How Did You Get This Number Part 2

What hooked me in the end was the presence of a washer and dryer. People may not murder for twenty-five hundred square feet in Manhattan, but they'll maim for a washer and dryer. I typed the address into Google. I don't know what I was looking for. I didn't recall Mac implying anything special about the apartment beyond its dimensions. Perhaps I just wanted some insight into my potential neighbors. Maybe a resume of some earnest MFA candidate or a male model's plea for the return of lost head shots. I didn't expect much. And certainly not the five hundred hits that came back to me. This was 2002. Five hundred hits was a lot in 2002. That would be like twenty thousand hits in today's Web currency.

But almost none of the hits concerned the building's current residents. I was scrolling through a virtual graveyard of newspaper archives and real estate websites, each link a headstone from the past. In the early twentieth century, 295 Bowery was a brothel. And not just any IHOP-style wh.o.r.e-house. It was the site of the worst, and by default the most famous, brothel in the history of New York City: McGurk's Suicide Hall. A macabre tourist attraction a century ago, in one year no less than six prost.i.tutes killed themselves because the conditions were so poor. Apparently the bartenders were on suicide watch, told to keep an eye out for nipple-exposed women standing in close proximity to pocket daggers, bottles of ether, open windows, that sort of thing. This must have been a conflicting a.s.signment. It was in the best interest of the business's reputation for a percentage of these women to continue killing themselves.

I, however, experienced no such conflict of conscience. I would be sleeping with the ghosts of dead s.l.u.ts! How could I resist? Here, finally, was my converted candy warehouse. Except that instead of an "a" in the warehouse there was a "ho." Several, actually.

I called immediately, eager for my first wh.o.r.e haunting. Presumably these were the vengeful brand of specter, the kind that refuses to move on. But I figured they'd be kind to me just for believing in them. And believe in them I did. I have seen too many movies about the paranormal. Too much bad dialogue has been exchanged; too much overwrought acknowledgment of the ridiculous has been imbedded in phrases like "Oh my G.o.d, you guys! Did you hear that?" and "But Grandma's been dead dead for twenty years!" In the movies I'm thinking of, if the viewer's disbelief isn't suspended by act three, the director will forcefully bungee it off a bridge. There have been too many well-rendered special effects, too many starlets with flashlights under their faces muttering the mantra "I don't believe in ghosts," only to be told that their beliefs, like their thighs and knowledge of global politics, are nothing. Because the ghosts believe in them. for twenty years!" In the movies I'm thinking of, if the viewer's disbelief isn't suspended by act three, the director will forcefully bungee it off a bridge. There have been too many well-rendered special effects, too many starlets with flashlights under their faces muttering the mantra "I don't believe in ghosts," only to be told that their beliefs, like their thighs and knowledge of global politics, are nothing. Because the ghosts believe in them.

According to my Internet research, the apartment was one of only a handful of units. Two were occupied by a feminist activist known for her work, ironically, about s.e.x and prost.i.tution. The one I'd be visiting was under the owners.h.i.+p of a Canadian artist who, for reasons unknown, sublet the s.p.a.ce for far less than it was worth. Occasionally, it seemed someone would get married or go back to grad school and then the apartment would be unhooked like a rare fish, released back into the Craigslist stream of otherwise untenable listings. A golden ticket with gills.

For these reasons, I began to think the apartment was calling to me. Even at the time, I knew that this sort of backstory was providing me with a false sense of destiny. Lots of people live in apartments with history in the floorboards. Usually it's obscure history having to do with famous people. Marilyn Monroe ate a hamburger in your lobby. Edgar Allan Poe once bought a pot of ink in your bas.e.m.e.nt. But McGurk's Suicide Hall was the reverse-it was the anonymity, the relative uncommemoration of these women, that I found irresistible. No one knew their names, but everyone knew their profession. I also thought of what I'd be leaving. For all their paid promiscuity and suicidal tendencies, at least the ghosts of McGurk's disappeared the old-fas.h.i.+oned way. Whereas my current roommate was doing it by shedding body ma.s.s. The former seemed less gruesome somehow.

