Julie, a flight attendant, was grounded. It was as though there was a blizzard spanning the whole Eastern half of the U.S. and she had to get home from O’Hare, but every New York airport was temporarily closed. She fidgeted in her pleather chair that was connected to 24 other pleather chairs by shared arm rests. But it wasn’t winter. It was the first warm day of spring, when all of New York dusted off and glowed refreshed. And it wasn’t the airport. It was a King’s County courthouse—jury duty. And she had never wanted to go home as much as she wanted to get out of that room right at that moment.

The walls of her one-bedroom apartment in Park Slope were white, unpunctured by nails, unfettered by artwork. Her refrigerator had only natural peanut butter, blueberry jam, a Britta filter and honey mustard. The kitchen cabinet where the previous tenant kept pots and pans, she stored washed plastic takeout containers. The dishes in the cabinet were unscratched. The coffee table, kitchen counter and bathroom sink remained unstained. The couch a mod design in bright red from Ikea, but uncomfortable to sit in for long stretches, sat stark like a sudden stoplight on a dark, country road. A fruit bowl held bright oranges and Granny Smith apples. This was how she liked it—like a picture from a catalog.

And that’s how Roger kept it. He just wanted to fit in to her life, to burrow out a nook and stay there till death did they part. She loved him more than his own mother did, he thought. So he slept, brushed his teeth, shaved, showered, stretched out on the couch to watch TV, and poured himself evening drinks of Jonny Walker Black, without leaving a mark. At least 60 percent of his time at home was spent wiping, sweeping and smoothing. He loved her.

In the courthouse Julie stretched in her seat to try to see the street without getting up, but couldn’t, even though she had placed herself at the outer edge of the row. She only saw the stationary and bland second floor of nearby buildings. So she decided to watch the activity of this bottled up swath of Brooklyn around her, a few hundred of her strangest neighbors sitting under the fluorescent lights waiting just like her. Some people read the Daily News. A minority read The New York Times. About 20 percent of the people were engrossed in books and 50 percent were on laptops. There was one man making what she knew to be friendship bracelets out of thread the colors of the Jamaican flag; one young woman with thick eyeliner and combat boots slept deeply; one overweight black woman struck up conversations with every person within a 10-foot radius from her seat; and yawns. There were many, many yawns rolling through the room like far-off thunder.

She had brought her computer with her. But to get it out of her bag, open it and boot it up would be to commit to her spot, to build her chair into a little nest. That in Julie’s mind would be like surrendering to her situation, to her container. So she decided to text Roger. He didn’t need to wake up until 10:30 this morning, but he wouldn’t mind hearing from her even though it was only 8:33. “Holy Christ, this sucks,” she sent. And then she waited.

Jennifer, wearing skin-tight jeans, a drooping belt and a baggy American Apparel sweatshirt, marched up to the microphone like a super model, each foot exactly in front of the other, knees exaggeratedly popping up on each step so she resembled a two-legged, upright deer. A few audience members released a short spurt of giggles assuming this was part of a comedy routine. Then she began her story:

“I was a skinny bitch. I could have modeled if I was an inch or two taller—that’s what an agent told me. And I know that sounds awesome ladies, but it really sort of sucks. At least half of the advice in women’s magazines, how to lose weight, how to get toned abs, how to have clear skin, didn’t apply to me. I couldn’t join in casual conversations about weight or diet without getting eyes rolled at me or behind my back. I was an outcast—excluded from most of the topics inherent in female-to-female interaction.”
Jennifer had expected a murmur of sudden enlightenment from the audience, but didn’t get one.

“When I got pregnant I didn’t show until I was 6 months along. I didn’t stop wearing high heels until 7 and a half months. Women would gawk in disbelief at my distended belly balancing above my size-2 legs and 4-inch heels. I felt beautiful and proud. I imagined this is how Heidi Klum feels when she steps out on the red carpet dressed to the nines while being as wide as a house, because she always smiles.

