In the first days of my mother’s hospitalization, when she was being given steroids and fluids, and getting oxygen, and we expected her stay to be brief, my father and I stopped to feed the turkeys. Passing two birds while approaching the hospital, we pulled over and got out of the car. There was more than enough food for both, but apparently, they didn't think so, and a territorial battle ensued. It began with their heads intertwined, barely touching, as they rotated. Finally, they locked beaks as the grace of their tango gave way to something far less beautiful. Several passersby stopped to watch, mouths agape. They were still engaged when, ashamed of ourselves, we made our getaway.

My mother’s condition worsened, and she was admitted to ICU, and eventually intubated. It was during this period my father and I happened upon a hen, sitting atop her nest in the low-cut bushes just outside the revolving door of the hospital's main entrance. Something I discovered about turkeys: while defending their eggs, they hiss like a snake. We checked in on her daily, often bringing bread and (shelled) peanuts, though it wasn't uncommon to find that someone had already scattered bread. Over the next weeks, as setback followed setback, and my mother moved back and forth from a regular room to ICU, we anticipated the eggs hatching. Finally, in a moment that makes you stop and point, we spotted the hen and her ten chicks -- an estimate, since it's nearly impossible to get an accurate count on the kinetic furballs – walking along the side of the road.

One afternoon, while my father and I arrived at the hospital, and crossed the parking lot toward the rear entrance, we noticed a woman standing in the street, flapping her arms in a desperate bid to get someone’s attention. As we approached, she explained how a chick had fallen through the grate. Upon entering the lobby, we informed the security guard, who seemed genuinely concerned as she promised to alert the proper authorities. That night, while leaving, the same guard smiled at us as she said that the chick had been rescued. Later in the week, there was an Animal Control van parked around back, and we speculated that the earlier incident had lead to the chicks being rounded up for relocation. But as we neared, cheeping could be heard coming from the grate -- another chick had taken the plunge. Peering down into the storm sewer, a security van stopped, and the guard asked, rather sarcastically, "Somebody fall down there?" When we told him it was a chick, he replied, "They fall down there all the time. Sometimes six or seven of them. We pull them out when we can."

The discovery of blood in my mother’s bed triggered a Rapid Response, as a dozen doctors filled her room. Unrelated to the reason she was initially hospitalized, what was diagnosed as a cyst in her intestines, and the ensuing complications, lead to life and death surgery. With her recovery now a long-term prospect, a tracheostomy was performed, and she was transferred to the Vent Unit, as she struggled with two illnesses that complicated one another. Over the summer, as my father and I sat on the benches surrounding the clock tower in front of the hospital, feeding the turkeys Saltines from the cafeteria, the number of chicks dwindled to seven, then five, and finally, two.

When my mother’s condition stabilized, she was transferred to Silver Lake Nursing Home, as a “short-term rehab patient.” Rehabilitation went well, but then her belly swelled, as adhesions resulted in a blockage, and she was sent back to SIUH, and a second surgery became necessary. Her recovery, this time, was particularly trying, as an ileus left her intestines dormant for ten days, and she survived on an intravenous TPN drip. The chicks, grown into turkeys now, were trying to find their way in the world. Three images stand out in my mind from that period: A turkey buzzing the clock tower, like a low-flying plane in distress. Several turkeys gathered outside an idling Access-a-Ride van, as though waiting to board. A crowd watching as a turkey digs up a flower garden, circling the border, kicking the dirt out with as much enthusiasm as any dog.

The day my mother was discharged, rolled out on a stretcher, the medic paused outside the door and exclaimed, “Look at the turkeys!” and she turned to the turkeys who’d come to see her off and smiled. Back at Silver Lake, she was eating chopped-consistency food, and tolerating the speaking valve for twelve hours a day, and going down to physical therapy five times a week, culminating in her standing up, with the therapist’s help, for the first time in months. The doctors came by on rounds, and their assessment was: “She’s getting well.” In early December, the belly swelled again, and it was back to the hospital.

The turkeys were nowhere to be seen, and I feared that, long considered a nuisance in the surrounding neighborhood of South Beach, they’d finally been eradicated. I went out of my way to search for them, and eventually discovered the gang in the corner of the fenced-in field, huddled beneath the bare trees that provided desperate little shelter. This is where they spent the winter, as my mother made three additional ambulance trips to the hospital, each stay wearing her down a little more, as her albumin level dropped, and the infections lead to sepsis, until she fell into agonal breathing, and on February 4, 2012, Dianne Elaine Diriwachter lost her most courageous fight.

Tom Diriwachter is the son of Thomas and Dianne Diriwachter.

“I’m just returning the key to the supply closet,” I said, heading over to the corkboard to hang it back up. I did not want to get drawn into whatever they were talking about. Sunlight was streaming in through the windows, and I felt like fainting. Karen squinted at me over the top of her glasses and smiled: “Ah, I wondered who’d been rooting around in there.”

“Bobby’s been in the closet for a long time,” Marco said, in a low, mischievous growl. He rubbed his short grey beard. The tattoos on his upper arms leered out from underneath his skintight T-shirt.

I laughed but didn’t take the bait. Marco and I were friends on Facebook and his status updates showed a remarkable propensity for gay innuendo. And in person, if you let him get started, he was even more relentless .

But Karen wasn’t feeling so discreet either. “Yes, Bobby would be a bear, right?” She looked over at Marco with a conspiratorial smirk.

With my thick, luscious brown beard and hairy chest, I would be a bear, I thought proudly—if I were gay, of course.

“Oh no,” Marco said with exaggerated surprise. He was looking at me very sternly, suppressing a smile. “Bobby is no bear. He’s more of an … otter.”

I was a bit offended. I’d always kind of thought of myself as a bear. A few years ago, during the dark time after college but before the even darker time after after-college, I’d worked at an independent video store in the West Village. The neighborhood was teeming with homosexuals (or so it seemed to me), and gay pornography was one of our specialties. Titles like Bear Patrol and Free Fur All lined the walls of the seedy little porno room in the back of the store, so I knew what bears looked like: hairy, muscular, dressed in leather, and carrying a nightstick. I’d also seen plenty of pictures of bears on Marco’s own Facebook page. Hardly a week went by without him posting a dozen or so pictures of a weekend “Bear Picnic” or “Bear Hiking Trip” (not surprisingly, bears enjoy the outdoors) or “Bear-E-Okee,” all full of hairy thirtysomethings that, frankly, looked a lot like me. Perhaps I wasn’t old enough? Or burly enough? Gay subcultures seemed so nuanced, I was surprised they could even keep track.

I’d been finding myself embroiled in a lot of these awkward little gay scenarios lately. I’m a bit of a loner, so my day-to-day routine didn’t involve going to that many different places, and it seemed like more and more of these daily stops were becoming tricky due to the presence of gay, or potentially gay, men that I was convinced had crushes on me. But perhaps I was just being paranoid. I mean flattering myself. When I tried out this theory on a friend of mine (that gay men were constantly ogling me and that my awareness of this was adding unnecessary stress to my otherwise banal errands), she said that I have “difficulty” in most scenarios that involve casual interaction with strangers and was likely blowing it way out of proportion.

Nevertheless, I’d started avoiding the bodega near my apartment in Park Slope because of a gay clerk’s overzealous greetings and small talk. And the way he stared at me! It started out innocently enough, with him paying extra-special attention to my bacon, egg, and cheese sandwich orders on Sunday mornings. I was usually hungover, worn out from a long night of drinking alone, or a shorter but somehow more abusive night of drinking with others and feeling alone, so perhaps my defenses were lowered, but I liked the way he smiled at me and said, “Helloooo … bacon, egg, and cheese, right?” before I even had a chance to speak. I’d stand off in the wings pretending to read the newspaper, as he lovingly laid a slice of cheese over the egg and called out, “Salt and pepper?” I’d wait a moment, so as to dampen any impression that I might be at his beck and call, then I’d rush forward saying, “Yes, yes, thank you.”

It wasn’t long before he started complimenting me on my beard, which was lovely, I realized, and apparently impossible for gay men to resist, so I took it gracefully. I’m very susceptible to flattery. And in fact, I was sort of fascinated by his appearance as well. His perfectly round bald head glistened, and his huge blue eyes were always popping with curiosity, the way I imagined mine might, if I didn’t always feel so fatigued. I was simultaneously impressed and appalled by how friendly he always seemed, and he was almost charming, in an exceedingly goofy way.

But being friendly is exhausting for me (this is one of the few drawbacks of being such a stalwart introvert), and sometimes I want to order a bacon, egg, and cheese without being flirted with. I began to dread going in there, and I realized I could only humor this kind of thing for so long. I’d wake up on a Sunday morning with a pounding headache and sit on the couch miserably thinking to myself, “All I want right now is coffee and a bacon, egg, and cheese, but if I go down there, I’ll have to talk to him.” Some days, the dread was so severe I wouldn’t even leave the house, subsisting instead on a box of Rice-a-Roni or Lipton Noodles and dark, milkless coffee brewed in my own coffeemaker. The fact that I’d also have had to go to the bodega if I wanted milk was a bitter pill to swallow that always sent me into a small rage.

Finally, one day when I was feeling brave enough to venture out to the store, he looked up at me expecting the friendly greeting we’d established over the last few months, I snubbed him. I ignored him completely and walked past as if we’d never exchanged hellos before. He was stocking the orange juice refrigerator, kneeling on the dirty floor, and I was overwhelmed by the smallness and sadness of our lives. I was able to collect my meager purchases (toilet paper, soup, milk, cheese) without interacting with him directly. It was obvious to both of us that I had ignored him on purpose, and now the spell was broken. Our little romance was over. I thought that would make it easier to go back in there in the future, but in fact it only made it harder.

Simultaneously, there was also a similar situation going on at Cosi in Midtown, near the magazine publisher where I worked. Once a week, I had a powerful need to consume a turkey and cheddar melt, so I left the hermetically sealed little room where they kept the copy editors and headed out into the midtown Manhattan lunch-hour feeding frenzy.

At Cosi, the prudent first move was always to steel myself with a warm little scrap of bread from the communal bowl they had stationed at the beginning of the line. With my grizzly-man beard, unwashed jeans, and sweater, I always felt out of place in the sea of pant-suited and humorless career women, jocular post-frat boys in light-blue button-downs, and cranky European tourists. “I might look at one of these women and smile,” I’d think, “if this were another life,” but actually I couldn’t bring myself to look at any of them. I was too blinded by their chatter and perceived hostility.

Here, my gay interlocutor was not the person taking the lunch orders, or even one of the half-dozen folks in the sandwich-and-salad assembly line, but the slight, feminine boy at the cash register. His mop of dark hair was mostly hidden under a flaccid Cosi cap, and the faint shadow of a mustache on his upper lip did nothing to diminish the girlish aspect of his face. If Marco were with me, he’d probably dismissively call the fellow a “twink.” (They had plenty of that genre at the video store as well, perhaps even some involving twinks and bears, though based on my cursory scans of the boxes, it seemed like kind was usually paired with kind.)