MY NEW ROOMMATE WAS A TALL KOREAN HIPSTER who answered the door in a man's flannel s.h.i.+rt. She had misjudged the b.u.t.ton-to-hole alignment, leaving one swath of cloth farther below her belt than the other. But she couldn't be bothered to start over. She wore black jeans and no shoes. It was as if she knew the beer-bottle shards and cigarette b.u.t.ts and centuries of grime would bow in deference to the filth of her feet. And filthy they were, striking some shade between the matted nest of her hair and the oxidized toe ring that clung unhappily to her pinkie toe. When she seemed surprised to see me, I knew instantly not to take it personally.

"Hey, I'm Sang," she said, looking into some middle distance between my face and hers. I wiped my nose. She c.o.c.ked her head at me, and I c.o.c.ked my head in the same direction.

"I'm Sloane. Mac's friend."

"Yeah. Come up," she added, as if I were the one holding us back.

As I followed her up the stairs, I thought of how strange it is to follow anyone up the stairs. Your face is so close to their b.u.t.t. It's one of the unsung pleasures of riding in cabs-I have seen very little cabbie a.s.s in my life. Whereas my fellow subway riders' cheeks are thrust, s.h.i.+fting back and forth, in front of me every day, countless as stars. Sang's a.s.s was not so much an a.s.s but a continuation of leg and bone, covered by pockets because society demanded it be covered by pockets. They came with the jeans. But much like the rest of Sang, her a.s.s seemed inconvenienced to exist at all. I wondered about the build of the women who first ascended this staircase. People from one hundred years ago looked different. Rounder and smaller at the same time. More forehead, less chin. I am often curious about the texture of their hair. This is why period films are so unconvincing. Because actresses use conditioner and have been plucking their eyebrows for years, and you can't hire the dead.

A few beat-up sepia photos of the women from the last century hung, warped, in cracked frames drilled into the brick. They wore boots and feathers and stared with purpose into a bulky wooden box to have their portrait taken. I imagined them lifting their skirts as they marched up these same steps, a red-faced drunk in my position-bob, s.h.i.+ft, bob, s.h.i.+ft, mustache, mustache, bowler hat. Of course, the kind of women walking up these steps would not likely be wearing skirts long enough to lift.

"So, how long have you lived here?" I said to the a.s.s.

"Don't know," the a.s.s threw its voice. "A while now, I guess."

I wondered what it must be like for the lucky gent who dated Sang. It's never good to fall in love with someone whom you'd have to stab in the eyeb.a.l.l.s to elicit a response. Sang pushed the metal door with a callused heel, and it swung inward with surprising ease.

There are fulcrum moments in life when you can feel your world pivot in a new direction. Everything that mattered doesn't. There is no adjustment period between the old and the new. Slice open the plastic bag and pour the goldfish straight into the bowl. Here is how your life will go from now on. My moment came while looking at the dining room table in Sang's loft. I would make as many toothbrushes out of hair as the situation required if I could do it at that dining room table.

Crafted in the "picnic" school of tables, complete with benches, it had been rescued from a flea market in Norway, painted white, and then intentionally stripped so that swirling knots of wood overpowered the paint. It was oversized and smooth. Above it hung a chandelier with every other bulb covered by a plastic doll's head. Brunettes and blondes and a redhead glowed from their eye sockets. There's no way to convince someone that a doll-head chandelier is tasteful. But this one was. As I strolled around the place, I kept alert for signs of crafts or splatter paint or batiking of any kind. But all I found were beautiful touches that put the creative solutions necessitated by my small s.p.a.ce to shame. Like the refrigerator sunk into the wall and then painted to match the wallpaper. Or the slab of jagged marble on the back of the toilet to replace the porcelain cover. It was a beautifully disheveled mess. A warmer, more cared-for version of Andy Warhol's Factory. There was even a potted tree of some kind, and it was more or less alive. This, despite Sang's repeated attempts to kill it.

"I never water that thing," said Sang, "but it just keeps on living."

We sat on one of the artfully mismatched sofas surrounding a freestanding fireplace. I sank into the cus.h.i.+on until it touched the floor.

"Also, there's no air-conditioning," she said, looking down with superhuman vision to remove one of her hairs from her black jeans. "I mean, obviously. It's a loft."

Did I look like the kind of girl who was going to storm in, demanding Freon? I was; I just didn't want to look like it.

"Oh, that's okay," I said, picturing my practically medieval collection of hair-torturing devices. On hot days, I had been known to stick my freshly burned scalp in the freezer. I was willing to eschew it all if I lived here. I would be the kind of girl who doesn't blow-dry her hair, who has transcended the brush.

