Nicholson Baker
The Mezzanine

Copyright (c) 1986, 1988 Nicholson Baker

Chapter One

AT ALMOST ONE O'CLOCK I entered the lobby of the building where I worked and turned toward the escalators, carrying a black Penguin paperback and a small white CVS bag, its receipt stapled over the top. The escalators rose toward the mezzanine, where my office was. They were the freestanding kind: a pair of integral signs swooping upward between the two floors they served without struts or piers to bear any intermediate weight. On sunny days like this one, a temporary, steeper escalator of daylight, formed by intersections of the lobby's towering volumes of marble and glass, met the real escalators just above their middle point, spreading into a needly area of shine where it fell against their brushed-steel side-panels, and adding long glossy highlights to each of the black rubber handrails which wavered slightly as the handrails slid on their tracks, like the radians of black luster that ride the undulating outer edge of an LP.
When I drew close to the up escalator, I involuntarily transferred my paperback and CVS bag to my left hand, so that I could take the handrail with my right, according to habit. The bag made a little paper-rattling sound, and when I looked down at it, I discovered that I was unable for a second to remember what was inside, my recollection snagged on the stapled receipt. But of course that was one of the principal reasons you needed little bags, I thought: they kept your purchases private, while signaling to the world that you led a busy, rich life, full of pressing errands run. Earlier that lunch hour, I had visited a Papa Gino's, a chain I rarely ate at, to buy a half-pint of milk to go along with a cookie I had bought unexpectedly from a failing franchise, attracted by the notion of spending a few minutes in the plaza in front of my building eating a dessert I should have outgrown and reading my paperback. I paid for the carton of milk, and then the girl (her name tag said "Donna") hesitated, sensing that some component of the transaction was missing: she said, "Do you want a straw?" I hesitated in turn—did I? My interest in straws for drinking anything besides milkshakes had fallen off some years before, probably peaking out the year that all the major straw vendors switched from paper to plastic straws, and we entered that uncomfortable era of the floating straw; although I did still like plastic elbow straws, whose pleated necks resisted bending in a way that was very similar to the tiny seizeups your finger joints will undergo if you hold them in the same position for a little while.
So when Donna asked if I would like a straw to accompany my half-pint of milk, I smiled at her and said, "No thanks. But maybe I'd like a little bag." She said, "Oh! Sorry," and hurriedly reached under the counter for it, touchingly flustered, thinking she had goofed. She was quite new; you could tell by the way she opened the bag: three anemone splayings of her fingers inside it, the slowest way. I thanked her and left, and then I began to wonder: Why had I requested a bag to hold a simple half-pint of milk? It wasn't simply out of some abstract need for propriety, a wish to shield the nature of my purchase from the public eye—although this was often a powerful motive, and not to be ridiculed. Small mom and pop shopkeepers, who understood these things, instinctively shrouded whatever solo item you bought—a box of pasta shells, a quart of milk, a pan of Jiffy Pop, a loaf of bread—in a bag: food meant to be eaten indoors, they felt, should be seen only indoors. But even after ringing up things like cigarettes or ice cream bars, obviously meant for ambulatory consumption, they often prompted, "Little bag?" "Small bag?" "Little bag for that?" Bagging evidently was used to mark the exact point at which title to the ice cream bar passed to the buyer. When I was in high school I used to unsettle these proprietors, as they automatically reached for a bag for my quart of milk, by raising a palm and saying officiously, "I don't need a bag, thanks." I would leave holding the quart coolly in one hand, as if it were a big reference book I had to consult so often that it bored me.
Why had I intentionally snubbed their convention, when I had loved bags since I was very little and had learned how to refold the large thick ones from the supermarket by pulling the creases taut and then tapping along the infolding center of each side until the bag began to hunch forward on itself, as if wounded, until it lay flat again? I might have defended my snub at the time by saying something about unnecessary waste, landfills, etc. But the real reason was that by then I had become a steady consumer of magazines featuring color shots of naked women, which I bought for the most part not at the mom-and-pop stores but at the newer and more anonymous convenience stores, distributing my purchases among several in the area. And at these stores, the guy at the register would sometimes cruelly, mock-innocently warp the "Little bag?" convention by asking, "You need a bag for that?"—forcing me either to concede this need with a nod, or to be tough and say no and roll up the unbagged nude magazine and clamp it in my bicycle rack so that only the giveaway cigarette ad on the back cover showed—"Carlton Is Lowest."
Hence the fact that I often said no to a bag for a quart of milk at the mom-and-pop store during that period was a way of demonstrating to anyone who might have been following my movements that at least at that moment, exiting that store, I had nothing to hide; that I did make typical, vice-free family purchases from time to time. And now I was asking for a little bag for my half-pint of milk from Donna in order, finally, to clean away the bewilderment I had caused those moms and pops, to submit happily to the convention, even to pass it on to someone who had not yet quite learned it at Papa Gino's.
But there was a simpler, less anthropological reason I had specifically asked Donna for the bag, a reason I hadn't quite isolated in that first moment of analysis on the sidewalk afterward, but which I now perceived, walking toward the escalator to the mezzanine and looking at the stapled CVS bag I had just transferred from one hand to the other. It seemed that I always liked to have one hand free when I was walking, even when I had several things to carry: I liked to be able to slap my hand fondly down on the top of a green mailmen-only mailbox, or bounce my fist lightly against the steel support for the traffic lights, both because the pleasure of touching these cold, dusty surfaces with the springy muscle on the side of my palm was intrinsically good, and because I liked other people to see me as a guy in a tie yet carefree and casual enough to be doing what kids do when they drag a stick over the black uprights of a cast-iron fence. I especially liked doing one thing: I liked walking past a parking meter so close that it seemed as if my hand would slam into it, and at the last minute lifting my arm out just enough so that the meter passed underneath my armpit. All of these actions depended on a free hand; and at Papa Gino's I already was holding the Penguin paperback, the CVS bag, and the cookie bag. It might have been possible to hold the blocky shape of the half-pint of milk against the paperback, and the tops of the slim cookie bag and the CVS bag against the other side of the paperback, in order to keep one hand free, but my fingers would have had to maintain this awkward grasp, building cell walls in earnest, for several blocks until I got to my building. A bag for the milk allowed for a more graceful solution: I could scroll the tops of the cookie bag, the CVS bag, and the milk bag as one into my curled fingers, as if I were taking a small child on a walk. (A straw poking out of the top of the milk bag would have interfered with this scrolling—lucky I had refused it!) Then I could slide the paperback into the space between the scroll of bag paper and my palm. And this is what I had in fact done. At first the Papa Gino's bag was stiff, but very soon my walking softened the paper a little, although I never got it to the state of utter silence and flannel softness that a bag will attain when you carry it around all day, its hand-held curl so finely wrinkled and formed to your fingers by the time you get home that you hesitate to unroll it.
It was only just now, near the base of the escalator, as I watched my left hand automatically take hold of the paperback and the CVS bag together, that I consolidated the tiny understanding I had almost had fifteen minutes before. Then it had not been tagged as knowledge to be held for later retrieval, and I would have forgotten it completely had it not been for the sight of the CVS bag, similar enough to the milk-carton bag to trigger vibratiuncles of comparison. Under microscopy, even insignificant perceptions like this one are almost always revealed to be more incremental than you later are tempted to present them as being. It would have been less cumbersome, in the account I am giving here of a specific lunch hour several years ago, to have pretended that the bag thought had come to me complete and "all at once" at the foot of the up escalator, but the truth was that it was only the latest in a fairly long sequence of partially forgotten, inarticulable experiences, finally now reaching a point that I paid attention to it for the first time. In the stapled CVS bag was a pair of new shoelaces.

Chapter Two

MY LEFT SHOELACE had snapped just before lunch. At some earlier point in the morning, my left shoe had become untied, and as I had sat at my desk working on a memo, my foot had sensed its potential freedom and slipped out of the sauna of black cordovan to soothe itself with rhythmic movements over an area of wall-to-wall carpeting under my desk, which, unlike the tamped-down areas of public traffic, was still almost as soft and fibrous as it had been when first installed. Only under the desks and in the little-used conference rooms was the pile still plush enough to hold the beautiful Ms and Vs the night crew left as strokes of their vacuum cleaners' wands made swaths of dustless tufting lean in directions that alternately absorbed and reflected the light. The nearly universal carpeting of offices must have come about in my lifetime, judging from black-and-white movies and Hopper paintings: since the pervasion of carpeting, all you hear when people walk by are their own noises—the flap of their raincoats, the jingle of their change, the squeak of their shoes, the efficient little sniffs they make to signal to us and to themselves that they are busy and walking somewhere for a very good reason, as well as the almost sonic whoosh of receptionists' staggering and misguided perfumes, and the covert chokings and showings of tongues and placing of braceleted hands to windpipes that more tastefully scented secretaries exchange in their wake. One or two individuals in every office (Dave in mine), who have special pounding styles of walking, may still manage to get their footfalls heard; but in general now we all glide at work: a major improvement, as anyone knows who has visited those areas of offices that are still for various reasons linoleum-squared—cafeterias, mail-rooms, computer rooms. Linoleum was bearable back when incandescent light was there to counteract it with a softening glow, but the combination of fluorescence and linoleum, which must have been widespread for several years as the two trends overlapped, is not good.
As I had worked, then, my foot had, without any sanction from my conscious will, slipped from the untied shoe and sought out the texture of the carpeting; although now, as I reconstruct the moment, I realize that a more specialized desire was at work as well: when you slide a socked foot over a carpeted surface, the fibers of sock and carpet mesh and lock, so that though you think you are enjoying the texture of the carpeting, you are really enjoying the slippage of the inner surface of the sock against the underside of your foot, something you normally get to experience only in the morning when you first pull the sock on.
At a few minutes before twelve, I stopped working, threw out my earplugs and, more carefully, the remainder of my morning coffee—placing it upright within the converging spinnakers of the trash can liner on the base of the receptacle itself. I stapled a copy of a memo someone had cc:'d me on to a copy of an earlier memo I had written on the same subject, and wrote at the top to my manager, in my best casual scrawl, "Abe—should I keep hammering on these people or drop it?" I put the stapled papers in one of my Eldon trays, not sure whether I would forward them to Abelardo or not. Then I slipped my shoe back on by flipping it on its side, hooking it with my foot, and shaking it into place. I accomplished all this by foot-feel; and when I crouched forward, over the papers on my desk, to reach the untied shoelace, I experienced a faint surge of pride in being able to tie a shoe without looking at it. At that moment, Dave, Sue, and Steve, on their way to lunch, waved as they passed by my office. Right in the middle of tying a shoe as I was, I couldn't wave nonchalantly back, so I called out a startled, overhearty "Have a good one, guys!" They disappeared; I pulled the left shoelace tight, and bingo, it broke.
The curve of incredulousness and resignation I rode out at that moment was a kind caused in life by a certain class of events, disruptions of physical routines, such as:

(a)  reaching a top step but thinking there is another step there, and stamping down on the landing;
(b)  pulling on the red thread that is supposed to butterfly a Band-Aid and having it wrest free from the wrapper without tearing it;
(c)  drawing a piece of Scotch tape from the roll that resides half sunk in its black, weighted Duesenberg of a dispenser, hearing the slightly descending whisper of adhesive-coated plastic detaching itself from the back of the tape to come (descending in pitch because the strip, while amplifying the sound, is also getting longer as you pull on it), and then, just as you are intending to break the piece off over the metal serration, reaching the innermost end of the roll, so that the segment you have been pulling wafts unexpectedly free. Especially now, with the rise of Post-it notes, which have made the massive black tape-dispensers seem even  more grandiose  and  Biedermeier and  tragically defunct, you almost believe that you will never come to the end of a roll of tape; and when you do, there is a feeling, nearly, though very briefly, of shock and grief; 
(d) attempting to staple a thick memo, and looking forward, as you begin to lean on the brontosaural head of the stapler arm, to the three phases of the act—

first, before the stapler arm makes contact with the paper, the resistance of the spring that keeps the arm held up; then, second, the moment when the small independent unit in the stapler arm noses into the paper and begins to force the two points of the staple into and through it; and, third, the felt crunch, like the chewing of an ice cube, as the twin tines of the staple emerge from the underside of the paper and are bent by the two troughs of the template in the stapler's base, curving inward in a crab's embrace of your memo, and finally disengaging from the machine completely—

but finding, as you lean on the stapler with your elbow locked and your breath held and it slumps toothlessly to the paper, that it has run out of staples. How could something this consistent, this incremental, betray you? (But then you are consoled: you get to reload it, laying bare the stapler arm and dropping a long zithering row of staples into place; and later, on the phone, you get to toy with the piece of the staples you couldn't fit into the stapler, breaking it into smaller segments, making them dangle on a hinge of glue.)

In the aftermath of the broken-shoelace disappointment, irrationally, I pictured Dave, Sue, and Steve as I had just seen them and thought, "Cheerful assholes!" because I had probably broken the shoelace by transferring the social energy that I had had to muster in order to deliver a chummy "Have a good one!" to them from my awkward shoe-tier's crouch into the force I had used in pulling on the shoelace. Of course, it would have worn out sooner or later anyway. It was the original shoelace, and the shoes were the very ones my father had bought me two years earlier, just after I had started this job, my first out of college—so the breakage was a sentimental milestone of sorts. I rolled back in my chair to study the damage, imagining the smiles on my three co-workers' faces suddenly vanishing if I had really called them cheerful assholes, and regretting this burst of ill feeling toward them.
As soon as my gaze fell to my shoes, however, I was reminded of something that should have struck me the instant the shoelace had first snapped. The day before, as I had been getting ready for work, my other shoelace, the right one, had snapped, too, as I was yanking it tight to tie it, under very similar circumstances. I repaired it with a knot, just as I was planning to do now with the left. I was surprised—more than surprised—to think that after almost two years my right and left shoelaces could fail less than two days apart. Apparently my shoe-tying routine was so unvarying and robotic that over those hundreds of mornings I had inflicted identical levels of wear on both laces. The near simultaneity was very exciting— it made the variables of private life seem suddenly graspable and law-abiding.
I moistened the splayed threads of the snapped-off piece and twirled them gently into a damp, unwholesome minaret. Breathing steadily and softly through my nose, I was able to guide the saliva-sharpened leader thread through the eyelet without too much trouble. And then I grew uncertain. In order for the shoelaces to have worn to the breaking point on almost the same day, they would have had to be tied almost exactly the same number of times. But when Dave, Sue, and Steve passed my office door, I had been in the middle of tying one shoe—one shoe only. And in the course of a normal day it wasn't at all unusual for one shoe to come untied independent of the other. In the morning, of course, you always tied both shoes, but random midday comings-undone would have to have constituted a significant proportion of the total wear on both of these broken laces, I felt—possibly thirty percent. And how could I be positive that this thirty percent was equally distributed—that right and left shoes had come randomly undone over the last two years with the same frequency?
I tried to call up some sample memories of shoe-tying to determine whether one shoe tended to come untied more often than another. What I found was that I did not retain a single specific engram of tying a shoe, or a pair of shoes, that dated from any later than when I was four or five years old, the age at which I had first learned the skill. Over twenty years of empirical data were lost forever, a complete blank. But I suppose this is often true of moments of life that are remembered as major advances: the discovery is the crucial thing, not its repeated later applications. As it happened, the first three major advances in my life—and I will list all the advances here—

1.  shoe-tying
2.  pulling up on Xs
3.  steadying hand against sneaker when tying
4.  brushing tongue as well as teeth
5.  putting on deodorant after I was fully dressed
6.  discovering that sweeping was fun
7.  ordering a rubber stamp with my address on it to make bill-paying more efficient
8.  deciding that brain cells ought to die

—have to do with shoe-tying, but I don't think that this fact is very unusual. Shoes are the first adult machines we are given to master. Being taught to tie them was not like watching some adult fill the dishwasher and then being asked in a kind voice if you would like to clamp the dishwasher door shut and advance the selector knob (with its uncomfortable grinding sound) to Wash. That was artificial, whereas you knew that adults wanted you to learn how to tie your shoes; it was no fun for them to kneel. I made several attempts to learn the skill, but it was not until my mother placed a lamp on the floor so that I could clearly see the dark laces of a pair of new dress shoes that I really mastered it; she explained again how to form the introductory platform knot, which began high in the air as a frail, heart-shaped loop, and shrunk as you pulled the plastic lace-tips down to a short twisted kernel three-eighths of an inch long, and she showed me how to progress from that base to the main cotyledonary string figure, which was, as it turned out, not a true knot but an illusion, a trick that you performed on the lace-string by bending segments of it back on themselves and tightening other temporary bends around them: it looked like a knot and functioned like a knot, but the whole thing was really an amazing interdependent pyramid scheme, which much later I connected with a couplet of Pope's:

Man, like the gen'rous vine, supported lives; 
The strength he gains is from th'embrace he gives.

Only a few weeks after I learned the basic skill, my father helped me to my second major advance, when he demonstrated thoroughness by showing me how to tighten the rungs of the shoelaces one by one, beginning down at the toe and working up, hooking an index finger under each X, so that by the time you reached the top you were rewarded with surprising lengths of lace to use in tying the knot, and at the same time your foot felt tightly papoosed and alert.
The third advance I made by myself in the middle of a playground, when I halted, out of breath, to tie a sneaker, my mouth on my interesting-smelling knee, a close-up view of anthills and the tread marks of other sneakers before me (the best kind, Keds, I think, or Red Ball Flyers, had a perimeter of asymmetrical triangles, and a few concavities in the center which printed perfect domes of dust), and found as I relied the shoe that I was doing it automatically, without having to concentrate on it as I had done at first, and, more important, that somewhere over the past year since I had first learned the basic moves, I had evidently evolved two little substeps of my own that nobody had showed me. In one I held down a temporarily taut stretch of shoelace with the side of my thumb; in the other I stabilized my hand with a middle finger propped against the side of the sneaker during some final manipulations. The advance here was my recognition that I had independently developed refinements of technique in an area where nobody had indicated there were refinements to be found: I had personalized an already adult procedure.