Cosi was packed during lunch hours, so my attitude was always get in and get out as quickly as possible. This meant, of course, that my interactions with the boy were more hurried and subtle than those with my bald friend at the deli, but again I got the strong and very definite impression that he liked me. His eyes seemed to be looking at me, rather than through me, past me, past everyone, onto the street and into oblivion, like the other wretches with his job. I imagined his whole world snapped into focus a bit more when he saw me approaching, a lovely bearded stranger here to rescue him from the doldrums of another day spent ringing up sandwiches. In any case, he certainly became more attentive, smiling at me slightly, with almost imperceptible amusement—or so it seemed to me, for in the world of midtown Manhattan lunch lines there can be no overt displays of affection.

A few times our hands touched as he was handing me my change, and he didn’t draw away quickly in alarm; perhaps he even let his hand linger on mine for a split second longer than necessary. When I worked at the video store, I tried that trick on a few of the pretty female customers, but I seemed to remember them recoiling in disgust. However, perhaps my slightly warped and impoverished sense of self was overruling reality. In my mind, I am like a bearded god in the eyes of homosexual men, but like some pathetic hairy troll in the eyes of beautiful women. So whenever his hand grazed mine, I smiled and tried to act naturally. I didn’t want to appear rude, but I also didn’t want to lead him on.

Once again, I felt the situation was becoming too familiar. One of the things I like most about living in New York is the absolute anonymity. As soon as I feel obligated to exchange familiar greetings with a person—the chatty doorman at a friend’s apartment building, the brisk Mexican woman who sells me coffee in the morning, the obese and obviously lonely neighbor in the laundromat on a Saturday afternoon—I begin to dread seeing them. And if those interactions are laced with unspoken gay romantic undertones, then they really become too much to bear. So I quickly found myself withdrawing my affection and natural friendliness, which, again, was becoming strained. And in fact, he seemed to be withdrawing as well, perhaps slightly ashamed to have been subtly flirting with a bearded stranger to begin with. I sensed that he was not nearly as self-assured as his goofy bald counterpart at the bodega in Brooklyn.

Incredibly, a similar but even more disruptive situation like this had also developed at my local gym. This one caused me the most consternation, as avoidance was not really an option. At that time in my life, I felt like I had to continue to sculpt and maintain my body, plus the gym seemed vital to my mental health.

I’m not exactly sure how it started, but one particularly muscle-bound jock and I somehow became trapped in a pattern of exchanging the most intense and awkward man-on-man eye contact I have ever experienced in my life. As most gym-goers know, making eye contact is something that is generally not done. In fact, most people at the gym tend to act a bit scared of each other (the women especially seemed skittish toward me); there is a lot of forced politeness, and whatever exchanges do occur are brief and tense. No one wants to “invade each other’s space,” so to speak. Plus, the fact that nearly everyone is wearing headphones further prevents conversation. Before I’d joined the gym, I had imagined (and hoped) that the atmosphere would be more sexually charged somehow, but it wasn’t. Except, unfortunately, between me and this … dude.

It never failed: I’d go dashing up the stairs after doing some bench presses, ready to grab a towel and mount the stair-climbing machine, and I’d look to my left and there he’d be, staring at me. I’d round the corner, heading toward the free weights, glance up, and there he’d be, barreling toward me, staring at me. I’d head into the locker room, drenched in sweat, eager to strip off my headphones and T-shirt, and there he’d be, suddenly, clad in nothing but a tiny white towel, staring at me.

His body was phenomenal. I could admit that. It was no wonder it seemed like he was always at the gym (I tried going at different times of day and night in an effort to avoid him, to no avail). In order to build and maintain a body of such absurdly statuesque proportions, you’d have to be there all the time. He was several inches taller than me, his chest and arms were chiseled, and his stomach was flat and defined, but it was his legs that were really impressive. His buttocks, thighs, and calves were all ripping with muscle that was perfectly in proportion to his heaving upper body. In contrast, my own legs were a source of constant shame. They looked and felt (both physically and psychologically) too skinny, but I found leg exercises to be too tedious to really correct this problem. I’d look down at my legs, at my sneakers really, as I hurried past this Adonis in a skimpy white towel. My face felt hot and, absurdly, my heart was racing, the way it did in middle school whenever I saw a girl I liked.

He had an interesting face. I suppose that was the original problem; he caught me looking at him. He had a strong chin, which was angular and smooth and always immaculately shaved, dark eyes and dark, spiky hair, which he wore very closely cropped on the sides. This combination of features made him look a bit like a Japanese anime character, although if I had to guess, I bet he was from New Jersey.

Actually, now I do remember how this all started. The gym was about two blocks downhill from my apartment; and Prospect Park, where I went running during the warmer months, was about four or so blocks uphill from my apartment. Sometimes on my way downhill to the gym, or on my way uphill to the park, I would pass this spiky-haired gym bunny as he was also either coming from or going to the gym. (I don’t think either of us lived very busy lives.) The first one or two times this happened, I may not have even recognized him. Most likely, I just noticed that he looked familiar, if I noticed him at all. But then, perhaps the third time this happened, I had a simultaneous flash of recognition and fit of friendliness, and I did something unthinkable: I nodded in recognition at him, breaking the invisible plane that usually exists between strangers and establishing actual, furtive human contact. (How I wished I could take that back later!) He nodded back. And so our new nodding-in-recognition rapport was established. Then, for a while, it actually seemed like I didn’t see him at the gym anymore, just in the outside world, in the vicinity of the gym, and so we would nod hello, each thinking, in a very masculine, non-gay way, I presumed, “Oh, there’s that dude from the gym.”

Strangely, while I was OK with this dynamic of nodding hello to a guy in the real world that I recognized from the context of the gym, when I started seeing him again at the gym and he wanted to continue (or even, I feared, escalate) this nodding relationship in that context, I wanted no part of it. It was absurd to have to nod hello at this guy every time I saw him at the gym, which started to feel like every time I went in there. And even more unsettling, he seemed to want more than that. It was almost as if he wanted to talk to me. For what reason though, I couldn’t fathom—at first. Perhaps he was just a lonely straight guy. Maybe he just wanted to have a beer or something, make a new friend. But, no, I thought … that is madness.

Back in the office one afternoon, as I was scrutinizing some proofs, Marco came in and said, “Hey Bobby, you claim to be straight, you should know this: How many players on a hockey team?”

I didn’t really look up. I could imagine the smirk on Marco’s face well enough. “I don’t watch hockey,” I said. “And what do you mean ‘claim’ to be straight? Is there some debate about this?”

Marco laughed. He was standing by the window looking down at the city, perhaps evaluating its relative hetero or homosexuality as well.

Then, as if to cast further doubt on the matter, I said, “So I looked up ‘otter’ and you were right, an otter is just a skinnier bear.”

“Mmmhmm,” Marco said, glancing back at me and drawing the sound out—as if he found otters delicious.

It would be kind of nice to be an otter, I thought to myself, or a bear, to have a cozy little niche clearly designated like that; to be eagerly accepted by a group based on the way I look. I’ve never had that. In fact, I’ve never really been a part of any group, not even any of the ones that are based on the feeling of not fitting in.

I looked up to say something to Marco, something witty about otters and bears perhaps, or maybe even something serious and sincere about people, but he had already wandered out of the room.

Rob Williams is a mercenary copywriter and copy editor who currently lives above a meat market in the East Village. You can find more of his stories at www.itmustbebobby.com.

Photo by Mike Baird 

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.
 

I read the Timeses, the Newses, the AM New Yorks. I watch the Ernie Anostoses, listen to the Brian Lehrers, check out the NY1s, peruse the Gothamists, and call the 311s, only to end up hearing the same message, the ongoing drumbeat pounding in my brain in 12-8 time.

THE-BED-BUGS-ARE-COM-ING! THE-BED-BUGS-ARE-COM-ING!

I can’t see them, but I know they’re everywhere. A WPIX headline screamed bed bugs have reached an “epidemic scale!” And that was based on a survey of pest control companies. Who knows the bed bug scourge better than those paid to remove bed bugs?

Uh-oh. Kevin. That guy I play basketball with on Sunday. He had marks all over his legs. Were those nocturnal nibbles? Were they embedded in his skin? Was it contagious when I brushed by him off a baseline pick? Is it too late? Has our mattress been infiltrated? My wife can’t sleep, has her blissful slumber shield been penetrated? Why am I so itchy? Won’t those little bastards be attracted to their own kind? Must the Moses be bed set on fire like the burning bush that MADE HIS VERY NAME!

I need to settle down. I sit on the couch and thumb through a newspaper.

Oh no.

THE-POS-SUMS-ARE-COM-ING! THE-POS-SUMS-ARE-COMING!

Wait, the possums aren’t coming. They’re already here. Years ago, the city let them loose in Coney Island to eat the vermin. And yet the rats still rule, so soon, possums will overrun Brooklyn.

Brooklyn.

Where I eat, and sleep, and wake up in a sweaty possum-induced panic attack where the wily beasts gnaw on all available wooden rails. These possums have a mouth full of 50 sharp teeth, tend to exude a foul odor, and can occasionally contract rabies. It’s true. It has to be true, it says so right there in the New York Post. Tiny creatures that prey on tiny creatures in the night. And since the rats are clearly onto the possums that can only mean we’re also breeding super-rats with a taste for blood and discarded Nathan’s wieners!

I throw down the Post and pick up New York magazine, sweet arch too-cool-for-school New York. You’ll calm my frayed nerves while pointing me to the hippest spot for fried risotto balls with oxtail… Wait, what!?! “A whole mess of COYOTES are already living in the city!” Coyotes are carnivorous and dine on small mammals, lock the door and holster the deadbolts!

Needing to clear the cobwebs, I go out to breathe fresh air. I take a walk downtown. Well, what do we have here? Police barricades, a handful of gawkers, a decrepit building. Sweet mother of mercy, it’s the jihad mosque! The crumbling shell of a cut-rate coat outfit soon to be home to an evil gang of super villains hell-bent on blowing up our very way of life! On a quiet street where I may soon want to enjoy a four-wheeled stroll no less!

Sure, the terror mosque doesn’t look scary right now. In fact, the only noise being raised is by an old man in a white linen suit with a sign that clearly states what we’re all thinking: Thank You New York Police Department. You protect and serve us and keep us safe and the NYPD is the real heroes and the police and the firefighters should never be forgotten on 9/11. God bless the NYPD for all of your dedicated service and for keeping us safe and we our honored that you protect and serve us—

The sign says it all, or it would if a bored-off-his-ass cop didn’t ask the dangerous septuagenarian to take his righteous cause to the designated city “protest pens” down the block. “I’m on your side,” rages the man. “That’s the rules. Whaddya gonna’ do?” says one of Gotham’s finest. Things are getting ugly, voices may or may not be raised, blood may or may not be shed, and what is that falling from the sky? Is that? Is THAT!?!

Oh. It’s a D’Agostinos bag.

Holing up in my apartment seems to be the only solution. Stay vigilant by staring out the window. My oh my, it’s getting dark awfully early. Why is the sky green? Is that tree blowing sideways?

MAYDAY! Water, water, water, everywhere. Batten down the hatches! Or at least shut the windows. All the sudden, I’m living inside a car wash. Is that an air raid siren? Tornado? Tornado! TORNADO! Mass hysteria. Human sacrifice. Dogs and cats living together! Tornados scoop up the young and transport them to far away lands populated with trolls, robots, man-eating beasts, scorceresses, and mad geniuses with oversized heads.

