Our paths intersect just west of the median. My cellphone is glued to my right ear, and I continue chattering because if I pretend not to notice Tim Gunn, perhaps I will actually be invisible to one of the world’s best-known authorities on fashion and possibly Heidi Klum’s BFF. But I can’t resist; I look up. Our eyes meet. I see his glance flicker to my flip flops and my sincerely unmanicured, unwinterized toes. His examination is similar to that of one who involuntary swivels to check out a roadside accident when the traffic slows and you see the flashing lights of the highway police at the scene - but quickly checks himself. For a second -- do I really see it? -- a scintilla of a shadow of a moue crosses his elegant face, and then it’s gone. I almost expect him to tell me that I’m so deliciously low, so horribly dirty; would that he were the Higgins to my Eliza.

I should have known; looking that unkempt, I was bound to cross paths with Tim Gunn. Ever since he moved to the Upper West Side maybe a year ago, he’s classed up the place just by being here, but I seem to never see him when I look good. I actually spoke to him the first time I saw him; it seemed so unlikely that I would ever see him in person again, having never seen him around before, that I thought it would be ok to gush a bit. He was shlepping a massive laundry bag, which proved to me that (1) despite his godlike looks, he’s human and (2) he looks godlike even shlepping a massive laundry bag. As I confessed my admiration, I remember a voice in my head saying, “Let. Him. Do. His. Laundry.” When I finally, reluctantly, tore myself away, Leo, seven at the time, asked me who the man was. I giggled, “I know who he is because he’s on TV but he doesn’t know who I am.”

“So he’s a stranger?”

“Yes. He’s a stranger. I was talking to a stranger. You still can’t.”

It’s not like I haven’t been cautioned since I was at my mother’s knee to look good when I left the house. The first iteration of the rule was rather obvious: you never knew who would see you outside, which, when I came of marriageable age, emphatically included possible suitors who might somehow apparate onto Main Street, Harry-Potter like, just in time to check me out. That morphed into the more sinister, if slightly unlikely rule that if you left the house looking bad, you would of necessity encounter someone important, like the aforementioned phantom suitor or one of my mother’s friends. This latter rule seemed akin to the one that leaving the house without an umbrella would guarantee rain. I never completely understood the causal relationship at work here, but apparently, leaving the house bare-faced caused the planets to subtly realign so that when the shifting slowed to a stop, there was Mrs. Englehoffer, staring at me disapprovingly.

These thoughts were in part prompted by reports of a recently released study which found that a woman who wears makeup is perceived as more likable, competent and provided she doesn’t overdo it, more trustworthy. Researchers at Harvard were among those who designed the study, which was paid for by Proctor and Gamble, makers of among a billion other things, makeup. Their sponsorship of the study leads me to wonder, perhaps uncharitably, whether the study would have seen the light of day had it concluded that makeup makes no difference in the perception of one’s abilities. But the findings shouldn’t have surprised anyone. Certainly, the idea that makeup can make you look better isn’t new (that’s why you buy it), and studies have found that more attractive people get better jobs and earn higher lifetime salaries (see, for example, Beauty Pays: Why Attractive People Are More Successful, by the economist Daniel Hamermesh). This study just connects the dots: if (1) makeup makes one more attractive, and (2) attractive people are considered more employable and, implicitly, more competent, then (3) a bit of artful shading and contouring should cause you to be perceived as more competent. I confess that the fact that you can paint on a face and be thought of as actually better than one who doesn't, is kind of mind-spinning to me. I’ve never been completely comfortable wearing makeup. But maybe that’s just a vestige of the child in me who was distinctly unhappy with her looks and believed that brains could combat plainness (as Jane Austen might have called it) and were therefore, somehow incompatible with beauty.

The P&G study does make me wonder if I’m short-changing myself when I walk out of the house without so much as a smear of lipstick. One day last week, on impulse, I tried on some cheapie drugstore makeup I'd recently bought. Then, of course, since a made-up face demands commensurate accoutrements, I put on my black leather jacket and heels, fluffed my hair and walked out of the house. I felt great, if a bit conspicuous. I heard someone call my name. It was my friend Karen, who looked me over quizzically as she walked toward me. Finally she carefully told me that I looked good. Knowing her, I’m pretty sure she tread lightly because to squeal “You’re wearing makeup! You look great!” is to imply, “You know, when you don’t wear makeup you look sooooo awful.” But as we spoke about the usual stuff, in her eyes was the unasked question: Why? And in my own mind, I’m still not sure if the answer is that I’m selling out or being smart enough to accept reality. Maybe I’m just doing my part to spruce up the neighborhood for Tim.

Sharon Silver is a wife, mother, lapsed lawyer and aspiring writer.

By the 2nd Grade in New York, surrounded by Jews of every degree of enlightenment and gentiles with their kaleidoscope of religious beliefs, I became ever more resistant to what seemed to me to be the senseless sacrifices I was forced to endure to my mothers increasing piety.

We lived on the upper west side of Manhattan where there were few other Orthodox German Jewish refugees. Most of the indigenous Jews were Conservative (they wore Yarmulkes in Synagogue) or Reformed (Yarmulkes were optional). My mothers’ extended family, who began arriving a year or two after us, had all settled further north in the Washington Heights section of Manhattan, which became a major German Jewish Refugee enclave. There, the Jews were classified according to the Rabbis who led the Synagogues that they attended. There were (Rabbi) Breuers’, (Rabbi) Jungs’, and (Rabbi)Sterns’, the three most prominent Congregations all German and all Orthodox. My Mothers relatives belonged to Rabbi Breuers congregation. They were as clannish as Hatfields and McCoys. They too, grew more religious as the times grew more perilous, the headlines more horrific.

They sensed my apostasy and looked at me as a dangerously aberrant infidel even at the tender age of seven. For my part, I couldn’t accept their unquestioning fanaticism, the men’s black hats, the constant prayers, or the traditional sheidels (wigs) worn by the married women. Fortunately we were separated by the geography of Manhattan Island and the restriction against travel on the Sabbath. Thankfully, the two branches of my mothers family only got together on Holy days or for occasions like weddings and Bar Mitzvahs. I hated those events even more than Saturdays.

Removed from this intensely conformist culture I soon began to rebel at what I felt were the onerous Sabbath taboos. Riding in an elevators was proscribed although we lived on the fifth floor. Lights were left on from Friday night until sundown Saturday. The same for the stove. The light in the refrigerator was even removed because it went on when the door was opened. Carrying money was forbidden. You couldn’t even carry keys in your pocket although, arguable, it was permissible to pin them to your clothes. It was a sin to tear a piece of paper even by accident, so the Sabbath toilet paper supply was prepared in advance. The pay telephone that was downstairs in the hall was off limits. The usual reply to my impertinent questions about the paradoxes of these rules was that “these are the rules set down in the Bible and the Talmud and if you break these rules God will curse you.” I didn’t buy these less than factual answers, I couldn’t see the analogy between modern electricity and Biblical camp fires. Nor could I find where work was involved in dialing a telephone or pressing a button. Tearing papyrus was different from tearing toilet paper, and how could riding in a car or subway be forbidden ex post facto?

Most of every Saturday was spent inside a dimly lit apartment converted into a Synagogue, chanting prayers in Hebrew which I did not understand, and listening to interminable sermons in German that I didn’t understand either. To my mind the boredom was another level of torture. Here I was confined in an expatriate German Orthodox Synagogue. I stood and sat in unison with the congregation while inwardly I seethed with anger. My thoughts were with my neighborhood friends and non-refugee contemporaries who were playing stickball and baseball or street hockey on those warm summer Saturdays or ice skating and sledding in Riverside Park in the winter snows.

