The voice was close to my ear.
At a corner facing streams of trucks and cars and mad men on electric scooters and skateboards, the voice said, “Careful. Careful. They aren’t looking.”
The black man in my ear was dressed in a black cloth coat, a newsboy’s cap and elegant tie. Unnamed, he announced his history to me on that street corner. This is what I remember.
“Thirty-two years in the NYC Police, detective First Grade and before that five years in the Marines. I jumped out of planes. I was there at the end in Vietnam. My blessed wife has kept me together all those years. This is what I do now.”
He nodded to a black SUV idling in a parking spot.
“I do driving and security. My wife loves that I come home on time. Be careful. My head is full of all the things I’ve seen. Be careful.”
We shook hands.
That night we took a cab back to the hotel in a steady rain.
My wife jumped into the front seat. She thanked the cabbie for stopping for us and asked how he was.
He looked at her. “No one asks me how I am. Thank you.”
His name was Fazeel, eight years in America from the tribal regions of NW Pakistan, studying IT, here to make money. He had not been home in eight years. He didn’t know when he would return.
I’ll never see either man again or the young woman walking her dog in Central Park who I greeted with, “Pitties are the best.” She laughed and said “He’s a handful but yes, yes, Pitties are the best. Yay for Pittie lovers!”
Or the guard in The New York Library who asked me to get up, that no one could sit in the hallways, but then, smiling, she showed me to another room where there were vacant benches.
Or the smiling guard in the Met who told me his favorite paintings were the Fauvists but that his answer could vary upon where he was assigned that day.
Or the quiet man at the Pet Memorial Tree in Central Park who told me he was its curator and that the picture of the Boston terrier had been his dog.
And long-gone Kafka at the Morgan, dour Kafka who drew cartoons on postcards to his friends and who seemed so happy to be photographed with a dog.
It rained all four days we visited, but we walked from 84th to 37th and streets and avenues between day and night and watched apartment lights snap on far above us and crowds moving all around us in their mysterious tasks, and for moments that went on longer than I could have expected, I felt the return of tha
t familiar surge of energy that had always come to me in this astonishing city.
