted with the two guys long enough to learn that the older one, Mitch–an eccentric who seemed to plant a riddle, a deeper meaning, in every sentence and never answered questions directly–owned the place. The other one, Jay, a twenty-year-old whose family moved to Manhattan from Israel twelve years earlier, played jazz guitar when he wasn’t helping Mitch collect covers at Smalls’ door.

After Andersen paid up, he and I descended a set of stairs to enter a small smoky room packed with people listening to slew of twenty- and thirty-something musicians–multiple saxophonists and trumpeters, a pianist, a bassist, a drummer and even a man pulling a slide trombone. Crowded on a wooden floor space at the back of the room, they played underneath a large sepia-toned photo of a young black man, outfitted in culottes, argyle socks pulled up to his knees, a jacket and tie, with his arms resting on his folded legs. Like a statue of Jesus in a church, he seemed to be guarding and godding the place. As I later learned, the youth in the picture was Louis Armstrong. And there were other indicators that the place was a shrine to jazz:, like all the other pictures covering the walls–of Sidney Bechet, of Charlie Parker and Miles Davis when they were still kids, of Nina Simone, and on and on; the carved wooden statues of men blowing horns; the burning of you-know-which holy weed by a few devotees in a far corner; the congregation in their seats bobbing and swaying like they were swooning or praying.

Everyone with a free hand seemed to be smoking cigarettes, even the jazz cats–sneaking a drag when someone else was soloing or even, as was the case with one trumpeter, holding a cig as he played so that his instrument seemed to be literally smokin’. Since it was BYOB, people were constantly pulling beers out of quietly crinkling paper bags. There was a bar off to the left as you walked in, but, underscoring the idea that everything there was secondary to the jazz, the only working part of it was a single soda gun teetotaling patrons could help themselves to. Both sides of the impotent bar were packed with listeners on stools.

Andersen and I had come prepared, with two six-packs, purchased from the Korean deli around the corner. Snuggling into seats on a couch that ran the entire length of the right-hand side of the club, we let the night take hold of us.

Hours later, near dawn, out of beer and happily full of jazz, Andersen and I were leaving when we found Mitch in a chair at the bottom of the stairwell, talking to Jay, who sat on a step just above him. We joined their conversation–first about poetry, then about jazz–for a few minutes before heading back to Andersen’s apartment, just down the street. The sun was starting to peek out, and I was convinced I was one of the coolest people in all of New York.

A couple months after my Smalls’ initiation, I moved to New York from D.C., remorselessly. I had been a New York resident for only a few weeks when my fling with Andersen ended, ugly-like. We climbed into my loft-bed late one night and, after acting like a dead fish while I tried to make out with him, Andersen told me that though he thought I was beautiful, smart, funny and wonderful, he just wasn’t interested. He didn’t know what was wrong with him, he said. I didn’t know what the hell was wrong with him either.

“Maybe you’re gay!” I shouted, though I knew that wasn’t true. Then, shrieking, I kicked a hole in the sheet-rock wall near his head, scaring the hell out of both of us. Without another word, he scrambled down my bed-ladder and out the door.

After he left, forcing myself to stop my lonelyhearts hysterics, I shoved off to Smalls for a cheer-up. By now I had been to the club so many times that Mitch–who was downstairs when I arrived that night, checking to make sure the bathrooms were clean and the sound system was working–wasn’t surprised to see me. We chatted for a second before I took a place at the end of the bar facing the stage.

Unable to stop thinking about the Andersen disaster, I was sobbing again before I could help it. I didn’t want anyone to see me, so I ran into a closet near the back of the bar and slumped into a corner to continue my self-pity session undisturbed.

Almost immediately, an arm landed gently on my back.

“Come on,” I heard Mitch say. “You can’t hide in here.”

“And why not?” I demanded without turning around.

“I can’t let you be miserable all by yourself.”

“Leave me alone, Mitch. I’ll be fine. I just want to cry for a minute.”

While he started tugging me gently to my feet, I tried to thwart him by sagging like a rag-doll.

“Come on, stand up,” he said. “I’ll let you cry, but not it in here.”

He wasn’t going to give in and I didn’t want to be a total pain in the ass, so I stood up but refused to look at him, hiding my face in my hands.

“I’ll leave you alone if you take the seat right outside the closet,” he pointed. “Right next to my friend.” Let’s pretend the friend was called Richard. “You can cry all you want out there,” Mitch continued. “Richard’s a good guy. He’ll keep an eye on you.”

Too aggravated to continue crying, I dried up and climbed on the stool like Mitch wanted, without so much as glancing at his friend, staring at the stage as if I could find my composure there. Maybe in between the cymbals of the high-hat. As I was looking for it, I realized how glad I was that Mitch had noticed me and that he cared. It was nice not to have to cry alone.

“Good,” Mitch said after I was mounted in the seat. “Richard, will you look out for Maura?” And then he walked away.

“What made you cry like that?” Richard said.

“It’s silly, really,” I said. And then the damn burst; and the tears flooded down my face again. Richard threw an arm around me and I buried myself in his shoulder and let loose. He stroked my hair and my back and after about ten minutes, I had exhausted myself enough to realize how good this felt.

I pulled my head out of his armpit and took a good look at him. Holy shit! He was drop-dead dreamy! Shoulder-length black hair curled behind his ears, framing a handsome olive-skinned face with huge dark eyes and full rose-petal lips. Thank you, God! Thank you, Mitch!

I started hiccuping and whimpering again a little, overcome by his gorgeousness. He responded by hugging me, and I quickly stopped crying so I could concentrate on hugging back. Realizing there was more than an urge to comfort me in his hug, and that the situation had the potential to fly out of my control–if he tried to make out with me right there at Smalls, I would have been powerless to resist!–I took charge fast.

“Listen,” I piped up, pulling away from him. “I live really close. I want you to sleep over, but all I want you to do is hold me. No sex. No nothing. Just hold me. Then you leave in the morning and we never see each other again.” Where was I getting my schtick from? I felt like I was playing the heroine in some B-grade romantic comedy.

It worked though. “That sounds nice,” he said. “And it’s probably best, considering I want to spend the night with you but I have a girlfriend.” As soon as he said it, I knew I hadn’t meant a thing I had just said. But the girlfriend was away for the summer, as it turned out. So the next morning–despite our agreement–we exchanged numbers and spent the next few months messing around. But I was the other woman, of course, and besides, we didn’t have that much to talk about. So when the summer cooled into fall and his girlfriend returned, Richard and I drifted apart without any hard feelings.

But I stuck with Smalls for a long time after that, and often ended up there in the wee hours, alone, looking for trouble or solace, or both. In March 2001, though, I started cleaning up my act: getting to sleep earlier and cutting back on the booze. Smalls was one of the many victims of my reorganization, and though I missed the people there and the music, I knew foregoing the late nights and drinking was good for me. I assumed Mitch understood; I assumed a lot of people passed in and out of his life; I assumed he knew how important Smalls had been and would always be to me; I assumed he still had a soft spot in his heart for me like I did for him.