What’s next? A giant terrorist made of marshmallow? Raining down the sweet sticky soot-covered poison to be devoured by all the good little boys and girls. A Stay-Puft Pied Piper, driving children to their sugary demise like so many super-rats, uber-possums, and monster-coyotes escaping this mortal plane in the East River?

Exhale. Exhale. Exhale.

Focus on what’s important right here, right now. Ignore the theoretical demons. Get grounded, goddamnit. Don’t look at the downed trees, that’s just Mother Nature messing with you.

Ahh, yes. I will take the hospital tour. Perfect thing to get me out from underneath the covers. Beth Israel seems ideal. Lots of helpful information, clean facility, nice rooms, friendly staff, plenty of watchful eyes so nobody will come in and TAKE WHAT?!?

I never even thought of that. Does that actually happen? Oh my God, that Lindbergh snatcher. He was from the Bronx. Are his offspring still roaming streets and corridors, hidden in the shadows of our look-straight-ahead mind-your-own-business metropolis?

Pull yourself together, man. Funny…Is that the guy that was sleeping in the corner during the introduction? Maybe he got there early after a long day at work, but why is flying solo? Don’t let it get the best of you. It’s not unreasonable that a slovenly middle-age 300-lb. man with Coke bottle glasses in a dirty maintenance worker shirt who was snoozing in a chair not ten minutes ago is wandering around the happy floor without a female companion.

What’s that you say? It’s not normal? He had to be removed from outside the nursery when the host asked where his partner was and he loudly responded in his reedy voice, “Oh, my wife has to be with me to take this tour?”

SECURITY!!!

Our guide apologizes, explaining that she was thrown off. Yes, the mystery man was wearing a hospital employee shirt, but not for Beth Israel. He works at the V.A. Hospital in the Bronx.

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!

Scary scary scary things everywhere.

New York City, my home, our home, soon to be someone’s hometown can be a terrifying place.

Truth be told, I am afraid.

Pleasantly, excitedly, childishly, the-only-fear-is-fear-itselfedly, infantilely, deliriously, crazily, end-of-the-world-as-we-know-itedly, sublimely afraid.

But it’s got nothing to do with rodents, Muslims, funnel clouds, infant-filchers, or any other phantom menace lurking throughout our great city.

Hey, bedbugs! Listen up! You can all go get fucked.

I ain’t afraid of no ghosts.

Patrick J. Sauer is a freelance writer for Fast Company, ESPN, Popular Science, Smith, AOL and Huffington Post Humor. He is the author of The Complete Idiot's Guide to the American Presidents. Originally from Billings, Montana, he now lives in Brooklyn. For more, check out patrickjsauer.com.

“He’s great,” I say, “But it’s way more overwhelming than I thought it would be.”
Her face instantly screws up in anger.

“You have to keep him! You knew what you were getting into,” she sputters with contempt.

I’m so caught off guard that I answer, “Actually, now that it’s real, I—”

“You bought him! You’re committed to him!!”

I completed enough inversions in class to be mellowed with serotonin; yoga really does work, at least for one of us. Instead of clobbering her, I say, “I’m committed to his spirit.”

She winces, turns and walks away.

As I watch her cross the street, my jaw drops and I remember that she once mentioned she was adopted. I have just met one of those episodes where someone takes what’s all inside them and spills it out all over you. People have a lot of feelings about attachment.

*

My current entrance into the animal kingdom begins as I am standing on a crowded street corner in Manhattan. When I step off the curb and turn my head to see if there are any oncoming cars, I find myself gazing into the eyes of a pint size pooch in a shoulder bag. The liquid brown eyes meet mine lovingly and then I watch as the tiniest pink rose petal tongue licks his owner’s upper arm. She coos to him and he wiggles and licks some more. The light changes. As we walk, I ask her,

“How old ?”

“She’s three months and she’s the love of my life.” She smiles. She seems happy. They seem happy.

I start thinking about getting a dog. Now as I walk around the city, I feel like I am seeing wet dog noses under armpits on every block.

I have had a recent loss which is what prompts me to focus on a pet in the first place. I was a caretaker of my terminally ill sister for almost two years, not to mention throughout her entire life because she had some disabilities. It was often hard but the last part was an ordeal. Now she is gone. I want new warmth. I like dogs. Dogs have personalities. I call a breeder a friend of mine bought a puppy from and make plans to pick up a black poodle puppy when he is 8 weeks old. My friend is excited imagining play dates for the “cousins.”

When the time arrives, I drive into Pennsylvania and meet Bonnie the breeder in a suburban parking lot, a halfway distance point from her home to mine. She emerges from her car with a crate and hands me an infant. I begin to try and make ‘Rio’ feel safe. He has just been taken from all that he has known and I can feel his jangling nerves in my hands.

“If he cries for a night or two,” Bonnie says, “Don’t pick him up and he’ll get used to it. It’s better for them.”

I have had quite a few conversations with Bonnie. At night, she watches the puppy litters on a monitor with her husband and granddaughter. She gushes with pleasure when she describes the pups sleeping next to one another on their backs all intertwined. She loves these dogs. Knowing this fortifies me to withstand Rio’s cries. Bonnie is like the “Supernanny” for canines.

When I put Rio to bed that night, I see that he crawls onto an enclosed corner and not into his fleece bed. The next day, I stand in PETCO and read, “Potty Training your Pup.” Last week, I was reading D.H. Lawrence and doing freelance work.

I decide to buy a crate. Dogs are cave animals, descended from wolves (I did know that) and they can feel comfort in small dark places. I line the crate with terrycloth, fleece and an old sweat shirt and a few of his toys. He is reluctant to go in and stares at me intensely popping his head out several times. I feel like a jailer as I snap the door closed and lilt, “Home, home.” All the instructions, say to pick clear appropriate words and repeat them. My friends did not crate train or stopped because it felt cruel. ‘Muffie didn’t like the crate.’ Muffie is now three and still pee-pees, etc. on the floor whenever. Not good. I don’t want an anxious dog so I am clear, calm, consistent and devoted. If I make this crate a haven, he will have that for his whole life. I meditate, do art, I get the need for safe havens. He whimpers for a long ten minutes. The next night when I lock him in his cell, I mean crate, I play new age music and he whimpers less. He’s getting the hang of it. A few days later, he voluntarily rests inside his crate with the door open. I feel so successful, I actually have a flash of becoming an animal trainer.

I cancel plans the next day as I realize that it’s really not fair to leave a new puppy for more than four hours, especially if you are crate training. Rio only has the hang of doing potty on paper if he is in a fenced-in area. If he is out of the fenced-in area and the crate I have to watch his every move and direct him to the paper. Some books suggest keeping him on a leash and walking him to the paper when he starts sniffing. I find that if I do this and look away a moment too long, a puddle appears. Then I have to say, “No,” firmly with kindness, dip paper in the pee, bring it to the proper paper and say my simple chosen phrase, “Good Potty.” After a few days, he’s still having accidents about twenty percent of the time. My hands reek of Baby Angel wipes. Every elimination requires, a supportive ‘Good Potty’ and a special treat. I am squatting and gently correcting him continually. My gluts never looked so good but it is so time-consuming. Animals are poop machines. A neighbor wisely suggested, “Roll up your carpets for the first six months, at least.” Bless her for that advice.

After another day or two, I now have paper on the floor in each room when Rio is with me. I have to remember to close off all other rooms. He is smart and he is really trying. If he is having fun, he gets distracted, looks at me lovingly and pisses on the parquet. Again, I kick into the program. I scoop him up, say, “No, No,” dip paper in pee-pee, move him to the proper paper and lilt, ‘Good Potty.” I run into a friend in my building who lost a younger brother some years back. She says, “I don’t know how you are doing it. After my brother’s illness and passing I didn’t want to take care of anything. It took me a long time to even think about having children, I was so tired.” I feel like falling into her understanding arms and licking, I mean kissing her cheek.

Rio is the most adorable little thing imaginable but it’s only about thirty percent pleasure. The rest is custodial and I just got released from custodial. The balance isn’t so hot. Uh, oh. Before he arrived, I had ‘peripheral consciousness.’ I knew it would be work to have a dog but I only glanced over at that prospect. As a little girl, I had a dog that I loved but my involvement consisted of cuddling him, hanging out and being nagged to walk him. The end. Now I am steeped in the real experience and living how it feels. Every morning Rio wants me the minute I am up. Even if I wait, how long can I really wait? I have to feed him, wash his face and go through the good potty routine. I am running back and forth several times a day to insure that the training is on track. I give him Reiki energy to calm him, a toy to chew when he teethes on my fingers. When I audited a class last week, it ran over time and I started checking my watch, waiting for someone to finish presenting before I could slip out. I grabbed a cab. Twenty dollars. Over the weekend, I attended an opening and couldn’t stay to finish dinner without being uneasy picturing him tearing up his newspaper and spilling his water bowl from loneliness and boredom. I feel bad having him eliminate on newspaper. I will switch to wee-wee pads. After nine days, I wake up with this lyric running through my head, ‘Yes, he’s warm, yes, he’s sweet, yes, it’s poo-poo at my feet.’ No more Bob Dylan lyrics cascading through my mind, only Barney look-alikes.

As I express doubt, one friend tells me she always has guilt if she is out more than eight hours. That’s a lot of guilt. Another friend with an older puppy shares that she both craves the affection and dreads the neediness when she is tired and not in the mood to play. Dog as lifestyle. It’s not the country where he could go outside on his own, ever. I carry on despite all my doubts circling.

I take Rio for his New York vet appointment. In the waiting room, I overhear an older woman with a Yorkie, bargaining to reduce her bill.

“How old is the dog ?” I ask.

“Four months and he’s costing a fortune. He had ear mites that were misdiagnosed and this is our third trip over here. I hope it gets easier,” she says. Then she picks Angela up and squeals, “Don’t we hope it gets easier, don’t we?” The dog licks all up in her nostrils. She’s happy. I’m getting queasy.

As Angela and her owner leave, another woman is looking morose.

“Dog or cat ?” I ask.

“Bunnies.”

“What’s up with the bunnies.?”

“Bunnies are great pets,” she answers. “But he has a chipped tooth.”

Turns out ‘Fluffer’ has a penchant for eating metal. I hadn’t even considered the possibility of dental work.

Once inside with the doctor, Rio is a charmer, 2lbs, 7 ounces on the baby scale. He has beautiful long legs, gobbles his treats, licks the doctor’s hands and goes rather easily into his carrying case. Everything checks out fine. As I’m paying the bill, I overhear a receptionist discussing the mass on a two year old dog’s nose. It requires surgery. I flash back on the bunny in need of dental work. Ca-chink, ca-chink. There goes my summer vacation.

On my way home from the vet, I return my friend Jean’s call and she hears my anxiety. “I’d never get a dog, I’m too practical,” she says. A day later, she is sitting in my living room with Rio hopping around, nuzzling her and retrieving his American Kennel toy on command. Jean is originally from China and sometimes changes up some grammar. She looks up at me, “He so smart and cute. Oh, Martine, you create dilemma.”

When I walk Jean to the subway, I stop in at the local pet store. While paying for an organic chewie, which Rio loves, I share with the serene animal lover owner that this adoption may be more than what I had expected. “Do you know of people who might be looking just in case I decide to…?” The owner takes my card sympathetically and tapes it to the side of the cash register, “Sometimes people do ask.” Wow, this is weighing on me. At night, after playing with Rio which is fun and giving him Reiki calming energy which relaxes him to mush, I put him in his crate. My head hits the pillow and I’m out before Charlie Rose announces his guests.