I wanted badly to be an American, to be like my American friends. Their parents spoke unaccented English and didn’t worship in two foreign languages. And, oh yes, when our histrionic Rabbi grew particularly intense during his sermons he sprayed spittle over me and the congregation.
In stark contrast to the Saturdays, our Sundays were often wonderful. We would go on outings. In the summer the whole family would go to Coney Island. We’d ride in the first car of the IRT with our noses pressed against the front door watching the endless ribbon of track streaming towards us out of the dark tunnel and disappearing under the train. Once there, at the crowded beach, we’d claim a blanket's worth of sand and have a picnic. After the obligatory one hour cramp wait, we’d swim in the murky salt water, jumping up and down in the weak surf.

My brother and I would often explore the cool, damp sand under the boardwalk, crisscrossed by thin lines of sunlight through the shadows, looking for dropped coins and other lost treasures. We’d press up against a fence to watch the rolling Steeplechase ponies carry their riders to the finish line. We watched as white captive silken parachutes slowly carried young couples up cables to the cupola at the top of the huge tower, where, with a snap, they would be released, the canopy filling and the passengers descending, screaming into earshot as they floated back to earth. My father would give us a few coins and we’d go to the penny arcade.  I loved the machine gun device there, fantasizing that I was a fighter pilot shooting at planes on the screen inside. I also liked the mechanical boxing ring, where I controlled one of the two robotic figures, flailing steel arms against my brother's boxer without the peril of a bloody nose and working off some of my accumulated anger.

Another favorite excursion was a subway ride to South Ferry. We’d take the Staten Island Ferry and a bus to Silver Lake Park. Before the bridge was built Staten Island was a completely rural enclave. The bus went past working farms before reaching the small lake that was as pure and clean as a beer commercial. My father would cut a woody stem from the shore of the lake with his penknife. Then he would loosen and remove the intact tube of bark. Part way down the core of wood he’d cut a half moon notch, and above this he flattened about an inch of the core to the end. When he put the bark back on it became a tunable whistle that we would blow on for hours until it finally dried out and split.

In winter, we would go to Central Park and ice skate on the lake underneath the Belvedere Castle. Sometimes we’d explore the still raw Hudson River shore where Robert Moses was building his Riverside Park and West Side Highway.

When the weather was bad we’d go to one of the City’s many Museums all of which were free. For us, the Museum of Natural History was a regular stop on rainy days as well as an after school hangout. Nearby, the Museum of the City of New York featured real antique fire engines, Currier and Ives prints and life-size dioramas of early New York and Nieuw Amsterdam.

However, what excited us more than any other museum was the Museum of Science and Industry, at Rockefeller Center. The industrial displays of this unique museum were like magic. I didn’t understand all that I was seeing, so the actions and effects seemed even more amazing. I would stand transfixed in front of an exhibit that featured ball bearings being tested. The shiny metal balls would pop out of a slot one after another, onto a flat steel plate, ball bearing after ball bearing, bouncing high and true in endless perfect arcs and out through a small exit hole. There were displays of things that belched smoke. There were working models of steam engines and gasoline engines. There were arc lights and wire recorders and radios and all kinds of operational displays that showed how a watch or a toaster worked.

Even though we were young kids, we were well aware that the world was heading down the greased path of crisis. The tension of the gathering omens war preoccupied our parents and teachers and filtered down to my brother and me with a sense of impending doom. We heard the names Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, Franco, and Churchill; we knew who the good guys were and hated the villains. We sensed that the world was sliding headlong into an awfulness that could not be prevented.

One cold dreary Sunday early in December, when I was seven and a half, my father, my brother and I went to the Museum of the American Indian. It was in a building on the West Side near Columbia University, a long walk from our apartment. There is something about the American aborigine that is endlessly fascinating to anyone from Germany and there is no better market for the prototypical American Western Film. Having been born German, my brother and I were infected with this obsession, and we lost ourselves in the artifacts that had been stolen from the proud native tribes of North America and deposited in a huge incongruous Greek Temple. There were peace pipes, moccasins and wampum. Feathered headdresses, rugs and blankets. Tomahawks, papooses, buckskins and bows and arrows. Beautiful things that even someone as young as I was able to appreciate.

Stimulated by the beauty of the artifacts, we walked home along West End Avenue. As we passed the Tennis Courts that used to occupy the block between 95th and 94th a boy about 10 years old came running up to us breathlessly.

“The Japanese have bombed Pearl Harbor,” he shouted at us and then spread his news to some other people across the street. It meant nothing to us. We had never heard of Pearl Harbor. We shrugged and kidded about his excitement. A twin engine plane heading east flew overhead. “Maybe that’s the Japanese bombing New York,” we joked.

We lived on 93rd near an equestrian statue of Joan of Arc that sat on a land island park off Riverside Drive. We were home in a few minutes and my father turned on the radio. There were news bulletins on every station affirming the now-terrifying news. Did this mean that Hitler and the Nazis were on their way to invade New York? Frightened, I sat on my father’s lap as he tried to reassure us that the real danger was still thousands of miles away far across the wide Atlantic. We looked up Pearl Harbor in the Atlas and learned that it was in the middle of the Pacific and that Japan was many thousands of miles from the US. We weren’t reassured because, somehow, they had managed to attack it. We knew planes could cross the Atlantic in hours- hadn’t Lindbergh proved that? Was Hitler, the monster scourge, following us to America? Was there no place to hide, no escape? I remember the sheer, trembling terror.

Over the next weeks, months and years the world assumed a feverish pace. War was declared. We were issued small cream colored plastic ID tags that we wore on a chain around our necks. Rationing was imposed on almost everything. Gasoline was hard to get. Norman Rockwell painted the Four Freedoms. My male cousins began disappearing into the Army. We collected paper, tin foil, even donated our prized cast iron toys to the incessant scrap metal drives. We started collecting posters of Air Force planes. Because we were of German origin my father had to have the short wave section of his Grundig Console radio disconnected.  But every day, that AM radio brought us news of the Allied victories in Africa, the battle for Italy, the D-Day invasion, the shock of FDR's sudden death and at last, the ecstatic joy of victory over the Nazi scourge.

Fred Abrahams has had an interesting life. Fleeing Germany just before the Holocaust, he spent his childhood on the upper west side of Manhattan. He graduated from Stuyvesant High School and the University of Pennsylvania before serving a tour of duty with the US Army in Germany. A career in marketing grew into a stint as a writer/producer of TV Infomercials. A quad bypass started him writing about his experiences, including; travels in post-war Europe; partying with the abstract expressionist painters of the Chelsea school; his 270 minutes of fame as a champion on a TV Quiz show; visits to the original Studio 54; co-founding The Improv comedy club and the interesting people he's met along the way.An avid skier and amateur photographer he now lives in Brattleboro, Vermont.

During the years I worked on West 57th Street, I would sometimes browse in Daffy's, a discount department store. I grew to expect to see (and hear) a certain salesperson who roamed the women's shoe department, intoning, "Doctor Shoe here! Doctor Shoe is in the house! We've
got your sandals, your pumps, your mules, your boots! If you don't see it, come see Doctor Shoe."

At some point I realized I hadn't seen him in a while. In his continuing absence, silence in the shoe aisles replaced his litany. Had he been laid off? transferred to a different... clinic?

One morning, walking to work, I reached the corner of 96th Street and Central Park West and
waited a moment for the light to change. I didn't so much as glance at the man who stood nearby, handing out flyers for a local mini-storage company. But as the light changed and I proceeded, a familiar voice rang out, "Doctor Storage is in the house!"

Lisa Bergtraum is a New Yorker, a would-be writer and artist, working as an information specialist (librarian/researcher, whathaveyou). She also likes to run ( 5-time finisher of the NYC Marathon) and bake.

“Feed me some vocab,” I whispered.

He started, turned to look at me. Blue eyes.

“Vocabulary,” I said.

“There’s no more port wine left,” he whispered back.

I looked at him.

“Port, left,” he said, looking down at his left hand, palm up. “Starboard, right.” His right hand held an invisible plate next to the first.

“I’m really good at physical stuff,” I said. “Work. I mean, farms. And sports.” I gestured over his palms, indicating winds and oceans and the muscle memory it took to move safely through both. “I learn fast.”