“The first time someone offered me a seat on the subway, I was on my way home from the office on the uptown 2 train. It was insanely full. I had had to let two trains go by before I even could squeeze myself on board. When I did, I noticed an open spot mid-car. I hate it when people don’t move in and just stand there crowding the doors. So I finagled myself to the spot and stood there in front of a row of seated commuters. The man directly in front of me was engrossed in a copy of Esquire. But when the train started, I lost my balance and my bump bumped into the Esquire. ‘Excuse me,’ I said in a whisper hoping those three syllables would be the beginning and end of the uncomfortable exchange. But before I could grab my Blackberry to look busy while underground, the guy said, ‘Would you like to sit down?’

‘No. Thanks I’m fine,’ I said in a chipper tone to show just how fine I really was.

‘Are you sure? It’s no big deal,’ he pressed on.

‘I can stand on my own two feet. I’m not some charity case,’ I spouted.

‘Damn. I was just trying to be nice,’ he said.

An elderly woman next to him leaned over. ‘You did the right thing,’ she told him.

And then I topped off my performance with. ‘Sorry. I should have said, ‘No, thanks. I’m fine.’ Oh wait, I did.’”

Here Jennifer anticipated someone in the crowd would give a big woohoo, but the audience was quiet.

“At that I could tell he was assessing whether to join me in a public fight or to crawl back into the safety of the unruffled mass of patient commuters. He chose patience and picked his magazine back up. I felt like I’d won.

“But from then on out, I was offered a seat every single time I boarded a train. It was like that one interaction opened the floodgates of New Yorker’s gentility. But I didn’t need one or want one. I could hold my own weight—which you know isn’t much.”

No laughter. No peep. Jessica kept going.

“So whenever I waited for a train, I made sure never to sit down. I would stand there with the rest of the ambulatory commuters even if an empty bench was just a few feet away. Then when I boarded, I would stay right in the doorway as far away as possible from the seats. But it never paid off. Every single time, some seemingly generous soul would tap me on the arm to offer up their seat. At first I kept up the tough girl act with comments like, ‘Do I look like I can’t hold myself up? Are you telling me I’m fat?’ But eventually this got boring, and I just started saying no like three or four times in row. It would go like this:

Them: ‘Do you want to sit down?’
Me: ‘No thanks. I’m fine.’
Them: ‘It’s ok. I’m getting off soon.’
Me: ‘No really, it’s ok. I’d prefer to stand.’
Them: ‘Are you sure?’
Me: ‘You’re too kind. But no thank you.’
Them: ‘Ok. Fine.’

“But then one day, I woke up with cankles. You know, fat ankles that appear to be part of the calf. Luckily it was a rainy day so I could cover them up with my Marc Jacobs rain boots. But even my big boots weren’t wide enough for my whale feet. Each rain boot fit tight like foot condoms. My feet hurt like crazy and gave me an unsightly waddle.”

Jennifer had expected a few girls to groan empathetically. But no one did.

Ralph’s butternut-squash head hangs down. The yellow kitchen light reflects off his oily bald crown. He looks at the deep blue stain on the thigh of his jeans. Last spring, the pen he kept in his hip pocket sprung a leak. It was the one he used to fill out invoices for his handyman jobs. “Ralph the Right Man for the Job” was printed on the pen’s side. He had bought 500 of them. He hopes no one else’s “Ralph” pen leaked. He hopes Rose will feel better soon. But Ralph is old enough to know that hoping does no good. He has to accept what he can’t change and change what he knows he can improve. Rose’s outlook he can probably improve.

They were married at age 19 in 1966 at a VFW in South Brooklyn. He knew her so well she was like a puzzle piece he could always shape himself around. He knew how to support her no matter what she said, no matter what was on her mind. They had evolved together over a lifetime.

“And there’s nothing of me anywhere else,” she says fingering a neon yellow square of yarn she’d knitted together and used like a trivet. He looks up at her. She is missing something; she had been for a long time. But now the deficiency had gone on too long. He knew what she needed—a meaningful job.