A few friends offer support with e-mails:

‘After all you have had to do? Get a fish, it swims, it moves, it’s not an infant, it’s enough.’

XO, B

Another is babysitting rodents for a neighborhood kid:

‘I was serving my nocturnal pals their complete hamster buffet and decided to get creative. I gave them a lettuce leaf. They pounced and began devouring it. Rapaciously. It's the most enthusiasm they've ever shown. Now I'm worried that I've inadvertently introduced them to the crack cocaine of the rodent world. There must be a reason why fresh greens aren't on the menu. What if it causes diarrhea and they dehydrate? I'll have to explain to Ryan that Tom and Jerry died on my watch. Maybe I'll take the low road and blame it on Pete.’

XX

He's like a big fluff ball -- I think I have bigger ones than him under my bed. But, yeah a huge responsibility -- tough decision I'll bet. My sister says dogs are harder than kids because they never grow up and fluff balls are self-sufficient. Mine grow all on their own.

Marie

A couple of days pass and I receive a call from a woman referred by the pet shop. She has a ten year old daughter and they have had some bad luck over the last few months with puppy mills and a breeder. I explain that I haven’t made a decision yet but she says they’d like to visit anyway; just in case. The mom remarks on how calm Rio can be as he uses his toy to relax around new company. I feel proud.

Five minutes after they leave, the phone rings, these words are recorded, “We definitely would love the dog if you feel it’s right for you. Otherwise, we would love to have the name of the breeder.” Oh, God. ‘I create dilemma.’

I keep connecting to Rio and waiting for the answer. That night we lay around together and I stare into his large black eyes. He is soulful and kind. Just watching him yawn is a joy. He really is like the most adorable stuffed toy except he’s alive. Can I do this?

One morning, a few days later, when I am washing his eyes, I glance at the clock and am running late. I place Rio down to get my coffee and check my Week at a Glance. Damn, I have to cancel dinner plans because I can’t be away for 9 hours. I look back at him and see he missed the paper and I am down for the poop. Do I truly want to do this?

Rio and I have to break up. It’s not that I don’t love him enough. Timing is everything and this just isn’t the right time. When I tell a friend that I am writing about my ambivalence, he nods and says, “I totally get it but be prepared for hate mail.” Still, I have to go with what feels right for me, for us.

My mind is a montage: my neighbor who lost her brother flashes, I’m off the hook, I see the woman from my yoga class, I’m on the hook, ‘You knew what you were getting into!!’ Well actually, I didn’t until now. Now I really know. A dog is a baby, forever. I call Rio’s new family and give them their good news.

Zoe and her parents come for a play date (recommended by the pet store owner) so that Rio can get more familiar with them. As Zoe enters, she asks if she can give Rio a stuffed duck that she has held under her armpit for an hour so that he would know her scent. I am so moved and reassured by her gesture that I feel like sniff, sniffing and going home with her too. Who wouldn’t want to be around this kid? She looks at me, full eye contact, ‘Thank you so much. Thank you so much.’ She is a love bath. And they call it puppy love.

The next morning as promised, I deliver Rio. I actually cry in the lobby of their building. I’ll miss him. If I was ready for a dog, I couldn’t have a better one. Once upstairs, I am uncharacteristically awkward when they show me Rio’s new digs. I accidentally knock my arm on a glass door. The dad asks if I’m alright? I am but it’s emotional. I get balanced again; peaceful though sad.

A few days later Zoe e-mails to say, ‘He is so great!!’

She invites me to visit anytime. I will call her.

Now as I walk around the city and see cute pooches in fashionable shoulder bags, I hope that the shoulder they are under is the right one for them to be leaning on.
 

We were speeding south on the New Jersey Turnpike, and it was a sunny day in early June 2004. McAdams, then the director of the New York Audubon Society, had invited my companion, Alexis Rockman, and me to join him, and an ornithologist, Paul Kurlinger, on a survey of black crown night herons at an 80-acre refuge known as Prall’s Island.  

One of three islands wedged into the slender estuary known as Arthur Kill, which winds between western New Jersey and the eastern shore of Staten Island, Prall’s Island had once been a thriving bird sanctuary, boasting healthy populations of nesting egrets and herons. But then a spill in 1990 leaked 567,000 gallons of heating oil into the estuary. With their food supply contaminated, an estimated 700 wading birds had died. Since then, according to McAdams, nesting activity along Arthur Kill had been, at best, erratic.

McAdams gave his name at the security booth of a Conoco Philips-Bayway refinery in Linden, before introducing us to a heavyset communications coordinator, who ushered us down to a dock crowded with towering oil storage tanks.

It struck me as odd that we were embarking on a birding expedition from the headquarters of an oil refinery, especially since the refinery’s previous owner, Exxon, had been responsible for the calamitous 1990 spill. But when I asked McAdams about this, he brushed me off. Of the Conoco folks, he said, “They may be the bad guys, but they’ve been very nice to us. And they always let us use their boat.”

The ride across the Kill usually took ten minutes, but when Conoco’s captain suggested a tour of Prall’s periphery, we were happy to oblige. The Kill was calm, albeit filthy. While McAdams and Kurlinger discussed their plans for counting nests, Alexis, a painter, enthused about our first-hand encounter with what he called “toxic real estate.” Spotting a motorboat with a NYC Department of Parks and Recreation logo, McAdams explained that Prall’s belonged to the parks department, but a 30-year lease gave the Audubon limited access in the name of science and education.

Prall’s Island was originally called Dongan’s Island, after a New York Governor Thomas Dongan, who took office in 1688. Toward the mid-1700’s the island, a former center for cultivating feed for livestock, was renamed Prall’s, in reference either to its former Dutch-born owner, or a prominent Staten Island farmer, according to the Parks’ website. When business in New York harbor boomed more than a century later, Arthur Kills became an industrial hub with more shipping traffic than the Panama Canal. Prall’s Island, by contrast, slipped into neglect.

“What was amazing about Prall’s Island was that so many birds found shelter in the middle of these very, very active waterways,” said McAdams. “But everyone was so busy working that no one paid much attention.”

Proposed for a waste processing plant in 1916, Prall’s briefly assumed center stage in a political battle between the plant’s developer and Staten Island’s residents, according to an excellent book, “The Other Islands of New York City,” by Sharon Seitz and Stuart Miller. Eventually a waste processing plant was proposed elsewhere, and apart from the two World Wars, when Prall’s provided anchor for occasional military ships, it saw little human activity.

In its relative obscurity it become a haven for wading birds until the 1960’s, when the waters of the surrounding Kill became so polluted that, according to Seitz and Miller, the fish and marine life providing the waders’ nourishment could no longer survive.

The birds proved resilient. Shortly after the passing of the Clean Air act in 1972, said McAdams, wildlife conservationists once again began to see birds building nests there. In addition, hundreds of thousands of migrating birds were using Prall’s and its neighboring islands as a seasonal sanctuary. Among the many birds that once called Prall’s island home are the glossy ibis, the snowy egret, the cattle egret, the great egret, the little blue heron, and the black-crowned night heron. Although none of these birds are endangered, this rookery in New York Harbor is considered the most important in the state, according to Seitz and Miller,

As our boat nudged into soggy marshland surrounding this former idyll, Alexis and I jumped off, and immediately sank into shin-deep mud. From the bow of our boat, the captain called, “You guys all set?”

McAdams arranged a time for our pick up. Then the motorboat pulled away, leaving us in its mucky wake.

Taking the lead in our march toward solid ground, Alexis exclaimed, “I love the contradiction of a bird sanctuary in a toxic waste dump,” his gleeful disgust in direct proportion to the distance his feet sank in the dark brown ooze.

“It’s the dirtiest part of New York,” agreed McAdams, gamely, “but that’s kind of a good thing, because there’re no people.”

Due to limited access on Prall’s Island, no trails had ever been cleared there. Alexis climbed up the riverbank into a thicket. Then he reached for my hand. That was when I noticed, to my terrified astonishment, that the thicket was completely overrun with poison ivy.

“I think I mentioned, they have a little poison ivy problem,” said McAdams.

Indeed, earlier that morning we had dressed, according to McAdams’ instructions, in long pants, long sleeved windbreakers, and hiking boots. But somehow in my excitement over what had sounded like an exotic excursion in the out-of-doors, I had ignored the possible degree of the infestation. Poison ivy snaked through every plant in sight, it’s shiny red leaves dangling from every raspberry bush, bramble, tree, and nettle. In order to count nests, McAdams, Kurlinger, Alexis and I would each have to find our own path through the dense underbrush.

The others didn't appear particularly worried, but glancing up and down the shoreline, I felt suddenly lightheaded, all of the alarm bells in my body signaling danger. A horror movie starring poison ivy, as a human predator would probably look like this, I thought. I considered my choices. Waiting offshore in the mud, and having McAdams send the boat around to fetch me when the time came, sounded pathetic and boring. Also, in the company of such enthusiastic naturalists—all men—I was pretty loath to play the role of helpless damsel. So I followed Alexis inland, my body physically catapulting forward, as my mind drifted up to the treetops. From up there, at least, I was relieved to note, the poison ivy looked much smaller.

Prall’s Island is so narrow that, depending on the density of the trees and underbrush, you can sometimes see across to both coasts from the center. Kurlinger suggested that we divide into two groups, the better to maximize our total nest sightings. Sending McAdams and Alexis in one direction, he suggested that I follow him. When Alexis and McAdams disappeared into the underbrush, my heart fluttered erratically. In the canopy of leaves above, birds fluttered and squawked. Kurlinger rattled off their names—woodcocks, egrets, starlings. Whenever he spotted a heron nest I scribbled a notch in my notebook, in the hope of distracting myself. We had counted our 11th nest when it occurred to me that my pen was probably contaminated, and my notebook. The underbrush thickened. “They should make trails,” muttered Kurlinger, yanking apart the young shoots of a gray birch tree, and shimmying in between. Several steps ahead, he called out “PI at eye level.”

PI? I’d never heard it called that, but immediately I saw it, snaking like a cobra from above. With less than a foot of space to edge through sideways, I wondered, did the PI touch my hair? The underbrush was thick with nettles, and thorny vines that kept scratching my legs through my pants. If any of these branches had brushed against poison ivy, I realized, the nasty oils were probably now inside my clothes.

“How allergic are you to this stuff?” Kurlinger asked, as if my terror was finally dawning on him.

“Very.”

“Ever had any shots?”

I nodded. One winter, I told him, long before leaves were even visible, I was walking in the woods, fully dressed in a turtleneck, long pants, winter coat and boots. I caught the worst case of the poison ivy of my life. Having somehow penetrated my layers of winter gear, the nasty little plant had managed to cover my face, neck, chest, and back with a nasty rash of bumps and pustules. The rash spread under my arms, behind my knees, even into my belly button. After a month of itchy hell, it began spreading into my eyes, my mouth, and down my throat. Finally, a doctor agreed to give me a shot of some steroid considered too unhealthy for routine use.

Kurlinger had been listening intently, and for a while all I heard was the snapping of branches and the dull thud of our boots in the leaf litter.