I left orientation early to make an apartment interview in Brooklyn. My brother was moving to the city in a week. The apartment had bars on the windows, but the sublettee had cat-eye glasses and a tiny ponytail.

“Jessie,” she said with one downward handshake. She apologized that her roommates weren’t home but assured me they were the greatest, bestest friends from art school in the south. I am from Kentucky. Her voice rang with sensible but persistent joy, and really, my only responsibility was to ensure the place wasn’t a crack den.

“Above and beyond,” I said, reaching for the deposit.

A week later my family arrived to shuttle their second child from landlocked horse farm to concrete island. My mom and I stood outside my Park Slope apartment, the base camp, loading the Subaru with boxes. She was taking pictures because she believes her children will find home here. A memorialized beginning supplies faith in what follows; you insist it is, in fact, a beginning. I was posing on the sidewalk when the guy, the sailor, Mr. Vocabulary, exited the building directly across the street. He mounted a red vintage motorcycle, kicked it into gear, and drove past us, uphill, into the morning.

“Oh my God,” I said.

Right after orientation, I had emailed my new boss to apologize for the tardy arrival. He had replied, saying all fine, but how much sailing experience do you actually have? We struck a deal involving the company’s adult sail camp and blitzkrieg training. I bought a book and a length of practice rope. I read the book and started calling the rope ‘line.’ Class started the Saturday after the Subaru’s departure. My sailor was my instructor.

“You’ll never guess,” I said. “Red motorcycle, 8 AM, Tuesday, Twelfth Street?”

“My girlfriend lives there,” he said toward the boathouse. He followed his voice inside and deep into a tide book

To his triangle back, I said softly, “I live there.”

On the water, somewhere around the cross-town canyon of 42nd Street, he taught me the choreography of the bowline with a rhyme about rabbits. Lessons and landmarks disappeared. We swapped the basic details, then stories. We echoed each other. We both had studied photography; he had taken it much further and was completing an MFA. Both our mothers were forgiving Catholics who had shopped for our school clothes at Goodwill. For a glossy magazine, he had photographed the southern horse show circuit.

“Oh, my brother just moved in with some southern artist types,” I said. “Shitty block, very happy people.”

“Where?” he said.

“Off the G,” I said. “Gates.”

He looked at me like he had during vocabulary lessons.

“Where exactly?”

“Oh, a good walk, Gates-and-something,” I said. The sun filled everything. The wind moved us toward the Statue of Liberty.

“Did he take Jessie’s room?”
“What?” I said. “Jessie Sears?” She had such a tiny ponytail.

He laughed the way you do when a miracle shakes your shoulders. “Chris,” he said. “Your brother, Chris. He lives in my house. Your brother is Chris.” I wanted to hold his grin in my hands. I or that girlfriend, one of us was sunk.

On charters for the forty-two foot Beneteau, there is a captain and a mate. When you work a sail, you captain or you mate that sail. My boss paired my sailor and I together for a few real jobs, trial runs. After that, when Mr. Vocab agreed to captain, he called to see if I wanted to mate. Yes, sure, absolutely. We captained and mated all summer.

Late June is proposal season, so every sunset job is a guy with a diamond and a woman with ready hands. The breathless couples invited us to weddings, included us in their engagements photos, confided the Statue of Liberty was their self-imposed deadline, asked us if everyone did this, left us in the cockpit while they made out on the bow, left us with the last of their champagne so we could toast the night after we docked. They all wanted to believe we were together. An older couple even assured us we would have kind, beautiful children. Blue eyes! I wanted to shout.

Aside from sharing his motorcycle downtown for tacos, we still hadn’t touched each other when we stole the dinghy for a midnight tour of the Jersey coast. And still not when we drove two hours upstate to buy orchard apples in the rain. I had memorialized our beginning, though, and maybe this was the wrong time, but this was definitely the start of something, meant for some time.

When I returned to Kentucky for Christmas, he was driving cross-country. He stopped for a night. Finally, finally. One night would turn to three. As we settled beneath the blankets, I imagined my mother in the morning, with a grin of conspiracy, whisking pancakes, something she did not do for other boyfriends.

Some six hours later, sooner than I imagined, she shouted, “Kate?” Then, immediately panicking, “Kate?”

“Oh boy,” I said into his chest.

“Chris?” she called. “Kate? Chris?” She was near the top of her register.

“Okay, okay,” I said, pulling on yesterday’s clothes.

I arrived to the kitchen as my brother streaked through, literally, with a soup pot full of water. The water sloshed onto his boxers. The back yard billowed black smoke.

Mom rushed after him, extending two saucepans awkwardly in front of her. “The compost was frozen shut. I dumped the fireplace ashes in the trashcan.” She shouldered open the storm door. “Leaves inside. It was leaning against the shed.”

The shed was, indeed, in flames. My bedmate appeared.

“What’s going on up here?” he said.

“Mom lit the shed on fire. Apparently the hose is frozen.” I revved, reached for the decorative tin pail above the fridge. As I filled the pail in the tub upstairs, I heard him opening and closing cabinets below. When I exited the backdoor with my full bucket, I was following him across the yard. Thinking he had nothing to offer, I scooted in front and pitched my water onto the almost-under-control flames. He sprayed something from a red cylinder until the something and the flames died completely. A fire extinguisher.

“Melinda,” he said, handing the extinguisher to my mom. “You’ll want to get that recharged.”

“Where did you get that?” I said. My heart awoke all over again.

“Always under the sink.”

My brother rolled his eyes. My mom beamed exactly like I had imagined. We were half-clothed around a melted trashcan, breaking the grass’s frost in borrowed shoes. I wanted to high-five the clouds.

Back in New York, in our winter lives, things were not the same. Things were horrible. We spent months in an indecisive dance. He was moving in the summer, at the completion of his MFA, and we had a hard time talking when there wasn’t a physical task to talk around and through. We had communicated in lessons and word games and stories of miraculous similarity. In the sloppy cold, walking to an unremarkable movie, how were we to believe where—or whether— we were going? We were at the stage that takes work, and we were overbundled in unflattering coats.

When the cold broke, our friendship—much less any sort of relationship—was a mess, but he asked me to sail with him, the first sail of the season. The charter was two middle-aged French women who didn’t speak a lick of English or boats. The winds were fifty miles an hour. The Beneteau would never tip completely, but the French women wanted to float lazy-river style, so we scrabbled to keep the boat from heeling deep into the Hudson.

“You’re wrapping the wrong way,” he said over the jib’s luffing.

“Yeah, yeah, okay.” I snapped the sheet to wrap clockwise.

The poor women could only understand the tone of our voices, which said something was capsizing. Not you, us, I wanted to tell them.

“It’s really fine,” he said to the two women, who had moved near the life vests. “Just wind,” he waved his hand in the air. “Wind.”

“Remember stealing the dinghy?” I said.

“I steal that dinghy like it’s my job,” he countered.

I persevered. “Do you remember how we met? Do you remember exactly?”

“You took a sailing lesson.” He lunged into trimming the main.

We finished the tack. The French women hugged each other. Instead of hanging behind him on a shroud, like usual, I joined him at the wheel. We bounced over wake. Steadying myself, I reminded him of the typed orientation packets and my frazzled rush down the dock. The sound of the fenders against the wall, my bad haircut, the springtime smell of wet polyurethane. I reminded him there’s no more port wine left. My litany of details was a plea, next time, to risk. At the very least, pay attention. Two people only get one beginning.

Kate grew up in Kentucky and now lives in Brooklyn. Her writing has also appeared in The New York Press and The Accidental Extremist.

After September 11, I never wrote about that last approach toward an intact Lower Manhattan; in fact, I never wrote about the terrifying events of that day itself, or about the infinitely wretched aftermath, except in random journal jottings and desk calendar entries. There was, of course, no shortage of writerly response: first hand testimony, political editorializing, expressions of grief and rage and all of it, all of it. I found myself unwilling, unable, to join the chorus, or the cacophony. I felt stunned, silenced, stopped, and rather than struggle against that, I accepted it as my most authentic response to the devastation around me.