Chapter Three

PROGRESS LIKE THAT did not come again until I was over twenty. The fourth of the eight advances I have listed (to bring us quickly up to date, before we return to the broken shoelaces) came when I learned in college that L. brushed her tongue as well as her teeth. I had always imagined that tooth-brushing was an activity confined strictly to the teeth, possibly the gums—but I had sometimes felt fleeting doubts that cleaning merely those parts of your mouth really attacked the source of bad breath, which I held to be the tongue. I developed the habit of pretending to cough, cupping my hand over my lips to sniff my breath; when the results disturbed me, late celery. But soon after I began going out with L., she, shrugging as if it were a matter of common knowledge, told me that she brushed her tongue every day, with her toothbrush. I shivered with revulsion at first, but was very impressed. It wasn't until three years had passed that I too began brushing my own tongue regularly. By the time my shoelaces broke, I was regularly brushing not only my tongue but the roof of my mouth— and I am not exaggerating when I say that it is a major change in my life.
The fifth major advance was my discovery of a way to apply deodorant in the morning while fully dressed, an incident I will describe in more detail later on, since it occurred on the very morning I became an adult. (In my case, adulthood itself was not an advance, although it was a useful waymark.)
My second apartment after college was the scene of the sixth advance. The bedroom had a wooden floor. Someone at work (Sue) told me that she was depressed, but that she would go home and clean her apartment, because that always cheered her up. I thought, how strange, how mannerist, how interestingly contrary to my own instincts and practices—deliberately cleaning your apartment to alter your mood! A few weeks later, I came home on a Sunday afternoon after staying over at L.'s apartment. I was extremely cheerful, and after a few minutes of reading, I stood up with the decision that I would clean my room. (I lived in a house with four other people, and thus had only one room that was truly mine.) I picked up articles of clothing and threw some papers out; then I asked myself what people like L., or the depressed woman at work, did next. They swept. In the kitchen closet I found a practically new broom (not one of the contemporary designs, with synthetic bristles uniformly cut at an angle, but one just like the kind I had grown up with, with blond smocked twigs bound to a blue handle by perfectly wrapped silver wire) that one of my housemates had bought. I got to work, reminded of a whole chain of subsidiary childhood discoveries, such as putting to use one of my father's shirt cardboards as a dustpan, and bracing the broom with an armpit in order to sweep the dust one-handed onto the shin cardboard; and I found that the act of sweeping around the legs of the chair and the casters of the stereo cabinet and the comers of the bookcase, outlining them with my curving broom-strokes, as if I were putting each chair leg and caster and doorjamb in quotation marks, made me see these familiar features of my room with freshened receptivity. The phone rang just as I had swept up a final pile of dust, coins, and old earplugs—the moment when the room was at its very cleanest, because the pile that I had just assembled was still there as evidence. It was L. I told her that I was sweeping my room, and that even though I had already been feeling very cheerful, this sweeping was making me wildly cheerful! She said that she had just swept her apartment, too. She said that for her the best moment was sweeping the dust into the dustpan, and getting those ruler-edged gray lines of superfine residue, one after another, diminishing in thickness toward invisibility, but never completely disappearing, as you backed the dustpan up. The fact that we had independently decided to sweep our apartments on that Sunday afternoon after spending the weekend together, I took as a strong piece of evidence that we were right for each other. And from then on when I read things Samuel Johnson said about the deadliness of leisure and the uplifting effects of industry, I always nodded and thought of brooms.
Advance number seven, occurring not long after the Sunday sweep, was occasioned by my ordering a rubber stamp with my name and address on it from an office-supply store, so that I wouldn't have to write out my return address repeatedly when I paid bills. I had dropped some things off at the cleaner's that day, and the day before I had taken some chairs that L. had inherited from an aunt to be recaned by blind people in a distant suburb; I also had written my grandparents, and I had ordered a transcript of a MacNeil-Lehrer show in which an interviewee had said things that represented with particular clarity a way of thinking I disagreed with, and I had sent off to Penguin, just as they suggested in the back of all their paperbacks, for a "complete list of books available"; two days earlier I had dropped off my shoes to be reheeled—it's amazing that heels wear down before the laces snap—and paid several bills (which had made me think of the need for an address stamp). As I walked out of the office-supply store, I became aware of the power of all these individual, simultaneously pending transactions: all over the city, and at selected sites in other states, events were being set in motion on my behalf, services were being performed, simply because I had requested them and in some cases paid or agreed to pay later for them. (The letter to my grandparents didn't exactly fit, but contributed to the feeling even so.) Molten rubber was soon to be poured into backward metal letters that spelled my name and address; blind people were making clarinetists' finger motions over the holes of a half-caned chair, gauging distances and degrees of tautness; somewhere in the Midwest in rooms full of Tandem computers and Codex statistical multiplexers the magnetic record of certain debts in my name was being overwritten with a new magnetic record that corresponded to a figure diminished to the penny by the amount that I had written out in hasty felt-tip pen on my checks (I made the traditional long wavy mark after "and 00/100" on the dollar line, just as my parents had, and their parents had before them); the dry cleaner's would close soon, and in a sack somewhere in the darkened store, tied in a bundle to keep it separate from all other bundles, behind the faded posters in the window saying "For That Newly Tailored Look," my dirty clothing would rest for the night; I trusted them to take temporary possession of it, and they trusted me to return to their store and pay them for making it look like new. All of this and more I could get the world to do for me, and at the same time all of it was going on, I could walk down the street, unburdened with the niceties of the individual tasks, living my life! I felt like an efficient short-order cook, having eight or nine different egg orders working at once, dropping the toast, rolling the sausages, setting up the plates, flicking the switch that illuminated a waitress's number. It was the rubber stamp specifically that pushed the advance over the top, because, in bearing my name, the stamp summed up all of this action at a distance, and was itself a secondary, life-ordering act, which had taken time now, but which would save time later, every bill I paid.
The eighth advance, the last one that I can think of antedating the day of the broken laces, was a set of four reasons why it was a good thing for brain cells to die. One way or another, I had worried about the death of brain cells since I was about ten, convinced year after year that I was getting more stupid; and when I began to drink in a small way, and the news broke (while I was in college) that an ounce of distilled spirits kills one thousand neurons (I think that was the ratio), the concern intensified. One weekend I confessed to my mother on the phone that I had been worrying that over the past six months especially, my brain wattage had dimmed perceptibly. She had always been interested in materialist analogies for cognition, and she offered reassurance, as I knew she would. "It's true," she said, "that your individual brain cells are dying, but the ones that stay grow more and more connections, and those connections keep branching out over the years, and that's the progress you have to keep in mind. It's the number of links that are important, not the raw number of cells." This observation was exceedingly helpful. In the week or two following her news that connections continued to proliferate in the midst of neural carnage, I formed several related theories:

(a) We begin, perhaps, with a brain that is much too crowded with pure processing capacity, and therefore the death of the brain cells is part of a planned and necessary winnowing that precedes the move upward to higher levels of intelligence: the weak ones fizzle out, and the gaps they leave as they are reabsorbed stimulate the growth buds of dendrites, which now have more capacious playgrounds, and complex correlational structures come about as a result. (Or perhaps the dendrites' own heightened need for space to grow forces a mating struggle: they lock antlers with feebler outriggers in the search for the informationally rich connections, shortcutting through intermediate territories and causing them to wither and shut down like neighborhoods near a new thruway.) With fewer total cells, but more connections between each cell, the quality of your knowledge undergoes a transformation: you begin to have a feel for situations, people fall into types, your past memories link together, and your life begins to seem, as it hadn't when you were younger, an inevitable thing composed of a million small failures and successes dependently inter-grown, as opposed to a bright beadlike row of unaffiliated moments. Mathematicians need all of those spare neurons, and their careers falter when the neurons do, but the rest of us should be thankful for their disappearance, for it makes room for experience. Depending on where on the range you began, you are shifted as your brain ages toward the richer, more mingled pole: mathematicians become philosophers,  philosophers become  historians,  historians become biographers, biographers become college provosts, college provosts become political consultants, and political consultants run for office.
(b) Used with care, substances that harm neural tissue, such as alcohol, can aid intelligence: you corrode the chromium, giggly, crossword puzzle—solving parts of your mind with pain and poison, forcing the neurons to take responsibility for themselves and those around diem, toughening themselves against the accelerated wear of these artificial solvents. After a night of poison, your brain wakes up in the morning saying, "No, I don't give a shit who introduced the sweet potato into North America." The damage that you have inflicted heals over, and the scarred places left behind have unusual surface areas, roughnesses enough to become the nodes around which wisdom weaves its fibrils. 
(c) The neurons that do expire are the ones that made imitation possible. When you are capable of skillful imitation, the sweep of choices before you is too large; but when your brain loses its spare capacity, and along with it some agility, some joy in winging it, and the ambition to do things that don't suit it, then you finally have to settle down to do well the few things that your brain really can do well—the rest no longer seems pressing and distracting, because it is now permanently out of reach. The feeling that you are stupider than you were is what finally interests you in the really complex subjects of life: in change, in experience, in the ways other people have adjusted to disappointment and narrowed ability. You realize that you are no prodigy, your shoulders relax, and you begin to look around you, seeing local color unrivaled by blue glows of algebra and abstraction.
(d) Individual ideas are injured along with the links over which they travel. As they are dismembered and remembered, damaged, forgotten, and later refurbished, they become subtler, more hierarchical, tiered with half-obliterated particulars. When they molder or sustain damage, they regenerate more as a pan of the self, and less as a pan of an external system.

These were the eight main advances I had available to bring to bear on my life on the day I sat repairing the second shoelace to wear out in two days.

Chapter Four

AFTER I HAD FINISHED the repair knot, a lump with two frizzed ends just below the top pair of eyelets, I pulled on the tongue of the shoe—another of the little preludes to tying that my father had shown me—and gingerly began the regulation knot. I took special care to scale down the bunny's ear that I had to form from the now shorter lace-end, so that there would be enough leeway to pull it tight without mishap. I watched with interest the fluent, thoughtless rumblings of my hands: they were the hands of a mature person, with vein-work and a fair amount of hair on their backs, but they had learned these moves so well and so long ago that elements of a much earlier gilled and tailed self seemed to persist in them. I noticed my shoes, too, for the first time in quite a while. They were no longer new-looking: I thought of them still as new, because I had more or less begun my job with them, but now I saw that they had two deep wrinkle lines above the toe, intersectingly angled, like the line of the heart and the line of the head in palmistry. These creases had always appeared on my shoes in exactly the same form, a puzzling fact that I had thought about often when I was little—I had tried to accelerate the forming of the paired wrinkles by bending a new shoe manually, and I had wondered why, if the shoe had just happened to begin to bend in a certain atypical place, because of a fluke weakness in the leather there, it never established the wrinkle line where it had first bent, but eventually assumed the classic sideways V pattern.
I stood, rolled my chair back into place, and took a step toward my office door, where my jacket hung all day, unused except when the air-conditioning became violent or I had a presentation to give; but as soon as I felt myself take that step, I experienced a sharpening of dissatisfaction with the whole notion that my daily acts of shoe-tying could have alone worn out my shoelaces. What about the variety of tiny stretchings and pullings that the shoe itself exerted on its laces as I walked around? Walking was what had worn down my heels; walking was what had put the creases in my shoe-toes—was I supposed to discount the significance of walking in the chafing of my laces? I remembered shots in movies of a rope that held up a bridge cutting itself against a sharp rock as the bridge swayed. Even if the shoelace's fabric moved only millimetrically against its eyelet with each step, that sawing back and forth might eventually cut through the outer fibers, though the lace would not actually pop until a relatively large force, such as the first tug I gave it when tying, was applied. All right! Much better! This walking-flexion model (as I styled it to myself, in opposition to the earlier pulling-and-fraying model) accounted for the coincidence of yesterday's and today's breakages very well, I thought. I almost never hopped, or lounged in a storefront with one foot crossing one ankle, or otherwise flexed one foot to the exclusion of the other—patterns of use that would have worn one shoelace disproportionately. I had slipped on a curb's icy wheelchair ramp the year before, and had used a crutch the next day, favoring my left leg for a week after that, but five days of limping was probably insignificant, and anyway, I wasn't at all sure that I had worn these, my new and best, shoes that week, since I wouldn't have wanted to get mountain-range salt-stains on the toes.
Still, I reflected, if it were true that the laces frayed from walking flexion, why did they invariably fray only in contact with the top pair of eyelets on each shoe? I paused in my doorway, looking out at the office, with my hand resting on the concave metal doorknob, resisting this further unwelcome puzzlement. I had never heard of a shoelace parting over some middle eyelet. Possibly the stress of walking fell most forcefully on the lace bent around the top eyelets, just as the stress of pulling the laces tight to tie them did. It was conceivable, though scary to imagine, that the pull-fray model and the walk-flex model mingled their coefficients so subtly that human agency would never accurately apportion cause.
I walked to Tina's cube, on the outside wall of which was the sign-out board, and moved the green magnetized puck next to my name from in to our, bringing it in line with Dave's, Sue's, and Steve's pucks. I wrote "Lunch" in the space provided for explanation, using a green Magic Marker.
"Have you signed the poster for Ray?" said Tina, rolling out in her chair. Tina had lots of hair, moussed out impressively around a small smart face; she was probably at her most alert just then, because she was watching the phones for Deanne and Julie, the other secretaries in my department, until they returned from lunch after one. In the more private area of her cube, in the shadow of the shelf under the unused fluorescent light, she had pinned up shots of a stripe-shirted husband, some nephews and nieces, Barbra Streisand, and a multiply xeroxed sentiment in Gothic type that read, "If You Can't Get Out of It, Get Into It!" I would love sometime to trace the progress of these support-staff sayings through the offices of the city; Deanne had another one pushpinned to a wall of her cube, its capitals in crumbling ruins under the distortion of so many copies of copies; it said, "you mean you want me to rush THE RUSH JOB I'M RUSHING TO RUSH?"
"What's happened to old Ray?" I said; Ray being the man responsible for emptying the trash in each office and cubicle and restocking the bathroom supplies, but not for vacuuming, which was done by an outside company. He was about forty-five, proud of his kids, wore plaid shirts—he was always associated for me with the feeling of working late, because I could hear the gradual approach of distant papery crashes and the slinkier sounds of sheet plastic as Ray worked his way down the row toward my office, emptying each wastebasket liner into a gray triangular plastic push-dumpster, and thereby defining that day as truly over for that office, even though you might still be working in it, because anything you now threw out was tomorrow's trash. Before he draped a new plastic liner in a wastebasket, he left a second, folded one cached in the bottom for the next day, saving himself a few motions on every stop; and he tied a very fast knot in the plastic so that it wouldn't be pulled in, effectively becoming trash itself, as soon as you discarded something big like a newspaper.
"He hurt his back last weekend while trying to move a swimming pool," said Tina.
I winced in office sympathy. "An above-ground pool, I hope."
"A toddler's pool for his grandniece. He may be out for a while."
"That explains why for the last few days, whenever I throw out my coffee cup, I've had to lower it through this puffy cushion of plastic. The person who's been taking Ray's place doesn't know how to get rid of the trapped air. I've been kind of enjoying the effect, though—a pillow effect."
"I'll bet you enjoy the pillow effect," she said, flirting mechanically. She led me to a poster laid out on the desk of a research assistant who had called in sick.
"I sign where?"
"Anywhere. Here's a pen."
I had already half pulled out my shirt-pocket pen, but not wanting to refuse her offer, I hesitated; at the same time, she saw that I already had a pen, and with an "Oh" began to retract hers from the proffering position; meanwhile I had decided to accept hers and had let go of the one in my pocket, not registering until it was too late that she had withdrawn the offer; she, seeing that I was now beginning to reach for her pen, canceled her retraction, but meanwhile I, processing her earlier corrective movement, had gone back to reaching for my own pen—so we went through a little foilwork that was like the mutual bobbings you exchange with an oncoming pedestrian, as both of you lurch to indicate whether you are going to pass to the right or to the left. Finally I took her pen and studied the poster; it depicted, in felt-tip colors, a vase holding five large, loopy outlined flowers. On the vase was the legend, in A+ cursive handwriting, "Ray, missing you, hoping you come back to work soon! From your Co-Workers." And on the petals of the felt-tip flowers were the neat, nearly identical signatures of many secretaries from the mezzanine, all of them signed at different angles. Intermixed with these were the more varied signatures of a few of the managers and research assistants. I made an exclamation about its beauty: it was beautiful.
"Julie did the vase, I did the flowers," said Tina.
I found an unobtrusive petal of the fourth flower: not too prominent, because I had a feeling that I might have been a little on the cool side to Ray recently—you go through inevitable cycles of office friendliness—and I wanted him to see signatures of people whose sentiments he would be absolutely sure of first. I almost signed, and then luckily I noticed that my boss Abelardo's tall and horizontally compressed conquistador signature, with lots of overloops and proud flourishes, was located one petal over on the very same flower I had chosen. To sign my name so near his would have been vaguely wrong: it might be construed as the assertion of a special alliance (my signature being closer than Dave's or Sue's or Steve's, who also worked for Abelardo), or it might seem to imply that I was seeking out my boss's name because I wanted to be near another exempt person's name, avoiding the secretarial signatures. I had signed enough office farewell and birthday and get-well cards by that time to have developed an unhealthy sensitivity to the nuances of signature placement. I moved over to an antipodal flower's petal, near Deanne's name, and signed at what I hoped was an original angle. "Ray will sob with joy when he sees this poster, Tina," I said.
"Aren't you nice," said Tina. "Lunchtime?"
"Off to buy shoelaces. One broke yesterday and one broke just now. Doesn't that seem strangely coincidental to you? I don't know how to explain it."
Tina frowned for a moment and then pointed at me. "You know, it's interesting you say that, because we have two smoke detectors in our house, all right? We've had them since about a year ago. Last week, the battery of one of them wore down, and it started to go, 'Peep! ... peep! ... peep!' So Russ went out and bought a new battery. And then the very next day, in the morning, I was just on my way out the door, I've got my keys in my hand, and suddenly I hear, 'Peep!... peep! ... peep!' from the other one. Two days in a row."
"That's very strange."
"It is. Especially because one of them goes off more often, because it's nearer the kitchen and it doesn't like it when I do any kind of broiling. Chicken roasting—peep, peep!— red alert! But the other one only went off once that I can remember."
"So you're saying it doesn't matter if they're used or not."
"Yeah, it doesn't matter. Wait a second." Her phone had begun ringing; she excused herself by raising her hand. Then, in a voice that was suddenly sweet, efficient, platinum-throated, slightly breathy, she said,

"Good morning, Donald Vanci's office? I'm sorry, Don's stepped away from his desk. May I take your number and have him get back to you?"

Smoothly disengaging her pen from my fingers, she located her While You Were Out pad and wrote down a name. Then, repeating product codes and amounts, she began to take a complex message. I wanted slightly to leave, but it would have been brusque to do so. What with Ray's poster and the roasting chicken, our interchange had passed just barely beyond office civility into the realm of human conversation, and thus had to be terminated conversationally: etiquette required me to wait until her phone duty was done in order to exchange one last sentence with her, unless the message she was taking was clearly going to go on for more than three minutes, in which case Tina, who knew the conventions well, would release me—cued first by some "Gee, I'm taking off now" movement from me (pulling up the pants, checking for my wallet, a joke salute)—with a mouthed "Bye!"
While I waited, I checked the revolving message carousel for messages, despite the fact that I had been in all morning and would have gotten any calls for me; then, reaching into Tina's cube, I picked up her heavy chrome date-stamper. It was a self-inking model: at rest, the internal dating element, looped with six belts of rubber, held its current numerology pressed upside down against the moist black roof of the armature. To use it, you set the square base of the machine down on the piece of paper you wished to date and pressed on the wooden knob (a true knob!)—then the internal element, guided by S curves cut out of the gantry-like superstructure, began its graceful rotational descent, uprighting itself just in time for landing like the lunar excursion module, touching the paper for an instant, depositing today's date, and then springing back up to its bat-repose. When I came in early in the morning, I sometimes watched (through the glass wall of my office) Tina advance the date of the date-stamper: after she had finished her plain donut, and had frisked the crumbs from her fingertips into the piece of plastic wrap that the donut had come in, and had folded the plastic wrap in around the crumbs until it formed a neat whitish pellet, and had thrown the pellet out, she would unlock her desk and remove her stapler, her While You Were Out pad (these tended to disappear if you didn't hide them), and the date-stamper from her meticulously arranged central drawer, placing any extra packets of sweetener that the deli had thrown in with her coffee into a special partition in the drawer that contained nothing but sweetener packets. And then she would advance the rubber belt of the date-stamper by a single digit, a performance that by now probably began the day for her, as her first office act—just as my turning ahead my Page-A-Day calendar, with its two hoops of metal over which you guided the holes of the postcard-sized page, to the next day (which I always did last thing the night before, because I found it deflating to confront yesterday's appointments and "to do's" first thing in the morning) had become the escapement on which my own life ratcheted forward.
Now I touched the date-stamper's belts of rubber numbers, which were updated by little metal thumb-wheels; the belts that corresponded to days were entirely black, but the belt that corresponded to the decade was still red-rubber-colored and new, except for the 8, which was sticky with ink. I opened my palm and pressed the date into it.
"Let me read those figures back to you," Tina was saying. The interesting thing about having to stand there and wait for her to finish before I left for lunch was that, even though we had been in the middle of a conversation whose interrupted momentum was what was holding me there, the longer I stood, the less likely it became that we would resume where we had left off, not because we had forgotten the thread, but because we had been discussing light, dismissable subjects, and neither of us wanted to be perceived as having paid too close attention to them: we wanted to preserve their status as chance observations that we had happened to make in the midst of a hundred other equally interesting items in our lives we might just as easily have mentioned to each other. And indeed, when Tina finally hung up, she said, changing instantly from her telephone voice, sensing that I wanted to get going, "How is it out there?" She leaned back to look at the square of blue sky and two taut, vibrating pulley-ropes from the window-washer's gondola visible through her boss's window. "Ooh, it's gorgeous out," she said. "I've got so many things to do—Julie better be back on time. I've got to get a birthday present for my goddaughter, a card for Mother's Day..."
"Oh man, that's coming up."
"Yep, and I've got to get a flea collar for my dog, and what else? There was something else."
"A battery for your second smoke alarm."
"That's right! No, actually Russ bought extras. He's smart, you know?"
"Smart guy," I said, tapping my temple as she had. "Tell me one thing—where would I get shoelaces?"
"CVS, maybe? There's a shoe repair place over by Delicato's—no, that's closed. CVS would definitely have them, I think."
"All righty!" I put down the date-stamper in its correct position on her desktop. "Bye."
"Did you sign out?"
I said I had.
She wagged her finger at me. "I have to watch you every minute. Have a nice lunch!"
I stepped away toward the men's room, and the lunch hour beyond.
 