But Mitch was less and less friendly when I stopped by now and then to say hello. Maybe he doesn’t feel as comfortable around me as he used to since we don’t talk as often, I thought. But mostly I tried not to think about it and, telling myself I did it because it was faster, I started walking home using a route that didn’t take me by the club.

And then last month, on Tuesday May 27, 2003, about two years since I had last set foot inside Smalls, I got an e-mail from a jazz pianist friend. “SMALLS IS CLOSING! THIS WEEKEND IS ITS LAST!” he wrote.

I went by that Friday around 7:30, when the first set would start, to see what was up. No one was at the door so I went down and grabbed a seat just as the music was starting. My buddy Ari, a Smalls friend I have kept in touch with, was on bass, playing with friends of his I had met before–Mike and Zaid on saxes–and a few other guys. When they finished their first set, Ari came over to chat and confirmed the rumor: Bankruptcy was forcing Smalls to shut its doors after Saturday night.

Mitch appeared, collecting the cover charge from people who were going to stay for the second set. (Jay had long ago stopped working there.)

“She’s my guest tonight, Mitch,” Ari said when he got close to us.

“Hi Mitch,” I said.

“What?” Mitch said. “This girl is your guest? She knows about Smalls and still she never comes.”

Ari just shrugged.

Smalls! I felt myself getting intoxicated again, this time on nothing but the jazz and the history. The first time I looked down at my watch, it was past midnight. Content, and ready for bed after a long week of work, I headed home. Returning the following night, Smalls’ last, I waited in line for an hour while the weather alternated between heavy downpour and a misting rain. But the soaking was worth it, even if the scene wasn’t much different than it had been the night before, because I was glad to be able to say good-bye.

Around 2:30 a.m. that morning, I walked out of the club for the last time. Mitch was on the sidewalk surrounded by a crew of new, young Smalls regulars, all of them unfamiliar to me. I walked over, stopping before the inner circle.

“Good night, Mitch,” I said.

He glanced at me. “I feel like I am watching my funeral,” he said to no one in particular, watching people crowd in and out of the door where he’d stood just about every night for the past decade.

“But you’re not!” I said. After all, he wasn’t dead, and moreover, he was still booking jazz acts at Fat Cat, a billiards club around the corner. But Fat Cat wasn’t his place. And it wasn’t all about jazz. It wasn’t the same. If Mitch had heard me, he didn’t show it.

Farewells are never easy, even when you have the chance to say them.

I turned and walked off into the rainy night.

There was the New Year’s Eve party at my best friend Erin’s house during my junior year of high school. I’d gone out on a few dates with this blond-haired, blue-eyed quarterback named Matt Jezior.

As I waited and waited for him to show up, I drank and drank. When he finally arrived, around 11, I was wasted on the two beverages that, since my missed date with destiny four years before, had become synonymous with New Year’s celebration in my mind: vodka and champagne. And I was marching around the house solider-style, sporting Erin’s dad’s old army jacket.

After spotting Matt, I ran over and hugged him, clocking him on the forehead with the green wicker Christmas basket I was wearing as a helmet. Then I tried to remove it, but the handle that I’d somehow pulled under my chin like a strap made it too tight; why are things always easier to get on than to get off? When I finally freed myself, Matt and I sat on the couch and talked for about five minutes until I passed out.

Matt was shaking me when I woke up. "Listen," he said, "I’m going to go home to ring in the year with my mom."

Matt and I said a polite good-bye. I watched him cross the porch and head to his black Volvo. Before he reached it, I started screaming, "You mama’s boy! Fuckin’ mama’s boy! Yeah, that’s right, go home to your mama. Wuss!"

Despite all this, every time the holiday approached I thought with hope: This year will be better. Different. Special. Finally.

But for the first time, as New Year’s 2000 approached, I had no such belief. I was in the midst of a pretty intense depression. Mourning, I guess, is the more accurate word. As the psychological torture ran its course, I’d been forcing myself not to drink, something I usually like to do when I feel down. So I was feeling pain as clearly and sharply as a patient without anesthetic would feel a wisdom tooth being pulled.

An old college friend of mine was throwing a NYE 2000 party at her father’s penthouse apartment in Soho. I had no excuse not to go. I hadn’t seen any of my college friends in about three months, and one of the lines I’d been using to put people off was: "Well, I’ll definitely see you at A.’s New Year’s party." The idea of making polite party conversation made me feel sick to my stomach, but I was equally horrified by the idea of staying home alone.

At 10:30 I was in my red party shoes and fuchsia party dress and at the door of A.’s dad’s apartment: full of old friends, demi-starlets, rich-crowd kids, real art, four make-shift bars, a full staff of waitpeople passing hors d’oeuvres and pouring drinks, silver holiday decorations and a giant tree in the corner with silver lights.

I had a hard time talking to anyone–I was too busy conducting an interior dialogue. I ordered a Wild Turkey and Diet Coke to try and shut myself up.

By the time my friend J. and I decided to leave the party shortly after midnight to do some serious drinking, I’d had four more Diet Turkeys. We met up with another friend and headed to the Emerald Bar on Spring to start drowning our souls in earnest.

I was still drinking my Turkeys at 5 a.m., across the street from the Emerald at a club called Sway–dark lights, cigarette smoke and women with backless shirts being groped by men wearing designer clothes. By that time I had: lost both my friends and my wallet, accidentally scraped half the leather off my red heels, spilled a drink down the front of my dress, and picked up a sexy Portuguese guy with a black leather jacket and a dark goatee who was happy to buy me drinks. We tried to talk at first, but his English was bad and my Portuguese was non-existent. So we gave up and made-out instead.

At 6 a.m. I peeked behind one of the club’s black curtains and saw the morning light had started to rise. It sobered me up a bit, made me realize I didn’t want a one-morning stand. I told Portugal I was heading home alone.

A cab pulled up to the corner at the same time I walked out the door.

"Where you want go?" said the cab driver.

I told him my address. "But you gotta take me home for free because it’s not that far and I have no cash," I said. "I lost my wallet tonight."

He turned to look at me. Maybe he saw the drunkenness in my eyes, the brown stain on my dress, the ripped white fishnets, the washed-out mascara shadows under my eyes.

"Please," I said.

"Okay," he said in a foreign accent.

I kneeled up on the seat and gave him a hug. He laughed and started accelerating slowly.

"Is your accent Iranian?" I said.

"No."

"Iraqi?"

"Saudi," he said.

"You miss your home?"

"Sometimes, some things. But there is more here. It is better."

"Did you have a nice New Year’s Eve?"

He shrugged.

"I am in my cab. But I make lot of money. It is okay."

"Will this New Year be good for you?"

"Be good?"

"Yes. Will good things happen?"

"Oh yes, very good things. It will be good."

