I awoke to a few powerful jabs in my ribs that I momentarily thought were from a perturbed angel trying to shoo me off his heavenly cloud with a baton. When I turned, I realized my girlfriend Kelly was poking me sharply with her bony left elbow.

“You’re doing it again,” she groused as I came to.

“Huh? Oh. Sorry. Same as before?” I replied, my voice sounding like an unexorcised demon’s, as it tends to be at 4:00 A.M.

“Yes, exactly like before,” she said, wiping her blonde bangs from her eyes. “This is really starting to. . . well . . . it’s totally freaking me out. I don’t know if I can deal with this right now.”

I understood why she was upset, since I had woken her up with my bizarre ritual for eight nights in a row. From September 3rd to September 10th, 2001, I kept repeating the word “cataclysm” in my sleep. I said it exactly ten times each night in a stentorian voice, as if I were broadcasting an urgent announcement to the rest of the world. In a normal state, I have a low voice, one that people say makes me sound like a graying news anchor, rather than someone like me, a scrawny 30-year-old Asian guy. But when I said “cataclysm,” I descended even further into a deep bass. I’d heard myself do this as Kelly recorded me on a tape recorder the third night it happened and, in the morning, angrily played back what I was putting her through. Curious to see if I had any more to say, she did not disturb me on the first seven nights, but on the eighth night she jabbed me after the fifth “cataclysm,” unable to endure anymore.

The same dream accompanied my repetition of “cataclysm” each night. I was sitting in a cloud in the heavens looking down onto a cityscape at night. Though I was miles in the air, I had telescopic vision that enabled me to see every intricate detail on the ground, even peoples’ faces. Amidst throngs of strangers below, I spotted my grandmother who was dressed in a traditional colorful Korean robe and looked at least 30 years younger, her hair jet-black, and her face unwrinkled. She could see me in my cloud and waved at me cheerily. When she saw that she had my attention, she held out her arms to me, welcoming me into them.

This dream related to a family legend. The night I was born, my grandmother said that as she was waiting in the hospital lobby for my birth, she fell asleep. She dreamt that she was standing outside in the Korean countryside when she saw a falling star in the night sky. She stood directly in the star’s trajectory, knowing that it was not going to harm her. When the star reached her, she lifted the hem of her dress and caught it, the way a girl catches an apple falling from a tree. When she looked down into her lap to see what stars were made of, she saw a newborn baby.

In my dream, by holding out her arms to me, I knew she was inviting me to be born into her family. But I couldn’t bring myself to fall out of my cloud. I knew I would fall safely into her arms, but I believed that some unspeakable event would befall the world immediately afterward. The feeling was so horrid that I wanted to stay safely aloft in my diaphanous limbo, never to be born.

Each morning, I awoke just before I could see the exact nature of what I had feared. All day afterward, at work, at meals, at bars, I could not shake the disconsolate feeling that the world was on the verge of being struck by an evil beyond description, one that I did not have the temerity to face.

At my office computer at work that day, I spent more time using Google to interpret my dreams than actually working.

“Cataclysm.” Three definitions: 1) a violent upheaval that causes great destruction or brings about a fundamental change; 2) a violent and sudden change in the earth’s crust; 3) a devastating flood. From the French cataclysme, which was derived from the Latin cataclysmos, which was derived from the Greek kataklusmos meaning “to inundate.” Originated when “kata-” (an intensive Greek prefix) met kluzein meaning, “to wash away.”

Searching on Google using the terms “cataclysm” and “nightmares” I found about 10,000 articles, links, blogs and message boards. I must have clicked on at least two-thirds of them over the course of the next few hours. A good proportion were blogs of so-called psychics with ramblings that I found too drivelish to pay attention to even in my desperate state. I found nothing that actually helped me understand what I was going through.

After it happened, Brian took her to Moldavi’s on Long Island for the weekend. They’d gone there before whenever something special occurred in their lives – a promotion, a birthday, a spat that needed to be resolved. When Brian’s band got a gig in Atlantic City, they’d splurged on the spa package worth every bit of the five hundred a night. So they went again to recover now.

And they needed to recover. For the past two weeks they’d hardly slept. Especially Brian. Even with pills and booze he’d scarcely closed his eyes. That past summer he’d taken a temp job in Lower Manhattan and was on a coffee break when it happened. “Life turns on a coffee break,” he said for days afterward. That day when he finally got home, Jenna kept saying, “I didn’t know where you were. I didn’t know what happened to you.” As he held her, shards of glass cut into her flesh. She’d winced in pain. She never told him about the glass.