"And," she continued, "there's no hot water. There is, but it's two seconds and then it turns freezing cold."

"Good!" I clapped my hands. "Must offset the humidity!"

She could have told me that the mattresses were full of bedbugs and I was going to have to sleep on plastic sheets, and I would have clapped like a trained seal.

We sat in silence. I listened to the traffic on Houston, trying to determine if it would be worse or better at night as I fell asleep in my envy-inducing bedroom.

"How is it that this place is available?"

Sang explained her situation-a bad boyfriend whom she had kicked out. She described him as "one of those non-talkative types."

"Some people are just so blase about everything." Sang sighed.

I said that yes, I had heard of such a person.

Then I explained my situation-a bad roommate I described as one of those "non-eating types." When I mentioned the casual kleptomania, Sang perked up for the first time. Stealing was something to which she could relate. You could really picture her hanging out with open thieves, tiring of people she called "friends" stealing her credit cards and photocopying her pa.s.sport. Not cool, guys. Not cool. So I delved further, but too deep too fast, uttering more syllables through normal conversation than Sang had released in the past week. The more I detailed Nell's crimes, the more Sang distanced herself from me.

"So, she wears your stuff without asking? Oh. I guess that can be annoying. I grew up with sisters, so-"

"So did I!" I attempted to sit up straight, but the couch pulled me back. "But this girl isn't my sister."

I did a quick mental montage of every time I had attempted to borrow an article of clothing from my sister in high school. Not one image featured her giving it to me of her own volition. Indeed, several featured locked drawers and slammed doors and, in one instance, a thrown Walk-man. I stole from her as a matter of habit. But Sang didn't need to know this.

What she needed to know was that the first time I laid eyes on Nell was in a broker's office. We were then chaperoned by a landlord showing us an apartment. Nell kept removing nuts from a plastic bag in her pocket and seemed concerned with installing motion sensors in the grateless windows, but I didn't mind because I thought, Well, it's good to snack Well, it's good to snack, and I don't know why I don't carry around nuts more often. and I don't know why I don't carry around nuts more often. And New York is a dangerous place. Why should homeowners have a monopoly on protecting their bodies and their valuables with silent alarms? Desperation is a funny thing, I explained to Sang, who seemed never to have experienced the sensation. Rarely does it announce itself. It is instead the silent killer of expectations until you don't think of yourself as desperate. You think of yourself as a reasonable person who compromises because that's what living with a roommate is about, compromise.... And New York is a dangerous place. Why should homeowners have a monopoly on protecting their bodies and their valuables with silent alarms? Desperation is a funny thing, I explained to Sang, who seemed never to have experienced the sensation. Rarely does it announce itself. It is instead the silent killer of expectations until you don't think of yourself as desperate. You think of yourself as a reasonable person who compromises because that's what living with a roommate is about, compromise....

I was losing her. She was lost in thought, looking me up and down. I strummed my knees to fill the silence.

"I like your picnic table." I pointed.

"It's not mine." She looked with me.

"That's cool." I nodded.

When Sang escorted me to the door, I wasn't sure how to say good-bye. A hug, a handshake, and direct eye contact were equally out of the question. This woman made me feel naked. Luckily, I had clothes on, so I opted to jam my fingers into my pockets and sway. On the street, cars honked in frustration, trying to get to the FDR. Sang leaned against the thick door frame.

"It's quiet at night," she said.

"Even with the ghosts?"

"What ghosts?"

"I read somewhere that this place used to be an old brothel. Apparently, a bunch of prost.i.tutes threw themselves out the window."

"My G.o.d." Sang covered her mouth. "That's horrible!"

"It's sad."

"No." She wrapped the bones of her hand around my arm. "That's so horrific."

"Well"-I didn't know how to handle this level of alertness-"it's certainly wh.o.r.e- wh.o.r.e-ific, I'll give you that." I'll give you that."

Sang was not amused. Figures. The one time I'm cavalier about a subject and I'm underreacting. Certainly throwing oneself out the window is objectively worse than borrowing a bra without asking. But most people tended to have Sang's reaction to Nell's tendencies.

"Haven't you ever noticed the pictures in the stairwell?" I asked Sang.