"It will?" I said.

He glanced over at me. "Oh yes," he said, eyes back on the road.

I started crying.

"Why you are crying?" he said.

Then I just said it: "One of my favorite people in the world shot himself in the head last month." I wasn’t sure he understood. "My friend is dead and I loved him," I said.

My cabbie put an arm around me and pulled me to him. I let his sweater absorb my tears.

"It will be good,"Êhe said. "You are beautiful."

"But why didn’t I hold him like you are holding me? Why didn’t I know?" I stared at him, waiting, even though I knew by then that nobody had an answer to that question. Then I realized he had pulled to the side of the road. We had reached my corner.

He turned to me, pulled me tight, kissing me firmly on the lips and then working his tongue through them. Partly because my mouth was so used to being open after Portugal, partly because I thought he might not have had a New Year’s kiss, because I thought he might be sad like me, and partly just because, I opened my mouth and we frenched for a few seconds.

I pulled back hard against the strong arms enfolding me, like I’d stuck my tongue in an electric socket: I suddenly got scared. But he was too strong and held me tight. I almost couldn’t separate my mouth from his but somehow managed to do it.

"No, no," I mumbled against his lips. "Please, no!"

I pushed away from him again and this time he let me go.

"I’m sorry," I said. "I can’t any more."

I patted his hand.

He smiled at me. "It is okay. It will be good."

I nodded. "Okay," I said. Maybe he’s right, I thought. "Thanks for the ride."

"Happy New Year," he said. We both smiled.

I opened the door and got out.

So my doctor said it is true: You can get AIDS just from snorting cocaine. I decided to visit my doctor’s after I was unable to donate my vital juices at the Port Authority Blood Drive in the fall of 2000.

I left without getting the needle after reading a form given to all potential donors that said anyone who’d sniffed coke in the past year shouldn’t give. I figured the Red Cross made that recommendation because people who do blow probably engage in other dangerous behaviors that put them at risk for contracting the HIV virus; I thought it must be almost impossible to get it just from doing coke.

Still, I figured I’d visit my physician and ask about it; it’d been a long time since I’d gotten a physical so I could kill two birds with one stone. She told me there’s evidence the virus can be carried by the “snorting implement” – like a straw or a rolled-up dollar – and since cocaine causes abrasions in the mucous membrane of the nose, it is possible to pass on the disease if both the carrier and the receiver bleed. Sounded pretty legit. Shit.

“Are you interested in getting tested?” the doctor asked.

What the fuck would I do if I had it?

“Definitely,” I said.

“Here’s the consent form,” she said, pulling it out of a file slot above the examining room sink. “I’ll give you a few minutes and some privacy to put your clothes back on and read it over.”

As she closed the door, a dizzying panic crashed over me like a tidal wave: What if I have AIDS?

What if I have AIDS?

What if I have AIDS?

What if I’m gonna die?

What if I’m gonna die?

Gonna die, gonna die, gonna die.

A very quiet little voice in my head said: You’re being ridiculous! Get it together. You’ll be fine. You don’t have it. But it was no match for the wild chorus still screaming: Gonna die! Gonna die! Gonna die!

A knock on the door sent the screamers inside my skull scurrying for cover. “Just a minute,” I said, as I rushed to pull my pants and shirt on. “Okay, come in.”

“Everything okay?” my doctor asked. She was smiling, but also looking at me carefully, examining my face.

“Sure,” I said. “Why?”

“I just heard you moaning,” she said. I hadn’t realized I’d been making any noise.

“Sorry. I was just thinking about what it must be like to be told you have AIDS. It was freaking me out a little.” She nodded. “You sure you want to get tested?” I nodded. It was a Friday afternoon and she told me she’d have the results for me on Monday. Shit.

2.

I’d also been tested at the beginning of the summer before taking off for a three-month writing fellowship in Berlin. Then I got the results back immediately: No time for fret or panic or basic nausea. And I was clean. My days of “risk-taking” behavior had pretty much ended after that. No more drugs, no more heavy drinking and especially no more picking up guys at bars. I’d had too many black-outs, too many mornings waking up in apartments of too many guys I’d met in the early morning hours whose names I couldn’t remember. I was pretty sure I’d never had sex with those guys – blow-jobs were as far as I would go; anything else seemed too intimate; this being the strange logic of a girl who grew up Catholic. Pretty sure I’d never done anything else with those strangers, I couldn’t be positive because there were too many gaps of memory. Not too many lapses since my early summer test.

But a few. Most of them were probably nothing to worry about, but there was one that had me worried, my last night in Berlin.

3.

Kat, a friend since high-school, arrived at my flat in the Friedrichshain neighborhood in east Berlin in the early afternoon of my penultimate day there. A little more than 24 hours later, she and I would embark on a two-week tour of a few European cities. Before closing time, we saw as many sights as we could in the city once divided by Communism – the Wall, Victory Column in Tiergarten, the Reichstaag and my favorite art museum in the old train station.

That evening, we were both exhausted but eager to make the most of the nighttime. In an effort to be more healthy and wise, I’d abstained completely from drinking all summer. So by then I was sick to death of my new goody-two-shoes teetotaling ways. A little alcohol wasn’t going to hurt me. And Kat likes to have fun. So, after showering, we decided to skip dinner out and start boozing right away. We left my apartment building and spun around the corner to a place called Astro-Bar, which seemed to be the destination for all the 0well-dressed Berlin hipsters looking for a little trouble. DJs were spinning American funk – “Spooky” by Dusty Springfield was on when we walked in. Oh, yeah.

The décor was mod; circular red leather couches and round red leather seats with white stands. The place was lined with mirrors, dense with smoke, packed with people. Kat and I carved out some space for ourselves in a corner couch and ordered a couple of beers – served in huge cylindrical glasses, so tasty they went down fast. We ordered another round and started meeting people. Just short conversations at first: My German is barely functional, especially after alcohol, and the Berliners who chatted with us weren’t too good with English or else they just weren’t interested. But then a guy named Roberto and his friend Hannah came over and sat down in recently vacated space next to Kat.

Despite his name, Roberto was a born and bred Berliner; his parents decided to call him that after a trip to Italy. He was wearing all black: a button-up short-sleeve shirt, pants and shoes with a multiple-inch platform sole. The rest of him was yellow, in different shades: the greenish bleach job on his hair; brownish tobacco-stained teeth; and the fluorescent lenses in the sunglasses he was wearing. Hannah was blond, fair and pink in the cheeks, a healthy-looking girl in jeans and a powder-blue sweater. They explained to us that they weren’t dating but went out together to help each other meet people.

Kat and Roberto were sitting next to each other and hitting it off so Hannah and I, sitting on either end of our gang of four, tried polite conversation for a while. She was telling me about her ex and pointing about some guy at the bar she had a crush on – blah blah, blah.

