“No,” is the curt answer from the elderly gentleman.
“Obviously,” the young man goes on, spinning the story in a leisurely way. “Obviously, the show attracts a few squealing nannies and the grinning park workers until the cops finally haul him off. By then he starts howling about the pills he gets in jail and how they fail to stop his incredible shrinking and by the next day, he says, he’s no bigger than a rat, and why do you people want him to turn into that? Aren’t there enough rats in the city already? He screams at the cops. And more, like: ‘If not, then look at me now, take a good look before I fall through a sewer grate, and before you good folks blow up into huge balloons, filled with the fumes and farts of the streets . . . ’ It was on TV, the show he puts on. I saw it the other night. Didn’t you?”
“No.”
“By then the nannies move on,” the young man is undeterred by the lack of interest in his news item; it’s like he’s rehearsing for an audition. “Yes, the parade moves on, and only some professorial types on their way to the Museum stop to listen. ‘Yea, big huge balloons,’ he tells these suits passing by, ‘And you and your briefcases will float out over the park and get punctured by the Empire State Building. And then you’ll come down as empty sacks, you’ll cover the whole City, bringing on the darkness of an endless night while I’ll be safe in the sewers, protected by the sewer grates.’ The scene ends with the cops throwing a tarp over him and escorting him out of the park. Wrapped in the unwieldy tarp he seems to shrink further but nowhere near the size of a rat when he gets shoved into a squad car. Only his voice never shrinks. ‘Help, please somebody help me; they always make me shrink more in jail . . . ’ You can hear his voice even over the police sirens. Well, what do you think? Is he going to be on Oprah next?”
This time the young man addresses the question directly into the elderly gentleman’s face. The latter does not cringe but turns his wire-rimmed bifocals at him.
“Of course, he knows what he’s doing. He knows we’re living in an expanding universe, and he’ll be back tomorrow and the day after, until he’ll appear as a balloon in Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade along with other icons of our infinitely varied civilization. After all, he seems to be commuting between the Met Museum and the Museum of Natural History, at least for now, until he has a museum of his own dedicated to his shrinking body.”
The lines are delivered in the tone of an experienced salesman rather than that of a teacher. Then silence. The young man drops his broad shoulders on the back of the bench.
“You don’t say.”
“That’s right, I don’t.” The bifocals switch back to the Times.
“What I’m saying is that what you really want to say is you want dick.” The young man announces wearily to the ashen sky.
“Thanks, I already have one,” the older man also speaks into the air as if addressing an invisible bird. But he does take his eyes off The New York Times in his hand without, however, lowering it.
“Wiseguy.”
“Question the virtue of wisdom?”
“That’s not the question. How much do you have on you?”
“Dick?”
“Yeah. That’s my name. What’s it going to be? Yes or no?”
“No comment.”
“You mean you want it.”
“I told you I have one already.”
“What you’ve got is not a dick, but worn-out pisser. And it can’t even piss any more.”
“Good enough for me.”
“That’s sick. You mean you go down on yourself?”
“Very ingenious. You must be an off-off-Broadway producer.”
“That’s sick. You hang in the closet and jerk off over you face.”
“Sounds like quite a feat, don’t you think?”
“Sick, that’s what I think.
“I didn’t say how I used it.”
“Used what? The closet?”
“No, my dick.”
“You didn’t?”
“No, I didn’t.”
Pause. The young man spreads his legs a little wider before he speaks again.
“Okay, wiseguy, just give me twenty.”
“Twenty what?”
“What? Twenty kisses on my ass . . . Come to think of it, that’ll be extra.”
Without looking at the young man the older gent looks around to see if there were any witnesses to the statement. No one in earshot.
“Twenty bucks? What for?”
“My time. You’ve taken up twenty dollars worth of my time already.”
“And you fifty of mine.”
“Wiseguy again. Dick or no dick, you’ve got to pay.”
“This is a public bench.”
“Not talking about the bench but my time.”
“You seem to have plenty to spare.”
“That doesn’t give you the right to abuse it.”
“What? The bench?”
“Enough of this. I have no time for people who’re just looking.”
“What? Looking at the lawn? The pigeons?”
“Just move on, you jerk.”
“That a threat?”
“Go and jerk off somewhere else. But first the twenty.”
“You’re mugging me.”
“I never use force. Hardly ever. Instead I call the cops.”
“Who? What are you going to tell them? I stole from you?”
“Worse. You offered twenty for a feel. To a normal young man on his way to work, you creep.”
“This bench is big enough for the two of us.”
“Go tell someone else on another bench. In the meantime I may be losing business. People might think you’re on.”
“I sit where I please.”
“You want me to make a scene? That’ll cost you a couple hundred . . . I can follow you home and go up to your apartment, make a scene with your doormen.”
“And how much for my dick?”
“Don’t get sick on me. Just give me the twenty and we’re buddies. You can even put your hand on my basket. Just for a few seconds, no more.”
“Rotten fruit in that basket.”
“And you’re dying for it . . .”
“Dying, dying, dead. No, I’ll make it a gift basket.”
“That’ll cost you . . .”