It was more than a month before I dared venture downtown to survey the ghastly, gaping pit I never called Ground Zero: one morning, I got on my bicycle and rode south along the West Side Highway as far as I could until disaster teams detoured me east, where I dismounted, walked as much of the pit’s perimeter as I was permitted, then slowly rode the bike back up to West 66th Street again. I didn’t write, or even speak much, about that little trip at the time. And I didn’t return, not for quite awhile.

Over the past several years, though, my working life has come to include leading city tours for groups as a licensed New York guide. Uptown/Westside woman that I am, I like nothing better than introducing newcomers to the neighborhoods above 59th Street they usually bypass. But I have spent a great deal more time way downtown, serving as a guide to the one site no tourist in this city can miss, the one site that is like no other—not least in terms of the sense of connection nearly every visitor feels with it, which informs my own sense that you can’t show and tell its history in the same way you highlight landmarks like City Hall or the Woolworth Building or Trinity Church. A canned WTC “presentation,” with September 11 as the centerpiece, has always seemed out of the question.

My style, such as it is, was certainly influenced by my tagging along, early on, with a tour group led by an experienced, if lugubrious, guide who insisted on narrating the entire timeline of the attacks, the building collapses, the early optimism, the crushing of hope, the mounting body count, as if willing each of us to relive the trauma moment by melodramatic moment. And indeed, the small crowd, speechless, seemed properly, painfully overwhelmed. He lectured, they listened; the few factual questions raised were promptly dispatched by this “expert,” no time or room for real interaction. But I resisted the idea of using my “expertise” regarding the past and future of the WTC as a defense against its deeply individual meaning, its emotional associations, for me, for others. Nor was I interested in denying my own longtime diffidence about dealing with September 11 in so many words.

I don’t think my tour of the WTC site has ever been the same twice. I’m perpetually reworking it, while learning to be prepared for reactions ranging from awkward comments to streaming tears. It’s not my job to overawe, or to merely inform. Returning again and again, accompanying people who have most likely never stood in the shadow of this lack of towers before, I’ve wanted to acknowledge what was originally experienced as a collective loss; I’ve tried for more give and take, more conversation than scripted monologue. It has seemed important for me to discover—especially with students—something of what these visitors do remember, what they’ve kept in their heads and hearts, what they’re thinking, feeling, right now, years later. And I am nearly always asked, in turn, Where were you? As a guide, you personalize sparingly, if at all. But I’m their representative real New Yorker, as well as their trusty New York escort; I was there (or somewhere here in town) when the towers fell. What was it like for you? they want to know. So I share the small, unremarkable story of my September 11.

I overslept, only hearing about the first plane when I turned on the radio to get a 1010 WINS weather report. (Blue skies, yes; bluer than blue, we would all later recall.) I tell them that I ran into the living room, turning on the TV just in time to witness the second plane hit, then sat there, disbelieving, watching countless replays along with continuing coverage of the burning towers, the entire area, being evacuated. I tell them that I phoned a girlfriend in the other wing of my building, that we hurried to meet on the roof, where from more than five miles upriver, we could see dense, dark smoke filling the downtown sky. And that we went back to her apartment, where she anxiously awaited word from two daughters who lived and worked in the immediate vicinity of the WTC. (My own young daughter was safe at school just a few blocks uptown from home.) Both her girls escaped to safer ground, one turning up at Mom’s door a few hours later, clothes and skin completely powdered in ash. If there’s time, I tell them that when we greeted her with hugs in the front hall, it was more matter of factly than I can entirely fathom, in retrospect: what’s clear is that we ourselves didn’t yet fully comprehend the horror she had outrun. I’m not sure, I sometimes say, that what was happening seemed less surreal to us in New York City than to everyone else watching it on television around the nation and the world.

And at this point, I usually take out a tiny, treasured September 11 artifact, a panoramic photograph that, rolled up, fits into the palm of my hand. Shot from the 70th Street Hudson River pier (by a friend who, fortuitously, began working digitally just that morning), it captures, in the distance, the ominously mushrooming cloud of smoke we’d watched from our rooftop.

The image perfectly represents how near, and how far, I was from the inferno itself: Near enough that the fire station on my UWS corner lost twelve of thirteen men all those miles down island. Far enough that I still can’t quite explain why I suddenly began locking my enclosed terrace’s steel door (five miles and eleven floors up) every night, against I don’t know what terror. Though it’s true, there were armed men on the roof of the unmarked power facility across the street. I don’t tell my people any of these things, though. I don’t have to say that I was much luckier than many. The photo is more eloquent than I. I love it because it speaks somberly without shrieking, because it is concretely sharable—connecting my inconsequential story to the larger cataclysm—and because it was a gift from the photographer, Ben Stern, himself gone too soon, just a few years later.

What I’ve never shared, until today, in this, my first writing about September 11, 2001—what I hold dearer still, is my own final image of the towers as seen from the Staten Island ferry that long-ago July night. I only wish I could do it justice, give you this glorious yet all too often taken-for-granted view of skyscrapers- so much a part of the urban landscape, you could never imagine them being—gone. I wonder if I would’ve even bothered getting it on film if I’d had a camera with me, which I didn’t. I can only be grateful that I looked and looked and looked some more; I may never be able to completely convey it to anyone else, in mere words, but I’ve got it, it’s mine, here, glowing inside me, forever.

SUSAN VOLCHOK is a New York writer (mainly of fiction) who has published widely in journals and anthologies ranging from Kenyon, Confrontation and VQR to Best American Erotica, as well as in mainstream magazines and newspapers, including The New York Times, and online, most recently @ n+1, Mr. Beller’s Neighborhood, and The Other Room. This essay was written for a public reading on September 11, 2011 at The National Lighthouse Museum, Staten Island, as part of Beacon: Artists Respond to September 11, a week-long 10th anniversary commemoration bringing together both visual and literary artists.

The building, one of those depressing residential hotels, housed a variety of colorful wayward denizens, including destitute students (like myself), drug addicts, alcoholics, and the elderly. There was one communal bathroom per floor. I shared my bathroom with an oddball cast of characters. One of them was a forty year old Male-To-Female pre-op transexual named Crystal.

“Are you getting off on sixteen?” A deep James Earl Jones-like voice reverberated from Crystal’s thin-lipped mouth like a bassoon. The elevator doors could never open up quick enough for me.

I always felt bad for Crystal because she was not attractive as a man and it was pretty obvious that she wouldn’t be any more fetching as a woman. Crystal was infamous for wearing loose fitting hospital pajama bottoms accompanied by a sheer yellow bathrobe that clung tightly to her gangly body. The robe’s billowy, faux-fur sleeves added an appropriate element of femininity to Crystal’s otherwise manly persona. Donning thin, drawn-in, eyebrows and just a hint of pink lipstick, Crystal took appearances very seriously and, despite the deep baritone voice and thinning spindly hair, Crystal made a concerted effort to always appear ladylike.

Crystal’s body language and flirtatious vibe made me feel ill-at-ease, but that didn’t stop me from admiring her. “How brave,” I always thought to myself after encounters with her. She was undergoing a major life transformation in front of all the building’s residents and staff. This was a gutsy thing to do. I thought so anyway.

One summer evening after an exhausting day of classes, I was on my way to use the communal facilities. I needed to take a shower and get ready for work (an evening shift of scooping ice cream at Ben & Jerry’s). Crystal suddenly approached me in the hall ...

“Don’t bother. It’s locked from the inside. He’s been in there for hours. I think he’s shooting up again.” It was common knowledge that the Russian residing in room #1605 had a penchant for heroin and other hard street drugs.

“Oh. OK. Thanks.” I said.