I thought: This is not what I want for my last night in a foreign city. I didn’t leave America for this, the kind of talk I could find at a bar named something like “McSullivan’s” on Bleecker Street in Manhattan if I was looking for it. But I wasn’t. So the next time she caught her breath, I pulled back, ending our dialogue, and leaned against the red banquette again. It was best for both of us.

We all ordered more beers. Another drink was all I needed to entertain myself for a while. I was happy being a voyeur with a buzz. I watched Hannah, after a brief consultation with Roberto, approach her man at the bar. He turned away after they spoke for a moment or two, but some other guy, spotting his opportunity, rushed in to introduce himself and save Hannah. After a few minutes, Man #2 bought her a drink and threw an arm around her shoulder. Success.

I turned my gaze to a very drunk girl on my right who looked and dressed like the 70′s painter Bridget Reilly. She attempted to put her drink down on the circular white table in front of her while leaning back to kiss her boyfriend. She missed her target by a mile, letting go of the glass too early and dropping it on the floor instead, with slapstick timing so perfect she might have been trained by the Three Stooges. She and her lover locked tongues sloppily. They were so excited to slurp every inch of each others’ mouths that neither of them noticed her first faux pas, or her second: She kicked her foot out into the table – either in a show of arousal or a drunken spasm –knocking all the drinks on it to the floor.

A flurry of protest exploded like an atomic mushroom as the patrons around them demanded they buy new drinks. Young Bridget, who, like her lover, looked like she might still be in her teens, stood up, outraged. She threw her shoulders back and stuck out her pretty face, twisted with drunken righteousness. In a dress patterned with black and white stripes that emanated from a point near her belly-button, she began shaking her head in denial and holding her hands up in protest. The crowd around her angrily jabbed fingers at her, the table, the wet floor littered with glass, the boyfriend – who was looking only at the cigarette he was trying to light. He was unperturbed, probably because he had been holding on to his own drink during the make-out session. After lighting his smoke, he removed it from his mouth to sip from his cocktail. Bridget sat down next to him, scowling.

The four or five people whose drinks she tossed looked at each other, shrugged, and all headed over to the bar in a pack to buy their own drinks. Shocking. It was the kind of thing that would never happen in America: No group of people who had been wronged would let justice go undone like that. They would fight for their rights. I turned to ask Kat if we should get more beers and noticed she and Roberto were pressed together more tightly than two New York subway riders on the east side during rush hour. Their lips were stuck together so desperately it seemed they were sucking oxygen from each other in a last-ditch effort to stay alive. I snickered at the deliciousness of the spectacle – ah, it was nice to be anonymous in a foreign city – and tottered off to the bar for another drink.

Two young tall guys had taken advantage of some space that cleared around Bridget and her boyfriend after the drink debacle. One was especially skinny, with long thin hair the color of a dark ale that fell flat to his waist, pale skin, rosy cheeks and features so delicate they were almost feminine. He was wearing a white linen shirt, unbuttoned to just beneath his sternum exposing his chest, so flat and underdeveloped it seemed pubescent. His friend had short dark hair that had probably been combed earlier in the week and was not quite as bony. His lean muscles were obvious in the olive T-shirt he was wearing over a pair of khakis. Mischievous eyebrows jumped around his face, darting into peaks and valleys like a line graph illustrating a very rocky market whenever he made a joke or found something to laugh at, just about every other minute, it seemed. Long-hair was much more serious; he sat forward, legs spread and bowed, and frequently flung a praying-mantis arm up to make a point by flicking out a wrist before letting it fall back into the space between his legs. Dark-hair reclined against the cherry couch with his right hand flung over the top behind his friend. His left hand was free to gesture, complementing his friend’s moves. Comedy and tragedy. My heart surged with affection for them. They seemed like boys who’d recently been told it was time to be men and weren’t quite sure how they were supposed to play that role.

I understood: I felt like a girl ordered to be a woman, and I wasn’t happy about it. I realized they reminded me of two of my best friends from college. Sitting on a bar stool, I pulled my camera out of my hand-bag and started snapping pictures of them after I’d taken a few good mouthfuls of the beer the bartender had just plunked down in front of me. During the three months I’d spent in Berlin, I’d only taken about half a roll of pictures. I was not a cooperative tourist. Why take pictures if you can buy a postcard instead? But then I never bought postcards either; those weren’t really the memories I wanted to capture. It’s fine to see the sights, but what I am most interested in finding and remembering when I travel are people.

Never before and never after that night have I been possessed to take photographs of strangers. But something about being an outsider in a foreign city, about not being a native speaker, about not being able to communicate, about being goofy with beer for the first time in a long while, and considering the only person I knew in that bar was lost in a drunken approximation of passion – . something about all of these things combined to allow me to forget myself temporarily and start snapping without thinking that anyone, even my subjects, would notice.

I took five or six shots before a big crowd of people near my boys left. A smaller crowd moved in and sat down. Somehow, a space just big enough for me opened up right next to the boys. I slipped into it and kept clicking, not incessantly, just one every few minutes or so. Long-hair turned to me and started to say something in German. Still feeling invisible, I kept taking pictures, wondering whom he was addressing. He’s looking at me, I thought, but I don’t speak German. I put a hand on my chest and raised my eyebrows to ask: You talking to me?

“Ich nicht spreche Deutsche,” I told him. “Sprechen sie English?”

“Of course I can speak English,” he said in a German accent that sounded particularly stern. “It’s only you Americans who speak only your own language.” He had a point: Travelers from other countries, especially European ones, seemed always able to handle at least two tongues.

“I asked, ‘Do we amuse you?’” he said.

I shook my head. No.

“Why do you photograph us then?” he said. His friend, whose eyebrows seemed to be bouncing off an invisible trampoline above his lids, was smiling. But Long-hair was not. “I just like the way you talk to each other,” I said. “I like your gestures” – I motioned with my hands to illustrate – “your movements. You remind me of some friends from home. You seem like you have known each other for a long time. That’s all. I like your friendship.”

He relaxed a little and turned back to his friend. They kept talking, ignoring me. I finished my beer and figured they’d forgotten me again. So I resumed shooting. After two or three clicks, though, Long-hair had had enough. He leaned forward and addressed me. “Please do not continue,” he said.

“Is it bothering you?” I asked.

“Of course it bothers us.”

“You are a photographer?” Dark-hair said.

“No, no,” I said. “Just a writer, actually.”

“You are visiting Berlin?” he asked.

I explained I’d been living there for a few months and told them as well that it was my last night in town. “My friend is here to visit,” I said and pointed to Kat, still sucking face with Roberto. “Tomorrow we leave to go to Venice and Paris after that.”

“Your friend is having fun, no?” Dark-hair asked.

I shrugged. “Yeah, why shouldn’t she?” I said. “Hey, I’m Maura.”

We all shook hands. Long-hair was named Lars McLean. His father was Irish, he said, hence the surname, but his parents divorced when he was young and, as such, he’d grown up in Berlin. Dark-hair was Paul.