I knew making her feel foolish was probably not the key to her steely heart, but how could she not know? I didn't expect her to turn into an Asian s...o...b..-Doo, but surely there was a baseline level of curiosity all humans shared. Food, shelter, clothing, creepy old s.h.i.+t. New Yorkers in particular are m.a.s.o.c.h.i.s.ts when it comes to obtaining housing information that will only p.i.s.s them off. We are gluttons for discovering that our twenty-unit apartment building used to be a single-family home. And not even a nice one at that.

"Huh," she mused. "I thought they were from a thrift shop or something."

I RETURNED TO MY APARTMENT AND LOOKED AT MY bedroom, which felt smaller than ever. Every inch was planned and decorated because I had no choice. I looked in Nell's bedroom. Everything was so neat and perfectly matched. I felt myself falling somewhere between Nell and Sang. I could sense them both categorizing me as the other when they looked at me, a feeling that made me wish I could put them in the same room together and say, "You think I'm I'm bad? Look at bad? Look at this!" this!"

Mentally, I was already packing, deciding what I'd bequeath to Nell when she returned from Nepal and what I'd have to hide before she found out I was moving. This would be good for her. She could find a more suitable gym buddy to fill my room and cover the kitchen drawers in antibacterial contact paper like she'd always wanted. Maybe they could even share soymilk and-with a little time and a little trust-shampoo.

I got a pair of tweezers, took the peanut b.u.t.ter jar down from the kitchen cabinet, and started digging.

IT WAS HARD TO PIN DOWN WHICH WAS STRONGER: the desire to live like a real live grown-up or the desire to spend some quality time with the dead. True, the s.l.u.tty ghosts had their appeal, but my relations.h.i.+p to the supernatural had a longer history than that. I was nine years old when I saw my first ghost, and I had been waiting for another ever since.

I grew up on a rarely trafficked street-the kind of street you could play just about any sport in the middle of with little automotive interruption. At night, when the occasional car pa.s.sed through, I could follow its headlights as they projected their way around my walls. Sometimes I'd pretend I had escaped from prison in some brilliantly confounding fas.h.i.+on and they were searching for me. One night when I was tucked in with my disintegrating blankie, a car pa.s.sed by but failed to take the light with it. My bedroom remained dimly but steadily illuminated. I was not afraid of the dark. The dark is what happens when the sun goes down. It was like cowering from dirt. But I was was afraid of inexplicable light. In the movies, a sudden glow was generally accompanied by exhaust fumes from an alien s.p.a.ces.h.i.+p. It's why I was never comfortable with night-lights. They were unnatural. Plus, if they worked for me, would they not also work for the eight-eyed monster hiding in the closet? b.i.t.c.h has eight eyes. She can see a night-light. Best to level the playing field. afraid of inexplicable light. In the movies, a sudden glow was generally accompanied by exhaust fumes from an alien s.p.a.ces.h.i.+p. It's why I was never comfortable with night-lights. They were unnatural. Plus, if they worked for me, would they not also work for the eight-eyed monster hiding in the closet? b.i.t.c.h has eight eyes. She can see a night-light. Best to level the playing field.

So I crept out of my room, on the hunt for artificial brightness. I turned off the hallway light and returned to bed. There, There, I thought, I thought, that should take care of it. that should take care of it. But the ghost was just getting started. The perfectly sharp silhouette of a little boy with a bowl haircut appeared in the far corner of my bedroom. He was approximately my size and shape, with a Peter Pan gait, except that he was obviously a minion of Hades. He glided across the wall, stopped, and looked up at some invisible speck on the ceiling. Then he turned to face me for a moment before quickly merging into the darkness of the adjacent wall. But the ghost was just getting started. The perfectly sharp silhouette of a little boy with a bowl haircut appeared in the far corner of my bedroom. He was approximately my size and shape, with a Peter Pan gait, except that he was obviously a minion of Hades. He glided across the wall, stopped, and looked up at some invisible speck on the ceiling. Then he turned to face me for a moment before quickly merging into the darkness of the adjacent wall.

And that was it. Like a photosensitive plant reaching for the sun, I widened my eyes, attempting to absorb all the paranormal presence possible. The strange c.o.c.ktail of fear and magic kept my eyes bouncing from wall to wall in time with the eyes of my cat-shaped wall clock, which ticked off the seconds with its tail. I a.s.sumed the boy would cycle back, but he never did. I felt a little rejected. I always thought there was an understanding in the community of the dead that it's best to appear before children, who are more apt to accept what they're seeing. My ghost took one look at me and changed his mind.

"h.e.l.lo?" I whispered. And he pretended not to hear me.