“I see,” he said, finally. “Well. Huh.” Then he told me about someone descended from the original owners—the Dongans—whom he’d invited to Prall’s a week before. Apparently this guy Dongan hadn’t even known how to ID poison ivy. “I guess he’s okay, since he hasn’t called,” mused Kurlinger. “Then again, he doesn’t have my number.”

On several occasions we could hear Alexis and McAdams thrashing toward us. Each time, Kurlinger would instruct them to keep their distance. His motive for dividing us up, he said, had been somewhat selfish. He was hoping they would flush all of the birds in our direction. “You’re a quiet walker,” he told me.

On the forest floor, Kurlinger spotted remnants of a heron’s egg, which he said could have fallen from a nest after hatching. “Of course, it also could have been eaten by a raccoon,” he added. Further along, another shattered eggshell looked even more promising. I imagined a heron chick learning to fly. Kurlinger turned the shell over in his fingers. He believed the chick had hatched, he said. But fledglings also presented easy targets for predators.

There were fewer nesting trees than there had been, he observed, but there were also more nests than he’d seen nearly a decade. Many of the nests were old, but several were also newer, suggesting that our black crown night herons were, at least, attempting a comeback.

At a small clearing, I noticed off to our left, that the sun was much brighter. “Is the coastline through there?” I asked.

It was.

Was there poison ivy along the coastline? I wanted to know.

“Not so much,” he said. “You may have to cross a barrier of the stuff to get there. But on the other side you should be okay.”

I left Kurlinger to his nest counting and made my way toward the light.

“I’ll call out to you if I find any nests,” said Kurlinger.

Of the countless times I’d come into contact with poison ivy, I’d often managed to prevent an outbreak, by washing my hands with soap and warm water. On Prall’s Island, unfortunately, I had no soap, and the fetid water didn’t exactly encourage hand washing. A scallop-edged yellow foam ran along the length of the shoreline. Clusters of small the rocks were covered with black slime. I saw Kurlinger through the trees, more or less alongside of me.

“You think it’s alright to wash your hands in this?”

“If I were you I would. Just don’t lick your fingers after.”

I bent down and dipped my hands in the toxic filth. The only other exposed part of my body--my face--I didn’t dare let near the water.

Kurlinger disappeared toward the island’s interior, and I picked my way quietly past the garbage that littered the shoreline--empty beer cans and plastic bags. Someone called to me from the underbrush—a man, Mike who had been dropped with several others at the far end of the island. My crew had been looking for him. He asked if I wanted to join them. I said thank you, but no.

Eventually Kurlinger called to me. “Just keep heading north,” he said. I didn’t have a compass. I continued in the same direction. The boat with the Parks Department logo droned past at a distance. Not far from the tip of the island, a long wooden beam had washed up along the shore. I decided to take a break and sit down. An old apothecary bottle laid half buried in slime. I fished it out with a stick.

Eventually I heard the sound of a motor. Moments later, our boat captain waved. Alexis, McAdams, and Kurlinger were all clad in bright orange life jackets. All told, they’d counted a minimum of fifteen and a maximum of thirty nests.

Back at the oil refinery, we sat parked in a steamy van, while a Conoco official went to make a phone call. The first sign of sweat activated what I immediately recognized as my body’s response to poison ivy. My skin began to tingle. The tingling began to itch.

I needed to scrub my entire body with warm soapy water as soon as possible. But we weren’t authorized to leave until all of our permits and papers were approved and signed off on. Kurlinger said he needed to go talk to someone. My heart raced. To kill time while we waited, our driver told us a story.

In December 1989, he said, months after the disastrous spill in Valdez, Alaska, Exxon wanted to assess what the response would be if there were a spill along Arthur Kill. “All of us contractors--we had the same response,” said the driver, who declined to give his name on account of his current employment with Conoco. “We said we’d come in with one boat, maybe two, and a couple of men.”

After deeming these responses insufficient, he said, Exxon acknowledged that they were not adequately prepared for a disaster in Arthur Kill. They planned to train eight people a week for a period of about two years, he said. By the end of the first week, he admitted, “I’d learned a few things.” But then, two weeks later, on January 2nd, a spill was reported. So soon after New Years, he said, it was difficult to find contractors willing to work, making response even slower than it would have been otherwise. “I was one of the people who showed up,” he said.

The air was cooler than the water, he said, so there was fog everywhere, making visibility extremely low. When he finally saw the water, he said, he was shocked to discover that it was completely green. He described blindly motoring through the water, trying to locate the source of the leak. Then he spotted a geyser, rising like a fountain about three feet above the water. He said he and his men began skimming. “We skimmed and skimmed for days,” he said, in accordance with Exxon’s recent—but limited--training. “Turns out, oil has a pretty thin surface,” he said. “We skimmed about 6 inches deep,” then the water looked clear.

When Kurlinger returned, the driver escorted us to our car. I ran into a bathroom reserved for truckers, and scoured my face and hands with warm water and apricot scrub. The following day, after repeated showers and scrubbing, a dermatologist administered a steroid shot in my arm, in addition to prescribing a topical foam and a pill, a powerful antihistamine the better to stave off a reaction.

Now six years later, it occurs to me that my skin fared much better than the nesting herons on Prall’s island. In the spring of 2007, an infestation of Asian longhorn beetles forced Parks to reduce nesting trees on the island to their stem, according to a 2009 Audubon survey. McAdams is now an associate director of philanthropy at the New York Conservancy, because, as he said recently, “I learned at the Audubon that money was a big limiting factor. According to Susan Elbin, an ornithologist, and currently the NYC Audubon’s director of conservation, some 30,000 gray birch trees were chopped down. “Then they chipped them. Then they burned the chips,” she said.

As if this were not trouble enough, the island has since become rife with nest predators such as red-tailed hawks and raccoons she said. Although the future still holds promise for herons seeking to raise their young on Prall’s Island, their projected presence depends on several key factors, according to Ms. Elbin. “One big question mark is what will happen when the Fresh Kills Park gets up and running,” she said, referring to the 2,200 urban park scheduled to open in the next year down the channel from Arthur Kill. Predators present a second problem. “But even if you get them off,” she said, “there’s still oil embedded in the sediment, which needs to get covered over.”

Yet Susan remains optimistic. “At one time the islands in Arthur Kill were among the most productive in the whole harbor heron system,” she said. “We have great hopes of attracting birds back. We want Prall’s Island once again to be a thriving colony.”

Her words reminded me of a particular moment in my 2004 visit that I will always cherish. I had just rinsed the mud from the apothecary bottle I’d found in the Kills, when I accidentally touched my pants. Certain the fabric was contaminated with poison ivy, I waded in a little deeper into the mud to rinse my hands.

That was when I saw the birds—hundreds of them—egrets, ibises, and herons. McAdams, Alexis and Kurlinger—or maybe Mike’s group—had flushed them out. Gazing up at the sky, I watched the birds cross paths with airplanes taking off from Newark Airport. I’d gotten lost. I didn’t care. For that moment, at least, all the risks I’d taken were worth it.

Dorothy Spears is a New York-based writer and arts journalist. Her anthology, Flight Patterns: A Century of Stories About Flying, was published last year by Open City Books.

After coming from a long twenty-four hour bus ride across Middle America in order to sight see and learn what it means to travel on a budget. I was fortunate enough to stay with friends in Manhattan. You can’t get any better than that.

My friend Dana, who used to be my co-worker years ago, would be out of town with her children (a “mini vakay,” as she would say) but her husband would be home, within reason, after working at the office. “He’s a lawyer, you know, he’s not home much. You and Jay will practically have the whole place to yourself. The only catch,” she warned, as she gulped loudly into the phone, “is that Ryan is really anal and really O.C.D but he is also a lot of fun.”

Anal and O.C.D? Those are the only two things we’d have to worry about? For a free place to stay in Manhattan for two full weeks, with no nagging and annoying kids running around, and no one to answer to but a somewhat anal and O.C.D lawyer? Wow! We had it made.

“Ryan will be there to let you in and show you around. He’ll give you our spare key so you guys can come and go as you please. Just make sure, above all else, anything he may tell you, take care of the cats.”

“Cats? No problem,” I assured her even though I never had a pet in my life, I liked cats. I liked pets, I just never had one. Coming from a military upbringing, all the constant traveling and moving, pets were a luxury and my mom never allowed them in the house. She was afraid we wouldn’t be able to give them all the love and proper attention they deserved. She’d always say, “If you love the pets so much, love them at a distance. They don’t need the turmoil of moving constantly. We don’t want the dogs chained the fence or the cat locked in the bathroom all day.”

***

The day of our visit Ryan was busy at work and texted a message that he wouldn’t be home to show us around but he left a key with the super and a list of instructions on the coffee table.

We arrived to apartment of sticky notes. It was a monochromatic collage of confetti, “Do not answer the phone.” “Let the fax run.” “Bagels are in the bread box” and a particularly odd one in bold, blocked letters, “CATS ARE PRISIONERS.”

The two little fur balls that I assumed would be no problem were not your average cat. They were huge like Mancoons. They looked to be about twenty to thirty pounds each and were full of hair and very active. As soon as we entered the apartment, the cats rushed over to greet us. They jumped on us, smelled us and purred as we petted them. “Nice cats” I said to them. “Very nice cats.”

We made ourselves comfortable, unpacked our clothes, and followed the instructions that were placed on the coffee table; READ ALL THE STICKY NOTES. We grabbed a bagel, made a pot of coffee, and fed the cats. Both of the cats’ bowls had sticky notes with their name and type of food preference; Binky: Wet food; Science Diet, Slim: Dry; Physician’s choice. I didn’t know what to think, for a minute I realized I had to figure out which cat was which and have them adhere to their strict dietary guidelines. I hoped for just a minute that the cats could read the sticky notes and eat accordingly.

I looked for a name tag collar on the cats and only found that they had been monitored for rabies, neither of them had their name on their collar. They were both boys, both furry and both trying to eat each other’s food. “They’re gay cats,” I remember Dana saying, “Very close.”

We decided we wanted to explore the city. Having fed the mancoon-like cats without adhering to their dietary needs (we couldn’t figure out which was which), we opened the blinds as indicated by a sticky, “Please open the blinds for the cats when you leave.” And when we got ready to leave, the door had a sticky note that read, “Remember-CATS ARE PRISIONERS,” and another sticky note underneath, “They must never get out,” and yet another, “EVER.”

I rushed around the apartment trying to find them and found them nestled in their large five foot kitty condo. Perfect timing, I thought. We opened the door and as soon as the door opened, the cats bolted out the door like jack rabbits in the wild.

‘No problem, I can handle this,’ I thought to myself. There is a main door and they won’t get outside, if I can just catch them at the building entrance everything will be fine and Ryan and Dana will never know.

A large shipment was coming in; the main door was propped open with a tiny rubber door jam. The cats maneuvered themselves around the assortment of boxes, the dolly and the delivery man. They got outside and ran around aimlessly. They were free. No longer imprisoned by the anal lawyer and his obsession with sticky notes.

At some point I thought I spotted one of them. But it was a stray, a skinny gray homely looking cat with a persistent meow. Poor thing looked homeless and hungry. I walked up and down East 87th street. I looked in and out of the dry cleaners, laundry mats, door crevices and even panicked and started looking under cars and behind planters.