Chapter Five

IT ISN'T RIGHT to say, "When I was little, I used to love x," if you still love x now. I admit that part of my pleasure in riding the escalator came from the links with childhood memory that the experience sustained. Other people remember liking boats, cars, trains, or planes when they were children— and I liked them too—but I was more interested in systems of local transport: airport luggage-handling systems (those overlapping new moons of hard rubber that allowed the moving track to turn a comer, neatly drawing its freight of compressed clothing with it; and the fringe of rubber strips that marked the transition between the bright inside world of baggage claim and the outside world of low-clearance vehicles and men in blue outfits); supermarket checkout conveyor belts, turned on and off like sewing machines by a foot pedal, with a seam like a zipper that kept reappearing; and supermarket roller coasters made of rows of vertical rollers arranged in a U curve over which the gray plastic numbered containers that held your bagged and paid-for groceries would slide out a flapped gateway to the outside; milk-bottling machines we saw on field trips that hurried the queueing bottles on curved tracks with rubber-edged side-rollers toward the machine that socked milk into them and clamped them with a paper cap; marble chutes; Olympic luge and bobsled tracks; the hanger-management systems at the dry cleaner's—sinuous circuits of rustling plastics (not a toy! not a toy! not a toy!) and dimly visible clothing that looped from the customer counter way back to the pressing machines in the rear of the store, fanning sideways as they slalomed around old men at antique sewing machines who were making sense of the heap of random pairs of pants pinned with little notes; laundry lines that cranked clothes out over empty space and cranked them back in when the laundry was dry; the barbecue-chicken display at Wool-worth's that rotated whole orange-golden chickens on pivoting skewers; and the rotating Timex watch displays, each watch box open like a clam; the cylindrical roller-cookers on which hot dogs slowly turned in the opposite direction to the rollers, blistering; gears that (as my father explained it) in their greased intersection modified forces and sent them on their way. The escalator shared qualities with all of these systems, with one difference: it was the only one I could get on and ride. So my pleasure in riding the escalator that afternoon was partly a pleasure of indistinct memories and associations—and not only memories of my father's (and my own) world of mechanical enthusiasms, but memories also of my mother taking my sister and me to department stores and teaching us to approach the escalator with care. She warned me not to jam a wad of molar-textured pink gum into the gap between one curved riser and the grooved stair below it—I wanted to because I wanted to see the gum crushed with the dwarfing force of a large, steady machine, the way garbage trucks forced paper cartons to crumple into each other. She would lift my sister up as we stepped onto the escalator, pinning the noisy form of the shopping bag to herself with her elbow, and set her down on a higher stair. I couldn't comfortably hold the rubber handrail, and sensibly wasn't allowed to steady myself with the high step ahead of me. As we drew close to the next floor, I could see a green glow coming from under the crenellated slit where the escalator steps disappeared; and as soon as I stepped off, onto oddly immobile linoleum and then a tundra of carpeting, the soft sounds reached me from some department I knew nothing about, like the "Miss" department: clickings of hangers with metal hooks and plastic armatures, hangers that were not heavily loaded with men's anechoic wool suits but rather were shouldering light, knitted burdens in tight schoolgirl circles around a cardboard clearance sign, accompanied by the melodious signal of the "Miss" telephone, dinging in slow sets of fours, one ding every second.
Yet, though it is true that my thoughts about escalators now are composed of up to seventy or eighty percent of this kind of kid-memory, I have lately become increasingly uncomfortable about including it in descriptions of the things I love—and it was only a few weeks ago, several years after the escalator ride that is the vehicle of this memoir, that I reached a somewhat firmer position on the whole issue. I was driving south, in the middle lane of a wide highway, at about 7:45 in the morning, on a very blue, bright, snowless day in winter, on my way to the job that I had taken after leaving my job with the department on the mezzanine. I had the sun-visor flap swung over to shield me from direct sunlight, which was hot on the left— in fact, I had extended the shade-range of the sun-visor (that beautiful aileron, notched in one corner to clear the rearview mirror) by slipping a manila folder over it—so the sky in front of me was filled with an excellent, pure blue, while no sun fell directly on me to make me squint. Cars and trucks around mine were all nicely spaced: close enough to create a sense of fellowship and shared purpose, but not close enough to make you think that you couldn't swerve exuberantly into another lane at any time if you wanted. I had the vertebrae of the steering wheel in my left hand and a Styrofoam cup of coffee with a special sipmaster top in my right.
I drew close behind a green truck going about five miles an hour slower than I was. It was technically a "garbage truck," but not the kind of city machine that comes to mind when you hear that phrase (the drooping rear section like the hairnet of a food-service worker). It was, instead, the larger kind of truck that hauls the compressed garbage from some central processing site to a landfill: a big rectangular container drawn by a semi-detached cab. I know that the garbage was somehow compressed because I could see little pieces of it pressing fiercely out the slight gap under the rear panel—it was not refuse of a normal, fluffy, just-gathered density. Thick green canvas covers, very dirty, were drawn across the top of the container, secured with bungee lines that stretched in angles down its sides.
The angles of the bungee lines and the transition between those straight lines and the taut scalloped curves they pulled from the cloth covers were what pleased me first. Then I looked between the bungee lines at the surface of the metal container: organic shapes of rust had been painted over with more green, and the rust, still active, had continued to grow under its new coat, so that there was a combination of the freshness of recent paint and the hidden weatheredness of rust. The whole thing looked crisply beautiful as I changed lanes to pass it. Right when I suddenly had more blue sky in front of me than green truck, I remembered that when I was little I used to be very interested in the fact that anything, no matter how rough, rusted, dirty, or otherwise discredited it was, looked good if you set it down on a stretch of white cloth, or any kind of clean background. The thought came to me with just that prefix: "when I was little," along with the sight of a certain rusted railroad spike I had found and placed on an expanse of garage concrete that I had carefully swept smooth. (Garage dust fills in concrete's imperfections when you sweep with it, making a very smooth surface.) This clean-background trick, which I had come upon when I was eight or so, applied not only to things I owned, such as a group of fossil brachiopods I set against a white shirt cardboard, but also to things in museums: curators arranged geodes, early American eyeglasses, and boot scrapers against black or gray velvet backgrounds because anytime you set some detail of the world off that way, it was able to take on its true stature as an object of attention.
But it was the garbage truck I saw at age thirty on display against the blue sky that had reminded me of my old backdrop discovery. Though simple, the trick was something that struck me as interesting and useful right now. Thus, the "when I was little" nostalgia was misleading: it turned something that I was taking seriously as an adult into something soupier, less precise, more falsely exotic, than it really was. Why should we need lots of nostalgia to license any pleasure taken in the discoveries that we carry over from childhood, when it is now so clearly an adult pleasure? I decided that from now on I wouldn't get that faraway look when describing things that excited me now, regardless of whether they had first been childhood enthusiasms or not.
As if in reward for this resolution, later that same day I was looking in a cooler in a convenience store and saw a plastic-packaged sandwich labeled "Cream Cheese and Sliced Olive." The idea of a cross-section of olive-encircled pimiento set like a cockatoo's eye in the white stretch of cream cheese hit me very hard as an illustration of the same principle I had rediscovered that morning: on their own, olives are old, pickled, briny, rusty—but set them off against a background of cream cheese and you have jewelry.
So I want now to do two things: to set the escalator to the mezzanine against a clean mental background as something fine and worth my adult time to think about, and to state that while I did draw some large percentage of joy from the continuities that the adult escalator ride established with childhood escalators, I will try not to glide on the reminiscential tone, as if only children had the capacity for wonderment at this great contrivance.

Chapter Six

WHILE STILL temporarily intoxicated by this sensation of candor, I have to say that no matter how hard I try to keep sentimental distortions from creeping in, they creep in anyway. In the case of the escalator, I can probably keep the warpage down, because escalators have been around, unchanging (except for that exciting season when glass-sided escalators appeared), for my whole life—nothing has been lost. But other things, like gas pumps, ice cube trays, transit buses, or milk containers, have undergone disorienting changes, and the only way that we can understand the proportion and range and effect of those changes, which constitute the often undocumented daily texture of our lives (a rough, gravelly texture, like the shoulder of a road, which normally passes too fast for microscopy), is to sample early images of the objects in whatever form they take in kid-memory—and once you invoke those kid-memories, you have to live with their constant tendency to screw up your fragmentary historiography with violas of lost emotion. I drink milk very rarely now; in fact, the half-pint carton I bought at Papa Gino's to go with the cookie was one of the very last times: it was a sort of test to see whether I still could drink it with the old pleasure. (You have to spot-check your likes and dislikes every so often in this way to see whether your reactions have altered, I think.) But I continue to admire the milk carton, and I believe that the change from milk delivered to the door in bottles to milk bought at the supermarket iii cardboard containers with peaked roofs was a significant change for people roughly my age—younger and you would have allied yourself completely with the novelty as your starting point and felt no loss; older and you would have already exhausted your faculties of regret on earlier minor transitions and shrugged at this change. Because I grew up as the tradition evolved, I have an awe, still, of the milk carton, which brought milk into supermarkets where all the rest of the food was, in boxes of wax-treated cardboard that said "Sealtest," a nice laboratorial word. I first saw the invention in the refrigerator at my best friend Fred's house (I don't know how old I was, possibly five or six): the radiant idea that you tore apart one of the triangular eaves of the carton, pushing its wing flaps back, using the stiffness of its own glued seam against itself, forcing the seal inside out, without ever having to touch it, into a diamond-shaped opening which became an ideal pourer, a better pourer than a circular bottle opening or a pitcher's mouth because you could create a very fine stream of milk very simply, letting it bend over that leading corner, something I appreciated as I was perfecting my ability to pour my own glass of milk or make my own bowl of cereal—the radiant idea filled me with jealousy and satisfaction. I have a single memory of a rival cardboard method, in which a paper stopper was built into one corner of a flat-topped carton; but the triumphant superiority of the peaked-roof idea, which so gracefully uses the means of closure as the means of dispensation (unlike, say, the little metal pourers built into the sides of Domino sugar or Cascade dishwashing detergent boxes, which while intrinsically interesting are unrelated to the glued flaps of cardboard at their tops and bottoms), swept every alternative aside.
But I also had a strong counter-fascination for the system of home delivery, which managed to hold on for years into the age of the paper carton. It was my first glimpse of the social contract. A man opened our front door and left bottles of milk in the foyer, on credit, removing the previous empties— mutual trust! In second grade we were bussed to a dairy, and saw quart glass bottles in rows rising up out of bins of steaming spray on a machine like a showboat paddle as they were washed. Despite my intense admiration for the carton, I felt superior to those who reached into the supermarket's dairy case and withdrew Sealtest products, admitting to the world in doing so that they did not have home delivery and hence were not really members of society but loners and drifters. Yet soon I began to sense that everything was not right in the realm of home delivery. We had begun with Onondaga Dairy, their quart glass bottles topped with a paper cap that held the glass with folded pleats, their trademark an American Indian child wearing the kind of Western-movie feather headband that I doubt was ever worn among the tribes of upstate New York. Then the dairy mergers began. Milk continued to appear without interruption, but the name on the step-van, and the step-van itself, kept changing. Deliveries went from three times to twice a week. Strange, foreign half-gallon bottles—Keen Way Dairy is the only one I remember—began cropping up: one dairy was using the bought-out bottles of other defunct dairies, meaning that the name molded in the glass no longer matched the name printed on the cap, a disturbing discordance. Then glass was abandoned altogether, replaced first by white plastic containers with red handles, and then by the very same Sealtest cartons you could buy in the supermarket. Out of habit or a reverence for tradition, we continued to take home delivery, even though the delivered milk often went bad more quickly after a day in the foyer, unrefrigerated, while my parents worked and my sister and I were at school. Though I resisted it at first, my mother began buying supplemental canons of Sealtest from the A&P, or sending me out to buy them from the mom-and-pop stores; but in order to keep (we thought) the home-delivering dairy afloat in these twilight years, we responded to the sad promotional leaflets they left between the cartons, diversifying into orange juice, chocolate milk, cottage cheese, buttermilk. By this time the step-van had no name painted on it at all; we were the last house on the street and perhaps in the whole neighborhood still taking deliveries, doubtless more of a nuisance than a mainstay: the delivery man, a different person every other week, would accelerate roughly as soon as he had swung back into the seat and put the van in gear—he had a whole city of isolated sentimentalists to cover. Finally the last merged dairy left a leaflet saying that they were discontinuing home service, and the transition was complete. I'll guess and say that it was 1971. Did I mourn? Any sadness I felt was overpowered by an embarrassment that we had associated ourselves with the losers, services that could be grouped with horse-drawn ice and coal trucks. Fuller brush men, and person-to-person telephone calls, in an age of Brasilia, of Water Piks, of wheeled and segmented arms that telescoped out from airport gates to press their vinyl, curve-accommodating terminus against the riveted door-regions of unloading passenger planes, and of escalators.
But because the whole gradual change was complete before I became an adult, whenever I think over it I am tempted away from history into all kinds of untrustworthy emotional details. It took my mother a few years before she stopped absentmindedly trying to tear open the wrong side of the Sealtest carton, despite my having lectured her on the fact that one triangle was much more heavily glued than the other, their difference indicated by the words "Open Here," enclosed in the outline of an arrow—to disregard it was to fail to take the invention seriously. My father made iced coffee after a morning of lawn-mowing or shrub transplantation, and often he left the carton sitting out on the counter afterward, with the spout open. And here I am pulled, willingly by this time, to consider my father's great iced coffee: several spoonfuls of instant coffee and sugar, liquefied into a venomous syrup by a bare quarter-inch of hot tap water to remove any granulation, then four or even five ice cubes, water to halfway up the glass, and milk to the top: so many ice cubes that until they melted a little, hissing and popping, with the milk falling in diffusional swirls around them, he could barely get a spoon to the bottom of the glass to stir the drink. His plan was to market a bottled mocha version of it called Cafe Ole, a mock-up of which, with a dramatic Zorro-like logo scripted diagonally across the label, sat on our mantel for a while after the plan was set aside. I have to include, too, the subsidized half-pints of milk we bought in school for four cents and raced each other to drink in one skull-chilling continuous inhalation on the paper straw—this mystical four cents linked both with the picture of the tall glass of milk in the poster of the four food groups, and with the rule that you should have four glasses of milk every day, a rule I faithfully followed, drinking four at one sitting just before bed if I had to. All of these nostalgia-driven memories pour out of that Sealtest carton, pulling me off course, distorting what I want to be a simple statement of gratitude for a great packaging design that happened to come into widespread use when I was little. I look forward to the time when I will have thought about milk and cheese products enough as an adult that the unpasteurized taint of sentimentality will lift from the subject; but so far, aside from the recent cream-cheese-and-sliced-olive thing, only one additional unit of dairy thinking has occurred to me: I have lately turned against milk as a beverage. In my first year of college it became widely believed that "milk makes more mucus" and hence should be avoided when you have a cold— that was the beginning of my disenchantment. I noticed soon afterward that it seemed to coat my tongue and give me bad breath, something I was, as I have said, very anxious to avoid, and then a few years later it developed that L. was allergic to milk: it gave her blood-flecked diarrhea, and the sight of someone swallowing a full cold glass on TV made her moan with distaste. Before she understood that she was physically allergic, she ascribed her dislike to her father's influence: he, she told me, associated dairy products with a certain kind of cheerful brutishness—blond mezzosoprano camp counselors in Wagnerian horn-hats sitting among the lupins drinking bowl after bowl, their knees and cheekbones visibly growing. She remembered his quoting Tacitus's Germania darkly, something about "barbarians who buttered their hair." (Or was it not Tacitus but Ammianus Marcellinus?) And I, influenced by her dislike, began to feel uncomfortable when I saw the semi-opaque coating left on the side of a glass of half-drunk milk narrowing up to where someone's lips had slurped at the rim; my pity for all those bouts of diarrhea that she had gone through before she understood her allergy and my own deep desire not to be thought of as a hair-butterer combining. When she had to use milk in a recipe, she would sniff at the open carton suspiciously, uncertain of its freshness, but uncertain too whether her uncertainty was not actually an aversion to its normal smell; and she would finally say, "This seem all right to you?" handing me the carton with a pragmatic, pursed-lip, frowning expression I liked a lot—the "Would you kindly corroborate this bad odor?" expression—studying my face carefully as I put my nose to the carton. And here was another wayside greatness of the milk carton: the small diamond shape of the spout is a perfect fit for the nose, concentrating any scent of sourness: no wide, circular milk-bottle opening could have been nearly as helpful for diagnosis.
I have, then, only one unit of adult thought about milk to weigh against dozens of childhood units. And this is true of many, perhaps most, subjects that are important to me. Will the time ever come when I am not so completely dependent on thoughts I first had in childhood to furnish the feedstock for my comparisons and analogies and sense of the parallel rhythms of microhistory? Will I reach a point where there will be a good chance, I mean a more than fifty-fifty chance, that any random idea popping back into the foreground of my consciousness will be an idea that first came to me when I was an adult, rather than one I had repeatedly as a child? Will the universe of all possible things I could be reminded of ever be mostly an adult universe? I hope so—indeed, if I could locate the precise moment in my past when I conclusively became an adult, a few simple calculations would determine how many years it will be before I reach this new stage of life: the end of the rule of nostalgia, the beginning of my true Majority. And, luckily, I can remember the very day that my life as an adult began. 