Kat came over to me and said she wanted to leave with Roberto. “Do you mind if we go back to your apartment?” she asked. He lived far away, in a western neighborhood or bizkirk called Charlottenberg.”

“You sure you want to leave with him?” I asked. “Is that smart?”

She nodded. Roberto did seem sweet. And I was too drunk to think much more about it. I gave her my key and they left. Me and the young dudes ordered more beers. They told me how they’d known each other since they were kids when they rode bikes around the streets together. Now they worked together in the same law office. They hated their jobs just like I hated mine at home in New York, and told me about their dream to establish an artists’ colony in the south German countryside. I stood up to go to the bathroom. What was wrong with my legs? I could lift my knees but couldn’t seem to move my feet. I remembered I hadn’t had dinner and realized I was drunk, my belly as tight as a drum, full of beer.

I went to the ladies room. After peeing, I made myself throw up a little. Vomiting helps empty your stomach of fluid, but not to make you feel less drunk. I went back to my seat and announced I was feeling sleepy. Sleepy is my favorite euphemism for drunk. “But I don’t want to go to bed yet,” I said. “I kind of want to stay up till dawn and see the sun rise on my last night in Berlin.” I started thinking about all I had to do the next day: finish packing and cleaning my room; send a bunch of boxes home to the states; have lunch with my Berlin roommates and two reporters we’d befriended, one from the AP and one from NPR – all of this and more before Kat and I boarded our train to Venice at 6 p.m.

I bummed a cigarette from Dark-hair. I’d quit smoking but I was drunk and a smoke always helped me focus a little. “Maybe I should see if they serve coffee here,” I said. “I wish I had something to help wake me up.”

“Why do you keep saying this?” Lars said. “About waking up?”

I stared at him stupidly. “Because I am tired,” I said.

“What do you mean?”

“You talk like we can help you,” he said. “But we don’t know what you talk about.” What the hell was he trying to say? It sounded like he was speaking in code. Maybe it was just his awkward English. Then it occurred to me what they might have. I didn’t want to be too aggressive or gauche about it, especially because I wasn’t sure we were thinking the same thing.

“I would take anything to help me wake up,” I said. “Anything.”

“Maybe we have something,” Lars said.

“Something for my nose?” I said. He smiled. I smiled. It was all so dorky and yet I could barely contain my excitement.

“Yes,” he said. “Do you like this?”

“I love it,” I said.

“We will all go to the bathroom next,” he said.

So we stood up and casually followed Lars through the crowded smoky bar until we got to the bathroom corridor. There were three single lavatory rooms, which was good; we could have complete privacy in one without any pressure to finish fast. Our drug den was standard issue for a john in a bar: dimly lit, with a black plastic seat over a white bowl, a cracked porcelain sink with water-drip stains and exposed pipes at the base. White tiling covered the floor and the bottom half of all four walls, and a small white tiled ledge cut the room into top and bottom at chest level. Lars walked toward the toilet.

“Here we will do it,” he said as he pulled a big Ziploc bag of white powder out of his pocket – big enough to have gotten him numerous consecutive life sentences in America if he was ever caught with it – and popped it on the ledge. I gasped with pleasure and clapped my hands together twice before pressing them to my mouth. Cocaine was the drug that really did it for me – not marijuana, not any of the hallucinogens, not uppers or downers, over the counter or otherwise. I love coke and usually I liked to do it until it was all gone, or whoever was giving it to me ran out of generosity. What they say is true: Cocaine makes you feel omnipotent and even sometimes omniscient, like you’re tougher and stronger and cooler and more intense and more deranged than everyone else. You know that adrenaline rush after you’ve pushed yourself a little harder one day during a run that somehow makes you feel exhilarated instead of exhausted? Like you could keep running forever? That’s the feeling of a cocaine high. Or, I imagine, it would be like a good first fuck with a person you’ve been lusting after for a while. You feel sexy and super. You’d think knowing it was the drug that made you feel that way would ameliorate the confidence effect – that recognizing that the reason you feel so strangely in control of your environment has nothing to do with you, nothing to do with, say, your talents or abilities or attractiveness but instead has everything to do with snorting some fine white schwag in a bag. But somehow that knowledge doesn’t take anything away from the experience.

To make the powder finer, Lars chopped the white pile he’d poured onto the ledge with a razor blade he had with him. I stood to his left and Paul, with one square-toed brown leather shoe on the toilet seat, stood on his right. When he was satisfied with its consistency, Lars separated the coke into four lines. He handed me a tightly rolled 10-Deutsche mark and extended his hand toward the piles. I started with the line closest to me and moved the money straw along till it disappeared into my nose. Then I handed the mark to Paul, who took his line so that two were left. Paul gave the money back to me.

“None for you?” I said to Lars.

“I have too much already tonight,” he said.

I snorted another.

“But I can never have too much,” Paul said. The last line disappeared into his nose and he straightened up, grinning. I noticed a thin finger of poppy-colored blood trickling out of his left nostril, cutting his upper lip in half. He brushed it away with his hand, still grinning. I wondered how long he’d been bleeding. We went back out to the bar, finished our beers.

Another thing about coke is it makes your tolerance for alcohol skyrocket. We got another round and took another quick trip to the bathroom after we finished. Lars cut and abstained again.

One more beer each, one more trip to the bathroom. I realized my own nose was bleeding a little, which seemed very strange considering it was the first time I’d snorted anything in a long time. I figured Lars’ stuff must be especially rough. I felt fucked up. My head felt like the thumb of a cartoon character who just hit himself with a hammer.

“We will leave now,” Lars said.

“Do you want to hang out still, or are you ready to quit?” I said.

Lars and Paul spoke briefly in German. “We will hang out,” he said. The three of us left and walked out into the dark Berlin night. After a few blocks, we stopped. Paul turned to me and said “Good luck in America. Good-bye.”

“Wait, what? You’re leaving?” I said. He nodded. I hadn’t been expecting that. We hugged. He shook hands with Lars, exchanged a few German words with him and disappeared into the shadows of the night.

“What are we going to do?” I asked Lars.

“We will go to my flat,” he said. We headed farther east to Schoenfeld, his neighborhood. We crossed a rickety bridge made of cris-crossed steel that ran over the train tracks. It shook so violently and stridently that even sober in the daylight, my brain would hum with vertigo as I walked over it. The coke had worn off and my head whirred in panic, thoughts shuffling and clucking like hens after a fox invades their house; feathers were flying. That night, I was glad Lars was leading the way so I could take my time following him.

Somewhere in all the panic, I found a steely piece of strength that led me to enough calm that I could place a hand on either side of the fence and move forward. Soon after we left the bridge behind, we came to a decrepit square building complex that seemed once to have been made of cement but seemed now to be made of moss and rainbow-colored graffiti. The grass hadn’t been cut for a long time; some windows were broken and others were unevenly boarded with wood.