Defeated, I turned around and sheepishly walked down the hall towards my crackerbox-sized room, my toothbrush, washcloth and towel all in hand. My shift was to begin in less than an hour. What was I going to do? I was a complete wreck. I was dripping with sweat (not to mention the smell) due to the challenging tap dancing class that had just ended moments before.

“Now what?” I muttered under my breath. I was just about to reach for my room key when I heard Crystal’s voice again ...“Don’t go. I want to show you something. Come here.” Like a mystical sea nymph, Crystal waved me on. She wanted me to come inside her room.

Call me crazy, or just plain naive, but something told me it was safe to follow Crystal into her apartment that evening. There was something so genuine about her overture and, I have to admit, I was a bit curious.

Crystal’s room was a pathetic little chamber facing the north side of West 75th St. The space was packed to the gills with women’s shoes, scarves, and stacks of hospital pajama bottoms. Plastic Rubbermaid containers on the floor housed dozens of prescription pill vials. But what I saw in the corner of this 100 square foot space took my breath away. Inside Crystal’s humble little boudoir was a fully operational sink!

“You can clean up in here,” she said. “I’ll stand outside, in the hallway, and give you some privacy. I don’t mind. I need to make a phone call anyway.” She shut the door and sashayed herself down to the rotary pay phone located at the end of the corridor of the sixteenth floor.

Crystal had saved the day.

As I turned the faucet knobs of Crystal’s modest wall sink an overwhelming sensation suddenly came over me. The feeling was so huge I had to turn the faucets back off and collect myself. I almost began to cry. With one genuine random act of kindness Crystal had rescued me from the embarrassment and humiliation, of showing up at my job looking and smelling disgusting. But it wasn’t just that. It was something deeper. In that moment, at Crystal’s humble, avocado-green sink, I felt a sense of appreciation and gratitude that I had never experienced before in all of my nineteen years. It was like something right out of Buddha’s teachings. The strangest thing about it all was my epiphany was not occurring under a tree, or by quiet stream in the woods. It was at a transsexual’s sink on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.

I embraced the experience. I lowered my head into Crystal’s chipped porcelain sink and allowed the water to douse my hair and alleviate my worries. I had reached my personal nirvana. “Maybe tomorrow I can go to the building manager and request a room with a sink in it, too,” I thought to myself as I gave my entire body a much-needed washing. I took liberty in using some of Crystal’s sweet scented soaps. I didn’t think she’d mind.

While drying off, something occurred to me. This was the first time since moving to New York City that I felt things were finally beginning to look up for me. I thought maybe, just maybe, I’d be able to stick it out and survive after all. I wiped up the remaining water and exited Crystal’s apartment.

On my way back to my room I mouthed the words “thank you” to Crystal. She was still on the phone.

“Anytime handsome. Anytime. Now don’t you work too hard!” she said.

“I won’t.” I replied back.

“Hey! You wanna know something? You clean up pretty good! Too bad I like older men.”

“Me too!” I replied.

Crystal let out a schoolgirl laugh and played with the pay phone’s long spiral cord in a coquettish manner and then blew me a big kiss from down the hall.

She was right. I felt like a million bucks.

Jackob G. Hofmann has lived and worked in Manhattan
since 1988. He is a theatrical director, produced playwright,
and essayist. www.JackobHofmann.com

At 10 a.m. on a Saturday morning in May, a blank white truck pulled up curbside and the most beautiful man I’d ever seen in New York opened the door and stepped out onto the sidewalk. He was dressed in black jeans and a spotless white t-shirt. His hair was military short. His eyes were the color of wet peat moss and dark tattoos ran down the sides of his neck and snuck up his sleeves. He extended his hand and introduced himself.

“I’m Jason,” he said, smiling a set of flawless teeth, straight and white, framed by lush lips. I’m such a sucker for polite, and for a good, strong handshake. I was immediately, completely undone.

My gaze traveled from our locked hands up his arms and across his chest—large but perfectly proportioned muscles, olive skin, a hint of Latino maybe. He smelled like fresh laundry.

“So?” Jason said.

“I’ll take you upstairs,” I said, snapping back to reality and turning toward the elevators.

In my tiny apartment, I showed Jason what had to go. I had separated the heavy things and the boxes full of books, along one wall, and I pointed these out, warning him about the weight.

“You like to read?” he said.

“Yeah. I’m a writer, or…trying to be.”

“That’s cool,” he said. “I like to read, too.” He asked me what I wrote and I told him I was working on a book about a cowboy.

“How can I get a copy?” he asked. I told him I’d have to finish it first. He said he’d watch for me. I decided not to tell him all about how I’d been working on the book for five years and was hoping to sell it soon, but how I was also too scared to put all my eggs in the precarious basket of being a writer and so would be starting a full-time, soul-sucking job the very next week for which I’d already bought a pair of black Kenneth Cole slingbacks, several conservative black suits and a professional handbag (black) to carry my office-issue Blackberry. He picked up a few of the book boxes and curled his arm around them, pausing in the doorway. I wanted to ask him what he liked to read, but I didn’t want him to have to answer my question while holding the boxes. Then again, I wanted him to stand there and hold the boxes for awhile, maybe all day. I was suddenly sorry the bed sheets were already packed. I desperately wished Dan would evaporate. The look on my face must have been confused.

“I know I look intimidating,” he said, unprompted. “But my friends say I’m a big pussy cat.”

All I could think to say was, “Okay.”

A half hour later, everything was loaded into the truck and the apartment was as empty as the day I’d moved in. Jason looked around, the way my mother does when she leaves a hotel room, making sure none of her things have blended inadvertently into the landscape of the space that is not hers.

“What’s this?” he said, picking up a stretched canvas propped against the corridor wall. It was a painting of two cowboys riding the range in black and white and shades of gray.

“Oh, that stays,” I said. “I’m throwing it away.”

“Why?”

“I never really finished it.”

“You painted this?” he said, his beautiful eyes wide. “You can’t throw this away. This is really good.” He held the painting at arm’s length and studied it the way people study paintings in museums. “Can I have it?” he asked.

“You want my painting?”

“Yeah,” he said. “I don’t think you realize how good it is.”

I think I smiled. I think I raised my eyebrows and smirked a little. It might have looked like a come-on. It might have looked like I wanted to puke.

“Sure,” I said. “You can have it.” And with that I closed the door to the apartment and we turned into the stairwell, Jason carrying the painting carefully by the frame.

Downstairs, Dan was pacing up and down the sidewalk next to the truck. It was drizzling and the door to the truck was open. Jason asked us if we wanted a ride to Brooklyn with him and I said sure. The subway would take us an hour, and it was such a dreary day. I climbed into the cab and took the middle seat and Dan got in beside me, his knees pressing against the glove compartment that was held shut with a piece of duct tape.

I wasn’t really sure, but I suggested we cut across to the FDR and drop down and cross the Brooklyn Bridge. Dan concurred. We wound up taking a wrong turn, and then somewhere along MLK everyone was honking. Jason looked in the side mirror and said, “Oh,” jerking the truck to the curb and jumping out. I looked back through the open window. Boxes were scattered down the street. “I’ll be right back,” Jason said. So Dan and I sat in the truck and waited. When Jason jumped back in the cab he said, “I got it all! Don’t worry!” And I trusted him completely.

A few minutes later, we were negotiating a series of one-way streets through Harlem when he spun around again, hit the brakes and wheeled the van around across traffic.

“Hang on a minute!” he said, leaving us idling on a sidewalk while he trotted into the open door of a junk store.

Dan looked at me, incredulous. “What the hell?” he said.

I shrugged.

Jason came back a few minutes later, got in the van and put the truck in gear.

“I just had to see about that juke box,” he explained without apology. “I collect ‘em. But the guy wanted eighty bucks, and that’s steep.” He pulled back into traffic, heading east, and I took the opportunity to look at his profile, his neck and hairline. “I watch Antiques Road Show,” he went on. “Do you know that show?”

“Yeah,” I said.