After a two hour search of the area, we decided to go back to the apartment. As we walked back, we thought of a variety of excuses “the super let us in and the door stayed open” or “the door was open when we arrived.” All the excuses, weak and unacceptable and we were left to face our fate.

We got back to the apartment, opened the main door and saw two large fluffy cats lying in front of the apartment door. Blinky and Slim looked tired and worn as they had their adventure in the city too. We quickly unlocked the apartment, shooed them in and decided to call for take out. Ryan may never know the cats had their day in the city, and we would never tell…but it would rest easier on our conscience if we could at least have dinner waiting for him when he arrived home.

Lesley Clark, author of The Absence of Colour, is obsessed with reruns of Seinfeld and all things New York. She is currently at work on a novel.

I immediately think of The Thorn Birds, which I read when I was a kid. I know it was meant to be a sweeping epic love story, but the scene that made the greatest impression on me was the one in which the main character, as a little girl, catches lice from a classmate. She has bugs crawling all over her hair. Her mother chops it all off and douses her head with kerosene and lye soap while calling her names like “dirty little grub,” leaving the girl with oozing red bald patches all over her head. All the family members have to wash their hair with kerosene and lye soap, and the mother boils all the bedding and sprays everything with kerosene. The girl’s father and brothers run the family of the classmate out of town, and her father tells her she may not associate with any children other than her brothers ever again. But–The Thorn Birds takes place in rural New Zealand in 1917. This is Manhattan, early 21st century. How did lice get here? And where does one get kerosene?

I then make the mistake of looking up lice online. Never do this. It serves no purpose to look at enlarged photographs of lice. Looking at the close-up of a person with eyelash lice, in particular, serves no purpose. It does not provide useful information, and it makes you want to throw up.

While I am riding the bus to school to fetch Meredith I manage to calm down, which is good, because the thing I keep thinking is that I’m mad at my daughter for getting lice. How could you be so careless? Didn’t I tell you to wear your hair in a ponytail after we got the notice about head lice in the school? I listen to myself and decide I sound like the mother in The Thorn Birds, so I stop calling my daughter names in my head and remind myself that this is not actually, or not entirely, her fault.

By the time I get to school I am in the proper frame of mind, which is, concerned more for her than for myself. Even though I’m the one who will have to boil all the bedding. I’m afraid she will be upset, as I know I would be if someone found larvae stuck to my hair. But when she sees me come into the nurse’s office she runs up to me and says, do you want to see my nit? And holds up an orange card with a piece of her hair taped to it. There on the hair, under the tape, is a single, tiny dark speck of something. Printed on the card is the toll-free number for “Licenders,” a company that exists solely to treat cases of head lice.

I take the card from her between thumb and forefinger and I call the number on my cell phone. The woman who answers tells me we can come right down. She starts to say something about how much it costs and I can’t believe she would even think that I care. I collect Meredith’s things and we race out to the street to hail a cab.

Licenders is at 32nd and 5th Avenue, on the 5th floor. In the cab, I wonder whether Licenders, or its equivalent, exists in other places in the world. I wonder if it is only in New York that is it possible to both 1) get lice AND 2) not know how to deal with them. I wonder if it is only in New York that people want to hire professionals for everything.

We arrive. We take the elevator to 5 and follow the signs for “Head Lites” — Licenders’ prior appellation. The “salon” is quite small, one receptionist and three stations each consisting of a high chair and a bright white halo-like light with a magnifying glass in the middle. On the wall is affixed a plastic box with copies of a pamphlet entitled “Everything You Never Wanted To Know About Lice.” There are three folding chairs along one wall, in which sit three Lice Ladies eating take-out. The place smells like food, which seems like an odd and wrong thing for a place like that to smell like. The receptionist asks for information, address and credit card, where I have traveled lately. As I fill out the form I think about the fact that the Lice Ladies are eating their lunches in the same room where they comb microscopic bugs out of people’s hair. Then I decide that an excellent working definition of a “professional” is a person who is capable of eating on the job.

They tell me to sit on one of the stools so they can check me. Until that moment it has not fully dawned on me that I could have lice, too. I sit on a stool and one of the ladies puts her lunch aside. She shines the light on my head and lifts sections of my hair with a long pick. She looks me over thoroughly. Fortunately for everyone, I don’t have lice, although my head now feels very itchy.

Meredith is asked to take my place, and the Lice Lady pins all of her hair on top of her head. Meredith has a lot of hair, thick and auburn, and it takes some time to pin it up. Then the lady unpins a few strands. She combs a mixture of Licenders Conditioner and baking soda through the section, with the proverbial fine-toothed comb. I think about the interesting impact head lice have had on the English language. Fine-toothed comb. Lousy. Nit-pick. Then the lady wipes both sides of the fine-toothed comb on a white paper towel and peers at the towel. Then she takes down another few strands. She says this will take about two hours.

The doorbell rings and I answer it because I am sitting in the folding chair closest to the door. Outside are one of Meredith’s classmates and his father, J. I don’t know them well, but I am very glad to see them, because the saying misery loves company, like most sayings, is true.

J. is a former soap opera star. I have never watched soap operas, but everyone in school knows about him and his wife, who is a current soap opera star. My sister-in-law, a soap opera devotee, once showed me a video from 1994 called “Daytime’s Most Wanted Men of Passion” that features J’s face on the cover. In that photograph, J.’s hair is thick and dark. He has blue eyes that could charge your cell phone, and a wry smile. He and his wife are both very nice, friendly people. Very down to earth. Yet there is something about them. Once they both came to a pot-luck school-related function wearing white. Everyone else was wearing black, or else gray. Her sweater, in addition to being white, was fluffy angora, and little feathery bits of angora floated around her in a cloud and settled gently on the lapels and shoulders of everyone she spoke to.

The Lice Ladies are kind of excited to see J. The one who gets to check him for lice giggles a little while she brushes his hair to one side. J. doesn’t have lice, either. J. fills out his information form.

“Oh, you were in California recently?” the receptionist asks him, reading the sheet.

“You must have brought the lice from California!” the Lice Ladies tease.

“We don’t have lice in California,” he says. “We have ringworm in California.”

“Ha ha!” the Lice Ladies laugh.

“Do you know [name of soap opera character]?” one of them asks.

“Well, you know, that isn’t actually a person,” J. says. “But I have met the actress who plays her. She’s very nice.”

“What soap are you on now?”

“I’m retired.”

“You can’t be retired! You’re too young to be retired!”

J. shrugs. I feel bad that the Lice Ladies are interrogating him.

“Good thing I’m retired,” he says. “If I were working, I wouldn’t get to bring my son to Licenders.”

Meantime, they are working away at Meredith, and pinning up J’s son’s hair.

“You’ll need clean t-shirts for the kids,” says the receptionist. “If you didn’t bring your own, you can go buy one somewhere around here.”

“Ok,” I say. J. and I get up off our folding chairs.

We walk a few blocks and see a souvenir and t-shirt shop. The sign outside the shop says “3 shirts for $10,” so we buy 3 shirts, one for each child and one for their teacher, who also has lice and is scheduled to arrive at Licenders any minute. We walk back to Licenders, passing by the Empire State Building. We briefly discuss the Empire State Building, and how we have not taken our children there, despite the fact that we live in New York City.

When we get back to Licenders, the teacher is there, and another classmate with her mother and nanny.

“I need this like a hole in the head,” says the mother. She and the nanny take turns having their heads checked.

The time passes. We all chat. J. is telling us about his first job.

“I had to learn to ride a horse,” he says. “I didn’t know how to ride a horse, but I had to learn. And I also had to learn gun tricks. In the show, I was playing a guy who goes around impressing people with his gun tricks.”

We all laugh.

“Gun tricks!” J. says, and dazzles us all with his smile. After a while, Meredith’s treatment is complete. Her hair is oiled, and neatly done in two braids. I learn that the oil prevents the lice from hanging on. They just slide right off. The receptionist gives me a small bag containing a vial of Licenders shampoo, Licenders oil, a metal Licenders comb, and instructions for Meredith’s hair care and also suggestions for cleaning the house. It isn’t so bad. I have to put things in the dryer.

We say goodbye to the others. Out on the street, I take Meredith’s hand. She is wearing her brand-new “I ♥ NY” t-shirt, and she smells, not unpleasantly, of citronella. We walk past the Empire State Building, past the dumpling restaurants of Koreatown.

“We’ll have to go to the top of the Empire State one day,” I say. “And we’ll have to eat at one of these restaurants.” I feel cheerful, and, amazingly, hungry. You know, if you’re going to get head lice, this is the place.

Carol Paik’s essays have appeared in Tin House, The Gettysburg Review, Fourth Genre, Brain Child, Literary Mama, Newsweek, and elsewhere.

Pixie was bred for the dog-show circuit but didn’t make the cut. And so my wife and I took ownership of this mite of a dog, now banished to household-pet status. Pixie, apparently, doesn’t have the desired long neck of a show dog and she is far too small to compete. The fact that Pixie is too small is indisputable and immediately obvious to breeder and non-breeder alike: she’s the size of a well-fed guinea pig.

She’s so tiny it can be visually jarring, even to me at times. I never thought I’d own a dog this small–a pocket dog, a frou-frou dog, whatever you want to call it. I always thought that when I got around to owning a dog I’d get, well, a bigger breed: a retriever, a shepherd, something like that. But I’ve grown to appreciate little dogs, and my wife and I have slowly become versions of a ghastly Park Slope stereotype: anthropomorphizing pet owners.

In Park Slope everyone seems to have a dog or a small child, or both. This is the convention. My wife jokes about a business plan to rent children and dogs, at an hourly rate, like Zipcars, to people entering Prospect Park. Corporate mission: to provide childless or pet-less customers with the sense that they fit in, momentarily, when walking around the lake, the carousel or when in the Long Meadow. (Actually, I’ve learned there already exists, elsewhere in America, pet-rental businesses, but my wife’s “plan” takes it one step further.)

Like many pet owners, we have numerous nicknames for our dog, most known only to us. But on the street and when in Prospect Park, I do shorten Pixie’s name. This way I avoid calling out, “Come Pixie! Come Pixie!” and retain a modicum of masculinity. Instead I call out “Pix, Pix, Pix,” which might remind New Yorkers of a certain age of an after-school video-game show on WPIX television in the 1980s.

Soon after getting Pix as a one-year-old, I noticed a fringe benefit, which I guiltily reported to my wife: young women love the dog. Invariably, she’s the “cutest thing” they’ve ever seen; they stop and talk to me and, curiously, to Pix, who loves people if not other dogs and creatures (which I’ll get to). I now have a greater appreciation for the ploy of using cute pets or children to attract the opposite sex. Women ask about Pix’s breed and about Pix herself. She’s a superstar, though she doesn’t know it. Often they ask for her age. Once in response to this question, I said Pix is four, and a woman asked, “Four months?” “No,” I said, “Four years.”

See: thimble-sized Pix is regularly mistaken for a puppy, though she is several years into adulthood. And because she has a beard, mustache, and wiry eyebrows, she is also often mistaken for being male. She is judged by her appearance. Though, of course, what something appears to be isn’t necessarily what it is.