“You would say this is a squat,” Lars said. I nodded and wondered what I was in for. We followed a narrow path of well-trodden dead grass back to a courtyard in the center of the four buildings that made up the complex. Lars moved to a heavy metal door that seemed to appear in one wall like magic out of the darkness. Then he pulled open a drainage grate on the ground to his right and out of it pulled a huge key – it could have been one to the city, it was so big – that opened the door. We walked down a long, bare cement hallway and came to another door that was shut with a padlock. Lars undid that as well and suddenly we were in a big, beautiful apartment. We walked past a cheerful kitchen, painted avocado green, to the living room: white walls, hard wood floors so shiny you could almost see your face in them, black leather couch and chairs with a dark wood frame, bookshelves packed tight with volumes. The framed prints on his wall were Rodin and pre-Cubism Picasso sketchings.

Lars disappeared into a third room, the bedroom. Music drifted on: early Leonard Cohen. Then he reappeared and sat in one of the two chairs, which were arranged around a wooden table with a top made from blue mirror. He motioned for me to sit opposite him.

From a drawer in the table, he pulled out a black laquered box. “What does that mean?” I asked, pointing to the red Chinese symbol in the center of it. “Death,” he said as he removed the cover, revealing four compartments, each filled with white powder. I must have looked shocked, because then he laughed.

“No, no. I don’t know what it means,” he said.

He turned the lid of the box over; on the reverse side was another mirror. With a tiny silver spoon, he put some powder on it, separated it into two lines and handed me a small straw also from the box . “Wait,” I said. “Are you having some?”

“Yes, of course,” he said. “I must have some. You are a special guest.”

“Thanks. How do you have so much?” I said.

“I sell this,” he said.

More coke, some wine, nudity followed. We didn’t do anything unsafe: I just jerked him off and he ate me out. Then he pulled out a condom. “I don’t want to have sex,” I said.

“What else have we been doing except having sex?” he said. His point, I think, was that we’d been so intimate already that refusing the final act of sex was primarily symbolic and only served to prevent us from more pleasure. I shrugged. I’m a writer; symbolism is important to me.

I crawled out of his huge white bed and grabbed my camera out of my bag. Crouching on my knees and elbows, I took aim at Lars, naked except for his hair, staring at me from all the white pillows and linens. “No!” he shouted and put up a hand. “No pictures now. No.”

I shrugged, put the camera away and started getting dressed. It was almost nine and I had a million things to do before I left Berlin that afternoon. That was the end of that; I hopped a train to Venice with Kat about six hours later, at 4 p.m. I didn’t think about the night again till that terrible weekend while I waited to hear my test results. From the time I left the doctor’s office until I got her call on Monday morning, I couldn’t stop thinking about it, running the details over and over in my head and asking myself, Why the hell did I do it? I hoped I hadn’t cut my life short for one more night of indiscretion.

I hadn’t.

The doctor told me I was virus-free.

Chun Kim, 43, a friendly balding man who’d emigrated from Korea 25 years earlier, was working behind the counter. I asked if he liked the Beatles. “Oh yeah, one of my favorites,” he said. Was he sad about George? “Everybody has to die eventually. At least he died of natural causes. Not like the other one, who was shot.”

I left and walked past the Dakota, the place where John Lennon, the “other one,” was murdered, on the northwest corner of Central Park West and 72nd. A group had gathered around the benches immediately east of the Park’s entranc, and a guitarist was playing “America,” by Paul Simon. (Maybe he’d played all the Beatles songs he knew.) Just past that cluster, I bumped into two New York City Park Enforcement patrol officers, 29-year-old Domingo Sanchez and 36-year-old Robin Teasley. Domingo said that though the park was usually closed at that hour, the Parks Commissioner always keeps it open for things like death-day commemorations.

“It was beautiful earlier this afternoon,” said Robin, a Beatles fan who’d been on the scene since a little after 3 p.m. “So many people dressed up like 70′s people.” Like hippies? “Yeah, right, and doing their little hippie dances,” she said. “People were crying like they knew him personally. I didn’t know George Harrison was touching people’s hearts like that.” A few feet east, a tape with the Beatles version of “Ticket to Ride” started to play, and Robin turned to listen. “That’s the fourth time today I’ve heard that song,” she said.

It was coming from a hand-held juke box, around which about 40 people were gathered, some sitting, others dancing, still others standing and talking. A smell of marijuana drifted by. More males than females, the attendees ranged in age from about 17 or 18 to a few people in their 50′s and 60′s. The majority seemed to be either in their 40′s or in their 20′s.

A skinny kid with long bleached-blonde dreads, khaki pants and tie-died shirt walked past, saying to a new friend, “Yeah, it’s cool to hang out on the Haight. Usually you can make some money.”

A middle-aged black man named Merrill, short, with an afro and a huge silver peace symbol earring, hugged a young blonde woman named Jessica.

“Will you be here on December 8?” he asked he–the anniversary of Lennon’s death.

“I guess so, will you?” she said.

I looked up and saw the clouds blowing quickly past the full moon. I sat down in front of a wreath of red and white carnations, next to a sweaty man wearing a brown leather bomber jacket and a denim baseball hat backwards. “You want beer?” he said to a boy passing by, who was wearing a Doors shirt and looked about 18. The kid took a sip and thanked him. “Peace and love,” the man said eagerly in a thick accent. “Peace and love!”

His name was Gary Kadalova, 41-year-old Russian who now works as a cook at Russian Samovar, a restaurant on 52nd. Another man, very drunk looking and short with a black moustache and yellow ski jacket, stumbled up and stopped in front of Gary, who wordlessly thrust his enormous bottle of beer-in-a-bag (its mouth was bigger than that of a 40-ounce) at the stranger. “I am listening to the Beatles since I am 17 years old and all my life I love it,” Gary told me. We chatted for a while about his favorite songs, St. Petersberg, and the enormous coffee pot at Samovar. (“It go like this: Puck, puck, puck,” Gary said, miming with his hands as if he were pouring a cup from a huge vat with a spigot.) A few minutes had passed when Gary remembered the moustached man, who was still drinking his beer, so he asked for it back. “Sorry about that, man,” the guy said. “George forever!” Gary said cheerfully. He sipped his beer. “Peace and love.”

I moved on farther into the park, joining a circle of people both sitting and standing around the Imagine mosaic there, which was completely covered with candles, flowers and posters. “We never forget George Harrison for his great contribution in our liberation war 1971. Gazi E. Huq, Bangladesh,” one sign said.

A young man in jeans was playing “Happiness is a Warm Gun” on his guitar, and people were singing along. A man moved through the crowd with two large deli bags. “Ice cold beers here, ice cold beers,” he kept saying. “Three dollars.” On the grass behind the circle, two smaller groups were gathered around two other guitar players.