“Well I watch it a lot,” he said, “so I know what’s worth collecting. I really like slot machines and skulls and inkwells. You know what an inkwell is?”

“Uh huh,” I said. I didn’t look at Dan, but I was sure his eyes were rolling.

“I got this skull inkwell on lay away,” Jason went on. “Nine-hundred-dollar skull inkwell. You put the ink in the top of the skull. It’s crazy. I love it.”

By this time, I was sure we were heading in the wrong direction. In a moment, we hit Broadway.

“I think you can just turn left here,” I said.

“Okay, no problem,” Jason said. And for the first forty blocks or so the traffic moved at a decent clip. Just above Houston Street things got hung up and we sat for a long time watching the lights turn green, yellow, red. The rain was streaming down the windshield and Jason flicked the AC on.

“What’s your neck say?” I asked.

He reached a hand up and rubbed the ink embedded just above his collar.

“F.T.W.? It stands for Fuck The World,” he said. “I hate everyone, so this is my message.” He reached around the back of his neck, slipping his fingers beneath the collar, suggesting ink beyond the visible. His arm was as thick as my thigh. “I got a lot of these in jail,” he said.

I could feel Dan’s leg against mine, and it wanted to twitch.

“How long were you in jail?” I asked.

“Two years. On and off,” he said, and of course I was dying to know what for but was too afraid to ask. Luckily, he offered. “This last time,” he said, “I was in there for selling two hundred hits of X to an undercover cop. You know, Ecstasy. But the Tombs, that’s not an easy place to be. I recommend you don’t go there. It ain’t too cute.” Okay, good, I thought—drug-dealing. That’s safe. We’re safe. We’re not going to die between here and Brooklyn. We moved forward a block and a half.

“I just hang around with idiots,” he went on. “Like my friends, Mario and Carmine, they’re retarded. Mario comes up limping the other day, says Carmine stabbed him in the leg. But the next day they’re walking down the street holding hands like they’re boyfriend and girlfriend. And mostly I date strippers. I know I should date nicer girls, but that’s just the people I hang around with. I just broke up with this girl. It started off good, and then she got crazy. We used to go dancing at Copacabana. You been there? You like to dance?”

“Yeah, I love to dance,” I said. I hadn’t been in years.

“You guys should come,” he said. “Just don’t go on a Tuesday. Tuesdays is hoodie night. It ain’t too cute.”

I considered his offer. What would I wear? Could my tits compete with the stripper ex-girlfriend’s? Dan didn’t say a word, south along Broadway through Manhattan, over the bridge, through Brooklyn Heights, past Atlantic Street Center, up 4th Avenue to 3rd Street where we pulled up in front of my new place. It was still raining, but not as hard. We all grabbed something and went up to the second floor, a spacious one-bedroom, freshly painted.

“This is nice,” Jason said. “Really nice.” He looked up at the pressed tin ceilings, peered in at the newly-tiled kitchen, and I wondered where he lived, what it looked like there. He unloaded the truck in no time. And then we stood on the sidewalk, me with a wad of cash and him with an empty truck and my painting. Dan was upstairs and I could feel his eyes on us from the window.
I wondered if he was watching to protect me, or to see what I would do.

Jason held the painting out to me. “You should finish this,” he said.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I just don’t think painting is my thing.”

“But if you get famous, this is gonna be worth something,” he said. “I’m no dummy. I seen it all the time on Antiques Roadshow. Somebody gets famous for one thing, like they write a book or something, and then everything they’ve ever done or owned is worth a ton of money. So you’re going to write a book and then this painting is gonna be worth some money. You gotta finish it. Will you finish it and send it to me? I’ll give you my address. You gotta pen?”

I looked him all over, searching for something I still can’t name. I couldn’t imagine how a boy this pretty had survived in the slammer for even a day. He was a mama’s boy, a curious boy. He did his research. He liked collecting things. His eyes were open for opportunity. His eyes were open.

I pulled a yellow legal pad from my bag and gave it to him. I knew I wouldn’t finish the painting, but I thought maybe I could write to him instead. Maybe we could go dancing. He handed the paper back to me with his name and address written in a neat, blue hand.

“You know,” I said, looking at the painting, “I want you to have this one. I really do. If you like it the way it is.”

“Okay,” he said. “But if you paint another one, in blue, you can send it to me. I think it would look good in blue.”

“Alright,” I said. “We’ll see.” We shook hands. And then he got in the truck and drove away.

Upstairs, Dan said, “What the hell was that?”

“He wanted me to finish that painting.”

“What painting?”

“Of the cowboys.”

“Are you kidding?”

“He liked it. He thought it was beautiful. And he thinks it’s going to be worth a million bucks on eBay if I become a famous writer.”

“Oh my god.”

“Yeah. Well,” I said. I ran my key along a seam of tape, opened a box and took some things out. There was no furniture in the place, nothing to sit on, so Dan sat cross-legged on the floor, asked if I wanted help unpacking and, when I declined, stood up and said he was going to go home.

I settled into my new place nicely, commuting every day to my job in Lower Manhattan and returning home to cook dinner for friends who would sit on the couch and balance plates on their laps, drink bottles and bottles of wine and make fun of my Barry-White-inspired bathroom, all black tile and gold fixtures. I worked 12 hours a day in my office with no windows and I got really good at running from one meeting to another in high heels. I had cocktails with the mayor at Gracie Mansion and rode around town in government-issued vehicles, with a driver who wore one of those curlicue wire devices behind his ear. I didn’t touch the draft of my book that sat on my desk for almost two years.

It would be a few months before Dan and I would break up, and years before I realized that at least one box of books and my favorite mug, stolen from the university student center in Reykjavik, were lost along that stretch of MLK in Harlem. Eventually I lost Jason’s address, too. For awhile I’d kept it, thinking I’d show up at Copacabana and try to find him, but of course I never did. I’m no dummy. Where Jason saw potential in my half-finished painting, in my half-formed self, I feared I would be disappointed in him. But who was I, in my suit and my slingbacks with my Blackberry, a nameless engine behind the powers that made the city go, go, go?

Much as I loved my new apartment, it was not who I wanted to be. I decided that after a year, I would move again. If I finished my book and became a famous writer, Jason could sell my painting on eBay and buy himself a cool new skull inkwell. I wondered if he would find the painting beautiful enough to hold onto until then.

Margot Kahn left New York City for Seattle where she hikes, bakes cakes and reads with her husband and son. Her book Horses That Buck, the biography of a Wyoming cowboy, was published in 2008. www.margotkahn.com

The year was 1981. Her name was Julie. Neither of her eyes looked in the same direction. I had a thing for wall-eyed girls. We met at the filming of DOWNTOWN 81. The set was Danceteria on West 45th Street. Jean-Michel Basquiat was the star of the movie. I was an extra, so was Julie. She could have passed as a double of Francoise Hardy, the 70s French pop singer. I still had a thing for the Yeh-Yeh Girl.

Julie said that she was a painter. She was studying arts at FIT with Manny’s daughter. Her old man had a diamond store on Canal Street. I was good friends with her brother, Richie Boy. It was a small world and the four of us ran into each others at a nightclub. Richie Boy swooped on Julie like a vulture hitting a baby lamb. Julie wasn’t impressed with his Crassanova tactics and sought refuge with me. Jean-Michel came over to say hello. He had once painted my refrigerator. I didn’t tell Julie that I made my hillbilly girlfriend wipe it off. She laughed at my joke. That was always a good sign with a woman and even better she agreed to see Werner Herzog’s AGUIRRE WRATH OF GOD with me.

“It’s a German movie about a conquistador seeking the cities of gold in the Amazon.”

“I’ve heard about it.”

“There’s a Five o’clock show at Lincoln Center.”

“I’ll meet you at 4:45 after my class.” She scribbled a phone number on a napkin and left with Richie Boy’s sister. They lived together underneath

5 O’clock Show.

Tomorrow.