He had gotten them one of the most expensive rooms, a bungalow really, the kind with the little deck and pathway that leads right to the shore. Because the room was so far from the main house, they purchased some supplies. Chips, a few beers, two bottles of coke. Jenna held one of them up in the palm of her hand as if she was practicing for a circus act. “Coke in bottles,” she said. “How quaint.” They settled into their room, putting the drinks into the mini-fridge. They unpacked, tucked everything away. Then they headed out to the beach. It was a cold, breezy weekend, cooler than one expects in early fall, but still they walked the shore. They walked for miles, it seemed, with the wind at their backs, just carrying them along. But then they had to turn around.

Jenna struggled, thinking she couldn’t walk back. She fought the wind, as sand pummeled her skin. At one point Brian had to drag her. We must look like refugees, he thought, coming across the barren sand. When they finally reached the inn, exhausted, gasping for breath, grit between their teeth. Jenna saw the beach chairs, the bungee boards right in front of their bungalow.

A family with two teenage boys had arrived at the room next door. They were carrying dress bags from their car into the room. “Oh, they must be going to a wedding,” Jenna said.

“I’m sure they won’t bother us.”

“They’re boys. They’re going to stay up all night,” Jenna said. “They’re going to drive me nuts.” She didn’t think she could handle any noise. She didn’t know that this family had come to recover as well. That it was a funeral, not a wedding, they were coming to attend. The father was a fireman and he’d attended twenty-eight funerals so far. Jenna would only learn this the next day as the fireman and his family were leaving.

I tilt my head back and relax as the cab takes me and my boyfriend down Houston Street to a dinner party at the home of old friends. I look up at the sheet metal sky. Night is just getting started. I’m so lucky, I muse. Some kid in Tokyo with East Village dreams yearns to live just once in my neighborhood. At ground level, the squiggles of graffiti on the sides of muted grey and tan buildings look like small, dark red, green and black explosions and feel beautiful. This is the rapid place and time I call home.

But as much as I love New York, New York refuses to be loved. Whenever I’m all warm, fuzzy and ready to give the city a carefree, trusting bear hug, it repels me with some crazy, only-in-New-York type of crap to deal with—like our cab, suddenly speeding up and swerving from lane to lane as though we’re being chased. And I think we are.

Jesus. I wake from my Southern back-porch moment only to see a thick, rugby-faced guy in a dark blue Subaru shaking his fist at our cab driver. Blonde hair is smeared down his forehead. He spits a New Jersey blessing out his window. Our driver speeds up. The blonde guy swerves to get behind us. He’s really close. We turn onto Allen Street. The Subaru turns following us. Our driver slams on the breaks. The Subaru slams to a stop. The maniac barely misses rear-ending us.

Now we’re stopped bumper to bumper like a blood clot in the middle of Allen Street. Other drivers are pulling around us continuing on their way. I try to catch their attention with my eyes. “Help us,” I want the other drivers to hear. “Help. We have no idea what is going on.” My boyfriend, God bless him with his honorable French genes, is genetically obligated to accept any duel. He is quietly but not calmly watching the situation play out. I feel him taking short, quick breaths.

Then our driver gets out. He leaves the door hanging open like an awkwardly unfinished thought. He’s wearing wide white pants, shirt, a long, beige vest and white skull-cap. All of it accentuates his long black beard. We watch him calmly walk up to the Subaru’s driver-side window. The blonde maniac is rabidly cursing. Our driver pauses and then plainly, simply shakes his fist. Then he turns and walks back to his cab the same way most people carry files around an office, like it’s a casual, common chore. Cars, new to the scene, honk as they drive by.

The blonde maniac gets out of his car. Our driver closes himself and us in the cab. The blonde moves stiffly, deliberately, like a hulk, and spits a loogie on the yellow trunk. The taillights glow red against his enraged face.

And then I do it. I flip him off. Me, the California girl brought up on anti-war protests and hugs. I flip off the burly, angry hulk with only a thin sheet of glass between us.

I catch eyes with the driver through the rearview mirror. He saw me do it. I sink down in my seat. I’m a little bit embarrassed, a little bit shocked at myself and more than a little bit scared of what is going to happen next. I look up at my boyfriend for camaraderie and compassion. He protectively grabs my hand.

Our driver’s fight had just turned into mine. Having lived here for some time, often in the far stretches of Brooklyn and Queens that you need a cab to reach late at night, I have a special place in my heart for cab drivers. I’ve gotten to know them, have taken them out to dinner, learned about their homes in Ghana, Turkey, Pakistan, San Francisco as they took me down the BQE. I spoke my broken French when they spoke French; I practiced the few bits of Turkish I knew. I often tipped well as my own good-luck charm and to help ensure their sanity. I imagined myself the self-appointed patron saint of cab drivers in a city that makes them go postal.