When he accepted the offer for early retirement last year, he drummed up a handyman business lickity split. He liked to help people and finally could do so without the beast to feed. His longtime albatross: the cable company. The cable company just wanted to make money. Ralph just wanted to make people happy. The pursuits overlapped when he was able to fix people’s cable connections without having to charge them more for the service. This didn’t happen nearly often enough for his liking. Then came the Internet. Cable customers wanted to ask him all about their modems, their connection speed, their WiFi, and to Ralph it was all gibberish. The cable company said training Ralph and the other older gentleman wasn’t a good investment. The cable company was done with Ralph, and Ralph was done with the cable company. As his pension kicked in, his next endeavor was clear. He made himself into the ultimate Mr. Fix-It—a hero in Carhartts. He made people happy by making their sliding doors slide, drains drain, creaky door that woke the visiting grandchildren quiet as a yawn. His work lived on in all of the problems he solved with his calluses. He was improving people’s lives. But Rose? He couldn’t say that Rose found the same satisfaction in work.

Rose cleaned homes—the same homes over and over again. When she’d leave a home smelling of bleach and ammonia, the walls unscuffed, the wood floors shiny, the windows translucent and streak-free, the stubborn spot of petrified burnt onion off the stovetop, she felt accomplished. Task done. Goals met. But then she’d go to that same house a week or two later, and it would be a mess. Her hard work from before non-existent. And it was this Sisyphean battle that kept the money coming in. If families didn’t ruin her work, they wouldn’t need her anymore. Ralph knew it disappointed her.

Ralph knows Rose needs to hear him say something. She needs to hear that he has heard her. He pushes his brain hard to come up with something helpful to say. But he comes up empty. “It’s like how you can’t remember something when you’re trying to remember it,” Ralph says.

“What?” Rose isn’t sure if she should be excited, relieved or frustrated by what he just said. A twinge of hope picks her head off her hand. She looks at him expectantly.

“Oh, shoot. Just thinking out loud, I guess.”

“Oh.” Rose’s eyes go back down.

Walker has several square feet of excess skin that she needs removed, but she can’t afford the surgery. At the Starbucks where we met near her old office—a now shuttered real estate firm in Midtown—she sipped on a grande drip coffee of the day.

“Two years ago at this time, I could barely finish a short 8-ouncer,” she said with a hint of nostalgia and disappointment.

Two and a half years ago, Walker underwent gastric bypass surgery. She had been morbidly obese at 347 pounds and just 5-foot, 3-inches tall. She had trouble breathing and moving quickly. It had gotten so bad she stopped traveling on the subway during rush hour because she needed enough room to sit. “People don’t look at obesity as a disability. So they wouldn’t offer me a seat, even though I was medically disabled,” she said. Walker would go to work at 6 am, leave around 3, and go to bed before prime-time shows were over at 9:30. Her general practitioner suggested the surgery.

“I had already tried every diet. The South Beach Diet, Atkins, The Cookie Diet, I tried it all and didn’t lose an ounce. I tried walking one subway stop further away in the mornings, get myself a little exercise, but it took just too long. I have battled with my weight since puberty, and it really felt like it was out of my control.”

She took out some pictures from her wallet. The edges of the photos were pulpy, the plastic sheaths ripped. It looked as though she’d been carrying them around for a very long time.

“Here I am when I was 9, skinny as a twig.”

In the picture she wore a sunshine yellow T-shirt, a pink tutu and white tights. She was standing on one foot as though ready to do a pirouette. In the lower left hand corner was a close-up, blurry pair of clapping hands.

“And here I am when was 13.” She put the photo on the table.

It looked like a wholly different little girl. In this shot, she was sitting on a piano bench smiling. But her cheeks protruded so far it made her forehead appear too short. Her breasts looked as though they had grown straight into a D cup. A roll of fat spilled out between her T-shirt and her pants.

Surgery was her last resort, but an essential move if she wanted to live a full life, her doctor said. Statistics show it’s an increasingly popular decision. The Imaginary Medical Association of New York reported that ten years ago only 1,300 gastric bypass surgeries were performed in the state. In 2009, this figure was up to 35,000.

When her doctor suggested the surgery, Walker bristled in agreement.

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.