I arrived at the theater 30 minutes early and bought two tickets. 15 minutes passed without any sign of Julie. 4:50. A no-show. 5 on the nose. I searched the faces on the sidewalk. She had stood me up and I sold my tickets to a couple holding hands. They were very grateful, since the show was a sellout.

My friend was tending bar farther up Broadway. I had two drinks and told him about my non-date.

“Typical of women in this city. Always saying yes to a back-up plan.”

Julie could have had 13 plan Bs. She was that beautiful and my soul was wandering through a vast abyss of emptiness. Something was sucking my energy without any chance of my repleting the loss. I paid for my drinks and wandered back downtown, thinking I might watch a XXX film at ShowWorld on the Minnesota Strip. The girls on screen weren’t real, but they were always punctual.

As I neared the theater, I lifted my head and spotted Julie running to the ticket booth. She was over two hours late. Her breathing was off pace and her out-of-synch eyes wavered in their gaze between mine, as if she were hypnotizing a cobra.

“Am I late?” Her question swirl as a life-sucking fog around my body. If I answered ‘yes’, those lost two hours would be banked in her longevity account. The first seconds of 5o’Clock were fleeing my soul and I fought for my life by saying, “No, I just got here too.”

“Really?” Her mesmeric stare was transformed by doubt. Men waited hours for beauty like hers. Disappointment broke her mirror of confidence and the stolen time of the past two hours snapped back into my eternity.

“Sorry, I’m late. You still want to see the movie?”

“Sure.” I bought two tickets and we entered the theater. She kissed me during the credits. I thought that it was an apology, but later in my life I realized that it was a kiss of surrender. It was the start of a short affair. She left for France to be a model that summer. I drove her to the airport.

We saw each other in Paris. Only as friends. She could only love someone who would give her his time and I wanted to live forever. I guess that she thought me selfish.

As far as I know Julie is alive in Paris. I hope that she lives long. Most women do and it ain’t no secret why.

Least not to me.

Peter Nolan Smith left New England in 1976 for the East Village. The nightlife became his vehicle for traveling the world; Paris, Hamburg, Nice, and London. His career ended at the Milk Bar in Beverly Hills in 1995 and devoted his years to traveling in the Orient, supporting by his new profession as diamantaire. Most of his 21st Century has been spent in Thailand, although economics forced his return to the USA in 2008. Peter NolanSmith currently lives in Brooklyn and Sriracha, Thailand. He is the editor and writer of www.mangozeen.com.

I dreaded going to my optician to replace it—I didn’t have the time and the lens would cost several hundred dollars because my prescription called for a prism that had to be carefully ground.

I had heard a delicate clink just as I rose to disembark the 96th Street cross-town. But having shoved my manuscript into my bag, I could not imagine what else might have slid off my lap, so I dismissed any further grab of gravity. Must’ve been some lady of leisure’s purse, its hardware dangling against a pole or something. And if the ping was from a falling button, well, my long 1980s raincoat would still keep me dry.

Now, having transferred to the downtown Lexington Avenue bus, I plotted how, after my East Side errand, I would backtrack. Maybe if I returned home the way I came, I’d get lucky and catch the same bus. The driver, a woman, had actually smiled and wished me a good morning and I’d returned the greeting. Maybe she would be helpful.

The first westbound bus on 96th was driven by a man who offered to wait while I punched in the bus depot number he knew by heart into my mobile phone. But I was probably the last person in Manhattan to get a VCR—a contrarianism rooted in having covered high-tech during the revolution with the result that I eschewed domestic gadgets––although I was pretty sure I wasn’t the only Upper West Sider without a cell. So the driver patiently watched while I fumbled for my pencil and file folder and scribbled the number. I thanked him, but as he pulled away, I thought I’d seen my driver wiz by in the opposite direction. But a guy in a red baseball cap was operating the next bus so evidently she had not yet turned around. It seemed I could spend hours hoping to catch her, whereas she might have ended her shift or gone to lunch. So I alighted the baseball guy’s bus and told him my plight.

“Do you know what time you took that bus?” he said.

“About 10:45.”

“What stop you getting off?”

“Broadway.”

“I’ll take you to the dispatcher. He’ll help.”

I preferred that to calling the depot, which I imagined to be the final home of dead umbrellas, crumpled hats, single gloves and lone earrings. Years ago I’d read in The Times of an MTA unclaimed belongings mortuary in a vast warehouse way out in Brooklyn, staffed by exasperated employees who rarely saw visitors. People just accepted that their possessions were fated to languish, abandoned, far from the churn of a town where time is money.

The dispatcher was hanging out in a stagnant M104 around the corner. My information told him exactly what bus I had been on, down to its fleet number.

“She should be back here in six minutes,” he said with confidence, through his white, handlebar mustache.

“Wow. You’re that organized?”

“Oh yeah. There’s some order in that chaos.”

“How many buses do you have running at a time?” Because I frequented the route, I often wondered about this.

“About 25 during rush hour, less at other times. Plus some drive the 106 route.” He was referring to the mysterious bus that turned north off East 96th on to Madison. Lots of people boarded blind and had to rush off to catch the real crosstown.

“Yup, that driver’s a really lovely woman,” the dispatcher volunteered.

“She was friendly to me this morning. Not your usual New York experience.”

“You’re not from New York?”

“I am. In fact, I’ve been afraid of bus drivers ever since I was a kid.” That admission just leapt out of my mouth like a big old frog.

The dispatcher gazed at me, surprised. Of course he wanted to know what little trauma had haunted me all those years.

“I used to ride the Q60 to school every day from Forrest Hills to the City,” I said. “And one day I needed change from the driver for a dollar bill.” Those days, you had to show your pass, which was a different color every month, and supplement your reduced fare with some coins. “I misunderstood what he wanted me to do and when I dropped the wrong amount into the fare box, he stood up, squinted through his blue eyes, and bellowed, ‘Don’t they teach you fancy private school kids any math?’” The dispatcher elevated his eyebrows. “I wanted to be invisible from then on,” I continued, “but that driver always recognized me and scowled. Trying to catch a mistake, seeking me out or some other kid with an out-of-date bus pass.” I didn’t add that he threw off violators, the persecutory bastard.

Again the dispatcher quizzically looked at me. I suppose he was figuring out my age because I remembered the days when drivers made change. It began to drizzle and he looked at his watch. “Maybe we missed her and she’s already on West End.”

“Can you call her on your walky-talky?”

He took up my suggestion. “What’s your location? Copy.”

“Approaching Columbus. Copy,” she crackled back. As we watched her bus barrel into the Broadway stop, I sort of waved to signal that nothing major was amiss. The dispatcher explained our mission, but the driver, thinking I was in search of a contact lens, warned that it might have dried out by now, two-and-a-half hours later.

We got on the bus after most passengers had stepped off. There, under my single seat, concave side up on the gritty black-and-white, dappled floor, was my lens. Uncrushed.

“You found it. They found it,” I announced to a pale, bald gentleman who was reading The Observer. He looked up and smiled at my smile. “Thank you,” I continued, this time addressing the driver and dispatcher, “You’ve saved me so much money and time.”

“You go get those repaired immediately,” the bus driver advised, with a bright laugh and a toss of her shiny, shoulder-length cornrows. I walked over to Cohen’s Optical where the clerk promptly found the right sized screw and secured my lens. While I watched, I babbled about my lucky retrieval. After polishing my now intact glasses, the clerk handed them to me free of charge.

She said, “You have a great day.”

“Thanks. I think I already did.”

Now all I have to do is land that book project.

Karen A. Frenkel is an award-winning science/technology journalist, editor, author and producer. Recent articles have appeared in Science Magazine, Bloomberg Businessweek (print and online) and U.S. News and World Report. She also blogs about neuroscience for the Foundation for Psychocultural Research and covers the intersection of science and the arts. She has made two documentaries about the impact of technology on society for public television––one on women and computing, the other about elearning. Her website is www.karenafrenkel.com. Twitter handle: @KarenAFrenkel

Which may have been the feeling I’d had, set upon by a sick, sadistic high school administration, but let’s face it, I did escape with my ass, if not my sanity, entirely intact.