Chapter Seven

IT HAPPENED when I was twenty-three, four months into my job on the mezzanine, at a time when I owned only five shirts. Each of them could be worn, at the most, three times, except for the blue, which continued to look sharp well into the fourth wearing, as long as none of the previous wearings had been on unusually hot days. The cleaner's would accept no fewer than three shirts at a time, and they took four days, so frequently there would be a single shirt hanging in my large, resonant closet when I came home from work.
On that morning of my adulthood, I had on my bureau an unopened brown paper parcel containing three clean shirts. I pried off the string (for it never paid to try to snap the string that early in the morning, or to fiddle with the rapid but excellent dry cleaner's knot), and let string and paper fall at my feet. My mother had sometimes brought home paper parcels of thinly sliced Westphalian ham and allowed me to open them, and this first moment of shirt disclosure had something of the earlier Westphalian unveiling, yet it was perhaps even more pleasing, because in this case I was rediscovering my old buddies, articles of clothing I had worn many times before, now made almost unrecognizably new, no longer wrinkled inside the elbows or around the waist where I had tucked and retucked them, but wrinkled with positive kinds of semi-intentional knife-edge creases and perpendicular fold-lines that only heightened the impression of ironedness, having come about either as a result of the occasionally indiscriminate force of the pressing and starching machines (such as the crow's-feet on the sleeve near the cuffs) or as a result of the final careful foldup. And the shirts weren't merely folded: strips of light blue paper held them tightly and individually to their stored state, their arms impossibly bent behind them as if each were concealing a present.
I looked at the three of them—two whites and the long-running blue—and I decided I would wear my slightly older (four months old) white. Four whole months as a businessman! When I looked closely, I was sure I could detect a slight aging of the cotton—it seemed to be soaking up the starch more completely than the newer white shirt was able to. I snapped the blue paper strip; then I pulled out the shirt cardboard and tossed it on the pile of cardboards I had already saved. I held the chosen shirt in the air with my little finger hooked under the collar and shook it once. It made the sound of a flag at the consulate of a small, rich country. Now—was I ready to put it on?
My T-shirt, of course, was already tucked into my underpants: a few weeks into the job I had discovered that this small act of foresight made the whole rest of the business day much more comfortable. And my suit pants were on but not fastened; I was ready. The shirt was always colder than you expected. I began buttoning at the second button from the top, braving the minor pain in my thumb-tip as I pushed that button through and heard the minuscule creaking or winching sound that its edge made in clearing the densely stitched perimeter. From here I progressed right down the central strip of buttons, did up my pants, and moved on to the cuffs. These two cuff buttons were the hardest, because you could use only one hand, and because the starch was always heavier there than elsewhere; but I had gotten so that I could fasten them almost without thinking: you upended the right cuff button with your thumbnail and cracked the starch-fused buttonhole apart over it, closing your fingers hypodermically to propel it into place; then you repeated the procedure with the other cuff. Sped up, the two symmetrical cuff-buttoning sequences would have looked like a Highland reel.
The topmost button called me to the mirror, where I saw my chin jut up into a bulldog expression to make way for the fists at my neck. Then the tie; the belt; the shoes—all automatic subroutines.
I had my coat on when I remembered that I had forgotten to put on antiperspirant. This was a setback. I weighed undoing the belt, untucking the shirt, untucking the T-shirt from the underpants: was it worth it? I was running late.
Here was where I made a discovery. An image came to me— Ingres's portrait of Napoleon. Displacing my tie, I undid a single middle button. Yes, it was possible to get at your underarm by entering the shirt through the gap made by one undone button and then working the stick of antiperspirant up the pleural cavity between T-shirt and shirt until you were able to snag the sleevelet of the T-shirt with a finger and pull it past the seam where your shirtsleeve began, thereby exposing the area you needed to cover. I felt like Balboa or Copernicus. In college I had been amazed to see women take off bras without removing their sweatshirts, by unfastening the rear bra-catch through the material, pushing one sleeve up far enough to slip off one strap, and, after a few arousing shrugs of their shoulders, pulling the whole wriggling thing nonchalantly out of the opposite sleeve. My own antiperspirant discovery had some of the topologically revelatory flavor of those bra removals.
I walked to the subway very pleased with myself. My shoes (very new then; only a few months of wear on the laces) made a nice granular sound on the sidewalks. The subway wasn't crowded, and I got a standing spot I liked, and had room to bend to put my briefcase between my ankles. It was one of those good rides, where the motion of the train is soothing, and the interior temperature pleasantly warm but not hot. I imagined the subway car as a rapidly moving loaf of bread. The motto "You can taste it with your eyes" occurred to me. It was a shame, I thought, that white bread had fallen into disfavor, since only white bread looks really good as toast, and only white bread looks good when cut diagonally. I recalled the strange steamy feeling of white toast at the moment you removed it from the toaster—no matter how crumby or disreputable your toaster was, the toast always came out smooth and clean—and the many styles of buttering you could use. You could scrape lightly, keeping to the surface; or if you had colder butter, you might be obliged to crush into the softer layer below the crust as you forced the butter to spread; or you could tap little chips of butter onto the toast without spreading them at all, place the two pieces of toast face to face, and cut them in half diagonally, so that the pressure of the knife stroke aided the melting of the butter in addition to halving the bread. Now, why was diagonal cutting better than cutting straight across? Because the corner of a triangularly cut slice gave you an ideal first bite. In the case of rectangular toast, you had to angle the shape into your mouth, as you angle a big dresser through a hall doorway: you had to catch one corner of your mouth with one corner of the toast and then carefully turn the toast, drawing the mouth open with it so that its other edge could clear; only then did you chomp down. Also, with a diagonal slice, most of the tapered bite was situated right up near the front of your mouth, where you wanted it to be as you began to chew; with the rectangular slice, a burdensome fraction was riding out of control high on the dome of the tongue. One subway stop before mine, I concluded that there had been a logic behind the progress away from the parallel and toward the diagonal cut, and that the convention was not, as it might first have appeared, merely an affectation of short-order cooks.
I then began to wonder how late to work I was going to be. My own watch had been stolen by threat of force a week before, but I glanced hopefully down the diminishing perspective of hands and wrists that held the metal loops of the subway car. I spotted many watches, women's and men's, but on this particular morning they were all unreadable. The buckle, and not the face, of one pointed my way; some were too far off; the women's were too small; several lacked all circumferential points of reference, and thus remained Necco wafers to all but their wearers; some were oriented so that glints from their crystals obscured the hands or the diodes beneath. A wristwatch less than a foot from my head, worn by a too carefully shaven man reading a newspaper folded into tiny segments, was exactly half visible; the half I needed was eclipsed by his cuff, so that while I could easily make out the terminal "get" of the tall-lettered trademark, the only time-telling I could do was to determine that it was not yet actually past nine o'clock. The cuff was possibly more expertly starched than my own.
And this was when I realized abruptly that as of that minute (impossible to say exactly which minute), I had finished with whatever large-scale growth I was going to have as a human being, and that I was now permanently arrested at an intermediate stage of personal development. I did not move or flinch or make any outward sign. Actually, once the first shock of raw surprise had passed, the feeling was not unpleasant. I was set: I was the sort of person who said "actually" too much. I was the sort of person who stood in a subway car and thought about buttering toast—buttering raisin toast, even: when the high, crisp scrape of the butter "knife is muted by occasional contact with the soft, heat-blimped forms of the raisins, and when if you cut across a raisin, it will sometimes fall right out, still intact though dented, as you lift the slice. I was the sort of person whose biggest discoveries were likely to be tricks to applying toiletries while fully dressed. I was a man, but I was not nearly the magnitude of man I had hoped I might be.
Riding the escalator to street level, I tried to revive the initial pain of the discovery: I had heard a lot about people having episodes of sudden perception like this, and had not undergone many myself. By the time I was outside, I had decided that I had just been through something serious enough that I was justified in taking the time, late or not, to get coffee and a muffin to go at the really good coffee place. Once there, however, as I watched the woman briskly open a small bag for my Styrofoam cup and tissue-protected muffin, using the same loose-wristed flip my mother had used in shaking down a fever thermometer (which is the fastest way to open a bag), and then sprinkle the purchase with handfuls of plastic stirrers, packets of sugar, napkins, and pats of butter, I felt an impatience to get to the office: I looked forward to the morning show-and-tell period with Dave, Sue, Tina, Abe, Steve, and the rest of them, when I would describe, leaning in doorways and on modular dividers, how my personality had ground to an amazing halt, right on the subway, and had left me a brand-new adult. I shot my cuffs and pushed through the revolving door to work.

Chapter Eight

I WAS BOTH RELIEVED and disappointed to find, later, that I wasn't quite so developmentally fixed as it had seemed on that morning; but even so I continued to think of that day as marking a notable, once-in-a-lifetime change of -hoods. Now, keeping this fixed age of twenty-three in mind as the definitive end of my childhood, we'll assume that every day of my life I had thought a constant number of new thoughts. (The thoughts had to be new only to me, previously un-thought by me, regardless of whether or not everyone else considered them to be outworn and commonplace; and their actual number was unimportant—one, three, thirty-five, or three hundred a day; it depended on the fineness of the filtration used to distinguish the repeaters from the novelties, as well as on my own rate of new thinking—so long as it remained constant.) We'll assume that all of these new thoughts, once they occurred, did not decompose past a certain point, but rather remained intact to the extent that they could be plucked back into living memory at any later time— even though the particular event, or later new thought, that would remind me of any given earlier thought might never arise. And let's say that my memory began suddenly to function consistently at age six. Under these three simplifying assumptions, I would have laid away in storage seventeen years' worth (23 - 6 = 17) of childish thoughts by the time I finally turned into an adult on that subway ride to work. Therefore, I concluded recently, I needed simply to continue to think more new thoughts at the same daily rate until I passed the age of forty (23 + 17 = 40), and I would finally have amassed enough miscellaneous new mature thoughts to outweigh and outvote all of those childish ones—I would have reached my Majority. It was a moment I had not known existed, but it quickly took on the stature of a great, shimmering goal'. It is the moment when I will really understand things; when I will consistently put the past to wise and well-tempered uses; when any subject I call up for mental consideration will have a whole sheaf of addenda dating from my late twenties and my thirties in it, forcing down the primary-colored pipings from "when I was eight" or "when I was little" or "when I was in fourth grade," which had been of necessity so prominent. Middle age. Middle age!
As I paused for an instant a few feet from the escalators, at the close of my lunch hour on that day my shoelace broke, carrying my Penguin paperback of Aurelius's Meditations and my CVS bag, I was two years on my way toward this great goal, though I did not understand it clearly at the time; that is, two-seventeenths, or roughly twelve percent, of the available ideas in my brain at that moment were grown-up ideas, and the rest were childish, and I had to accept them as such.
It happened that nobody was on the escalators just then, either going down or going up, even though the end of lunch hour was a peak time. The absence of passengers, combined with the slight thumping sound the escalators made, quickened my appreciation of this metallic, uplifting machine. Grooved surfaces slid out from underneath the lobby floor and with an almost botanical gradualness segmented themselves into separate steps. As each step arose, it seemed individual and easily distinguished from the others, but after a few feet of escalation, it became difficult to track, because the eye moves in little hops when it is following a slow-moving pattern, and sometimes a hop lands the gaze on a step that is one above or below the one that you had fixed on; you find yourself skipping back down to the early, emergent part of the climb, where things are clearer. It's like trying to follow the curve on a slowly rotating drill bit, or trying to magnify in with your eye to enter the first groove of a record and track the spiral visually as the record turns, getting lost in the gray anfractuosities almost immediately.
Since nobody was on the escalators, I could have played a superstitious game I often played during escalator rides, the object of which was to ride all the way to the top before anyone else stepped onto the escalator behind me or above me. While maintaining the outward appearance of boredom, gliding slowly up the long hypotenuse, I would inside be experiencing a state of near-hysterical excitement similar to what you felt when you were singled out to be chased in a game of tag; the premise, which I believed more and more strongly as I approached the end of the ride, being that if someone got on either escalator before I finished my ride, he or she would short out the circuit, electrocuting me.
I often lost the game, and since once I locked myself into it, it became a somewhat nerve-tingling experience, I was at first relieved to glimpse the head of someone named Bob Leary appearing way up at the top of the down escalator, because his presence made the game an impossibility for the time being. Bob and I had never had one of those less-than-a-minute chats that are sufficient to define acquaintanceship in large companies, yet we knew who the other was, just by having seen the other's name on the distribution lists of memos and on the doors of our offices; a sense of discomfort, or near guilt, was associated with our never having gotten around to performing the minimal social task of introducing ourselves, a discomfort which increased every time we ran into each other. There are always residual people in an office who occupy that category of the not-introduced-to-yet, the not-joked-about-the-weather-with: the residue gets smaller and smaller, and Bob was one of the very last. His face was so familiar that his ongoing status as stranger was really an embarrassment—and just then, the certainty that Bob and I were gradually going to be brought closer and closer to each other, on his down and my up escalator rides, destined to intersect at about the midpoint of our progress, twenty feet in the air in the middle of a huge vaultlike lobby of red marble, where we would have to make eye contact and nod and murmur, or stonily stare into space, or pretend to inspect whatever belongings could plausibly need inspection on an escalator ride, wrenching past that second of forced proximity as if the other person did not exist, and thereby twisting the simple fact that we had never exchanged pleasantries onto an even higher plane of awkwardness, filled me with desperate aversion. I solved the problem by freezing in mid-stride, the instant I caught sight of him (just before I had actually stepped onto the escalator), pointing in the air with an index finger, as if I had just thought of something important that I had forgotten to do, and walking off quickly in another direction.
I walked quickly through the bank of elevators that handled traffic for the fourteenth through twenty-fourth floors, out into the other side of the lobby, past the long, low building directory, in which white names and floor numbers glowed out of a black background (although little imperfect slits of light were visible in the black film here and there, where a less artful hand had updated the list of tenants), past a grouping of plants I had never noticed before, where a woman in a blue business suit stood paging through a stiff new manila folder that she had pulled from her equally new briefcase. Circling back around to the front of the lobby again, I passed several guys from the mailroom in sunglasses who were lounging on a decorative clump of couches (couches that were really intended for people like the woman with the resume, and not for support staff from the building to hang out on during lunch break, I thought disapprovingly). I knew them from a time I had had to send a number of last-minute packages via DHL to Padua for a philanthropic thing the company got involved in, so I waved at them. The sound of the mailroom's Pitney Bowes meter machine, which wetted and sealed envelopes in addition to printing a faint red postage emblem on them that included the time, an eagle's wings, and an exhortation to give to the United Way, was loud and rhythmical, and even with earplugs I never would have been able to stand it all day long the way these mailroom guys did. One of them waved back, but before I turned away I was fairly sure that I caught sight of another of them (notable because on hot days, incredibly, this man would wear a clip-on tie clipped to the V at the second button of his open-collared shirt, so that the gray plastic stick-figure limbs of the clip-on mechanism were plainly visible) leaning toward the others while looking at me in order to say something mildly malicious about me to them, something like: "A couple of weeks ago, I was walking past that guy's office? I look in: he's right in the middle of pulling a hair from his nose. He goes doink! and then he makes a face, nnng, eyes watering, and then this shiver goes through him. Probably he made a mistake and pulled out three at once." I knew it was some story like that, because I heard "No's!" and laughter at just the right interval after I'd waved to them, and because if I had been lounging on that couch, I would have been tempted to say something mildly malicious about someone like me, too.
Finally I closed in on the escalators again, now viewing them in profile. Bob Leary was gone; several secretaries were riding up. At the base of the machine, though, there now was an interesting little scene. A man from building maintenance, whose name I didn't know, had in my absence wheeled up a cart bearing squirt bottles of various cleaners, spare rolls of toilet paper, brooms, a window-washing squeegee, and lots of other things on it; and as I drew close, he atomized some pale green liquid onto a white bunched-up rag and applied the rag to the rubber handrail of the escalator. He did not make any wiping motions: he simply leaned on the rag with both hands, looking up at one of the secretaries, while the moving handrail polished itself to a blacker gloss. Imagine working in a building where one of the standard weekly jobs of a maintenance person was to polish the handrail of the escalator! The comprehensiveness of this, the all-embracing definition of what a clean office building really was, was thrilling! I was sure that this was one of the parts of the man's job that he liked the most, and not just because it was fun to watch the secretaries, but because it was something that maintenance men had not been doing for hundreds of years: they had been sweeping, repairing damage, mopping, waxing, finding the right key in the large ring that was clipped to a belt loop, but they had only recently begun shining escalator handrails by leaning motionlessly on a white cotton rag, using the technology, yet using it so casually that they appeared to us all as if they were lounging against their Camaros at a beach. This guy probably knew every landmark of that rubber handrail as it circled around—the chip in it where it looked as if someone had tried vandalizing it with a knife, and the section where it warped outward, and the little fusion scar where the two ends had been spliced together to close the loop. One of these landmarks was what he no doubt was using to be sure that he held the rag to the handrail long enough to have polished all of it. I said to him, "How's it going?" and then, reminded by the sight of a box of trash bags in the lower tier of his cart, "Ray's out, I hear."
"He came in last week," said the escalator man, "and I told him, 'You're nuts, stay home, all that bending you have to do?' You could see he was hurting. He was holding onto things."
"Awful."
Then, surprisingly, the man shrugged. "He'll be fine. This happened to him once before. It's not serious in my opinion."
"You know Tina, the secretary Tina?" I said, pointing up at the mezzanine.
"I know Tina."
"Tina has made a get-well poster for him, kind of cornball, with flowers, but really nice, a big poster—it's up there if you want to sign it."
"Maybe I'll get up there this afternoon." He lifted the rag that had been pressed to the handrail and looked at its underside. The edges of the random folds were already darkened where they had been in contact with the rubber. He bunched the rag a different way, sprayed it with more polish, and reapplied it. "Definitely I'll sign it. We've got to get Ray healthy so I don't have to run around doing his work."
"Ray was fast," I said.
"He is fast. You have to respect his speed. They've got a kid in to help out but he's no good."
We told each other to take it easy. Then I took hold of the handrail that he had not been polishing (it would have been odd to grasp the handrail he had been polishing—like walking on a newly mopped floor: it would have heightened the always nearby sense of the futility of building maintenance— better to wait until the man had finished the whole handrail before I contributed to the inevitable dulling process that would force him to polish it all over again next week), and I stepped onto the escalator. Without having to look down, I was able to time the moment I took the step that put me in contact with the moving grooves of the escalator so that my foot landed not on a crack between two steps, but on the middle of one of them; and even though just about everyone my age has mastered this skill, I still felt proud of myself, just as I had felt proud of being able to tie my shoes without looking. I also knew by habit just how high the still half-formed and growing escalator step would be as my other foot landed on it, in part gauging the speed of the escalator from the feel of the handrail in my hand. One of the things my mother taught me when I was very little (her emphasis on safety due probably to the fact that escalators and unmanned elevators were still somewhat novel then, and therefore were thought to be, like CRT screens and microwave ovens later, full of new dangers) was always to be sure to retie my sneakers before I used any system of vertical transport. The loose shoelace, I was told, could become caught in the crack between two steps, and I imagined the results: the steps begin to flatten themselves for their Trophonian redescent,  hauling  Struwwelpeter with them, threshing him, shoe, leg, torso, and finally head, through the metal tines at the top of the circuit, and then steamrolling him still further in the hard-to-picture flat journey in the underside of the stairs. (This was long before I had seen escalators taken apart for repairs, as we often see now in subways, where they break down much more frequently than in corporate settings—is it the heat, or bad maintenance schedules, or the amount of water and dirt and chewing gum they have to handle?—and the triangular shape of the steps finally became clear: before that, the subsiding of what I believed to be a rectangular block into a two-dimensional surface at the end, like the folding up of a travel alarm clock, seemed impossibly complicated.) In high school, I used to ride escalators with my shoes left deliberately untied, in order to demonstrate to myself how safe escalators were, how casually they could be treated—this was during a phase in which I allowed my shoes to come untied "and didn't bother to retie them, or even slipped them on in the morning untied, as if they were loafers. There were a few years there when lots of undergraduates walked around with laces untended to—1977 or so, simultaneous with Dr. Scholl's sandals, I think. I had appropriated the practice, thinking it was cool, but my mother, who happened to be taking some classes at the time at the University of Rochester, found it affected and irritating and thought I should stop; and now I can certainly understand how the sight of groups of nineteen-year-olds shuffling around from class to class with the plastic tips of untied Wallabees and Sears work boots clicking against hallway tile, their socked heels occasionally popping right up out of their footwear, would make you shut your eyes for a second at the mindless monkey-doism of the young. Another thing I did even into adulthood was to retie my shoes on the escalator— making it a little challenge: How late in the ride could I successfully tie both shoes without seeming rushed before I arrived at the top?
Given all of these powerful, preexisting connections in my past life between escalators and shoelaces, you would expect that at the moment I boarded the escalator that afternoon, I would have been forcefully reminded of the problem of shoelace wear which had occupied me an hour earlier. But the determinism of reminding often works obscurely; and in this case the subject had already occurred to me and been laid aside in the few minutes I spent in the men's room before lunch: following this recurrence, the subject didn't arise until very recently, as I began to reconstitute the events of that noontime for this opusculum. Even after lunch, back in my office, as I tore open the stapled top of the CVS bag and pulled the bubble pack of new laces out and wove them into my shoes, zigzagging up every other eyelet with one lace-end, as shoe salesmen had shown me, a moment when I should certainly have been reminded of the subject, I was instead preoccupied with whether I should send off four hundred dollars to Chase Visa, or whether that was too big a chunk and would get me in trouble before my next biweekly paycheck, and I should send only two hundred. Just after lunch always seemed to be the time to think about practical things like bills—and I can't help mentioning here the rarefied pleasure that I took in handling my finances back then: especially the pleasure of getting in the mail fat envelopes filled with charge statements and their receipts, the documentary history of that month, dinners out and odd purchases that you would have forgotten completely but for those slips, which nicely resurrect the moment of paying for you: you're there in the restaurant, very full, an entire steak in your stomach, with your beloved darling, smiling and happy, your bottom by this time on fire from the unabsorptivity of the vinyl seat, and you weigh whether or not to ask her help in calculating the tip—sometimes it is better to be the complete man and dash in a generous round sum, other times it is nice to confer with her about the shades between fifteen and twenty-two percent that evening's waiter or waitress deserved—and you experience the pleasure of writing down the tip's amount through several layers of carbon paper, bearing down hard against the little black tray the restaurant has provided to keep its compensation off the tablecloth, and then, once the totaling has been done and double-checked, you sign, more rapidly than you would sign a business letter because it doesn't matter here what character traits people will read into your signature, and because wine makes you sign more fluently: you whip off most of your last name with the sort of accelerating wriggle that a vacuum cleaner cord makes in retracting into its coiled place of storage—this moment of an evening's closure returns to you entire, rightly sized down to something the size of that duplicate receipt, its carbon image less distinct and the name of the restaurant sometimes barely legible, to accord with its fading state in memory.
No, it was before lunch, only a few minutes after I said good-bye to Tina, that I again briefly took up the thread of shoelace theory.
 