I found myself next to a dark-haired male in a blue blazer, khakis and a tie. “I am Ian Downey and I’m going to be famous some day like Zsa Zsa Gabor,” he told me. “She’s my hero.” which seemed like a very strange thing for a seemingly heterosexual 25-year-old male to say. “And like her, I will be famous primarily for being a celebrity, not for doing anything. But actually that’s not really true, because I play in the back-up band for a singer named Annika Bentley.”

Turns out that Ian is indeed in the band (you can find his name on annikab.com), that he plays the cello, and that he was visiting Manhattan from Rochester, where he lives with his parents, because his cousin was getting married Saturday afternoon. He was at the park with his 17-year-old baby-faced brother, who pulled a pack of cigarettes out of his khaki blazer pocket and casually popping one in his mouth as if he’d been doing it all his life. Ian’s 33-year-old sister was also there, with her husband. “George is the most underrated Beatle,” Ian said. “Even at his memorial service, they sing the Lennon-McCartney songs, not the Harrison songs, like “While My Guitar Gently Weeps‚ and “Something‚” and “I am the Walrus.” It was true. It’s also true that no one was playing, “I Got My Mind Set On You.” As if one cue, the kid in jeans started in with “While My Guitar,” and Ian’s huge smile got even bigger. The two of us started singing.

At about 3:30, a kid in Carhart overalls and a green t-shirt pulled all the different groups together to play and sing Imagine. Only two guitarists who wanted to play were left, but they did a great job for the crowd, about 100 people. The words seemed especially poignant, and everyone cheered when they finished. Merrill then quieted the circle. “That song was dedicated not just to John Lennon and George Harrison, but also to everybody that died at the World Trade Center.” Another cheer went up. “And the Pentagon! And the U.S.S. Cole!” shouted a 20-something kid dressed all in tie-dye with a bead hanging in the center of his forehead. A middle-aged man who looked like Bruno Kirby leaned over and patted him on the back. “That goes without saying,” he said gently. “That goes without saying.”

I approached Sylvester first. A tiny girl, about 4 years old, was sitting at its entrance. Dressed in a rumpled blue and white gingham dress with a white t-shirt underneath, white anklets and well-worn red-sequined shoes, it was immediately obvious that she dressed as Dorothy from Oz, even if it wasn’t Halloween. Sitting with her back against Sylvester, she looked like an especially small ladybug on an especially large rose. Her mother was looking down at her.

“What wrong honey?” her mom said.

“I’m sad,” Dorothy said.

“How come?”

“Because I can’t pick it up,” she said.

“But honey, no one can. It’s too big and heavy.”

“I know Mommy, but I want to. And see what I can do?” She got up and put her little hands in a crack between the floor and giant Sylvester.

“Please, honey, don’t do that, that’s not safe.”

That was all I heard of the interaction, because I decided to get moving through Sylvester, thinking that staying to eavesdrop on Dorothy and her mom would have been rude. I followed its curves to its center “room.” Something about Sylvester made me want to cry. This was, possibly, because I was very over-tired. But maybe it also had something to do with how immense and solid it was. At first, I felt comforted by its heft. Then I got a strange urge to try and hug Sylvester, or lay on it, or throw a leg around it, but its surface was too flat and rounded. I felt like Dorothy. It didn’t make sense, any of the stuff I wanted to do, but that didn’t change the way I felt.

After I walked out of Sylvester, I headed to Bellamy, which is very similar to Sylvester except her curves are different (as any girl’s would be different from any boy’s). Serra built the sculptures for the Gagosian, and Sylvester is closer to the gallery’s window, so that another difference was that Sylvester was much sunnier and happier than gloomy Bellamy. When I got to the middle of Bellamy, I stood for a moment. Three forty-something men were staring at its steel wall in silence. It seemed they’d been there forever, looking at the surface, which looked somewhat rusted and largely uniform, and that seemed both pretentious and stupid at the same time. I mean really, what was there to see?

Then three thirty-something woman entered Bellamy‚s center.”Isn’t it so great?” one said. “I know, it’s just… well, I don’t want to say.”

“It’s so cool,” another said.

“Yeah,” said the third. “I mean, I can’t believe it. It’s like, so big.” They went on gushing and I thought, Jesus Christ, would someone please take these women to the suburbs, or at least to Macy‚s? Suddenly, I thought the three were very cool, and clearly experienced art lovers.

Then Dorothy showed up with her father in tow.

“See Daddy?” she said once they were smack dab in the middle of Bellamy’s middle. Because he was taller than she, and because she’d been leading him, his hand was above her head in such a way that she took a twirl, like a dancer, underneath it; then she twirled back the other way.

“See, it’s a ballroom!” she said.

She and her dad walked over to look closely at Bellamy for a minute, and then they decided to go. Just as they were about to walk out of the center, a group of adults walked in past them.

“Hello Cinderella!” one man said.

“I’m not Cinderella!” Dorothy shouted.

“Who are you then?” the man asked, good-naturedly.

“Dorothy!” she shouted, sounding exasperated.

Though I wasn’t sure I’d ever be able to leave my friend Luke’s apartment, where I spent that Tuesday night, I woke up determined to get to work Wednesday morning. Life needs to go on, I thought. I walked out of Luke’s apartment building. The sidewalks were lonely; instead of the usual morning Manhattan activity, small groups of people occasionally drifted by like tumbleweeds in a desert. The streets were almost entirely still except for a HumVee driving slowly as I walked down the block.

I got to the subway entrance at 8th Avenue and 23rd Street and realized there were police officers on every corner I could see. Then an ambulance whizzed by, frantic sirens blaring; then another and another. I spotted a large group of National Reservists on the opposite sidewalk. I looked up and saw an olive military plane shaped like a dachshund: long with short legs at both ends, moving carefully through the sky. Suspicious of mass transit, I decided to skip the subway and walked to my office in Times Square. I work for a monthly magazine and when I showed up that morning, my boss, the news editor, told me we’d be working on a special feature about the attack. About 75% of my co-workers didn’t make it in that day. None of them had been personally affected by the atrocity, not any more than your average New Yorker or your average American, or your average member of civilization. But I suppose fear and uncertainty and the shock of it held them back. New York was a ghost town inside and out that day.

By the next day, however, people were forcing themselves to recover; everyone was back in the office. Things seemed somewhat normal. Our desks were still our desks and people looked the same and drank coffee the same way and said, “Good morning” like always. Then, a little before noon that Thursday, I heard a graphic designer shout into the phone, “What? A bomb? In this building?” Her voice caused ripples like a stone thrown in a pond; word spread throughout our floor in seconds. Our staff streamed to the elevators. As we rode down, someone next to me said, “We can’t tell ourselves we’re being silly anymore. We’ll never be able to say, ‘That will never happen.’ We will never be able to reassure ourselves of anything ever again.”