We live in the part of the Slope where Pete Hamill grew up. That Park Slope, which Hamill describes in his very good 1994 memoir A Drinking Life, is nothing like today’s long-gentrified “South” Slope. Undoubtedly, there were dogs in his Park Slope, though not very many Pixies, I’m guessing. His working-class Park Slope no longer exists. Nevertheless, if one looks closely, one can still see or hear, well, what’s left of those days. One can pick out a face or two or five; that is, one can guess who has, more than likely, been here since before double-decker tourist buses were a common sight on Prospect Park West (Ninth Avenue).

Pete Hamill’s old haunt is now one of the “top 10 neighborhoods” in America, according to the American Planning Association (whatever that is). And those old brownstones, they go for a few million apiece now–too pricey for me though not for everyone, apparently.

And so it is on these streets, newly paved with gold, that I walk a dog the size of an overgrown squirrel. Pix is painfully aware (I’m guessing) of how small and vulnerable she is. I think this because she lashes out in fear at every dog or dog-like creature that crosses her path.

Rottweiler, dingo, Grizzly: it doesn’t matter.

We’ve tried a number of training techniques to get her to stop doing this. She is much better than she was when we first adopted her, but she still lashes out on occasion. As a result, she has a bit of a rep in the neighborhood. A fellow dog owner once called Pix a “little monster.” And I’ve witnessed people crossing the street to avoid her (us, actually). On the positive side, she has gained some serious Park Slope street cred.

One night I walked by a group of teenagers hanging out in the park (boys and girls, blacks, whites, Asians–a multicultural teen gang suitable for Park Slope). They were very interested in the Pix. One young man asked if he might pet her. Sure, I said. As he bent over to pet her, another dog and its owner had the temerity to walk in Pix’s general vicinity. Pix leapt at the dog, a retriever, barking and showing her rice-sized teeth; instinctively, I yanked her little body back, but Pix kept at it. I ordered her to stop, which she disregarded until the other dog was at a safe distance. The other dog owner had moved quickly along, but his dog had all but ignored the pipsqueak “threatening” it. The kids, meanwhile, howled and shouted in approval at Pix’s bad behavior. One asked her name. I told him. “Oh man,” he said, laughing. “You shoulda called her Massacre!”

Well, Pix by any other name still has the weight of the world on her little shoulders. I can see it in her beady eyes. What’s she thinking? What would she say if she could speak? What do we make of these unknowable, odd creatures–of dogs?

Man’s relationship with dogs is well-trod writer territory. I’m thinking of Thomas Mann and his German shorthaired pointer and of his struggle to understand Bashan. And I’m thinking of Beckett and his Kerry Blue Terrier, the one he mourned for and refers to, supposedly, in “Krapp’s Last Tape.” There’s A.A. Milne, who wrote about a Pekinese named Bingo (not to mention a Pooh bear). I’m also thinking of E.B. White, who had a dachshund he wrote about, humorously, long after its death. The dachshund was called Fred, which might be a name diametrically opposite to Pixie.

Fred appears in some of White’s famous essays, including “Bedfellows” and “Death of a Pig.” One of my favorite Fred pieces is “Fred on Space,” which appeared in The New Yorker on November 16, 1957. In it White interviews the long-dead Fred, by then a ghost on White’s property in Maine, about the Soviet Union’s recently-launched Sputnik 2, which carried a Laika into space. It’s a very funny imagined exchange; most of it takes the form of a Q&A.

I think a Q&A with Pix might go like this:

Q: Pixie, do you enjoy living in Park Slope?

A: Of course, Park Slope has all that I might possibly need.

Q: But you’re a tiny dog. What could you possibly need?

A: Exactly.

Q: Oh, I see. So that bike lane on Ninth Street…

A: Meaningless. Look at my legs. They’re an inch long. I can’t reach the pedals.

Q: And that new bank…

A: Again, meaningless–unless you plan on opening an account there. I presume we have a bank account.

Q: We do.

A: Good. Restaurants: also meaningless to me. Unless–just once–you’d bring home a doggie bag. But, for the most part, sure, Park Slope is a nice place to live–for a dachshund and, probably, for a human being, too. I listen to what you say to that lady who lives with us. I hear you talk about how expensive it is, but this doesn’t interest me. I’m here for a briefer time than you, and so I’ll leave that money stuff to you. I’ll worry about my next meal; my bed in the living room. Things like that. As for the rest of Park Slope living. Dogs. Don’t like them. Except other dachshunds. Lesbians. Like them. Vegans. Like them–by the way, I don’t think they’d mind if you let me get at one of those squirrels once in a while? Baby strollers: terrified of them. They look like tanks coming at me, especially the ones with those big, knobby tires. I like kids, though–four-legged ones, two-legged ones. As for those free books people leave in boxes on sidewalks and stoops: useless. Instead of books about outmoded philosophies, why don’t they leave something practical–a squeaky toy or a bone? [Big yawn.] Well, nice talking to you. It’s time for my twelfth nap of the day. Gotta go.

Q: Wait, one last thing. Politics. Where do you stand?

A: I stand down here, dummy. At your ankles.

A former trade journalist, Kevin Nolan is finishing a novel.

It all began last spring when I turned my attention to a new phenomenon for me: online dating. I went through the four phases of Internet romance. First, the euphoria of “shopping for dates.” Next, the fear of taking a virtual exchange offline and actually meeting the human being. Third came the actual dating. It didn’t take long for me to enter the fourth phase, online dating fatigue.

Some dates were pleasant but lacked a certain spark. Others were disappointments that led to a distrust that anybody’s profile contains more than a shadow of the truth.

I learned how a first date feels like a combination of a job interview and audition, full of pitfalls and flubbed lines. I had my share. For instance, the bocce date. After a buildup of feisty emails, I bet my date five pounds in British currency against her 100 Mexican pesos that I would beat her at Bocce. When she arrived at the bocce court at Union Hall, she slammed a hundred pesos on the table and said, “You’re on!” I looked up at her blankly. I had completely forgotten about the bet and showed up without the money.

Another instance I call the vaudeville date. “I’ve never met a schwag bag I didn’t like!” she announced, having just come from a promotional soiree. She was of the standup school, whereas my comedy was of the ironic strain favored by English majors. I spent an hour practically speechless as she delivered one-liners. Beneath her humor I sensed an uptight, judgmental control freak. After an hour of awkward conversation, I rushed out of the bar at the Union Square W feeling like I’d just competed against Sarah Silverman in a joke contest.

One particularly ambitious week in April, I had four dates! Just thinking about it now is exhausting. There’s a lot to be said for the manic energy of a Match.com customer determined to get her money’s worth. I had officially entered phase four: online fatigue. I pushed back against the doubts that Match was anything more than a “Dungeons and Dragons” for serial daters—its participants fueled by fantasy and a bottomless affinity for re-invention. I decided to make one last attempt to connect and start a relationship before my subscription expired.

What do I really want? I asked myself as I walked home after a booze-filled evening with a friend. And why were most of my dates so lame? I needed to screen them more stringently. Liking the photo and words wasn’t enough. Because after the initial one-dimensional attraction, where I would eliminate profiles based on their lack of creativity, spelling errors, or too much cuteness, I was choosing the wrong type. I kept meeting alphas. In my past associations with aggressive extraverts, I always got burned. Something about the introvert-extravert coupling had a definite half-life that eventually imploded on me. I needed a sensitive, somewhat introverted-but-confident, artistic type. Oh, and she had to be hot, good at dancing, and like alternative music.

When I got home, I logged on to Match. My search came back with 35 pages of possible dates. Many of the profiles were new to me. After about an hour, I came up with three possibilities. The next day, sober and rested, I read each profile again and sent each person a unique, witty, flirtatious and self-descriptive message. “How cool that you’re studying piano. My calling is typing. I clock 90 wpm when I’m warmed up. And with the right rhythm, you’d be surprised how musical ‘The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy brown dog’ can be.’” I’d found that short was best for introductory emails. And I had to mention I was a writer up front, because it got me dates.

One woman, whom I will call Liz, wrote back immediately. “What a fantastic email! Let’s meet for coffee.” She gave me her number and asked me to call.

Liz’s profile included a photo of her standing in the sun, staring at the camera with a sultry half-smile. “Friendship is not a consolation prize,” she wrote, which I took to mean she wasn’t looking for new friends. She was a Mediterranean Beauty, with long dark hair and brown eyes. Her profile included this amusing quip:” If your profile says “no games,” to me it’s a red flag for “likes drama.” Her profile spoke equally to her likes and dislikes, which I interpreted as a sign of maturity. Also, she was hot.

After a few email exchanges to hammer out the details, I met Liz on a Sunday afternoon outside a coffee shop in the West Village. She was a few minutes late, and appeared anxious and apologetic. Her nose was pierced and she was a tad shorter than I expected. But she matched her photo. Exotic, refined. She had a birthmark on her upper lip that mirrored my own exactly. She shook my hand rapidly. “Let’s go in,” she said.

The good thing about my first two months of online dating was that I had learned how to smooth out some of the awkwardness of the first date. I had talking points as well as polished, neutral answers to questions about my history. My new job was a fertile subject, as were recent travels to the west coast.

Liz seemed jittery. The huge double cappuccino she sipped wasn’t helping her nerves. In a posture of self-defense, she peppered me with questions. We talked politics. She was a former schoolteacher, a big leftie, and wanted to make sure that she wasn’t dealing with the enemy. During one lull she grabbed her coffee mug, which seemed huge in her tiny hands. “We have the same mole, but on opposite sides,” she said, smiling. I smiled back and flushed. Our first flirt. “At least they’re not on the same side—” I joked. “Then I couldn’t date you!” She took a sip of coffee and didn’t drop her gaze. Again, I felt a slight buzz of sexual energy.

When the conversation shifted to exes, she blurted, “Just how important is sex to you?” This seemed like an odd question, and I sensed that it was a sore subject with her. I just couldn’t figure out if she was the frustrator or the frustratee in a past relationship. “Oh, very important,” I said. She retorted, “It’s important to me too, but it can’t be everything. I like to have conversations every once in a while.”

Another reason Liz might have asked this question is that she was traveling a lot. She was living in three cities in pursuit of a masters. Her home base was New York, but she was going to classes in Florida while doing research in New Orleans. In fact, she was leaving town in exactly one week. Not living in the same city was on my red flag checklist. But the fact that she didn’t have her own apartment wasn’t an issue for me at this point. I decided not to overthink this one. It seemed to me that a lasting relationship this was not. But in the moment, it was okay.

I had already made the snap judgment that I wanted to see Liz again. She wasn’t alpha. While she seemed combative during our political discussion, I sensed that she was open to debate and welcomed alternate points of view, at least academically. Plus there was definitely chemistry between us. I sensed that I might be able to take on some of her pent-up energy.

Mid-way through our conversation, Liz leaned forward and said, “Where are you with this? Do you, I mean, would you like to get together again?” I said yes, and then we made a plan to get together later in the week, before she left town.

Things with Liz accelerated. We exchanged emails that evening, re-confirming our date. During work on Monday, I got a text from her asking if she could call me that night. The next day, as I was leaving work, another text. She asked if I wanted to meet. Randomly, we ended up having drinks at the Union Square W, site of my doomed vaudeville date. After more flirting, we parted ways and planned our next date.

On Friday I met her in the Village to see a film. Afterwards we wandered to a nearby restaurant. After a meandering meal that was supercharged with sexual tension, she opened discussion about coming home with me.

“I really want to spend the night with you,” she said. “I packed some things. I hope you don’t mind me saying this.”