Chapter Nine

A SMALL, perhaps not very interesting question has troubled me occasionally: Is a lunch hour defined as beginning just as you enter the men's room on the way to lunch, or just as you exit it? At the end of an earlier chapter, I instinctively said, "I stepped away toward the men's room, and the lunch hour beyond"; and, right or wrong, this was how I saw the transition: the stop at the men's room was of a piece with the morning's work, a chore like the other business chores I was responsible for, and therefore, though it obviously didn't help the company to make more money, it was part of my job in a way that the full hour of sunlight and sidewalks and pure volition was not. What that meant was that my company was as a rule paying me to make six visits a day to the men's room—three in the morning, and three in the afternoon: my work was bounded and segmented by stops in this tiled decompression chamber, in which I adjusted my tie, made sure that my shirt was tucked in, cleared my throat, washed the newsprint from my hands, and urinated onto a cake of strawberry deodorant resting in one of four wall-mounted porcelain gargoyles.
Is there any other spot in the modern office where a comparable level of mechanical ingenuity is so concentrated and on display? Telephone PBX systems, typewriters, and computers are electronically sophisticated and therefore fundamentally uninteresting. The Pitney Bowes licker-and-stamper and the automatic paper-feed mechanism in the high-speed copier are somewhat more interesting because they are combinations of electronic and mechanical invention—but besides date-stampers and the ball bearings in pens and in desk drawers, which exist in isolation, where but in the corporate bathroom do we witness mechanical engineering in such a pure form? Valves that allow a controlled amount of water to rush into a toilet and no more, shapes of porcelain designed so that the turbulence in them forms almost fixed and decorative (yet highly functional) braids and twists that Hopkins would have liked; a little built-in machine that squirts pink liquefied soap with a special additive that gives it a silvery sheen (also used in shampoo recipes now, I've noticed) into the curve of your fingers; and the soap-level indicator, a plastic fish-eye directly into the soap tank, that shows the maintenance man (either Ray or the very one who was now polishing the escalator's handrail) whether he must unlock the brushed-steel panel that day and replenish the supply; the beautiful chrome-plated urinal plumbing, a row of four identical states of severe gnarledness, which gives you the impression of walking into a petrochemical plant, with names like Sloan Valve and Delany Flushboy inscribed on their six-sided half-decorative boltlike caps—names that become completely familiar over the course of your employment even though if asked you couldn't come up with them. Here also, in the midst of the surrounding office's papery, dry, carpeted arrangement of in boxes, framed art gallery posters, and horizontal filing cabinets, you confront a very industrial-looking storm drain set right in the floor. And consider the architectural mazelet you must walk in order to arrive in the bathroom proper after going in the door—an enormous improvement over the older double-door system—intended to keep passing eyes from seeing in. It works, too, no matter how close to the hallway wall you walk: I know because I sometimes tried in passing to glance into the women's corporate bathroom when by chance someone was opening the door, wanting even at the age of twenty-five to glimpse the row of sinks and the women leaning over them toward the mirror to adjust their shoulder pads or put on lip gloss, wanting to see a woman drawing her lower lip tight over her lower teeth a la William F. Buckley, Jr., and then, holding the screwed-out stick of gloss motionless, slide the lip from side to side under it and press her mouth together and then moue it outward, because the sight of this in a corporate setting gave an exotic overlay to memories of my beloved darling getting ready for parties:—the arousing skin-smell of her recent shower, the knowledge that she was putting on makeup to be attractive to other people, the sight of her wearing the holy expression that women have only for themselves in mirrors: slightly raised eyebrows, opened throat, very slightly flared nostrils.
This suggestion of domesticity, come to think of it, contributes a characteristic tone to the inventions found in the corporate bathroom: these inventions are grander, more heroic variants of machines central to our life away from work—the sink, soap dish, mirror, and toilet of home bathrooms. In home bathrooms, the toilet seats are complete ovals, while in corporate bathrooms the seats are horseshoe-shaped; I suppose the gap lessens the problem of low-energy drops of urine falling on the seat when some scofflaw thoughtlessly goes standing up without first lifting the seat. There may be several other reasons for the horseshoe shape, having to do with accessibility, I'm not sure. But I am pleased that someone gave this subject thought, adapting what his company manufactured to deal with the realities of actual behavior. (Until I learned how to raise the seat with my shoe I myself sometimes urinated into toilets with the seat down, and because I am tall, I almost always was inaccurate.) Unlike home rolls, the toilet paper here was housed in a locked device that paid out the frames of paper with a certain amount of resistance, so that you had to pull slowly and carefully in order to keep the paper from tearing on one of the perforations, discouraging waste, and when one roll was spent, a second dropped into place. I was willing to have my wastefulness discouraged, to some degree—before that invention, I had sometimes felt a qualm when I was able to make the roll trundle momentumously around the spindle, reeling off a great drape of unnecessary paper; although when you have a cold and you want a mass of absorbency to hold to your face when you blow your nose, the care you have to take tugging at the nearly tearing paper can be irksome.
Our mezzanine men's corporate bathroom was down a short hallway that housed a recessed row of vending machines and a bulletin board with internal job postings neatly tacked behind glass.-In this hallway you could hear the ghostly activity of inaccessible elevator cars as they dropped or rose past our floor—inaccessible because, except for a freight elevator and the emergency stairs, the mezzanine was served only by the escalators. (Besides the offices of three departments of our company, the mezzanine held a restaurant and the offices of a small, once famous mutual fund.) You heard the moans of vertical tradewinds in the elevator shafts, and the clinking of what seemed to be very heavy sets of chains, anchor gauge, possibly safety chains, sinking in heaps onto a basement concrete pad as the cars answered their call buttons. It was a pleasure to consider these boxes of human beings undergoing substantial accelerations somewhere very near me, suspended from bundled filaments of steel, behind one of the hallway walls, without my knowing architecturally just where they were. Some of the elevator cars were filled with passengers; in others, I imagined, a single person stood, in a unique moment of true privacy—truer, in fact, than the privacy you get in the stall of a corporate bathroom because you can speak loudly and sing and not be overheard. L. told me once that sometimes when she found herself alone in an elevator she would pull her skirt over her head. I know that in solo elevator rides I have pretended to walk like a windup toy into the walls; I have pretended to rip a latex disguise off of my face, making cries of agony; I have pointed at an imaginary person and said, "Hey pal, I'll slap that goiter of yours right off, now I said watch it! "The indicator light and slowdown give you enough warning to adjust your glasses and reassume a hieroglyphic expression before other passengers get on. Such moments of privacy were impossible on escalators, but even so I preferred the fairly unusual distinction of reaching my office via escalator over being forced to participate day after day in all the little ceremonies of elevator behavior—raising your eyes with everyone in the car to watch the floor numbers change; assuming the responsibility of holding the "Door Open" button or the rubber door-sensor with a pious expression as people boarded; hearing the tail ends of conversations suddenly become conspiratorial and arch because they are so completely overheard in the press of the car, though they were perfectly commonplace out in the noise of the lobby; interrupting the light beam between the open doors with your hand if nobody gets off or on at a certain floor, to simulate a passing passenger, shortening the wait time; change-jingling; greeting strangers with a voiceless lip-pop made by opening your mouth and then closing it. I did like touching the Braille numbers next to the buttons, and reading the much-xeroxed inspection form, and I liked when the doors began to open just before you had come to a stop so that you could admire the precision of the car's automatic match to the edge of the desired floor; finally, I enjoyed imagining the massive, nimble counterweights scooting roachlike on little three-inch wheels up and down the elevator shaft's rear wall in the opposite direction to the cars. On this mezzanine hallway, in any case, the impressive row of vending machines took the place of the bank of elevator doors. I paid no attention to them as I passed, though they deserved attention, and indeed, late most afternoons, when I stopped here (normally on the way back from my fifth company-paid visit to the men's room) to get a snack, I often had inconclusive, repetitive, short-lived thoughts about one or more of them. They seemed in a way like miniature office buildings themselves, except that the descending foodstuffs, unlike life-sized elevator cars, never made stops at intermediate floors, but fell when summoned straight down to lobbies and foyers of varying design. The most elevator-like of all the machines was the one I used the most: it had a panel with three small doors. When you made your selection, a frosted row of metal rungs behind one of the small doors would shift one rung upward (I think it was upward, not downward) and stop, revealing the end of an ice cream bar neatly wrapped in paper. Next to it was a Pepsi machine that often had notes on it saying things like, "This machine ate three quarters of mine!— S. Hollister x7892." And next to the Pepsi machine was a shorter cigarette machine, a holdover from the first great epoch of vending machines, unelectrified, making no change, functioning entirely with the aid of gravity and springs, made by National Vendors of St. Louis. It had two tiers of eleven clear plastic knobs (why eleven?); these you pulled on, exerting a satisfying level of force, harder than you used in launching a pinball or playing Foosball, for instance, and it had a wide metal mouth where the chosen brand would slide partially into view. To the right of this machine was a design that resembled the classic 1950s outward-and-upward-angling fast-food/gas-pump style, though it was probably manufactured around 1970 (vending machines, like staplers, are not in the forefront of general stylistic shifts): it was a hot-coffee, tea, and chicken-soup machine, decorated with a backlit white plastic panel that said, "Hot Beverages," in left-handed jaunty Highlights for Children handwriting, showing coffee beans spilling from a bean-scooper and an anachronistic china cup and saucer just behind it (such as you would never find in the workplace, except possibly at the officer level or in legal or classy sales settings) giving off a curlicue of steam. The last vending machine before the doors to the restrooms was a recent acquisition. This venturesome snack palace— designed in the era of the Centre Pompidou and of various atriums and malls in which the admittedly beautiful HVAC tubes, huge ribbed versions of vacuum-cleaner or clothes-dryer exhaust tubes, were treated architecturally as ornament—flaunted its interior mechanisms, displaying its inventory behind glass on metallic spirals that turned when you entered the appropriate two-character letter-number combination on a small keyboard. Where old candy machines (similar to cigarette machines—knobbed) might have offered you eight choices, plus a side buffet of chewing gums, this new machine offered thirty-five choices, including hard-to-vend bags of chips or pretzels. Your purchase, screwed out into space by the forwarding spiral, fell a fair distance into a low black gulley—hence the pillowy bags of chips were placed into the highest spirals, since they would suffer less damage than, say, a package of Lorna Doones or cheese-and-peanut-butter crackers if dropped from that height; although, oddly, I think I have seen (and bought) granola bars residing in the very top left spiral! The machine had two difficulties, in my experience. (1) The black triangular guard you had to reach past in order to remove your snack from the gulley was excessively heavy and clumsy and powerfully sprung, possibly to discourage pilferage with bent coat hangers, and almost demanded that you use two hands—one to hold the guard open, and one to grasp the Loma Doones—when very often you had only one hand available, having decided that you wanted a packet of Lorna Doones after you had brewed up some thirty-five-cent coffee at the Hot Beverages machine next door; and as a result, gripping a precariously full and hot container of coffee by its rim, with no surface in the area except the floor to rest it on, you were forced to hold open the edge of the black guard with the unpadded bones and tendons of the back of your hand, seize the Lorna Doones, and then withdraw your hand, marveling in the midst of your discomfort that the veins that diagonally crossed those bones and tendons weren't abraded or their flimsy adventitia crushed as that heavy rounded plastic edge was drawn over them. And (2) the spiral invention, though elegant, wasn't infallible: often your last fifty-five cents bought a bag of pretzels that remained hung by one heat-crimped corner out over the drop; nor was there any way to tilt or shake so massive a machine. The next person would get a bonus bag, as the spiral edged yours off with his own.
I didn't think about the vending machines as I passed them, but I did acknowledge their presence in some grateful part of my consciousness, a part equivalent in function to the person in movie credits charged with "continuity," who makes sure that if an actor is wearing a Band-Aid and sitting in front of three pancakes on one day of shooting, the pancakes and the Band-Aid look exactly the same the next day. I depended on the machines' presence as you depend on a certain bulbously clipped corner hedge, or a certain faded poster in the window of the dry cleaner's, as visual nourishment along the way home. And when two years later I walked down that hall and discovered that the cigarette machine—the primary trunk of original innovation from which all the rest of vendition had branched, closely allied with the clinking Newtonianism of the gumball machine and the parking meter—had been replaced by another huge heterodox box that sold yogurt, boxes of cranberry juice, tuna sandwiches, and whole apples, all rotating on a multitiered central carousel accessed through individual plastic doorlets (in compliance with a much-discussed three-phase plan intended to make my company a "smoke-free environment"), I grieved piecemeal over the loss once a day for about a week.

Chapter Ten

FROM THE MEN'S ROOM came the roar of a flushed urinal, followed immediately by "I'm a Yankee Doodle Dandy" whistled with infectious cheerfulness and lots of rococo tricks—most notably the difficult yodel-trill technique, used here on the "ee" of "dandy," in which the whistler gets his lips to flip the sound binarily between the base tone and a higher pitch that is I think somewhere between a major third and a perfect fourth above it (why it is not a true harmonic but rather perceptibly out of tune has puzzled me often—something to do with the physics of pursed lips?): a display of virtuosity forgivable only in the men's room, and not, as some of the salesmen seemed to think, in the relative silence of working areas, where people froze, hate exuding from suspended Razor Points, as the whistler passed. Tunes sometimes lived all day in the men's room, sustained by successive users, or remembered by a previous user as soon as he reentered the tiled liveness of the room. Once, hopped-up after several cups of coffee, I loudly whistled the bouncy opening of the tune that starts out, "All I want is a room somewhere," and then stopped, embarrassed, because I realized that I had unknowingly interrupted someone else's quieter and more masterly whistling of a soft-rock standard with my toneless, aerated tweets; later that day, though, I heard a stylishly embellished version of my tune whistled at the copying machine by someone who must have been in one of the stalls during my earlier roughshod interruption of the soft-rocker.
I leaned quite hard into the men's room door to open it, startling the Doodle Dandy man, who was on his way out, and who turned out to be Alan Pilna from International Service Marketing—his face, when the opening door revealed it, was not formed in the fruity whistler's pout, but had a momentary flinch of surprise on it.
He said, "Oop!"
I said, "Oop!" and then, as he stood aside, holding the door for me to enter, "Thanks, Alan."
I negotiated the quick right and left that brought me into the brightness and warmth of the bathroom. It was decorated in two tones of tile, hybrid colors I didn't know the names for, and the sinks' counter and the dividers between urinals and between stalls were of red lobby-marble. I checked in the mirror to be sure that while chatting with Tina I had not had some humiliating nose problem or newsprint smudge on my face—she would probably have told me about the smudge, but not about the nose. A few sinks over from me, a vice-president named Les Guster was brushing his teeth. He was staring straight at the mirror and very likely seeing there the same expression on his face, the same quick bulgings in his cheek, that he had seen while brushing his teeth since he was eight years old. He blinked frequently, each blink slightly more deliberate than a blink he would have performed while reading or talking on the phone, possibly because the large motor movements of tooth brushing interfered with the autonomic rhythms of blinking. His tap was running. As soon as I took my place at a sink, Les bowed close to his sink, holding his tie with his free hand against his stomach, even though he was clearly not ready to rinse or spit yet, in order to shield his sense of privacy against my presence in the mirror. We were not obliged to greet each other: the noise of the water from his tap, and Alan Pilna's winding-down urinal-flush, defined us as existing in separate realms. I was impressed by people like Les who had the bravery to brush their teeth (before lunch, even!) at work, since the act was so powerfully unbusinesslike; to indicate to him that I didn't think that his tooth-brushing was in any way notable or comic, and that in fact I was unaware of his presence, I leaned into the mirror, pretending to study a defect on my face; then I cleared my throat so unpleasantly that there could be no doubt that I was oblivious to him. I pivoted and stationed myself at a urinal. I was just on the point of relaxing into a state of urination when two things happened. Don Vanci swept into position two urinals over from me, and then, a moment later, Les Guster turned off his tap. In the sudden quiet you could hear a wide variety of sounds coming from the stalls: long, dejected, exhausted sighs; manipulations of toilet paper; newspapers folded and batted into place; and of course the utterly carefree noise of the main activity: mind-boggling pressurized spatterings followed by sudden urgent farts that sounded like air blown over the mouth of a beer bottle. The problem for me, a familiar problem, was that in this relative silence Don Vanci would hear the exact moment I began to urinate. More important, the fact that I had not yet begun to urinate was known to him as well. I had been standing at the urinal when he walked into the bathroom—I should be fully in progress by now. What was my problem? Was I so timid that I was unable to take a simple piss two urinals down from another person? We stood there in the intermittent quiet, unforthcoming. Though we knew each other well, we said nothing. And then, just as I knew would happen, I heard Don Vanci begin to urinate forcefully.
My problem intensified. I began to blush. Others did not seem to have any trouble relaxing their uriniferous tubing in corporate bathrooms. Some were obviously so at ease that they could continue conversations side by side. But until I developed my technique of pretending to urinate on the other person's head, the barren seconds I spent staring at the word "Eljer" and waiting for something I knew was not going to happen were truly horrible: even at times when I needed to go badly, if someone else was there, my bladder's cargo would stay locked away behind scared and stubborn little muscles. I would pretend to finish, clear my throat, zip my fly, and walk out, hating myself, sure that the other person was thinking, as his porcelain resounded from his own coursing toxins, "Wait, I don't think I heard that guy actually going! I think he stood there for a minute, faked that he had taken a piss, and then flushed and took off! How very weird! That guy has a problem." Later, I would sneak back in, painful with need, and crouch in a toilet stall (so that my head wasn't visible) to urinate without risk. This happened about forty-five times—until one night in the very busy bathroom of a movie theater at the end of the movie, I discovered the trick. When someone takes his position next to you, and you hear his nose breathing and you sense his proven ability to urinate time after time in public, and at the same time you feel your own muscles closing on themselves as hermit crabs pull into their shells, imagine yourself turning and dispassionately urinating onto the side of his head. Imagine your voluminous stream making fleeting parts in his hair, like the parts that appear in the grass of a lawn when you try to water it with a too-pressurized nozzle-setting. Imagine drawing an X over his face; watch him fending the spray off with his arm, puffing and spluttering to keep it from getting in his mouth; and his protestations: "Excuse me?
What are you doing? Hey! Pff, pff, pff." It always worked. If I found myself in very difficult circumstances—flanked on both sides by colleagues, both of whom said hello to me and then began confidently to go—I might have to sharpen the image slightly, imagining myself urinating directly into one of their shock-widened eyeballs.
And now, as the silence lengthened, I resorted to this technique with Don Vanci. After a short mechanical delay, a thick, world-conquering rope of ammonia sprung onto the white slope of porcelain. I gave it a secondary boost from my diaphragm, and it blasted out. Don Vanci and I finished at about the same time; turning from the urinals, just before we flushed in near unison, we greeted each other:
"Don."
"Howie."
Les Guster was on his way out, his toothbrush stowed in a plastic ribbed travel container. He nodded at us. "Gentlemen."
Don Vanci followed Les Guster out without washing his hands.

