Standing in front of me was a man with a bald spot, a sign I could trust this man because he, too, knew loss. I stared at his little bit of naked scalp, how tender, how shining, how close it was to his brain, his whole entire self. After some time he got off the train, so I got off the train, too, and I trailed behind the full moon his scalp was and when I lost track of him in a push of postwork people that was fine — we always knew it would end like this, that it would have to end somehow.
I watched my feet moving across the sidewalk and realized my shoes were at the brink of giving up on me and the rest of the world: the lace tips frayed, seams strained, a little mouth opening on one toe as if gasping for air or like it was trying to whisper, Enough, enough, haven’t you figured out that there is nowhere better or worse to go and other people put up with this fact and you, for some sickness, do not, and will you stop trying to see a meaning in everything, in anything, and will you stop wishing you could have come close to any sheep in New Zealand just so you could touch the animal who filled the world with wool and will you stop talking to your own shoes and imagining them talking back at you? I did not particularly like listening to my shoes speak to me. They did not have anything useful to say.
As I walked down the West Side Highway, cars shushing beside me like an ill ocean, I heard heavy steps, then a man’s voice—You one sexy-ass bitch—spoken so low I wondered if I was supposed to hear him or if it was a note to his sexy-ass self and then the man was to my left, and he looked over his shoulder at me before speeding up, his eyes scanning the crowd ahead of him, looking for other sexy-ass bitches. On a bench a man in ripped grey clothes with plastic bags on his feet was asking anyone if they had fifty cents—It’s just fifty cents, it’s only fifty cents—but when I passed he stopped asking and he gave me a look I’d never gotten before and I took that look and put a frame around it and hung it up in me. Every few minutes or so I would remember the look from the man who had wanted fifty cents, and I’d look at that framed memory hanging in myself and it meant I was here, back in this sick city, but in other ways I was not here at all and anyone who looked closely could see that I had nothing to give, that I was a junk drawer, a collection of things that may or may not have had a use.
I kept wandering through all these dirty, winding streets and all my thoughts and observations were immediately self-destructing, not a single memory made, and then I noticed that the sky had produced clouds that would have made a person believe in God if they were susceptible to believing in God but all they did to me was make me wonder if it had been a good idea to start walking across the bridge toward Brooklyn because it seemed that considerably less people were out here than usual, like everyone knew something was about to happen but I didn’t and those God clouds got fat and dark and let their rain come down onto the bridge and the river below went stucco textured and my body and my canvas bag quickly looked as if we’d just stepped out of the ocean, some sea monster in the wrong place. The few others on the bridge were smug and safe under umbrellas and it was clearer to me than it had ever been that all there is on earth is the eternal now and nothing else. I had heard, in the past, lots of people say that, say that nothing exists except the present moment, that nothing has ever happened, that no one is here or not here, that no object is more than its action in a moment, and if all this business about the present moment is true, and I am still inclined to believe that it is true, then all I was at that moment was a set of senses held captive in a wet body in wet clothes in the piss of a cloud, stranded on the center of a bridge and I was just that and nothing else, and the past, the recent past, and the less recent past were not a part of me, just something gathered around me, an audience for what I would do next.
The rain gave up and left and I wrung my hair out over one shoulder, then found a bench on the Brooklyn end of the bridge and I tried to hug some of the water out of my clothes and I took my shoes off and took off my socks and twisted the rain out of them and put them back on anyway because the other socks I’d brought with me weren’t any drier and as I was doing this a woman under an umbrella walked up and held out a few tissues she’d pulled from a plastic pouch. I said thank you and she said nothing and when I took them they turned to slime, sopped with the rain on my hands. She put the whole plastic pouch on the bench beside me and walked away wordless, so I watched her go, watched all of her goodness and empathy get away from me. I wondered why my husband couldn’t have just been all bad. Why couldn’t he have been a cartoon villain, someone I could have fled from and known I had made the right decision? Why must there be nice memories of him sitting beside the ugly ones, both of them oblivious, strangers on a bus? And I still wanted my black moment for it all, and I was still waiting on that black moment, still felt I was owed it, a little funeral for the us we’d been. I needed to stop wanting that impossible funeral, needed to leave that want like dogs must leave what their owners tell them to leave — I was something like a dog I owned. I had to tell myself to leave it, to shut up, had to take myself on a walk and feed myself and had to stare at myself and try to figure out what myself was feeling or needing.
By the time I started walking again the sky was going dim and the air became this nice blanket tucking us in, telling us to sleep well, sleep tight. I followed a broad, busy street where the bridge ended and I almost reflexively stuck my thumb out but I got the impression that this wasn’t the kind of thing a person should do in New York so I didn’t. Some sirens were screaming over and over, fire trucks and police cars and ambulances, those urgent noises that remind us that someone is always burning or breaking a law or having their body give up and if it is not you yet who is burning or breaking or falling apart, then you can be sure that it soon will be, that soon the sirens will come for you but you will never be missing to yourself and all you can do is delay, delay, delay, and the delaying must be good enough for you and you must find a way to be fine with the delay because it is your whole life and the minute you really go missing is the minute you can no longer miss.
Outside a grocery store a man was handing out flyers that said Do You Suffer from Chronic PAIN? And the word pain took up a third of the page and the man was saying, We got the best deals on massaging the deep tissue. Massage therapies. Massage therapies. I passed him quickly and when he tried to hand me a flyer I pretended as if I couldn’t see him even though he was impossible to ignore, this huge, pale man wearing an orange traffic vest, a wild grey-and-white beard, thick glasses. Are you in pain? he asked and I smiled. It made me smile. I don’t know why it made me smile.
The sun was all gone now, the city left to light itself. I walked through a dark neighborhood with narrow streets and wide trees. I walked behind a tall, dense man who walked as if he was the president of a country called Life and it seemed to me that if I could be associated with him, somehow, I would be safe, so I followed him without wondering where he might be going, followed him like baby ducks will follow anything that will lead them, an alligator, a small goat, an electric toy car. I dreaded the moment he would go inside his house or any other place he might go where I couldn’t, but that never happened because after I had followed him a mile or so he stopped and turned and said, Who the fuck you doing this for?
My voice was an ice cube stuck in my throat. I waited. We stared. It melted. I said, No one.