The driver doesn’t wait for the hulk’s reaction. He steps on the gas. But within a few measly feet a red light stops us. And without fail, the Subaru pulls up to our side. I notice for the first time there’s a woman in the back seat. The hulk is screaming at us again.

Our driver ignores him. But I watch him closely, incredulously and do think I notice him lightly flinching, doing the behind the scenes work that goes into ignoring someone.

Enough! This is my fight.

The remnants of the Californian in me rise up to call forth spiritual unity and neutralize potential violence. And with the unhinged vigor of a New Yorker, I stick my head out the window and yell, “Peace! Peace! Yoga! You need to do yoga! Breathe!”

Jackhammers would have been better—loud noises, he could sleep through. For several mornings now, jackhammers had assaulted his eardrums beginning at six a.m., and he was almost used to them. But the persistent buzz of his cell phone at eleven thirty p.m. on a Friday night successfully penetrated his haze of near sleep. The vibration of plastic against night stand was not loud enough to ignore.

He wasn’t sure the call was from Janine, but he knew it probably was. He reasoned as clearly as he could, his mind clouded by the five milligrams of Vicodin he’d swallowed an hour ago. Five milligrams wasn’t much, not by any addict’s standards, but then, he wasn’t an addict. Just a man who was done feeling for the day and whose friend had undergone dental surgery and didn’t like painkillers. At most he took one pill a week on Friday nights when he was alone, or wanted to be.

Last Friday night Janine had come over unexpectedly. Not exactly uninvited, but the idea hadn’t been his either. So he hadn’t felt too bad about surreptitiously ingesting a pill while she’d been in the bathroom. She’d stayed over that night too, which had been okay. He liked a warm body next to him in bed; it could even be soothing if it was the right person keeping him company. Janine probably wasn’t right, but she wasn’t necessarily wrong, and so it had been okay for her to sleep over.

It was a Thursday, and a week of reading, cramming and studying had exploded onto a sleazy, Lower East Side bar upon which I was dancing wearing only my black bra and jeans. Amy was on the bar grinding alongside me. We were among friends from NYU and strangers, and I felt comfortable. More accurately, I didn’t care enough to feel discomfort. So I danced holding an inverted, half-empty bottle of tequila to my lips as the kitchen help howled.

The rest of our group sat calmly at a table. Brad was drunk and moping over a girl. Scott was trying to cheer him up. And then there was Aiden, quietly watching. The drinking, the grinding, the nudity, all went against his strict Mormon values. And yet there he was still sitting at the table watching.

Aiden was often there, always involved, never partaking, throwing in the world’s face the cognitive dissonance of a Mormon priest who looked like a California surfer and danced till dawn swigging water from his flask. He was good looking, well-dressed, but didn’t pay much attention to women. Who could blame him? Not only did he have to remain chaste until marriage, but he could barely kiss a girl without invoking the wrath of The Church. So he receded into fashion, jokes and shenanigans earning the reputation of gay from half the school and asexual from the other half. As he sat there, Aiden barely registered on my radar.

Then he grabbed me. Well, actually the way it happened is hazy, but I presume this is how it occurred: Amy and I got drunker and as more clothes started coming off, the boys came to take us off the bar. Aiden put himself in my line of fire. He stood below me with his hands held up to help me down. I grabbed them, dropped down to his level and leaned against him. Emboldened by alcohol and attention—it’s blurry—but drunkenly, innocently, I kissed him.

I don’t remember much of the car ride home, but I don’t recall feeling bad. Aiden rolled with the gang, and a kiss was occasional collateral damage. When we got to my apartment, I wobbled out of the car, waved happily to the crew and started on my way. But my consciousness snapped back into place as Aiden got out behind me and planted a firm grip on my elbow. Once he had guided me up the front stairs, I turned at the top to wave goodbye. And that’s when it happened. In front of the doorman, in front of a car full of friends, he kissed me. Too drunk and dumbfounded to speak, I turned away slowly and gingerly made my way up to my apartment.

Compared to Aiden, and indeed compared with much of my medical school class, I was the picture of sin. I had my first drink at 14 and finished high school with a tongue ring, an arrest record and a penchant for frequenting nightclubs with men twice my age. I had spent the last two years running with a fast crowd in Los Angeles, and dancing shirtless on a booze soaked bar was a Tuesday for me, not a Thursday.

By Julia Neyman