Chapter Eleven

UNTIL SOMEONE EMERGED from the stalls, I had all four sinks to myself; I chose the one that wasn't surrounded by pools of water. I set down my paperback and rested my glasses on it; then I washed my hands briefly, making the date I had stamped on my palm fade but not disappear. Without turning off the water, I used a paper towel to dry my hands. We had the finest style of paper-towel dispenser available, I think. It was a kind you saw frequently in corporate bathrooms: a six-or seven-foot-high architectural element, a band of brushed steel, laid almost flush with the wall, into which was recessed a diamond-shaped opening that offered you the next paper towel, and, just below it, a waste region where you could throw the towel away. The maintenance man unlocked the front panel of this unit—perhaps using the very same key that opened the soap dispenser, or perhaps not—emptied the trash bag full of used paper towels, and loaded hundreds of just-unbound and slowly expanding new towels into a queue above the diamond cutout. The paper towels themselves were the best kind: nearly a foot wide, wavily embossed, white, folded with two flaps for easy removal—it was an honor to use them. Since the cost of paper has gone up so much in the last decade, some companies that used to use these wide towels have installed an adapter in the dispenser that allows it to handle smaller, cheaper ones. Other facilities managers have turned even more radical, installing, right beside the ghost town of the brushed-steel dispenser, a plastic Towlsaver with a little lever like a slot machine's that you have to pull four times, advancing a large internal roll, before you get an acceptable, crumplable length of brown rough paper, which you tear off against a set of metal teeth with a satisfying sound. Another version of this replacement machine has a rotating crank with a calculatedly low gear ratio: they hope that you will tire of cranking sooner, and use less paper. At the very bottom of the range, though it once (to me as a child, at least) was an exciting symbol of futurismo progress, is the "hazards of disease" machine—the hot-air blower. You find it now not only in thruway rest stops, but in the restrooms of Friendly's, Wendy's, Howard Johnson's, and other great chains. What they seem to have done, at least for a short period—the well-meaning but deluded managers responsible for overseeing bathroom cost-control in these chains, I mean, hypnotized by the sales rap of hot-air blower companies—was to rip out their paper-towel dispensers, bolt lots of hot-air blowers on the walls, and then remove all the wastebaskets. Towels were what filled the wastebaskets; the restaurants no longer provided towels; therefore they no longer needed to pay bodies to empty the wastebaskets. But in removing that wastebasket, they removed the only unpostponable reason for a staff member to glance over the bathroom at least once a shift, and the place quickly became a wasteland. Meanwhile, are people truly content to be using the hot-air blower? You hit the mushroom of metal that turns it on and, as the instructions recommend, you Rub Hands Gently under the dry blast. But to dry them even as thoroughly as a single paper towel would dry them in four seconds, you must supplicate under the droning funnel for thirty seconds, much longer than anyone has patience for; inevitably you exit flicking water from your fingers, while the blower continues to heat the room. In case you do decide to stand for the full count, the manufacturer (World Dryer Corporation) has provided a short silk-screened text to read to pass the time. I disapprove of this text now, but when I was little it bespoke the awesome oracular intentionality of prophets whose courage and confidence allowed them to scrap the old ways and start fresh: urban renewal architects; engineers of traffic flow; foretellers of monorails, paper clothing, food in capsule form, programmed learning, and domes over Hong Kong and Manhattan. I used to read it to myself as if I were reciting a quatrain from the Rubaiyat, and I read it so many .times that now it holds for me some of the Ur-resonances of Crest's "conscientiously applied program of oral hygiene and regular professional care." It says:

To Serve you better------We have installed Pollution-Free
Warm Air Hand Dryers to protect you from the hazards of
disease which may be transmitted by towel litter.
This quick sanitary method dries hands more thoroughly
prevents chapping------and keeps washrooms free of towel waste.

In the corner of this statement, World has printed the small Greek letter that looks like a hamburger in profile, the symbol of the environmental movement, a symbol that in seventh grade I cut out of green felt and glued to five white felt armlets, which four friends and I wore when we went out with trash bags and picked up litter on Milburn Street near the school (finding surprisingly little, and feeling the hugeness of the city, litter-filled, around us) on the first Earth Day celebration, whenever that was—1970 or 1971. But does the environmental movement have anything to do with the reason why the Wendy's restaurant that I stood in on September 30, 1987 (copying the legend out, while I counted at MM=60 to be sure that the warm air really did blow for about thirty seconds as I had estimated) had installed this machine in its men's room? No. Is it, in fact, an efficient, environmentally upright user of the electricity produced by burning fossil fuels? No—there is no off button that would allow you to curtail the thirty-second dry time—you are forced to participate in waste. Does it prevent chapping? Dry air? Is it quick? It is slow. Is it more thorough? It is less thorough. Does it protect us from the hazards of disease? You will catch a cold quicker from the warm metal public dome you press to start the blower than from plucking a sterile piece of paper that no human has ever held from a towel dispenser, clasping it in your very own hands to dry them, and throwing it away. Come to your senses. World! The tone of authority and public-spiritedness that surrounds these falsehoods is outrageous! How can you let your marketing men continue to make claims that sound like the 1890s ads for patent medicines or electroactive copper wrist bracelets that are printed on the Formica on the tables at Wendy's? You are selling a hot-air machine that works well and lasts for decades: a simple, possibly justifiable means for the fast-food chains to save money on paper products. Say that or say nothing.
But far more important than silk-screened hype is the fact that in trading paper towels for this blower, with its immovable funnel, the food chains, aided by World's rhetoric, are pretending that the only thing you do with paper towels is dry your hands. Not so, not so! You need paper towels to dab at a splash of food on your sleeve that you notice in the mirror; you need them to polish your glasses dry; you need them to wash your face. When you are oily-faced on a hot afternoon in a room made hotter by the hot-air dryer and you decide you want to wash your face before you order your Big Classic, what do you do? Out of desperation, real and true desperation that I myself have experienced, you resort to the toilet paper. So much toilet paper is being used in bathrooms with hot-air blowers that some of the same facilities managers who thought they were cost-cuttingly crafty in moving to blowers have gone to the opposite extreme in the area of toilet-paper dispensers, installing gigantic side-mounted hundred-thousand-sheet rolls the size of automobile tires in each "stall. But even so, toilet paper is ill suited to functions outside of a narrow range of activities. You go into a stall and pull yourself a huge handful (that's assuming that the stall is untenanted), and return to the sink with it. As soon as you dampen it with warm water, it wilts to a semitransparent puree in your fingers. You move this dripping plasma over your face; little pieces of it adhere to your cheek or brow; then you must assemble another big wad to dry off with—but ah! now your fingers are wet, so that when you try to pull more toilet paper from the hundred-thousand-sheet roll, the leading end simply dissolves in your fingers, tearing prematurely. Deciding to let your face air-dry, you look around for a place to throw out the initial macerated flapjack, and discover that the wastebasket is gone. So you drop it in the corner with the other miscellaneous trash, or flip it vengefully in the already clogged toilet.
And that is why I considered it an honor to be working at a place that still used the classic corporate paper-towel dispenser. But sometimes when I pulled several paper towels from it, or when I opened a gray steel supply cabinet stocked with black-handled scissors, Page-A-Day calendar refills, magnetized paper-clip dispensers, staplers, cobra-like staple removers, and box after box of Razor Point pens, or when I got a memo with a distribution cover sheet that had fifty names on it, I would suddenly start to doubt that the company I worked for could afford all this. I would think of the people in my department, one department out of maybe sixty-five in the corporation: I would visualize my salary, plus Tina's, Abelardo's, Sue's, Dave's, Jim's, Steve's, and that of ten or twelve others, none of whom did anything that directly pulled in money, as a row of numbers spinning around too fast to see, measuring the amount of cash that it took every second to bring us to work. Our salaries were based on a forty-hour week, not a thirty-five-hour week: think of the amount of money the company officially paid out every day just to finance the time all of its thousands of employees spent for lunch! In certain moods it became impossible for me to shift from my personal impression of the one small expensive sub-unit of the company to the overall net income figures we read every quarter on earnings reports in the internal newsletter—it was difficult to believe that money was coming in at anywhere near the rate at which we were pouring it out. And this doubtfulness would sometimes extend to companies all over the city: a skyline's worth of overreaching expenditure, a whole corporate stratum existing at an unsustainably high standard—the white paper towel standard, rather than the hot air blower standard.
When I would say to Dave or Sue that I sometimes wondered how we, or any company, could afford its operating expenses, they would smile at me charitably and say, "Don't worry, we can afford it, believe me." But they knew no better than I did. Just because it is convention to have one thousand business cards printed up for you the week after you are hired, even though, unless you are a salesman or you do a lot of recruiting, you will probably give out no more than thirty in the course of your whole employment, most of them in the first year to relatives, and later only on occasions in which the giving out of the business card adds a coy irony to some interchange, and even though the possession of business cards has no other function, really, than to demonstrate good faith on the company's part, to make you feel that you belong there right from the beginning, no matter how valueless you may seem to yourself to be in the first three months—just because this level of luxury is conventional, and the price schedules at printers' encourage volume, doesn't mean that it and things like it might not at some point pull the whole structure of wasteful, half-understood, inherited convention right down. We came in to work every day and were treated like popes—a new manila folder for every task; expensive courier services; taxi vouchers; trips to three-day fifteen-hundred-dollar conferences to keep us up to date in our fields; even the dinkiest chart or memo typed, xeroxed, distributed, and filed; overhead transparencies to elevate the most casual meeting into something important and official; every trash can in the whole corporation, over ten thousand trash cans, emptied and fitted with a fresh bag every night; restrooms with at least one more sink than ever conceivably would be in use at any one time, ornamented with slabs of marble that would have done unlit to the restrooms of the Vatican! What were we participating In here?
But despite this sort of periodic metascruple, I certainly helped myself to the paper towels. Now I briskly pulled five of them from the diamond-shaped opening: one to wash my face with, two to rinse it, a fourth to dry it, and a fifth to dry my glasses when I had rinsed them. Each time I pulled, a new but identical towel-flap was there for me to grasp: if you had blinked at the right moment, you might never have known that it was different from the towel you had been looking at; but it was! This renewing of newness—whether it was

•  the appearance of another identical Pez tablet at the neck of the plastic Pez elevator, or
•  the sight of one parachutist after another standing for a second in the door of an airplane before he jumped, or
•  the rolling-into-position of a pinball after the previous one had escaped your flippers, or
•  one sticky disk of sliced banana displaced from its spot on the knife over the cereal bowl by its successor, or
•  the uprising of yet another step of the escalator,

was for me then, and is still, one of the greatest sources of happiness that the man-made world can offer. And it remains a matter of some personal frustration to me that fast-food restaurants, which offer so much of this kind of patterned mechanical renewal (as in the spring-loaded holes from which one Styrofoam cup after another emerges), consistently interfere with the pleasure we might take in it by (a) failing to stress to their employees the extreme importance of loading the black-and-chrome table-napkin dispensers with the napkins pointing in the right direction: not backward, with flap-folds hidden, so that to get two napkins out you have to pinch a bulge of six or more at a time and wrestle them all through the chrome mouth at once, leaving the guilty excess on top, where nobody will use them because nobody will trust them; or if they don't do that by (b) allowing their people to stuff the dispenser full far beyond its capacity, carried away by the admittedly impressive number of napkins it can hold, so that the flap you pull tears or draws the machine shuddering on its rubber nubs over the countertop—frustrating because here is an invention that is simple, long-lived, life-enhancing, ingenious, and that could easily be one of those pings of small-time pleasure in your fast-food meal, and yet through ignorance or carelessness its greatness is consistently traduced, and as a result millions of table napkins are thrown away without having served their purpose. But I am confident that the food chains will recognize this common mistake in time and institute training procedures that have their new-hires chanting, "Flaps to the front! Flaps to the front!"; and they will trade in all of those hot-air blowers for the hazards of towel waste— just as the floating straw has been, at least by some vendors, recently made heavy enough to stay put in a carbonated environment.
I opened the first of the five towels under the hot water, folded it in half wet, and tapped just a half-squirt of pink soap onto it, which I diluted with another quick pass under the tap. Then, bending low over the sink, my tie clamped out of harm's way under one elbow, I raised the dripping folio in both hands and blinded myself in its warmth. I scrubbed. The wings of my nose were held closed by the sides of my little fingers. I said, "Oh God" into the sopping paper, immeasurably soothed. Face-washing seems to work as acupuncture is said to: the sudden signals of warmth flooding your brain from the nerves of the face, especially the eyelids, unmoor your thinking for an instant, dislodging your attention from any thoughts that had been in progress and causing it to slide back randomly to the first fixed spot in memory that it finds—often a subject that you had left unresolved earlier in the day which returns now as an image magnified against the grainy blackness of your closed eyelids. In my case, the image that returned was the broken shoelace as it had appeared just before I had repaired it in my office seven minutes before. The question then had been, how come my shoelaces broke within some twenty-eight hours of each other, after two years of continuous use? Now I relived the first sensations of pulling the lace-ends up tight before I had begun the knot: it was a pull that seemed to involve about an inch of lace friction. I compared it with the important second pull, often a much harder pull, a real yank, or even two, I did to tighten the twist of the overhand base knot. You yanked in a floorward direction in this second pull, and the friction seemed to be confined to about a quarter of an inch of lace length—so that, I now thought, was where the-real concentrated wear would have occurred. I felt I was making progress. As I rinsed my face with the second and third paper towels, I tried again to incorporate in my explanation of the dual breakage the additional contribution of walking flexion to total shoelace wear, since the stresses of walking, while individually small, were repeated thousands of times—for example, even in walking just now from my office to the men's room, I must have flexed each shoe and therefore exerted tension and friction on its lace thirty or forty times. I turned off the water and began absent-mindedly drying my face with the fourth towel.
What I needed was a way to discriminate between the kind of wear inflicted by pulling on the laces with my hands and the kind that came about as I walked. And this time, I came up with what looked to be a simple either/or test. Since my feet are mirror images of each other, and since I have no limp, the fraying under a purely walking-flex model of wear would be greatest at either both inside or both outside top eyelets—never at, say, the left shoe's inside eyelet and the right shoe's outside eyelet. My arms, on the other hand, perform their tying pulls asymmetrically, not only because my right arm is stronger than my left, as we know from murder mysteries, but also because I hold the left and right lace-ends in a subtly different grip, in readiness for the movements I will be making in forming the two bunny's ears. This allows us to determine very easily whether the chronic walk-flex or acute pull-fray model is dominant. Assume, I said to myself, that the shoelace on my right shoe that had snapped yesterday morning in my apartment had snapped at the left, or inside, top eyelet. Under walk-flex I would predict that the shoelace found in the right, or inside, top eyelet of my left shoe would have snapped today, maintaining symmetry. Conversely, under pull-fray, I would expect the left eyelet of the left shoe to have been the point of breakage. I couldn't remember, though, which two eyelets had really been involved.
I rinsed my glasses quickly under the tap, eager to be able to study my shoes in detail once again; I polished the lenses with the fifth paper towel, making bribe-me, bribe-me finger motions over the two curved surfaces until they were dry. A toilet began roaring. I stepped back from the sink and brought my glasses toward my face, enjoying the approach of those two reservoirs of widening distinctness; as I hooked the side-pieces over my ears, I raised my eyebrows, for unknown reasons. Now I could see my shoes.
What I saw was a left shoe displaying a broken and repaired stretch of shoelace at the left top eyelet, and a right shoe also displaying a broken and repaired stretch of shoelace at its left top eyelet. This was not symmetrical, and consequently pull-fray was dominant and walk-flex discountable as a source of wear. Good. But: these test results forced me to reconsider the whole earlier problem of how to make sense of the large percentage of random daytime comings-undone and retyings. And there I abandoned the topic, because Abelardo, my manager, emerged from a stall.
"What do you think, Howie?" he said; it was his standard greeting—one I was fond of.
"Abe, I don't know what to think," I said; my standard response. I adjusted my glasses in the mirror so that they weren't crooked, knowing that they would revert to their normal slight skew in five minutes.
"Lunchtime?" said Abe, scrubbing his hands.
"Yep. Got to buy shoelaces. One popped yesterday, the other popped today."
"Well well."
"It mystifies me. Has that ever happened to you?"
"No. I use a fresh pair every day."
"Oh? You buy them at CVS, or where?"
"I have them flown in. UPS blue. An Indian guy in Texas makes them for me. He blends alpaca and some of the finer tweeds. Then he sprays it with Krylon."
"Nice," I said. The secret to working for Abe was realizing that nothing he said, outside of company business, was serious or true. "Take it easy."
"Yep."
Approaching the door, I began to whistle loudly. I pulled on the handle; the door swung toward me fast with no resistance.
"Oop," I said.
"Oop," said Ron Nemick, entering.
I held the door for him. As I walked out into the hall, I realized that the tune I had just begun was "I'm a Yankee Doodle Dandy."
From within, I heard Abe cheerfully start up with "I Knew an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly."

Chapter Twelve

LESS THAN AN HOUR later, I stood in the pose of George Washington crossing the Potomac, one foot on a higher step, one hand on the handrail, gliding steadily upward on the diagonal between the lobby and my destination. The sound of the escalator's motor had become indistinct, although I could still feel a faint rhythm of clicks transmitted through the steps, which I assumed were caused as the links of the chain that drew me upward were engaged by the sprockets at either end; and the sounds of the lobby, too, were blurred and assimilated into a universal lobby-sound, as if each unitary tock of a secretary's heel were a sharp brush-point of pigment touched to a wash-covered watercolor, flaring palely outward. From this height, the height of sociology and statistics, foreshortened employees moved in visible patterns: they were propelled one by one at a fixed speed into the lobby by the revolving door; they coalesced in front of elevators whose arrival dinger had just lit; they renewed the permanent four-person line at the cash machine; occasionally two of them, on intersecting rushed trajectories, would raise their arms in joyful surprise and exchange civilities while sidestepping in a neat clockwise semicircle in order to continue backward on their way, each held for an obligatory moment in the other's gravitational field and then, by mutual consent, completing their loop-the-loop by turning and hurrying on.
I had not moved my hand from its first grip on the handrail, but because the handrail progressed upward on its track at an imperceptibly slower speed than the steps did (slippage?), my arm was in a different position, my elbow more bent, than when I had begun. I repositioned my hand ahead of me. It was strange to think that because of the difference in speeds, these escalator steps must periodically lap the handrail that accompanied them: since the slippage on my escalator was about a foot per up trip, or two feet per complete cycle, over an estimated complete handrail loop of a hundred feet, the handrail was lapped by the moving stairway every fifty revolutions— like those stock cars with fewer decals that you think are running neck and neck with Foyt or Unser, but are in fact laps and laps off the pace, driven by what kind of men? Sad, disappointed men, you instinctively feel; but maybe novices or fanatics, delighted to be there at all.
That the handrail didn't progress at exactly the same speed as the steps was an observation I owed to my lately acquired habit of standing still and gliding for the entire ride, rather than walking up the steps. I had switched to gliding only after I had been working at the company for about a year. Before taking the job, I had used escalators relatively infrequently, at airports, malls, certain subway exits, and department stores, and on these occasions I had gradually developed strong beliefs as to the proper way to ride them. Your role was to advance at the normal rate you climbed stairs at home, allowing the motor to supplement, not replace, your own physical efforts. Otis, Montgomery, and Westinghouse had not meant for you to falter after a step or two on their machines and finally halt, arriving at the top later than you would had you briskly mounted a fixed, unelectrified flight. They would never have devoted fortunes of development money and man-years of mechanical ingenuity in order to construct a machine possessing all the external characteristics of a regular set of stairs, including individual steps, a practicable grade, and a shiny banister, just so that healthy people like me could stand in states of suspended animation, our eyes in test patterns of vacancy, until we were deposited on the upper level. Their inspiration had not been the chair lift or the cog railway, but the moped, which you helped out with leg power on hills. Yet people refused to see this. Often in department stores I would get stuck behind two motionless passengers and want to seize their shoulders and urge them on, like an instructor at an Outward Bound program, saying, "Annette, Bruce—this isn't the Land of the Lotus-Eaters. You're on a moving stairway. Feel your own effortful, bobbing steps melt into the inexhaustible meliorism of the escalator. Watch the angles of floors and escalator ceilings above and around you alter their vanishing points at a syrupy speed that doesn't correlate with what your legs are telling you they are doing. Don't you see that when you two stop, two abreast, you are not only blocking me? Don't you see that you indicate to all those who are right now stepping onto the escalator at the bottom and looking timidly up for inspiration that if they bound eagerly up they too will catch up with us and be thwarted in their advance? They were wavering whether to stand or to climb, and you just sapped their wills! You made them choose to waste their time! And they in turn impede those who follow them—thus you perpetuate a pattern of sloth and congestion that may persist for hours. Can't you see that?" Sometimes I rudely halted at the step just below the one the pair stood on, my face a caricature of pointless impatience, tailgating them until (often with startled sounds and offered apologies I didn't deserve) they doubled up to let me pass. Headway was easier to establish going down, because the rapid thump of my steps would scare them over to one side.
But a year of riding the escalator to work changed me. Now I was a passenger on the machine four times a day—sometimes six or more, if I had to redescend to the lobby to take the elevator to one of the company's departments on the twenty-sixth or -seventh floor—and the habitual thoughts that the experience had previously called forth became too familiar at that frequency. My total appreciation for the escalator deepened, eventually becoming embedded along my spinal column, but each individual ride was no longer guaranteed to trigger a well-worn piece of theory or state of irritation. I began to care less whether the original intent of the invention had been to emulate the stairway or not. And when I went back to department stores after those early months of work, I regarded the big motionless backs of shoppers ahead of me on the crowded slope with new' interest,-and I relaxed with them: it was natural, it was understandable, it was defensible to want to stand like an Easter Island monument in this trance of motorized ascension through architectures of retailing. Fairly early on, riding up to Housewares to buy a Revere saucepan to pair with my Teflon fry pan and complete my kitchen, I even put my shopping bag (which contained a suit, a shirt, a tie, and, in a separate smaller bag from Radio Shack, a longer telephone cord) down on the step beside me and closed my eyes for a short while. I brought this new pleasure of standing still back with me to the workday escalations; and eventually I underwent a complete reversal: I never brought my long, leisurely trip to an early end with steps of my own, enjoying it as seasoned rail commuters enjoy the fixed interval of their train ride—and when people stumped past me I regarded them with sympathy. In special situations, the old irritation did occasionally come back, especially on subway escalators; but when it did I now divided my blame between the halted pedestrians and the original designers of the machine: clearly the engineers had made the risers of the steps too tall, and the height weakened the functional correspondence between these stairs and their home counterparts, so that riders failed to feel innately that they were expected to climb.
I was now close to two-thirds of the way to the mezzanine. Behind me, at the base, the maintenance man had moved his rag to the handrail I was holding—in another revolution, my handprint would be polished away. Every few feet, my hand moved past a raised disk of burnished steel attached to the slope between the up escalator I rode and the down escalator to my left. I followed the disks with my eyes as they went by. I had never figured out what their purpose was. Did they cover the heads of large structural bolts, or were they there simply to discourage anyone who might be tempted to use the long median slope as a slide? This question, compressed into a blip of familiar curiosity, occurred to me once or twice a quarter, never urgently enough for me to remember it later and find out the answer.
Presently the metal disk that drew near was half lit by sun. Falling from dusty heights of thermal glass over a hundred-vaned, thirty-foot-long, unlooked-at, invisibly suspended lighting fixture that resembled the metal grid in an old-style ice cube tray, falling through the vacant middle reaches of lobby space, the sunlight draped itself over my escalator and continued from there, diminished by three-quarters, down into a newsstand inset into the marble at the rear of the lobby. I felt myself rise into its shape: my hand turned gold, coronas of stage-struck protein iridesced from my eyelashes; and one hinge of my glasses began to sparkle for attention. The transformation wasn't instantaneous; it seemed to take about as long as the wires in a toaster take to turn orange. It was the last good blast of lunch hour; possibly the best part of the escalator ride. My moving shadow appeared far off, sliding on the lobby floor, and then it began folding itself over the sunlit piles of magazines in the newsstand—magazines as thick as textbooks, separated by wooden dividers—Forbes, Vogue, Playboy, Glamour, PC World, M—so filled with ads that they made a splashing sound as you flipped through their cool, Kromekote pages. Incited by bright textures and warmth, four distinct images occurred to me in quick succession, three of them familiar, one of them new to me, each suggesting the next. I pictured:

(1)  The lines of Creamsicle-colored shine on the shrink-wrapped edges of the row of record albums in my living room as they appeared in the evening when I came home from work.
(2)  A discarded cigarette pack still wrapped in its cellophane; specifically, the delight of running a lawn mower over it, buzzing its glints and paper out over the dry grass.
(3)  The mowed remains of a dinner roll I had seen once on a nice Saturday morning on the way to the subway. It was a potato-sized dinner roll, judging by the white shards, and bending closer, I recognized it as the kind of tasteless lovable roll that was included free with your order from a nearby Chinese takeout place. It had been mowed over where it lay that morning on the sharp slope that fell to the sidewalk (the street must have been widened at some point in the past): looking at it, I had imagined the flicker of indecision on the mower's sweaty face—"Rock?—No, a roll.—Stop?—Not on this tricky slope—Push on," and then the dip of the engine's drone and the card-shuffling spatter that followed, leaving, in place of a Chinese dinner roll, a neat circular distribution of white fragments.
(4)  A giant piece of popcorn exploding in deep space. This last was a conception I had never envisioned in isolation before. Its brief appearance on the heels of the mowed roll (an image that occurred to me once every few months) was probably explained by my having bought and eaten a bag of popcorn earlier in the lunch hour.

Chapter Thirteen

I HAD NOT INTENDED to buy a bag of popcorn. Under the impetus of a big-necked man and a rushed woman behind him, the revolving door from the lobby had been circulating a little too fast; when my turn came, I took advantage of the existing momentum by milling through my slice of its pie chart without contributing any additional force, rolling up a sleeve. Outside, it was noontime, noontime! Fifteen healthy, coltish, slender trees grew out of the brick plaza a short way into the blue sky in front of my building, each casting an arrangement of potato chip-shaped shadows over its circular cast-iron trunk collar. ("Neenah Foundry Co. Neenah, Wis.") Men and women, seated on benches in the sun near raised beds of familiar corporate evergreens (cotoneaster, I think) were withdrawing wrapped delicacies from dazzling white bags. Sidewalk vendors poked in the ranked compartments of their carts, flipping metal doors back and forth. The rear of a truck with quilted metal sides was packed with sandwiches, spigots, Drake's Cakes, and cans in ice, its owner making change from the monetary calliope on his belt, filling three cups at a time without flipping on and off the coffee spigot, pointing at the next customer, all in looping, circling two-armed gestures, as I imagine master telephone operators working the old plug-and-socket switchboards must have made—he was selling to the crew that was tearing down everything but the I beams and the front facade of a building across the street. I was hungry, but under this sunlit noon mood I needed something insubstantial and altitudinous, like a miniature can of Bluebird grapefruit juice, or half an arrowroot biscuit, or three capers rolling around a paper plate, or: popcorn. On impulse, I let a complete dollar fall into the popcorn vendress's hand and lifted a twist-tied bagful garnered from the cart's glass poppery, with its 1890s-style painted lettering and yellow heat lamps and suspended popping chamber, out of which individual white fulsomenesses were jumping from under a metal hinged flap, as if doing a circus stunt for the blank drifts that composed the audience—and I got no change back; no change at all to abrade my thigh as I walked or to overflow my bureau saucer that evening! How kind of her! As I jaywalked across several streets in the direction of the CVS, trailing the inevitable two or three particles from each handful that exceeded the mouth's capacity, moving between cars whose lacquer looked hot to the touch and pedestrians in white blouses and white pinpoint oxford shirts, I felt somewhat like an exploding popcorn myself: a dried bicuspid of American grain dropped into a lucid gold liquid pressed from less fortunate brother kernels, subjected to heat, and suddenly allowed to flourish outward in an instantaneous detonation of weightless reversal; an asteroid of Styrofoam, much larger but seemingly of less mass than before, composed of exfoliations that in bursting beyond their outer carapace were nonetheless guided into paisleys and baobabs and related white Fibonaccia by its disappearing, back-arching browned petals (which later found their way into the space between molars and gums), shapes which seemed quite Brazilian and intemperate for so North American a seed, and which seemed, despite the abrupt assumption of their final state, the convulsive, launching "pop," slowly arrived at, like risen dough or cave mushrooms.
It took me ten minutes to walk to the CVS pharmacy. I threw out what was left of the popcorn before I went inside, into a square can out front with a flap sticky from soft drinks: the trick here was to use whatever you were throwing out to push the flap open and then snap your hand out of the way quickly enough that the flap didn't fall back on it, a technique that didn't work perfectly in this case because the receptacle was overfull and I had to crush my popcorn bag down into earlier trash so that the flap could swing shut properly. I wiped popcorn salt and oil from my hands onto the inside of my pants pockets and entered the coolness of the store.
I had no idea where the shoelaces were kept, but I was a frequent customer of CVSes all over the city, and considered myself an old hand at their layouts and their odd systems of classification, "eye care," "headache," "hair notions," read the suspended placards, with a once catchy, now dated absence of initial capitals—but few, I thought, knew as I did to find earplugs in a far aisle called "first aid," near swimmer's nose-clips. Ace knee supporters, Cruex, Caladryl, Li-Ban lice-killing spray, and the Band-Aid shelves. In fact, most of my familiarity with CVS stores had come from my regular purchase of earplugs. I used a box or more of them a week, and over the years I had grown fond of their recherché placement, implying, which was often true, that hearing was an affliction, a symptom to be cured. The aisle, moreover, was never crowded with pill-studiers, as "headache" was, and all of those nearby boxes of Band-Aids, still trustingly unsealed, with specialized shapes for unusual wounds and the bonus row of miniature strips that adults used even for quite bad finger-cuts, such as you get slicing through a presliced bagel, because they were less ostentatious and self-pitying than the standard size, seemed to me to be the heart of the whole pharmacy. Incidentally, if you open a Band-Aid box, it will exhale a smell (as I found out recently, needing a Band-Aid for a surprisingly gruesome little cut) that will shoot you directly back to when you were four—although I don't trust this olfactory memory trick anymore, because it seems to be a hardware bug in the neural workings of the sense of smell, a low-level sort of tie-in, underneath subtler strata of language and experience, between smell, vision, and self-love, which has been mistakenly exalted by some writers as something realer and purer and more sacredly significant than intellective memory, like the bubbles of swamp methane that awed provincials once took for UFOs.
I used a lot of earplugs, not only to get to sleep, but also at work, because I had found that the magnified Sensurround sounds of my own jaw and teeth, and the feeling of underwater fullness in my ears, and the muffling of all external noise, even the printing of my own calculator or the sliding of one piece of paper over another, helped me to concentrate. On some days, writing impassioned memos to senior management, I spent the whole morning and afternoon wearing earplugs—wearing them even to the men's room, and taking only one out to talk on the phone. Lunch hours I never wore them; and possibly this explained why my thoughts had a different kind of upper harmonic during lunch: it wasn't just the sunlight and the clean glasses, it was also that I heard the world distinctly for the first time since walking to the subway in the morning. (I wore them in the subway, too.) I used Flents Silaflex silicone earplugs. Only since 1982 or so have these superb plugs been generally available, at least in the stores I visit. Before that I used the old Flents stopples, in the orange box—they were made of cotton impregnated with wax, and they were huge: you had to cut them in half with a pair of scissors to get a shape that would stay put when you worked it in place, and they left your fingers greasy with pink paraffin. They revolted L., who used to store any I left on her bedside windowsill in an empty pastilles canister with a rural scene on it—and I don't blame her. Then a company called McKeon Products began to be a force in the market, offering Mack's Pillow Soft® earplugs—lumps of transparent gel-like putty that made a seal so complete that your eardrums ached slightly as you released the pressure from your fingers, because they were creating a mild vacuum in your ear canal—a vacuum! We all know how poorly sound travels in a vacuum! These new plugs, then, were not merely blocking soundwaves from passing through, they were altering the sonic characteristics of the very air resident in the canal! Their fame spread from drug chain to drug chain by word of mouth. I wore them until I forgot what true sound was. Flents counteracted powerfully, pushing their sleek Silaflex model—flesh-colored cylindrical versions of Mack's—while gradually phasing out the old wax-and-cotton Tootsie Roll behemoths. The Silaflex plugs, like Mack's, were sold in a plastic snap-open carrying case, like a snuffbox; I carried the case around in my shirt pocket so that I could have new earplugs whenever I needed them. Fearing lawsuits, perhaps, Flents continued to oversize the newer product—though the package said "3 pairs in handy storage box," I still twisted each cylinder in half and got six complete sets. In bed I kissed L. good night while she wrote down the events of her day in a spiral notebook, and then I selected a promising used plug from the array on my bedside table and pressed it into whichever ear was going to point toward the ceiling first. If she asked a question after I had put the plug in and turned on my side, I had to raise my head off the pillow, exposing the lower ear, to hear her. Earlier I had tried sleeping with earplugs in both ears, so that I would be sound-free as I revolved in my sleep, no matter which ear turned up, but what I found was that the pillow ear would be in pain by the early hours of the morning; so I learned how to transfer the single warm plug from ear to ear in my sleep whenever I turned. By this time L. was resigned to my wearing them; sometimes, to demonstrate special tenderness, she would get the wooden toaster tongs, take hold of an earplug with them, drop it in my ceilingward ear before I had gotten around to doing so, and tamp it in place, saying, "You see? You see how much I love you?"
Just over from earplugs were the long-nosed white bottles of ear-wax dissolver, which I bought once a year or so. Whenever you discovered, on removing the night's earplug after your alarm went off, that you did not hear any better with it out, you remained in bed and squirted the cold carbamide peroxide solution into your ear and lay motionless, waiting for a tactile ferment of bubbling to begin. Then you took a shower. It is true that this squirt of reagent wasn't as effective as the mind-boggling steel warm-water blaster that nurses used: that device had two syringal finger-hooks and a thumb-actuated plunger, and it sent an almost unendurable surge of warm water into your head, flushing impurities out into a bedpan you held steady at your neck. After I had had my ears roared clean that way, I heard reaches of the hertzian range that I had not heard probably since I was newborn; and the greatest pleasure in hearing this new wheat-field crispness overlaid on normal sound was in being able to bottle it away when I wanted to with a pair of Silaflex earplugs. But I was embarrassed to ask a nurse to use the ear-blaster on me because she would see the impurities gush from my ear, so I often resorted to the do-it-yourself white bottle of CVS solvent, and afterward stood in the shower for the count of sixty with my head at an angle that allowed the hot water to enter my ear with as much flushing directness as possible. This was the kind of important and secretive product that CVS stores sold—they were a whole chain dedicated to making available the small, expensive, highly specialized items that readied human bodies for human civilization. Men and women eyed each other strangely here—unusual forces of attraction and furtiveness were at work. Things were for sale whose use demanded nudity and privacy. It was more a woman's store than a man's store, but men were allowed to roam with complete freedom past shelves that glowed with low but measurable curie-levels of luridness. You slip by a woman reading the fine print on a disposable vinegar douche kit. She feels you pass. Frisson! Another woman is contemplating a box of Aspercreme—what for? A third is deciding whether she wants a Revlon eyelash curler, which looks like a cross between a tea strainer and a medieval catapult. Heavy curved soaps like Basis and Dove, though sold in perky square boxes, will be slid from their packaging for tonight's shower: their cream-molded trademarks will be worn away by their passage over womanly upper arms and stomachs. When I was younger than I should have been, I used to steal sanitary napkins from the box among the shoes in my parents' closet, where they lay folded like tennis sweaters in a drawer, and take them to the bathroom with me, where I would with some difficulty poke a hole in one of them, using a pencil or a toothbrush, push my crayon-sized penis through the hole, and urinate into the toilet—and CVS stores have some of this uncertain, childish kinkiness and indirection to them, mixing so many kinds of privateness together in one public store. Even if you are there just to buy some decongestant or, as I was, simply for a pair of shoelaces, you feel the subdued tantalization of the place: the Coppertone billboards used as wallpaper, square yards of tanned shoulders and knees and faces; Krazy Nails wallpaper, too; and Maalox and Secret antiperspirant and Energizer battery wallpaper, all of the ex-billboards cropped and overlapping, obscured here and there by circular antitheft mirrors. Deeply confidential names whispered up at you from every aisle—Anbesol, Pamprin, Evenflo, Tronolane—masterly syllabic splicings of the perverted and the doctorly, the pattern of each color package repeated in piles of four and eight and ten on the shelf. It was a whole Istanbul of the medicine cabinet, insulated from the street by the Red Cross innocence and purity of the GVS sign.
And here were the shampoos! Was there really any need to study the historical past of Chandragupta of Pataliputra, or Harsha of Kanauj, the rise of the Chola kings of Tanjore and the fall of the Pallava kings of Kanchi, who once built the Seven Pagodas of Mahabalipuram, or the final desolation and ruin of the great metropolis of Vijayanagar, when we had dynastic shifts, turbulence, and plenty of lather in the last twenty years of that great Hindu inheritance, shampoo? Yes, there was. Yet emotional analogies were not hard to find between the history of civilization on the one hand and the history within the CVS pharmacy on the other, when you caught sight of a once great shampoo like Alberto VO5 or Prell now in sorry vassalage on the bottom shelf of aisle IB, overrun by later waves of Mongols, Muslims, and Chalukyas—Suave; Clairol Herbal Essence; Gee, Your Hair Smells Terrific; Silkience; Finesse; and bottle after bottle of the Akbaresque Flex. Prell's green is too simple a green for us now; the false French of its name seems kitschy, not chic, and where once it was enveloped in my TV-soaked mind by the immediacy and throatiness of womanly voice-overs, it is now late in its decline, lightly advertised, having descended year by year through the thick but hygroscopic emulsions of our esteem, like the large descending pearl that was used in one of its greatest early ads to prove how lusciously rich it was. (I think that ad was for Prell—or was it Breck, or Alberto VO5?) I remember friends' older sisters who used those old shampoos—one sister especially, fresh from using Alberto VO5 and Dippity-do, with her hair rolled up in a number of small pink foam curlers and three RC cola cans, sitting down at the kitchen table to eat breakfast while we (nine years old) ate raw Bermuda onions for lunch, reading Fester Bestertester paperbacks. I think of the old product managers staring out the window like Proust, reminiscing about the great days when they had huge TV budgets and everything was hopping, now reduced to leafing through trade magazines to keep up with late-breaking news in hair care like outsiders. Soon, nobody would know that they had introduced a better kind of plastic for their shampoo bottle, a kind with a slight matte gunmetal dullness to it instead of the unpleasant patent-leathery reflectivity of then existing efforts at transparency; that with it they had taken their product straight to the top! In time, once everyone had died who had used a certain discontinued brand of shampoo, so that it passed from living memory, it no longer would be understood properly, correctly situated in the felt periphery of life; instead it would be one of many quaint vials of plastic in country antique stores—understood no better than a ninth-century trinket unearthed on the Coromandel coast. I am not proud of the fact that major ingredients of my emotional history are available for purchase today at CVS. The fact seems especially puzzling, since mine was entirely a spectator's emotion: I did not use any of the great shampoos; instead I exhausted innumerable bars of Ivory soap on my hair (the bars turned concave as they diminished, fitting my skull), at least until a year into my job on the mezzanine, when hair began to leave my head and I, trying to undo the years of soapy harshness that I thought might have been the cause of the departure, switched to Johnson's baby shampoo.
Eventually, as products continue to be launched year after year, your original shampoo pantheon, or toothpaste or vending machine or magazine or car or felt-tip pen pantheon, becomes infiltrated by novelty, and you may find yourself losing your points of reference, unable to place a new item in a comparative nest of familiar brand names because the other names still themselves feel raw and unassimilated. In shampoos, I think I have reached that point; the Flex family wore me down finally and I am now living exclusively in the past: short of something really spectacular, any post-Flex product (like this Swedish birch-and-chamomile stuff, Halsa) will remain dead for me, external to my life, no matter how many times I see it on the shelf. Theoretically, I suppose there is a point, too, at which the combined volume of all the miniature histories of miscellanea that have been collecting in parallel in my memory, covering a number of the different aisles of CVS and even some of the handiwork of civilization at large, will reach some critical point and leave me saturated, listless, unable to entertain a single new enthusiasm; I expect it to happen when the CVS stores themselves have become sad and dated, like Rite Aids or Oscos before them: the red letters and stapled white bags bowing before something we can't even imagine, something even cleaner, electrifyingly chipper.
For now, though, the CVS pharmacy is closer to the center of life than, say, Crate & Barrel or Pier 1, or restaurants, national parks, airports, research triangles, the lobbies of office buildings, or banks. Those places are the novels of the period, while CVS is its diary. And somewhere within this particular store, according to Tina, who knew it much better than I did, was a pair of shoelaces, held ready in inventory against the fateful day that mine wore down and snapped. Disappointingly, the aisle labeled "footcare" offered only packets of corn cushions, corn files, corn/callus removers, toe cap/sleeves, ingrown-toenail relievers, and the rest of the Dr. Scholl's line. I checked "hosiery," but found only stockings. I was almost ready to believe that CVS didn't carry what I needed, when, turning down aisle 8A, marked "cleaners," I saw them, hanging over cans of Kiwi shoe polish, next to sponges and flock-lined latex gloves. They were CVS's house brand, sixty-nine-cent "replacement dress laces." A slight cheapo glint led me to suspect that they were woven of man-made fibers; but at the shoelace level of detail, nobody could reasonably demand cotton. A chart on the back of each package correlated the number of paired eyelets in your shoes with the length of shoelace you needed: counting mine (five), I bought the twenty-seven-inch size. My shoes looked scuffed, and I almost bought a can of black Kiwi polish as well—I was attracted by the archaism of the canister's design: it was American, yet easily as good as the cans of Filippo Berio olive oil; and there was a nice resemblance between the kiwi bird standing in its white semicircle and the white, encircled Penguin on the black paperback I was carrying. But I remembered that I had several cans of Kiwi black at home—it was a wonder, really, that Kiwi made any money at all in this business, given how long each canister lasted, I thought: you lost it in the bottom of your closet long before you ran out.
There were lines at all the cash registers. I studied the technique of the cashiers and chose the smartest-looking one, an Indian or Pakistani woman in a blue sweater, even though her line was two people longer than any of the others, because I had come to the conclusion that the differential in checkout speeds between a fast, smart ringer-upper and a slow, dumb one was three transactions to one, such was the variation in human abilities and native intelligence—even four to one if there were sophisticated transactions like returns, or the appearance of something whose price had to be looked up in the alphabetical printout because it wasn't price-gunned on the package. This Indian woman was a true professional: she put the items in the bag as she rang them up, eliminating the need to handle everything twice, and she did not wait to see whether the customer had the exact change: she had learned that when the guy said, "Wait, I think I have it!" there was a good chance that after all his fishing and palm-counting, the combination of coins would prove to be inadequate, and he would say, "Sorry, I don't," and hand her a twenty-dollar bill. She closed the register drawer with her hips and tore the receipt off at almost precisely the same moment, and her use of the chrome handgrip-style stapler that was chained to the counter was everything you want to see in bag stapling. Her only difficulty came when, making change for the woman in front of me (tweezers. Vaseline Intensive Care, Trident gum, nude-colored stockings, and a package of Marlboro Light 100s), she ran out of loose dimes. The coin roll was made of thick shrink-wrapped plastic. It took her ten seconds of unvexed, expressionless bending and prying to work four dimes out into the coin trough. Even with this setback, however, I reached her with my shoelaces faster than I would have reached any of the other cashiers. (To be truthful, I had watched her before, when I was at the store to buy earplugs, and thus I already knew that she was the fastest.) I broke a ten. She laid the bills on my palm and released the loose coins into the curve the bills formed—the riskiest, most skillful way, which left me with a hand free to take hold of the bag, and which avoided that sometimes embarrassing touch of a stranger's warm hand. I wanted to tell her how nimble she was, that I really liked the fact that she had discovered the movements and shortcuts that kept cash transactions enjoyable, but there didn't seem to be any unembarrassing way of conveying this. She smiled and nodded ceremonially, and I left, my errand complete.