I had been hoping that she would come back to Brooklyn with me. And I was flattered that she had actually put some thought into it. She was staying at her sister’s house in Queens, so me staying with her was out of the question.

Once Liz got to my apartment, her boldness disappeared. I poured her some wine, and she sat in the corner of my couch with her feet curled beneath her. She had made herself so small there, she looked like she didn’t have legs. I realized, in a bit of a panic, that nothing was happening tonight if I didn’t make the first move, so I kissed her. She kissed me back, but not in the hot-blooded Mediterranean way I had imagined. I had thought of her as a coiled, hot-blooded Cleopatra. In reality, she was a pale and passive Desdemona.

Still, we had come this far. She had asked to spend the night! The buildup generated its own momentum. We moved to the bedroom. The sex was brief and disconnected. When it was over, she moved to one side of the bed and was out cold. She didn’t move for the rest of the night. We didn’t touch. I marveled how someone could be so sexy and yet so bad at sex. As I lay awake, listening to Liz’s shallow breathing, it felt wrong to be next to her. I realized I had made a mistake. Then I fell asleep.

Liz rushed out the next morning, claiming she had an appointment at the dentist. I felt relieved that she refused my offer of coffee. All day I puzzled over what had happened. Had she suddenly decided that she wasn’t into me? What turned her off? Or did Liz have issues with intimacy, which made the act surreal for her? I went back to her profile. Re-read her comments about “no games” and friendship not being a consolation prize. She also put stock in her own honesty. Was she just another nut job from the online dating realm?

As I tried to sort out what had happened, Liz called. “I want to talk to you,” she said. “And you know that I’m leaving tomorrow morning. Would you like come out to Jackson Heights for dinner? I still haven’t packed, but I have a little bit of time.”

I decided to see her. I wasn’t envisioning a tearful good-bye. And I didn’t think we’d spend the night together. I went out of a different kind of need: curiosity. I was on the case of Liz’s mysterious, disappearing libido. This was partly due to the English major in me. If I didn’t figure out how I had misread her, I might make the same mistake again.

After a buffet dinner at one of the Indian restaurants on Roosevelt Avenue, Liz and I walked to her sister’s house.

“A warning,” she said, as we approached the front door. Her sister and family were away for the weekend. “My sister’s house is a mess. It used to bother me,” she waved her hand as if to swat away the thought. “It’s her mess. I’ve let it go. Anyway, if you want to know who I am,” she shrugged, as if to deflect all judgment. “This is part of my reality. And if it bothers you, it bothers you.”

I detected a slight “fuck you” in her preamble. But I didn’t fully understand the defensive posture of her speech until she opened the door of her sister’s apartment. The house was a complete clutterfuck. Magazines, books and boxes were stacked on every inch of surface. There were piles of laundry on the couch. Cereal boxes, soap, and toilet paper packs littered the kitchen table. Dishes towered on one counter, newspapers on another. Piles of mail were stacked by the front door. I got dizzy just looking around. The house smelled like baked-on grease and stale coffee. It was the smell of accumulation, half-finished chores and schemes left to their own devices.

“Want me to hang up your coat?” Liz asked.

“No thanks,” I said, setting it on the couch, next to the pile of laundry. I was afraid we wouldn’t be able to find it again. If the living room looked this bad, I shuddered to imagine the closets.

Besides the Collyer brothers, who died in a sea of crap they refused to throw away, clutter always made me think of bugs. Perhaps it was my recent experience subletting a friend’s cluttered apartment, which harbored a lot of bugs. As soon as I set down my coat and bag I thought, “I hope I don’t bring any bugs home.”

This feeling redoubled when I sat down on Liz’s nephew’s bed. This room was equally messy, strewn with toys, clothes and kids’ books.

Liz dragged a suitcase out of the closet, and began packing haphazardly. She threw clothes on top of books and added some toiletries, without arranging anything. Obviously, Liz had reconciled herself to the clutter—and didn’t think twice about it. So what did she think when she came to my tidy, clutter-free apartment? I had been spending the past couple of years getting rid of things, and my apartment was spare by design. It must have seemed like a 5-star hotel compared to this place. For me, there’s a certain comfort that comes from order, from knowing that things have a place—so that when they’re out of place, I notice. And I can find, say, a sock, when I need it. But for some, a messy room doesn’t feel disorderly.

Liz had said she’d made peace with her sister’s mess. Had she really? I remembered how soundly she had slept the night before, how quickly she’d moved away from me. Spending the night with me was a getaway for her, a clutter-free moment in her chaotic life. It struck me that her motive to come over wasn’t necessarily to hook up, but to get a good night’s sleep!

A movement on the floor caught my eye. A baby cockroach was crawling into the nephew’s closet. I squirmed on the bed. Bug alert! Time to excuse myself as quickly as possible. The thought of bedbugs crossed my radar. “Shit,” I thought. “That’s all I need!” I had read that if a place is infested, the bedbugs don’t wait for darkness. They crawl out in broad daylight looking for a meal, and can get in your clothes.

“I wanted to talk about last night,” Liz said.

“Yes, you mentioned that,” I said. “About last night. It was your idea to come over, but you seemed to lose interest once you got there.”

“I think I just want to be friends,” she said, rooting around in the suitcase. She looked at me and pulled out a book, Naomi Klein’s “The Shock Doctrine.” She’d talked about it on our first date. She opened the spine, then closed it quickly and set it on the bed.

“Okay,” I said. “I understand. But what happened? I’m fine with it, but I don’t quite get it. It seemed like you left the room the minute that we got physical.”

“Well,” she said, putting her hands on her hips. “If that was your experience. It wasn’t my experience.”

“I’m just trying to understand.” I said, my eyes darting to the closet floor where I’d last seen the baby cockroach. “Was I mis-interpreting the situation, or did you ask to spend the night?”

“Yes, I did. I was attracted to you. It’s been a while since that’s happened. And I invited you here to say goodbye, because I really like you, and didn’t want to blow you off. ‘Friendship isn’t a consolation prize.’ You saw that on my profile.”

“Yes, but I thought that meant you were interested in meeting lovers, not friends.”

“No,” she said. “It means I don’t take friendship lightly. Not everyone gets to be my friend. I think I’m more about having friends than lovers right now.”

Her suitcase was stuffed, but she went back to the closet and took out some shirts.

“You asked me to come over here because you want to be friends? Why couldn’t you have said that on the phone?” I said, suddenly realizing that she was wasting my time. I was angry because I had let myself be lured into a game. She had invited me over because she realized that she had behaved badly, but she still wanted me to like her, and pretend that everything was cool.

“No, I asked you here because I wanted to show you where I lived, which is part of who I am,” she said, shrugging again. She looked at me and smiled. Not a real smile, but a crinkling of the mouth, as if she were about to bite into a cracker.

“I’m sorry if I offended you,” she said. “I understand that you might not want to be my friend.”

“Do you see other people?” I asked, realizing that I should have brought this up earlier.

She sat on her suitcase. Clothes were spilling over the sides, so she stood up to readjust them.

“I was having a long-distance relationship with this guy. He started out as a friend. But really I hated him.”

“I really think I should go now,” I said. It had taken me a while to realize that she was a nut job, but when I did, I acted swiftly.

As I grabbed my coat, I realized why I had accepted her invitation to come over. I had wanted her to throw herself at me. And I was angry for that too. There were crazy lovers in my past, and I thought I had moved beyond them. But I had fallen for crazy again.

I spent the weekend telling the story of Liz to my friends, getting her out of my system. She sent me a few emails from New Orleans. She was apologetic, still insisting that we be friends. After a few exchanges, I said it would be fine if she called me the next time she was in town, knowing full well that she wouldn’t.

Doggedly, I went back on Match. I had a month left of my subscription. A few weeks later, I met the third woman who had come up in my springtime, late-night search. (I had already ruled out the second woman without meeting her.) We started dating. Looking back, it seems like a small miracle that we met. We were both on the verge of giving Match a rest. But now we had a better reason not to renew—we could both check off the box in the Match exit survey that said, “I met someone.”

In June, I started noticing bites on my arms and legs in the morning. Some of them had a telltale sign: three or four bites in a row on a patch of skin. This happens when a bedbug is disturbed while feasting. It moves on in a straight line to fresh vein.

My girlfriend mentioned that her feet itched at night in my bed. At first I blamed the bites on mosquitoes. Even though I never heard the buzz of their tiny wings in my ear. Then, allowing the possibility that the bites could be coming from bedbugs, I inspected my mattress. Nothing. Alone one night, something pinched my leg. When I threw off the sheet, I saw a spider fleeing. So I blamed the bites on spiders. A few weeks later, after something bit me, I discovered a spider chasing another bug. I killed them both and thought nothing of the other bug.

Bedbugs had been one of my biggest fears. Once, after a friend relayed her epic tale of infestation, I convinced myself that I had them. During this phantom bedbug scare, I lost a lot of sleep. I was about to throw out all of the furniture before I realized that the bugs in my bed were no-see-ums coming from the tree outside my window. The problem disappeared when summer ended, and all was well again in the tree-lined heart of Park Slope.

It wasn’t until mid-July that I saw a live bedbug. It was late. I had been reading in bed. I got up to get some water, and when I came back, a bug was in the spot where I had been. I recognized it by its appleseed body and the terror that ran up my spine. Christ! First I killed it. I was shaking as I picked the corpse off the bed with a napkin and put it in a plastic bag.

Then I spent one of the longest nights in my life. Other than learning of the death or tragedy of a loved one, finding out that you have bedbugs is some of the worst news you can get. They’re the unseen enemy, everywhere and nowhere. The mindfuck of not knowing where they are is part of the hell. That, and not sleeping. At one point, I flicked on the bathroom light and saw a big fat bug, engorged with my blood, crawling up the wall. It looked like a bloodsucker with six legs. I couldn’t get to it fast enough, and it scurried away.

I spent the rest of the night surfing bedbugger.com, reading fresh horror stories about the little vampires. And scratching. I read how they can get everywhere, even inside your television. How difficult it is to get rid of them without disposing of your entire life.

I wrote an S.O.S email to my landlord. He responded early in the morning with good news. An exterminator was on his way! Meanwhile, I had to boil or dry clean every sheet and item of clothing I owned. Or throw it away. In one horror-film moment, I found a nest of newly-hatched bugs living in a drawer. I threw the whole thing away.

Five exterminations, much vacuuming and many loads of laundry later, my apartment appears to be bug-free. It’s been seven months since I first saw a bedbug. I’m still sleeping on an air mattress, still cautious about getting a new bed just yet. And I inspect my sheets every morning. Thankfully, my girlfriend didn’t bring any of the bedbugs home, and I didn’t spread the horror to her apartment. And she didn’t freak out, or take the bugs as some sort of sign that our relationship was doomed. Her understanding and support were a great comfort during the ordeal.

Bedbugs were once my biggest fear. They still are. But they’re gone and I’m still here. I won’t deny that thoughts of them lying dormant in my baseboards occasionally keep me up at night. Whether or not the bugs came from Liz, I will never truly know. I wish I had been more cautious. At the same time, if meeting her led me to conquer my biggest fear, and led me to a real match, can I complain?

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Jill Bauerle is a journalist and writer who lives in Brooklyn. Her novel-in-progress is titled, “Liechtensteining.”