By the time I realized what had been going on in that tank—the smaller of two in the upstairs apartment of a fish-fancying friend—the paradise was a pathetic, stumpy remnant of its former self, unable to steer or swim with any speed. It could no longer even pretend to evade the increasingly vicious assaults on its ragged, bitten-raw body. It seemed definitively doomed, and my friend seemed, well, disinterested.

It’s a fish eat fish world, was his feeling. The main tank, up top, was filled with peaceful, sociable species; this tank down below was a somewhat experimental environment, in which a pair or trio of volatile fish might be put together, just to see what would happen. Most often, they reached a sort of standoff (as had the paradise and the cat.) But with the introduction of a tough new contender, the conclusion was foregone. Surely he didn’t need to let this scenario play out to its bitter end. I insisted he remove the battered, badly handicapped fish now.

He shrugged, then obliged me by scooping it up in a little net and dropping it into a plastic holding tank of its own, where it hung in the water, dazed and defeated. It constantly fell over and couldn’t easily right itself. Nor could it accurately navigate toward pellets or flakes at feeding time. Though paradise fish do get their oxygen underwater via gills, they also surface to breathe our air, which I, in my utter ignorance, found astonishing. Meanwhile, though, this one had trouble moving up or down at all, the six inch depth of the tank as challenging as any lake.

But it survived a few days of stunned relative stillness, and a few days more of tentative movement, retraining itself to swim without most of the external fishy anatomy swimming generally requires. When I saw it would most likely make it, I decided that since I was responsible for its life, it ought to be more properly mine, resident in my apartment. I brought it home one evening, setting the container on my desk where it would get the most sunlight during the day, and where I could easily observe its progress as it adjusted to its new surroundings (supposing it noticed such subtleties beyond the plastic walls), continued its rehabilitation.

In my mind and in my notebook his name was Blu, or sometimes Para (but that was too painful a pun, even for a fish.) Out loud, I mainly called him Fish and Fishy. I’d concluded he was a he because of his former ferocity with the catfish, and because, after another week or so of convalescence, he began to blow the kind of bubbles male paradises produce to support and hold the females’ eggs. Of course, Blu’s bubblings were a thin, inadequate version of the real thing, but still, it seemed a positive sign.

I didn’t actually notice I was calling Fish Fishy, or talking to him, for that matter, until almost a week after his homecoming. I mean, I suppose I’d been saying good morning when I opened the blinds and threw him a few “tropical crisps” or whatever. But it wasn’t until I found the paradise hovering motionless, patiently watching me as I sat back down to work one afternoon that I stopped too, took some time to study the deformed survivor, who neither flinched nor fled under my steady gaze. We stared at one another for minutes on end, and then I heard myself say, “Fishy, we make a fine pair.” No need to elaborate on that, we both knew what I meant. Interesting, too, that I’d lived as a lone Pisces all these years, never harboring so much as a childhood guppy, until this unexpected rescue of a poisson more traumatized, more thoroughly screwed over, than I’d ever be.

“ You’re gonna be all right,” I told him. I was, more or less. Mere all rightness didn’t seem too much to promise a fish. I wondered whether accidentally amputated fins and tails could ever be expected to regenerate. If that were to happen, Fish would doubtless need a larger habitat in which to enjoy doing real laps again. And maybe even a new tank mate? But that would surely demand careful, critical thinking (the kind the aficionado upstairs apparently hadn’t bothered exerting on Fish’s behalf.) Meanwhile, he had me, and I had him. And as even a tiny tank without a filter requires quite a bit of personal attention, we were more together each day than not. And then there were the nights.

My bedroom is never absolutely dark: streetlight filters in, and there are points of electro-green emanating from the laptop and various peripherals. I couldn’t see Fishy, precisely, but I could discern the tank’s outlines, sense a piscine presence on the far side of the space between my bed and his inches of desktop. It made me feel like a child in some picture-book fantasy. I can’t recall the last time I prayed, or even wished on a star, but suddenly, one night when I was having trouble sleeping, it struck me that I could wish on this Fishy. A simple wish, to start: I wished I’d fall asleep. And I did.

I didn’t often wish on Fishy in the darkness, but I did make a point of saying good-night, as I turned off the bedside lamp. And once in awhile, I’d go on, no more than a minute, outlining provisional plans for the following morning. If Fish was just a way to rationalize talking out loud to myself, what of it? People talk to their dogs and cats (and birds and rabbits) all the time. At least I wasn’t making a public spectacle of my special relationship out on the street, or irritating friends by insinuating Fishy into ordinary conversation at home.

In fact, it never occurred to me to discuss him, beyond the bare fact of his existence in a plastic box on my desk. Which itself didn’t much grab anybody: just a fish, and a fairly sick joke figure of one at that. Scarcely counted as a pet, much less a companion. Even his original owner didn’t seem moved by Fish’s miraculous recovery. Moreover, as someone who’d kept large aquaria since adolescence, he’d seldom experienced attachment to any individual specimen.

On the other hand, he did more than once remark, “Who would have ever thought that fish could become a victim?” Exactly! And the unpredictably of such vicissitudes was clearly not restricted to life in the tank.

Still, it’s possible I didn’t realize, myself, that I was bonding (as the psychobabblers say) with Fishy, forming actual feelings for the little freak, and yes, perhaps over identifying with him, as the weeks went by. Because it’s otherwise difficult to explain the shock, and the surprisingly sharp pang of sorrow, I felt the evening I found him dead—and not floating, either, but, rather, standing straight on end, a strange centerpiece to the teeny green plastic grove I’d planted to cozy up his cold cell. Perhaps his dearth of limbs accounts for this last lugubrious trick. However that may be, I stroked him, spoke to him, and my eyes stung with tears (!) as I wracked my brain about what I could possibly have done wrong, this particular day, to bring about his so-sudden demise.

Yet there was something more, beyond useless guilt, past simple animal sadness. Fishy had beaten such odds, I think he’d become, for me, the living proof that anyone could survive anything and keep on swimming…or at least floundering with full attention. Now he was gone, and I was once again a split-off, solo Pisces, facing the unknown future on my own. Oy. What if this were some kind of sign? My melancholy mood made me more than usually suggestible, I suppose. In the end, in my wordless grief, I gave him a decent burial (no toilet flushing for my Fish), rinsed out his tank, swore off rescuing strays and sad cases, for the time being.

As fate would have it, though, the very next week my friend asked me to foster a failing blue gourami. Seems he was more impressed with my fish-keeping skills than he’d let on, despite the eventual loss of Fishy. I’m feeling better about that myself; my love kept him alive as long as anything could. Meanwhile, the new guy not only came through the crisis, he began to actually thrive. I upgraded to a two-and-a-half gallon tank, with gravel, modest décor, a filtration system, and a pair of corys for company and bottom cleaning.

But I never spent nearly as much time watching, never mind communing with this one; I rarely spoke to or called him by name, and I never, ever wished on him in the night. Fish is fish, finally, neither metaphor nor talisman. Man, they just die on you too much to put your whole heart into their happiness and well-being. There’s a reason so many people keep these cozily alien creatures, and from what I can see, psychic connection ain’t it.

Still, there’s no shame in recalling how, for one brief moment, Fish flashed through my life as the image of a soul mate in absurd adversity. By the way—word to those bee-atches at Wadleigh Secondary School—his cichlid tormentor was soon killed outright by a bigger, badder bully. So Fishy, despite the cruel suffering he endured, had the last laugh there. And really, what more, or better, could I wish for myself?

Susan Volchok is a New York writer of fiction and essays whose work has been published widely in literary journals and anthologies, and in mainstream magazines and newspapers, including The New York Times. These days, she leaves the fish to that upstairs neighbor, who's since become a most Pisces-loving boyfriend.