Cannibals in Love by Mike Roberts Page B

little less spit.
    The two cops burst into hysterics. “You’re in Manhattan , Mikey.” They were looking at each other, truly tickled by this. And I laughed, too.
    â€œHar-har-har. Very funny. You’re wasting all your jokes, man. I’m not some tourist. I’m already half asleep in my bed. I’m on autopilot here. Don’t you guys know you’re not supposed to wake a sleepwalker?” This was my best crack at New York posturing, and the cops seemed to warm to it a little. They were having fun with me.
    *   *   *
    The truth was I’d barely been living in New York a couple months at this point. Filing photocopies in some featureless Midtown office building. This qualified as working in the abstract, in the extreme. It had something to do with investment banking, a thing they were very careful never to explain to me. I copied and shredded documents until my left eye began to tic. What did that mean? Stress? Guilt? Boredom? It was all a little scary in its formlessness. Time was a drum, beating in my blood, I thought. This was not a life.
    I was living in some filthy rattrap apartment with a family of mice and a couple of Pratt kids who smoked cigarettes all day. My bedroom looked out onto an air shaft, and I would lie there and wonder about fire codes. I tried to imagine how many people lived in a building like this. Who even kept track of such things? People lighting burners; ironing shirts; smoking cigarettes, all day long, distracted. Every day was like this. It was surprising how few fires there actually were, when you stopped to think about it. I would go through a kind of morbid checklist each night, wondering if I’d even know how to get out of here when the smoke alarms went off. I walked through it in my head as I lay there in bed: crawling for the front fire escape, or groping for the hallway stairs. Did we even have a smoke alarm? Did it work? What if I jumped down three flights into this air shaft and found out that the doors didn’t open? What then?
    I already knew I would end up going back to Washington before the end of the year anyway. This was disheartening because I’d been so ready to leave it. I was desperate for a real change of scenery, some actual sense of urgency. To my mind there was a strange logic in moving to New York City at the dawn of the twenty-first century. Some raw desire to live under the volcano. Stress. Congestion. Pollution. Terrorism. I was courting death. This was the modern condition and I was the modern man.
    Still, I couldn’t believe that the temp agency actually wanted me to work in Midtown Manhattan. This seemed sadistic to me. Wasn’t Midtown going to be next? Downtown, Midtown, Uptown: crashing over the island like a tidal wave or a virus. Was it possible to not think about the world this way now?
    The woman at the temp agency did not find these sorts of questions amusing. Me neither, I told her. Me neither .
    Of course, I took the job, and I tried to do it right. Just like everybody else. I rode the subways at rush hour, like a real goddamn New Yorker. Sweating. Claustrophobic. Rushed. This lasted all of one week before I resigned myself to riding my bike the ten miles each way, from Brooklyn to Midtown, through the warm poison clouds of truck exhaust. I locked up under the Chrysler Building and learned to stop looking up for the top. I grew numb, the way that all the people in the business suits acted above fear. Aloof and impersonal. So, so very busy.
    If there were windows on the thirty-second floor, I never saw them. It didn’t take long for me to get a bit of a reputation in this office, either. Working inside of a storm cloud, I wanted to familiarize myself with the stairways. At first the floor security guard just laughed. When I assured him that I was serious, he creased his brow and told me that the stairs were on alarms.
    â€œI just want to make a test run, though. To time myself,” I