“I’m talking about mine. I’ll dress it up, put a bow on it and donate it to a saint who can give it away to the poor. My fruits and apples and banana . . .”
“In other words, you enjoy being the Incredible Shrinking Man . . .”
Silence. It begins to drizzle. Suddenly the young man gets up, casually kicks the older gent in the ankle and walks away. The older gent reaches into his sock with a shaking hand, but then he manages to stand up and limp off, holding The New York Times over his head against the rain. It’s a big park, room for everyone, whatever direction one takes, wherever one waits for someone.
The bench is slowly filling up with shiny beads of rainwater. Hard to tell what passes between them. They beam at one another and after a while move closer and mingle.
WAR, SEX, MONEY
BY NINA ZIVANCEVIC
The New York headquarters of the global law firm occupied the fifty-sixth floor of a steel, glass and hardwood skyscraper on Water Street. It was certainly no place for a tiny sparrow that had somehow flown inside. The bird traveled from one office to another, swallowed by a maze of corridors, until it finally dropped to the floor, then fainted from exhaustion on my desk. The temp at the next desk kept urging me to get rid of it before the supervisor arrived.
“What should I do, just throw it out the window, watch it fall fifty-six floors, crash into the sidewalk, unconscious, and die?” I asked.
“Of course,” he said, barely lifting his eyes from a merger report he had been proofreading for the last six hours without a break. “You’re wasting precious time. Take it off your coffee break. Here, I’ll get your coffee myself to save you time. Just get rid of the bird.”
He left, and returned less than two min
utes later, with my freshly filled coffee cup in hand. When he looked up, he almost dropped it on the floor.
“Oh, no!” he said. “It’s still here! The bird’s still here and you haven’t figured out how to get rid of it! Now we’re headed for real trouble.”
He sat the cup down and glanced at the stack of papers on my desk. His tone turned patronizing. “How much time did you spend on your document?”
“Thirty-four minutes and fifteen seconds,” I teased.
“Impossible,” he said. “You arrived here at 2 p.m., nearly six hours ago.”
“So what?”
“Well . . . that means . . . that means . . . You can only stay here until midnight, you know. Until the third shift arrives, and then you’re out . . .”
“Huh?”
“I’m telling you: You won’t be able to make any money now, no money whatsoever, at this pace. Taking care of a bird—it’s just ridiculous! By the way, my name is Roger. Are you an actress or something?”
He caught me off guard. I thought about it. In a way, I was an actress, like any immigrant new to New York City. I had struggled to attain success, one of the notions that seemed important to the American spirit. From what I could tell, success here came from a combination of three words: sex, war and money. Understanding the nuances of when and where to apply these was confusing, to say the least. An actress? Was Roger hitting on me? Starting a fight? Or trying to decide if I had any money?
“No, I am not an actress,” I said.
“Well, you look like one . . . ” he sighed. “I remember the last time I was in this law firm, a few months ago. I worked sixty-four hours straight—no sleep. This guy next to me just could not get into his work. He was an actor . . . Jim—yes, his name was Jim— that much I can recall, but I don’t remember his face. He just sat there, where you’re sitting now, and he ate sandwiches. He ate lots of sandwiches.”
“Did he offer you any?” I asked.
“You must be kidding,” Roger said. “Why should he? Would you offer your sandwiches to someone you’ve never seen before in your life?”
“Yes.”
“You would,” he snapped. “You’d try to save a bird too—because you are craaazy. Where do you come from? I mean, are there more people like you in your home country?”
“I’m from Nevada,” I said flatly.
End of conversation.
A huge woman, head of the word processing department, slid like a galleon into our tiny office. Mary Lou weighed close to 300 pounds and dressed in pink, which made her look even heavier. She carried an enormous plastic tray filled with legal documents.
“Good evening, Mary Lou! How are you today?” Roger seemed delighted, as if this ample lady were Our Lady of Salvation herself.
Mary Lou acknowledged him by setting the tray down.
“Here are two very important agreements for the Brown Wood firm which have to be done right away,” she announced with utmost urgency.
She glanced at the piles of unfinished work still on our desks.
“You two seem to be on the slow side tonight,” she observed.
“Well, Ma’am,” Roger chirped, “I’ve been trying to do my best but my partner has brought in this bird . . .”
“Bird?” Mary Lou asked.
“This—what should we call it?—this sparrow.” Roger pointed. “There, on the second debenture. Yes, Leah— . . . Oh, what’s your name again? Nina, right? Well, Nina brought the bird in and she kept parading around with this half-dead thing, wondering what to do with it. I told her to throw it out.”
I had to defend the honor of the bird and myself.
“Excuse me,” I explained. “The bird flew in through an A/C vent or a window or something and couldn’t find its way out. I found it on the floor, in the corridor next to Mr. Holmes’ office. I brought in here and it fainted on my desk.”
“What does this have to do with legal documents?” Mary Lou asked sharply.
“It has to do with empathy, with respect for life!” I cried. I detected a dangerously high-pitched tone in my voice. “I can’t simply let this little bird die! People kill so easily, without thinking twice. Soon, we’ll become an endangered species, too!”