Beyond the rejection, there were pretty convincing social reasons to keep the sighting on the down low. Every nine-year-old knows the difference between wanting the impossible and getting it. I didn't need my friends shouting "Boo!" at me on the bus any more than I needed a school psychologist holding up inanimate objects and asking me if they were real. Plus, I was already starting to second-guess myself. Even if it was real, as far as paranormal experiences go, mine was pretty uns.e.xy. Haunting Lite. It was brief and subtle and left no proof for the living-no recovered keepsakes or cardigans folded on headstones. No bones locked in a trunk in the attic, shrouded by a moth-eaten wedding veil.

So I was eager, to put it mildly, to move into McGurk's. I wanted to see what a real ghost looked like while simultaneously accessing my inner militant feminist/wh.o.r.e. I left a message for Sang, thanking her for showing me the apartment. When I didn't hear from her, I decided to follow up with an e-mail, thinking the chances of Sang's phone being disconnected were better than not. I felt like a desperate girl angling for a second date after my nerves had gotten the better of me on the first. Why didn't she love me? Was I not a catch? She could use my loofah if she wanted to. I never heard from her again.

IT WAS THE NIGHT BEFORE NELL REENTERED THIS half of the world. I couldn't believe I had packed in a whole real estate dalliance in the time she'd been gone. It was like the end of The Bridges of Madison County. The Bridges of Madison County. The never-released director's cut of The never-released director's cut of The Bridges of Madison County, The Bridges of Madison County, with the dead prost.i.tutes and the broken gla.s.s and the decapitated dolls' heads. with the dead prost.i.tutes and the broken gla.s.s and the decapitated dolls' heads.

I sat at a bar with Mac near his new apartment, eating stale popcorn and moping into my beer. I said I just couldn't believe Sang hadn't called.

"Who?"

"Sang."

"You did? When? You can't hold a tune."

"Shut up, racist." I laughed.

And he laughed, too. And then he stopped and said, "What are we talking about?"

For the first time, I found myself perversely grateful for Nell. If I didn't know that her punctual bill-paying and obsessive cleaning originated from a larger fissure in her psyche, I would be happy to have her as a roommate. If I lived with Mac or Sang, I might come home to find the house burned down. Mac wedged a lime into his beer and squirted himself in the face. I reminded him of his amazing apartment tip, which had turned out to be a big, fat tease, robbing me of the impossibly hip version of myself and dooming me to a life of ba.n.a.lity and a cupboard of Snackwells sandwich cookies. Though the devil's food ones aren't half bad. Mac looked at me.

"I can honestly say I have no idea what you're talking about. Have you been smoking pot out the window again? "

"That's hardly the point."

It took a few minutes to get his version of the story. Motivated by real estate guilt, Mac confirmed, he did pa.s.s on the e-mail. That he remembered. But he claimed never to have called me beforehand, reminding me that we were only tenuously "speaking." Furthermore, the e-mail was pa.s.sed on to him via a friend of a friend. He had no idea who this Sang person was.

"Why would I call you to tell you I was going to e-mail you? I'm not eighty years old."

I said I didn't know but that I had become accustomed to living with such obsessive-compulsive behavior. No amount of triple-checking or scheduling or Handi- Wiping fazed me anymore.

"I distinctly remember having this conversation with you."

"I love it!" Mac slapped the bar. "This is so like the Twilight Zone Twilight Zone movie." movie."

"That's a TV show."

"Movie."

"TV show. And are you kidding me?"

But he wasn't kidding. The more I pressed him, the further he backed away from it. My mind spun. But Grandma's been dead for twenty years! I But Grandma's been dead for twenty years! I had spoken to someone that night. Hadn't I? Something had stopped me from putting foam-core museum plaques next to Nell's Ansel Adams posters and sorority photos. Was it possible I had had an adulterous real estate conversation but couldn't recall with whom? Now who was the big wh.o.r.e? And where did this end? Maybe Sang was a ghost. She certainly had the demeanor for it. More likely, I had been a party to not one but several unaccounted-for phone calls that night. I am the thing even rarer than a ghost: a chatty pot smoker. had spoken to someone that night. Hadn't I? Something had stopped me from putting foam-core museum plaques next to Nell's Ansel Adams posters and sorority photos. Was it possible I had had an adulterous real estate conversation but couldn't recall with whom? Now who was the big wh.o.r.e? And where did this end? Maybe Sang was a ghost. She certainly had the demeanor for it. More likely, I had been a party to not one but several unaccounted-for phone calls that night. I am the thing even rarer than a ghost: a chatty pot smoker.