Chapter Fourteen

ON THE WAY BACK, my office seemed farther from the CVS than it had on the way there. I ate a vendor's hot dog with sauerkraut (a combination whose tastiness still makes me tremble), walking fast in order to save as much of the twenty minutes of my lunch hour I had left for reading. A cookie store I passed had no customers in it; in under thirty seconds, I had bought a large, flexible chocolate chip cookie there for eighty cents. Waiting for a light five blocks away from my building, I took a bite of the cookie; immediately I felt a strong need for some milk to complement it, and I nipped into a Papa Gino's and bought a half-pint carton in a bag. Thus supplied, full of thoughts about the ritual aspects of bagging, I returned to the brick plaza and sat down on a bench in the sun near the revolving door. It was a neo-Victorian bench, made of thin slats of wood bolted to curves of ornate iron and painted green—a kind that might be thought overly cute now, but which at that time seemed rare and wonderful, architects having then only recently begun to abandon the low, evil slabs of cast concrete or polished granite that had served as places to sit (or slump, for they offered no back support) in this sort of public area for twenty regressive years.
I placed the CVS bag beside me and opened the carton of milk, pushing an edge of the bag Donna had given me under my thigh so that it would not blow away. The bench gave me a three-quarter view of my building: the mezzanine floor, a grid of dark green glass with vertical marble accents, was the last wide story before the facade angled in and took off, neck-defyingly, into a squint of blue haze. The building's shadow had reached one end of my bench. It was a perfect day for fifteen minutes of reading. I opened the Penguin Classic at the placemarker (a cash-machine receipt, which I slipped for the time being several pages ahead), and then I took a bite of cookie and a mouthful of cold milk. Until my eyes adjusted, the pages were blinding, illegible hillocks, tinted with afterimages of retinal violets and greens. I blinked and chewed. The independence of the bite of cookie and the mouthful of milk began to merge and warm pleasantly in my mouth; another pure infusion of milk coldly washed the sweet mash down. I found my place on the brilliant page and read:

Observe, in short, how transient and trivial is all mortal life; yesterday a drop of semen, tomorrow a handful of spice and ashes.

Wrong, wrong, wrong! I thought. Destructive and unhelpful and misguided and completely untrue!—but harmless, even agreeably sobering, to a man sitting on a green bench on a herringbone-patterned brick plaza near fifteen healthy, regularly spaced trees, within earshot of the rubbery groan and whish of a revolving door. I could absorb any brutal stoicism anyone dished out! Instead of continuing, however, I took another bite of cookie and mouthful of milk. That was the problem with reading: you always had to pick up again at the very thing that had made you stop reading the day before. A glowing mention in William Edward Hartpole Lecky's History of European Morals (which I had been attracted to, browsing in the library one Saturday, by the ambitious title and the luxuriant incidentalism of the footnotes) was what had made me stop in front of the floor-to-ceiling shelf of Penguin Classics at the bookstore on a lunch hour two weeks earlier and reach for the thin volume of Aurelius's Meditations on the very top shelf, disdaining the footstool that was available, hooking my finger on the top of the book and pulling it so that it half fell into my palm: a thinner Penguin than most, glossy, inflexible, mint-condition. In earlier short-lived classical enthusiasms I had bought, and read no more than twenty pages of, Penguin Classics of Arrian, Tacitus, Cicero, and Procopius—I liked to see them lined up on my windowsill, just above the shelf that held my records; I liked them in part because, having come to history first through the backs of record albums, I associated the Classics' blackness and gloss with record vinyl. Lecky had praised Aurelius in a way that made reading him seem irresistible:

Tried by the chequered events of a reign of nineteen years, presiding over a society that was profoundly corrupt, and over a city that was notorious for its license, the perfection of his character awed even calumny to silence, and the spontaneous sentiment of his people proclaimed him rather a god than a man. Very few men have ever lived concerning whose inner life we can speak so confidently. His Meditations, which form one of the most impressive, form also one of the truest, books in the whole range of religious literature.

And sure enough, the first thing I read when I opened the Meditations at random in the bookstore stunned me with its fineness. "Manifestly," I read (the warped sound of a rinsed saucepan struck against the side of the sink ringing in my head).

Manifestly, no condition of life could be so well adapted for the practice of philosophy as this in which chance finds you today!

Wo! I loved the slight awkwardness and archaism of the sentence, full of phrases that never come naturally to people's lips now but once had: "condition of life," "so well adapted for," "chance finds you," as well as the unexpected but apt rush to an exclamation point at the end. But mainly I thought that the statement was extraordinarily true and that if I bought that book and learned how to act upon that single sentence I would be led into elaborate realms of understanding, even as I continued to do, outwardly, exactly as I had done, going to work, going to lunch, going home, talking to L. on the phone or having her over for the night. As often happens, I liked that first deciding sentence better than anything I came across in later consecutive reading. I had been carrying the book around for two weeks of lunch hours; its spine was worn from being held more than from being read, although a single white fold-line did run down the back, which made the book open automatically to page 168, where the "condition of life" sentence was; and by now, disenchanted, flipping around a lot, I was nearly ready to abandon it entirely, tired of Aurelius's unrelenting and morbid self-denial. This latest thing about mortal life's being no more than sperm and ash, read two days in a row, was too much for me. I replaced the cash-machine receipt in the page, where it remained until quite recently, and I closed the book.
Half the milk remained to be drunk. Feeling now won back by the taste, I downed it all at once; and then, remembering a habit of childhood, I balled up the cookie bag, which was made of a thin, crinkly kind of paper, and stuffed it into the spout of the milk carton. Ten minutes of lunch hour remained. If I wasn't going to read, I felt that I should spend the time replacing my worn-out shoelaces with the ones I had just bought. But the sun was too warm for that: inclining my face toward it, I sat with my eyes closed, my arms outstretched on the bench, and my legs crossed at the ankles in front of me, drawing in my feet whenever I heard a person walking nearby, in case I was blocking the way. My right hand, in the shade, touched the cool dome of a neo-Victorian bolt; my left hand, in the sun, touched hot, smooth, green paint; a current of complete peaceful contentment began to flow from the shade hand to the sun hand, passing through my arms and shoulders and whorling up into my brain along the way. "Manifestly," I repeated, as if scolding myself, "no condition of life could be so well adapted for the practice of philosophy as this in which chance finds you today!" Chance found me that day having worked for a living all morning, broken a shoelace, chatted with Tina, urinated successfully in a corporate setting, washed my face, eaten half of a bag of popcorn, bought a new set of shoelaces, eaten a hot dog and a cookie with some milk; and chance found me now sitting in the sun on a green bench, with a paperback on my lap. What, philosophically, was I supposed to do with that? I looked down at the book. A gold bust of the emperor was on the cover. Who bought this kind of book? I wondered. People like me, sporadic self-improvers, on lunch hours? Or only students? Or cabbies, wanting something to surprise their fares with, a book to wave in front of the Plexiglas? I had often wondered whether Penguin made money selling these paperbacks.
And then I considered the phrase "often wondered." Feeling Aurelius pressing me to practice philosophy on the scant raw materials of my life, I asked myself exactly how often I had wondered about the profitability of Penguin Classics. Merely saying that you often wondered something gave no indication of how prominent a part of life that state of mind really was. Did it come up every three hours? Once a month? Every time a certain special set of conditions recurred to remind me? I certainly did not think about Penguin's financial condition every time I set eyes on one of their books. Sometimes I just thought of whatever that particular book was about, uninterested for the moment in who the publisher was; sometimes I thought of the fact that the orange-backed Penguin novels faded in the sunlight like dry cleaners' posters, and how amazing it was that a color scheme as intrinsically questionable as that orange, white, and black would come to seem lovely and subtle, intimately associated with our idea of the English novel, just because it happened to be what somebody at a publishing firm had decided to use as a standard format. Sometimes the orange backs made me think of the first Penguin book I had read. My Family and Other Animals: my mother had given it to me one summer, and not only had I liked the lizards and scorpions and sunlight, I had also been interested, as I read my way deeper into the bulk of the pages, by a tiny printed code that occurred every twenty pages or so at the bottom left margin of the right-hand page: "FOA-7," "FOA-8," "FOA-9," etc. Some kind of private technical bookbinder's jargon, I thought—"Facing Off Alternate 7," or "Feed Onto Assembly 7," perhaps. Much later, when I noticed this feature of Penguin books again, in the middle of reading Iris Murdoch's A Fairly Honourable Defeat ("F.H.D.-6," etc.) and realized that it was simply the initials of the book's title, a quick way of avoiding mixups in manufacture, I felt a retroactive reach of love for this previously unsolved mystery, and gratitude to Penguin for providing us with this more absolute set of milestones to measure our progress through a book: for when you reach something like "F.H.D.-14" (as far as I got in that particular Murdoch, I have to say, much as I like her writing), you feel that your forward progress is confirmed more objectively than when you merely reach a new chapter. All of these particular Penguin-related observations had different cycles of recurrence and therefore microscopic differences of weight in my personality—and it seemed to me then that we needed a measure of the periodicity of regularly returning thoughts, expressed as, say, the number of times a certain thought pops into your head every year. I wondered about the financial situation of Penguin books maybe four times a year. "A periodicity of 4"—it had a scientific ring. Once a year, just when Muzak switched over to Christmas carols, I thought, "It's funny that 'God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen' is in a minor key." Every time I stubbed a toe I thought, "Amazing that a man's toe can take that kind of shock and not break"—and I stubbed a toe maybe eight times a year. About every other time I took a vitamin C pill, fifteen times a year, I thought as I filled the water glass,"... livin' on reds, vitamin C, and cocaine..." If we could assign a periodicity number in this way to every recurrent thought a person had, what would we know? We would know the relative frequency of his thoughts over time, something that might prove to be more revealing than any statement of beliefs he might offer, or even than a frozen section of available, potential thoughts (if that were possible) at any one time in particular. Just as the most frequent words in English are humdrum ones like "of" and "in" and "the," so the most frequent thoughts are bland and tiresome things like, "Itch on face," "[fleeting sexual image]," and "Is my breath bad?" But below the "of" and "in" level of thought-vocabulary, there was a whole list of mid-frequency ideas. I imagined them taking the form of a chart—something like:

Subject of thought
	Number of Times Thought Occurred per Year
(in descending order)
	
L.	580.0	
Family	400.0	
Brushing tongue	150.0	
Earplugs	100.0	
Bill-paying	52.0	
Panasonic three-wheeled vacuum cleaner, greatness of	45.0	
Sunlight makes you cheerful	40.0	
Traffic frustration	38.0	
Penguin books, all	35.0	
Job, should I quit?	34.0	
Friends, don’t have any	33.0	
Marriage, a possibility?	32.0	
Vending machines	31.0	
Straws don’t unsheath well	28.0	
Shine on moving objects	25.0	
McCarthey more talented than Lennon?	23.0	
Friends smarter, more capable than I am	19.0	
Paper-towel dispensers	19.0	
“What oft was thought, but ne’er” etc.	18.0	
People are very dissimilar	16.0	
Trees, beauty of	15.0	
Sidewalks	15.0	
Friends are unworthy of me	15.0	
Identical twins separated at birth, studies of traits	14.0	
Intelligence, going fast	14.0	
Wheelchair ramps, their insane danger	14.0	
Urge to kill	13.0	
Escalator invention	12.0	
People are very similar	12.0	
“Not in my backyard”	11.0	
Straws float now	10.0	
DJ, would I be happy as one?	9.0	
“If you can’t get out of it, get into it”	9.0	
Pen, felt-tip	9.0	
Gasoline, nice smell of	8.0	
Pen, ballpoint	8.0	
Stereo systems	8.0	
Fear of getting mugged again	7.0	
Staplers	7.0	
“Roaches check in, but they don’t check out”	6.0	
Dinner roll, image of	6.0	
Shoes	6.0	
Bags	5.0	
Butz, Earl	4.0	
Sweeping, brooms	4.0	
Whistling, yodel trick	4.0	
“You can taste it with your eyes”	4.0	
Dry-cleaning fluid, smell of	3.0	
Zip-lock tops	2.0	
Popcorn	1.0	
Birds regurgitate food and feed young with it	0.5	
Kant, Immanuel	0.5	

But compiling the list, as I saw as soon as I began sketchily to do so in my head, was not the enlightening process of abstraction I had expected it to be: thoughts were too fluid, too difficult to name, and once named to classify, for my estimate of their relative frequency to mean very much. And there were way, way too many of them. Yet this ranking of periodicity, as an ideal of description, was the best I could do that afternoon. Introspection was the only slightly philosophical activity I felt capable of practicing, sitting on the bench in the sun, waiting until the last possible minute before I went back into work; and the attribution of frequency did at least force a truer sort of introspection than the wide-open question "What do I think about?" People seemed so alike when you imagined their daily schedules, or watched them walk toward the revolving door (as Dave, Sue, and Steve, not noticing me, were doing now), yet if you imagined a detailed thought-frequency chart compiled for each of them, and you tried comparing one chart with another, you would feel suddenly as if you were comparing beings as different from each other as an extension cord and a grape-leaf roll. L. once told me that she thought "all the time" (I asked her to be more specific, she said once every three weeks or so) about a disturbing joke someone had told her when she was eleven, which goes: "Q: Do you know the description of the perfect woman? A: [Puts hand waist-high.] This tall with a flat head to rest your beer on." Until two or three years ago, she told me, she had, from the time she was ten or so, often against her will, thought several times a week of a rhymed riddle that went:

As I was walking to St. Ives 
I met a man with seven wives 
Every wife held seven sacks 
And every sack held seven cats 
And every cat had seven kits 
Kits cats sacks wives 
How many were going to St. Ives?

Every month and a half, so she told me, she thought with pleasure of a description in Daniel Deronda of a room in which everything was yellow, not having imagined high-Victorian rooms decorated in that color before. And I thought about none of those things! She and I knew each other well; we felt that we were alike in important ways, delighted and not delighted in tandem, yet charts of repeating thoughts and their periodicities for the two of us would reveal surprisingly little overlap in the mid-frequency range.
Above the periodicity of solitary, internal thought, dependent upon it yet existing on a separate plane, was the periodicity of conversation, on the phone and in person. Twenty times a year L. and I talked about the fact that women characters in film comedies almost always functioned as comic straight men. Twenty-five times a year we wondered what it would have been like if my parents had stayed married, or if hers had gotten a divorce. Fifty times a year we talked about promiscuity's effects on outlook and personality, with examples taken from her friends' lives and from our own. Every other day we considered which city or area we would most like to live in, and in what kind of house, if we were rich. Affirmative action had a periodicity of 4; the heritability of mental traits, of 12. Twice every summer we discussed whether colors in nature could clash. When a subject recurred, we felt it as familiar, but indistinct: almost always it came up (that is, felt worth discussing again) only after we could no longer remember exactly what our previous respective opinions had been—we remembered vaguely, unattributively, the telling points that had been made the last time, but often reversed our positions, each of us more enthusiastic now about the fresher-feeling arguments the other had made the last time, and less convinced by our own earlier ones.
And there were periodicities superimposed on the plane of conversation, too: nationwide fifteen-year cycles of journalistic excitement about one issue or another; generational corrections and pendular overreactions; and, above these, the periodicity of libraries and Penguin Classics, slower still, resurgencies and subsidings of interest in some avenue of inquiry or style of thinking from one century to the next, restatings of mislaid truths in new vernaculars.
On all these planes, I thought, the alternation of neglect and attention paid to an idea was like the cycle of waxing and buffing, dulling down and raising the shine higher, sanding between coats and then applying another—things happened to it during the long unsupervised stretches. Just now, for the sixth time in two workweeks, I had paid attention to one sentence-long idea of Aurelius for a minute or two, thereby lifting it up from artificial Penguin storage into living memory for that short time, when but for its occupying my thoughts, it might not have been for those minutes under consideration by anyone else in the entire city, maybe even in the world. Today, too, for the first time in twenty years, I had on two separate occasions been reminded of the act of tying my shoelaces (three occasions, if you count the momentary pride I had felt just before the shoelace had snapped), a lifetime average periodicity of around one-tenth of a reminding per year, although that number is misleading, since frequencies should, I decided, be averaged over a shorter interval, like five years, to be meaningful, at least until you have died. It was impossible to predict which of the two, Aurelius or shoelaces, would rank higher in my overall lifetime periodicity ratings upon my death.
It was time to go in. The fingers of my sun hand felt sticky; I rubbed them with my thumb until a tiny dark-gray cylinder, composed of popcorn oil, urban dirt, skin, and cookie sugar, was brought into being. I flicked it away. The date, I noticed, was still visible on my palm, but it would be gone after my next hand-washing. With some effort I was able to twist and crumple the Papa Gino's bag tightly enough to stuff most of it, too, into the milk carton; I took an obscure satisfaction in the inside-outness of this achievement. Collecting my possessions, my stapled CVS bag and my paperback, I stood up. The stuffed carton of milk I threw out; or, more accurately, I placed it very carefully at the apex of a mound of bee-probed lunch trash ready at any minute to overflow a nearby oil drum, making sure the carton wasn't going to topple at least until I was gone by steadying it gently with my fingertips in its precarious spot for a few seconds. I couldn't crush the underlying trash down, as I had half an hour earlier outside the CVS, because any application of pressure would only have made the whole mound disintegrate. A bee rose up from a sun-filled paper cup, off to make slum honey from some diet root beer it had found inside. I entered the lobby and made my way toward the up escalator.

Chapter Fifteen

THE VERY END of the ride, I caught sight of a cigarette butt rolling and hopping against the comb plate where the grooves disappeared. I stepped onto the mezzanine and turned to watch it for a few seconds. Its movement was a faster version of the rotation of mayonnaise or peanut butter or olive jars, or cans of orange juice or soup, when they are caught at the end of supermarket conveyor belts, their labels circling around and around—Hellman's! Hellman's! Hellman's!— something I had loved to see when I was little. I looked down the great silver glacier to the lobby. The maintenance man was at the bottom. I waved to him. He held up his white rag for a second, then put it back down on the rubber handrail.