My ecological rap seemed to mellow Mary Lou. The expression on her face suddenly changed from annoyance to indifference. She glanced at the bird and let out a heavy sigh.
“Okay,” she said. “Take the bird out and do whatever you wish with it.”
I smiled. Roger snarled.
Mary Lou snapped, “But come back immediately, these debentures cannot wait!” She left abruptly, a thick curtain of dust trailing behind her.
I was already halfway through the door, carefully clutching my poor bird in the palms of my hands, when Roger squeaked like a parakeet, “Come back immediately, these debentures cannot wait!”
I wheeled around. “Don’t repeat her words!” I shouted. “They sound even uglier coming from you!”
He acted like he didn’t hear me.
This is war, I thought.
How did our conflict start? Did I unleash some inner demon in Roger that caused him to act so callously about the bird’s existence? Did he clash with me because, deep down in his heart, he knew that I was right, that I had to defend this little creature against the corporate world?
In the claustrophobic elevator, I watched as the bird struggled for its life. This sparrow had nothing to do with the word processing department. It was there by chance. It didn’t exist to earn money, wasn’t there to start a war, and—at least in this environment—it had no mate.
I knew that once I released the sparrow on Water Street, it would not return.
Would I?
As soon as I passed the turnstile in the lobby, the bird lifted its head. Weak as it was, it nearly wiggled out of my hand and tried to fly away. I gently placed it on the sidewalk, next to a trashcan filled with soda cans and half-eaten hot dogs.
I stared as the bird struggled to its feet. It hopped a bit, and began nibbling at a discarded hot dog bun. It already seemed much better off than I ever was in the office, swimming in the word-processing pool on the fifty-sixth floor. Six hours of suffocating amidst the papers seemed like an eternity. Would I ever leave that pool? Could I do it now?
No. Not today. I stumbled back into the lobby and got in the elevator.
When I got back to the office, my tragic musings must have been visible on my face. Roger glanced up and snapped, “Back so soon? You know, for a second I thought that you’d left for good.”
“I almost did.”
“Yeah, but you know better,” he said. “Guess you need the money. Now you can redouble your efforts and prove that you deserve the money you earn. Here, take this debenture. We have to scan it for errors by reading it together. I’ll read out loud. Stop me if anything’s wrong.”
He handed me the papers and started to read. He read faster and faster, his curly head swirling around, hypnotized by legal language, his body shaking like a Dervish doing a strange corporate Sufi dance. I barely managed to keep up with him.
Suddenly, mid-sentence, he stopped and asked, “Would you like to have dinner with me tonight?”
I shuddered.
“I thought you wanted to stay here and work until dawn?”
“Well, that’s true,” Roger stammered. “But at the same time I started thinking that you had a nice body, uhmmmso . . . I thought we might have dinner instead.”
I wasn’t sure what “dinner” had to do with my body. Someone once informed me that in America, dinner was always followed by sex and no one could change the rules.
I was hungry, but . . . Didn’t he know we were at war?
“No,” I said firmly.
Roger seemed shocked.
“Are you sure?” he asked.
“Absolutely.”
“Why?”
“Well, it’s like this,” I said. “Roger—you and I are at war, but don’t ask me why. If we were to sign a sudden truce, and I had dinner
with you, we would eat, and then you would want to have sex. Then we’d be back in the office tomorrow to earn money and the war would start again. War. Sex. Money. For you and most of America, this may mean success, but for me, it is infinitely more important to save the life of a bird.”
Roger didn’t say another word.
When we clocked out, we left the building in separate elevators.
A CLOWN A DAY
BY ANGELA SLOAN
Pauline sat alone at a wooden table for two, drinking coffee from a china cup in the West Village café of the Jane Hotel. She swirled the contents with a French-manicured finger, glanced at her watch, and adjusted the sleeves of her cashmere cardigan.
The cafe wasn’t crowded. Nearby, an older couple read their respective newspapers. Soft music played from overhead speakers.
The door swung open and an attractive woman limped in. Her designer handbag matched her shoes. The left one was missing a heel.
“Hey Tash—!” Pauline said, fingering a long lock of hair.
“Hey Paul—! I’m so sorry to be late. I broke my pump in a subway grate.”
“Thought that only happened in the movies. You okay?”
Natasha sat down and removed her large dark sunglasses revealing a pair of eyes coated in smudged black mascara and faded eye shadow—remnants of the previous night.
“Yeah, yeah, I’m okay,” Natasha said. “But the strangest thing just happened. I was rescued . . .”
“Rescued?”
“A man in a clown suit saved me.”
“A clown suit?”
“Yeah!” Natasha said. “I was walking down Fourteenth Street, when my left Jimmy Choo wedged itself in a grate. I tried to wriggle free, but the heel broke and I started falling, face-first, toward the sidewalk. Then, suddenly, I was caught in the arms of this tall, tacky clown, who stood me back up—and handed me my shoe!”
“Sounds like some kind of fairy tale, Tash.”
“It was more like a drug-induced dream.” Natasha said. “We looked into each other’s eyes, then I took the shoe from the clown and stared like an idiot with my mouth gaping open as he walked off down Fourteenth Street! I shouted ‘thank you,’ but I don’t think he heard.”
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