"This is going to drive me crazy."

"Oh, I don't know." Mac put a thumb over the neck of his beer and turned it upside down. "From where you're sitting, I think you can walk there."

INQUIRIES WERE MADE. MINOR INVESTIGATIONS launched with finesse so as not to set off any "How many fingers am I holding up?" alarms. When those proved inconclusive, it occurred to me that it didn't matter. Perhaps this is always how ghosts appear in real life. More the suggestions of themselves, a series of shadows and arrows and unaccounted-for conversations. Even if I did move downtown, I would probably never see one of McGurk's famed prost.i.tutes in all her detailed glory. I would just see Sang, sitting barefoot at the Norwegian picnic table, one leg drawn up to her chest, staring into s.p.a.ce. And she wouldn't be able to do that for long....

Just as Nell and I had gotten back into the rhythm of things (me hiding my possessions and her hunting them down like Easter eggs), she moved out. Shortly after a new roommate moved in, I happened to walk past 295 Bowery. The building was boarded up from the inside, and a piece of official city letterhead was stuck to the door. I ducked under the orange tape and peered through a cloudy peephole. It looked the same as it had when it was inhabited. But that wasn't saying much. The only real difference was that the framed pictures were gone.

Despite valiant efforts on the part of the long-term tenants to get the building recognized as a landmark, McGurk's was evacuated and set to be torn down as soon as the city got around to it. When they did, 295 was replaced with the universally abhorred high-rise that currently bloats the s.p.a.ce between Houston and Stanton. The building is tall and reflective, covered in futuristic (if by "future" you mean 1984) windows. They enable the residents to live on the Bowery but not live on the Bowery, to pick over choice pieces of the past and dump the rest. Don't get me wrong-I'm not one to stand on principle when I can sleep in a duplex. I wouldn't kick gentrification out of bed if it crawled in there free of charge. But it never does. And so despising it becomes not only the right thing to do but the economical thing to do. Reading the ordinance, I found some small consolation in all this, both morally and personally. My haunted real estate heaven would have quickly become a living h.e.l.l. A few months of freestanding fireplaces and toothbrush haircrafting and the whole building would be dragged down into a pile of rubble. Not reduced but worse-replaced.

Already replaced was my conviction that my whole New York existence hinged on my address. Nell ceased to bother me as much once I realized how close I came to leaving her, how easy it would have been to say good-bye if Sang had welcomed me into her home with track-marked arms. I was a grown person and free to do as I pleased. It was the unhappy wh.o.r.es of McGurk's who were trapped at that site. I knew a thing or two about ghosts. So I knew a bulldozer, though a literal interpretation of "confronting the ghost head-on," wouldn't actually release them. Instead, they would be forced to move into the new s.p.a.ce, fixed and displaced at the same time. They would confuse one h.o.m.ogeneous condominium for another. Lose one another in identical walk-in closets. Find themselves shoved into odorless rooms, where they would be doomed to run like mercury along those perfect lines where the walls meet floors for all of eternity. A horizon of happiness around every corner.

It's Always Home You Miss

Every New Yorker's personal annoyance scale is best pictured as a cell phone commercial. The semipermeable bars of varying colors and heights extend up from people's heads as they move along the sidewalk. One person finds an open-air cigar smoker more irritating than a skill-less subway performer. Another considers the person who mistakes a subway pole for a full-body pillow during rush hour exponentially worse than a taxicab keeping its overhead lights aglow despite being occupied. One person knows that frozen-yogurt chains are the devil's handiwork and will penetrate the ground levels of civilization as we know it, softening our brains into the consistency of same, like hazelnut-flavored soylent green. Another just likes low-fat dairy. You begin to wonder if all of these infractions are actually detailed in a warning pamphlet you were meant to see when you moved here. It probably had pictures of people in solid-color clothing, like those on airplane safety cards. It was slid under your front door and accidentally discarded with the take-out menus. Now you are forced to learn the rules on a case-by-case basis.

"I mean, honestly," says a speed-walking aficionado trapped behind a dawdler, "you wouldn't pull your car over in the middle of the street without signaling, would you?"

Well, no.

"And you wouldn't synchronize drive across the highway."