By the time we got to the main lobby, a mob of people was rushing out of the building. There were so many at once that there was a log-jam at the door. The news that people in the towers had been told not to evacuate must have been fresh in everyone’s mind. When I got on the street, I noticed there were more people outside than usual: foot traffic along 42nd Street seemed to be triple what it usually is, making the going slow. I paired off with my friend Casey. We made our way to Bryant Square Park. There, she said, “Too many people here. I don’’t feel safe.” Too many people everywhere, I thought; this is New York.

We started to hear other people around us talking on cell phones about evacuations. “Where do you work?” I asked everyone I overheard. None of them worked in our building or in the same buildings as each other. (Later that day, I would learn there had been 90 bomb scares in the Times Square area.) I started talking to the cops on the corner closest to us. “Do you know anything about the bomb scare?” I said.

“You mean at the library?” the taller, younger cop said.

“No, no,” I said. “Oh, that building over there?” he said, pointing.

“No. Wait, can you tell us where we can go to be safe?”

“I’m telling everyone I know to stay out of the city. I’d say get out if you can. Think about it. This city is crawling with people in uniform. None of us knows what is safe and what isn’t.”

Of course no one knows, I thought. The security people at the airport didn’t know what those killers were going to do with box-cutters, and the firefighters didn’t know the buildings would fall and…nobody knows. Casey and I thanked them and walked off, dazed, sleepy, confused, drugged by the surreal situation. We stumbled uptown. She decided to go to her mom’s apartment on 72nd. I went to my friend Jeff’’s place on 57th and Lexington.

Another evacuee from Times Square, our friend Todd, showed up at Jeff’s shortly after I did. The three of us watched television all day; we barely spoke. (“I’m not used to seeing you without a smile,” Jeff told me.) The firefighters and rescue workers hadn’t left “ground zero” since the attack. And yet where the hell were the survivors? (Only five were ever pulled out.)

I started imagining the death and evil they were sifting through, then tried to stop. But what was I supposed to do with my mind? There was no psychological paradigm to fall back on, no established pattern of mourning for the most unexpected and terrifying attack we have ever known. Even on television, everyone – except resolute, wonderful Giuliani – seemed exhausted and debilitated and frightened, from the politicians to the news reporters. No one seemed to know what was happening. Manhattan did not feel safe. At 8:30 that night, I fled.

I got on a ferry to Hoboken, where my sister lives. Feeling like Lot’s wife, I looked back on my city, our city and saw the gray smoke rising up from the bottom and streaming back over the island, which reminded me of an Olympian running with a torch, except it was no symbol of triumph. My eyes on the skyline that had been so irrevocably changed, I did not think I would ever be able to return. I’’ll have to give up my new apartment, my books, clothes, journals and CDs. But it will be worth it to protect myself from death, I thought.

The city looked like war and it felt like war and I was petrified. Who knew when or where they would strike next? If they could destroy the World Trade Center and part of the Pentagon without making any demands and with little more than airline tickets, determination and a willingness to die, it seemed they could do anything. And no one even knew who they were. I tossed and turned Thursday night, thinking about the firefighters who still hadn’t had any sleep and were suffering all the more then because of the pouring rain.

I wished I believed in God so I could find relief in prayer. Faith makes death easier to both accept and inflict, I guess. The next day, again, I couldn’t stop watching the coverage in my sister’s living room. I couldn’t stop thinking about the firefighters, their desperate determination to keep looking. I was so proud of them and so sad for them. I couldn’t stop thinking about the relatives of the missing in their strange Purgatory – both unable to give up hope or to start grieving, but sick with pain. Love for the people suffering started to replace my fear. I was angry at myself for being such a coward. As the day wore on, my panic paralysis wore off.

Suddenly, I couldn’t wait to get back to New York. After a quick dinner with my dad, my sister dropped me off at the PATH train in Hoboken. I took it to Manhattan, got out at 23rd Street and headed straight for Chelsea Piers, where a WTC relief center had been set up. Volunteers were getting turned away during the day, but Todd and Jeff had worked there Thursday night after learning that people were needed for the graveyard shift. Around 11 p.m., I met them in front of a Chelsea Piers entrance opposite 19th Street. I followed the guys as they made their way to a volunteer coordinator they knew, Shannon; she got us all busy immediately.

I spent the next six hours doing a variety of jobs: making up part of a human chain that was moving donated food into a warehouse; separating hygiene supplies into boxes; handing out medical supplies to EMT’s, policemen and other rescue workers who were heading down to the site; helping those who had just been relieved from shifts at “ground zero” to get food; delivering excess perishable food to homeless shelters. It felt good to be doing something to help. The atmosphere was almost reassuringly upbeat. But not quite.

I had a terrible head cold and by 5 a.m. Saturday morning, I started banging into things and tripping over myself with exhaustion. Imagine what the firefighters are feeling, I kept telling myself. I sat on the floor and tried to label garbage bags filled with donated clothes. But I could barely move and couldn’t pick up one of the heavy garbage bags to save a life. I realized I wasn’t going to be of much use the rest of the night. I signed out and headed home. I crossed the West Side Highway – the entire thing seemed to be lined with ambulances in more colors than you would think they came in (reds, oranges, yellows, greens) from towns in New York, New Jersey, Connecticut and even states like Ohio and Michigan.

On the corner of the highway and 19th, I passed two cops, a man and a woman. I stopped to thank them and ask if I could get them anything: a sandwich, coffee, hot chocolate, anything? We’re fine, they said.

“Can I give you each a hug then?” I said.

“Yeah, I’’ll take a hug!” the woman said. “We have a long night out here.” She had an foreign accent. I hugged her hard. I hugged the guy too, then said good-night and thanked them both.

“See, see?’’ the woman said as I was walking away. “I love Americans. Even after all this, everyone is so nice.” Hearing that, my heart filled up. But as I walked away I thought, of course we are.

There’s so much hope in this country because there is so much possibility. So much predictability. Our nation is rational and peaceful. And it is, more than anything else, fate that I happened to be born here in a New York City hospital to parents that lived in New Jersey. Just as much as it was fate that many Arab people are born into countries where their prospects for the future are much bleaker than mine are. Just as much as it was fate that my mother died young of cancer, that one of my closest friends died last year at his own hands. What Tuesday reminds us is that, despite all of the medical and technological advances we’ve made in recent decades, we still don’t have complete control over life and death. So maybe there is a god. Nothing I’ve read in the time since terrorism has bloodied us all has given me as much comfort as a passage from The Teachings of the Compassionate Buddha: “As long as one is completely absorbed in his own grief…there is no way of gaining victory over pain or release from the numbing bitterness of loss. …If, instead, he can identify in feeling with the experience of others who similarly suffer, he will be freed from his own grief by and in a compassionate oneness with all beings.”

I cannot say what the perfect political response to the September 11 attacks should be. I think it is important to support President Bush right now, and I will. But those suicide-mass murders were an outgrowth of suffering. Which makes me think that the only long-lasting peace plan will have to entail easing the pain and discomfort of people in nations everywhere as much as we can.