Used to do this all the time. Just start walking, end up somewhere on Allen Street looking into the gaping throats which are the apartments and the shops and empty buildings.

Nowhere else to go, I got lost there once in 1993 feeling like someone who'd just emerged from an alien spacecraft, smarting from the cold, steel buttprobes and martian babies lodged deep into my brain.

When I'm told stories of being taken away body and soul by aliens or angels I react less with skepticism or disbelief then with sadness and dread about this weakness of mine whereby I genuinely want these cosmic fantasies to be real. I can only hope it never happens that my life reaches such a point of vacuousness and despair that I start hallucinating away my reality in desperate attempts to make up for the emptiness of human life.

In 1991, when I worked at Tower Records, I was walking near Broadway and 70th Street when a co-worker from the store tapped me on the shoulder and said hello. After a moment of idle chatter she said "Say, were you in the store at 5:30 this morning?" I said no, and she went on saying "This is gonna sound crazy, but I was putting the money into the cash register this morning and I swear I saw you walking behind a post over in the cassette section. When I went to see if it was you there was nothing there. So I went into the stock room and called your name but..."

I remember my reaction, which I'm having again as I type these words. My eyes welled up with tears through which her face became impossibly distorted, and my only defense against gasping outloud was to take a deep, sharp, sudden breath.

Just as quickly as it came upon me the sadness vanished; the tears retreated and there was a moment of concern for her, and then several seconds of serene clarity such that occur very rarely in my life. There was the sidewalk beneath me, there were the words of the person in front of me, the fabric of the shirt on my back, the liquor of air passing down my throat.

She spoke for several more minutes about ghosts in the Ansonia building, phantoms among us on Broadway, visitors in the sewers. I felt that the overwhelming present existence of New York City will always smother its past.