“Guess who?” murmured a disguised voice.

“Sarah?” was the only name that came to mind. Pulling off the blinds and turning around, I found myself face to face with Eunice.

“How are you doing?” she asked as if no preexisting clash had ever occurred.

“Are you here with him?” I asked, looking around.

“No,” she replied.

“Why did you lie to me,” I leapt right into the fray, “saying that you were going to visit your parents?”

“Well, I was going to. But do we really have to go through this?”

“But you lied to me! That’s what I most resented.” No anger still existed but for some reason I felt compelled to continue the fight, to hold to some righteous platform.

“You swine!” She gave me a token swat. “You have a girlfriend, and you have the audacity to yell at me for having a fling.”

“Ah ha! But I told you about it!”

“Is that how it works? If confession makes everything all right, then why don’t you tell her about us?”

“She already found out,” I confessed with a hung head. “I told you. She left me.”

There was a stretch of silence, so I gave a slight farewell smile and resumed walking.

“Wait a second.” Eunice caught up. “She left you?”

“Yeah.”

“Do you want to dance?” she finally asked pliantly.

“No thanks, I’m tired.” And resumed walking.

“Wait a fucking second,” she said this time, angrily. “Can’t we try to be friends, I mean does one fight end the friendship?!”

“Yes!” I yelled. “You teased!”

“Tease? I told you right up front exactly what I was up to when you asked me,” she answered.

“You left me hoping, you left the possibility dangling.”

“You’re crazy!”

“Fuck you!” I shouted unconcerned that we were the center of attention in the place. She, on the other hand, had become visibly embarrassed. I continued, “I made minimum wage and spent every cent on you! I spent all my available time with you!”

“Look, I was interested in you as a boyfriend, I admit it.”

“Ha ha!” I exclaimed idiotically.

“But I’m not going to be the other woman. Now that you’re unattached, there’s a new context.”

“Well fuck you!” I yelled. “Go fuck that old fart I saw you with.”

“Well fuck you too!” she yelled back and vanished back into the masses. If not getting involved with her was something that I would ever come to regret I couldn’t feel it then. All I wanted was sleep. On the ride home I couldn’t help but think how just one month earlier I would’ve died to have what I had just rejected.

Sleep was prematurely cut open for me by a sharp angle of sunlight that pierced my closed lids like a can opener. I turned over, but outside the battle of car horns finished off the beleaguered sleep. I lay there awhile with my eyes still closed and thought about old times, and then it started happening. I could feel the rapid palpitations and the sweat. The snail had visited last night; a thick film of oil seemed to be evenly licked over my body. I tossed the blanket to the floor, and with a towel I wiped my face dry. Helmsley’s door was open and his room was bare. Stepping under the shower, I felt the cold water slowly turn hot and then cold again as I tried to scour away my epidermis.

I dressed and wolfed down the ninety-cent breakfast special at the corner diner. It was a wonderful morning. Everything seemed real and luminous. I breathed deeply. A cold wind that days earlier had swept across arctic ice pans settled above Brooklyn and chilled everyone away, indoors. The sun was bright, but ineffectual. The few folks out looked more rugged than the usual anemic breed of New Yorkers. I had nothing to do, so I walked. After breakfast, I walked down Clinton Street, through Brooklyn Heights and across Cadman Plaza to the Bridge. The Brooklyn Bridge was reconstructed in the mid-eighties so that it became one graceful incline, more accessible to cyclists. But in crossing it by foot, I constantly feared I was going to be hit by a speeding bike, and preferred the way it was before, divided into roughly five parts by short series of stairs. By the time I finally reached the Manhattan side, I had both a chill and an appetite.

Walking south on Broadway, I realized that I had enough change for a coffee in a Blimpie’s. When I opened the door, I was shoved to the floor. When I looked up, someone was holding a fat handgun and wildly waving it around.

“Stay on that fucking floor!” I stayed. The gunman, a spindly Hispanic, was pointing to the till with the pistol. “In de bag,” he shouted. “Put it in de fucking bag.”

Suddenly the door swung open and in walked a preadolescent girl in a parochial school dress, probably for a pack of Yodels. He grabbed her and she screamed and continued screaming.

“There are cops all around here. Get out while you still can,” a career lady behind me said. I didn’t notice her until that moment.

“You’re next bitch,” he screamed at her. Grabbing the screaming little girl in his arm, he frantically tore at her dress. “Shut the fuck up!”

I guess he interpreted her screaming as insolence instead of fear. Spontaneously an old man leapt at the fucker’s gun hand. After hearing the discharged blast, the cashier jumped at the gunman, but he kept slipping backwards. The school girl broke free and dashed out the door. The old man dropped to the ground. I jumped up thinking the situation was defused. The gunman released two more shots. I jumped away, falling through the coldcut display case, and the gunman was out the door with his bag of money.

A tray of coleslaw had spilled over me, and as I tried to rise I felt a numbness in my right arm and saw blood mixing in with watery mayonnaise. The cashier leaned over his old friend. The old man was calmly on the ground, blood was drilling up out of his belly. The cashier was holding a rag on the puncture. The lady hung up the phone after notifying the 911 people. She looked at my arm; through my jacket and shirt there was a deep cut.

“I’m okay.” I trembled with false modesty. “How’s the old guy?”

“Did you know him?” she asked solemnly. I shook my head no.

The lady wrapped a tourniquet just below my shoulder. Soon people from the street started pouring in and asking me dumb questions: “Did it hurt? Are you all right? What happened?” In what seemed like forever, I could finally hear the wailing sirens, and then an endless flow of police started streaming in as if they were compensating for the prior lack of security. The cashier was sobbing over the dead body until one group of paramedics put it on what looked like a large tray and then covered it with the white sheet. Finally one medic, a big guy with a name tag reading “Luciano,” took a scissors and cut the jacket and shirt right off my arm. He started looking for a bullet hole.

“It was a piece of glass,” the career lady explained.

Upon hearing that I had no relations living in the city, she offered to escort me to the hospital. We spoke during the ambulance ride to Saint Vincent’s Hospital.

“What were you doing in there anyhow?” I asked her. She was attractive, articulate, well-dressed, and simply didn’t look like a Blimpie’s type.

“I work in the area.”

“As what?”

“A stock broker,” she said and then asked what I was doing there. I explained that I had just walked over the bridge.

“Didn’t you have a token?”

“The IRT isn’t as poetic as the Brooklyn Bridge.”

“Oh,” she replied with an inspired smile, “you mean not many dawns chill it from its rippling rest…”

“Very good.” I was surprised. She asked me if I knew the reference.

“What kind of bogus, never-completed-a-page, cappuccino-slurping writer would I be if I didn’t know the opening of ‘The Bridge’?” The odds that two people knew the same poem seemed rare in these illiterate days.

“Is that what you are?”

“Well,” I replied, “maybe I completed just one page.”