Greg, just arriving home late from work, lit up. Something was wrong. Fireworks of adrenaline and testosterone exploded underneath his skin. He grimaced. His toes curled in his shoes. His fingers shook as they struggled to fit the key in the front door just right so it would turn—“Fucking thing, turn!” he yelled. And the door opened up. His feet were numb. He barreled up to the third floor two steps at a time. His quads burned. His lips pursed.

The climb gave him just enough time to think. When he got to the door he would rush in to the apartment. He would be prepared for anything. Prepared for, prepared for, prepared for what? He didn’t know what. Why would his stuff be on the curb? Was she breaking up with him? But some of the stuff wasn’t just his. It was theirs. Was she moving? Is a robber in there? But wouldn’t a robber immediately put the stuff in a car or in a bag or away somewhere?

Once on the landing in front of the door, he turned the knob and threw himself in the room with such force it was as though he had just broken the door down with his shoulder. He stood in the main room and refueled with a deep inhale as he surveyed the situation—the room, which accounted for most of the apartment, seemed half empty.

The couch, coffee table and TV, Wii, Xbox 360, and Blu-Ray player were still there. The TV was on. They hadn’t been robbed. The tchotchkes and New Yorker magazines from the coffee table were gone. About half of the books on the bookshelf were missing. But this simply made it look like an orderly bookshelf. The closet, tall, narrow and the only one in the apartment, in which they kept their work clothes, coats, personal finance files and sheets, was open. Like the bookshelf, it was orderly, clean and half-empty. The throw over the couch was gone. All of their DVDs were gone. Greg noticed Marshmallow, their Shih-Tzu, yelping at his feet just like normal. “Julie?”

In between barks he heard their shower curtain pull open. He put his keys down on the end table, where their sunglasses used to be, and took the three steps to the bathroom.

“Hon?” The door was partly open. His adrenaline ebbed and flowed unsure of what he might find. He peaked around it slowly.

And then he saw her. Julie, his wife to-be, was sitting on the edge of the tub holding a half-used bottle of 2-in-1 shampoo plus conditioner. Hair was falling out of her ponytail and around her face. The soft skin around her eyes was swollen. She roughly wiped her nose on a bath towel.

“Is it worth keeping this? I used to bring this with me to the gym. But I don’t go there so much anymore now that it’s nice outside. So I don’t really use it. But I don’t want to waste it. I think I’m emotionally attached to it. I don’t know what to do.” And then she erupted into tears ready to share the burden she had been facing all by herself. “Thank god you’re here.”

She was safe. Marshmallow was unconcerned. A shampoo bottle?

“Woah. Woah, woah, woah, woah. What the fuck is going on here?” The scene outside on the curb seemed so extreme, so dire, so acute. A shampoo bottle?

“Greg, I’m nipping it in the bud.” she said cryptically.

Unsure what she meant or how she would interpret anything he said, Greg decided to get more data. “Nipping what in the bud?”

“I’m nipping it in the bud, Greg. Nipping it in the bud.” She answered.

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.

Jessica, 23, was asleep on her 6-year-old futon bed that was pushed tightly into a corner of her one-room kitchen, living room and bedroom. Now there’s not much you can learn about someone from watching them sleep. But since you’ve never met Jessica, I’ll try to use this idle—albeit important—moment to introduce her. She had turned off the lights and gotten into bed around 11:30, and she had fallen asleep by midnight. Her first episode of REM had already concluded, and she had shifted positions once to avoid sleeping on a cold spot of drool. Her alarm would ring at 7:16. Her choice of the seemingly random time helped her sleep. The unrounded number stopped her from nourishing insomnia by calculating exactly how much sleep she’d get before work the next day. Mental math was discouragingly harder to do without round numbers. Work was advertising sales for Cosmopolitan magazine—not usually a hard sell, but getting more difficult given the new media revolution and the recession.

The wall behind Jessica’s crown of tousled auburn hair was shared with a woman she’d never met face-to-face: Stephanie, a 24-year-old bartender who worked at the known-rowdy Coyote Ugly bar. But Stephanie wasn’t a real rowdy one. Yes, she could hold her own in a New York-style yelling match, and she could produce flirtatious smiles that appeared realistic even to the most homely, disgruntled men. But she was actually quite tame and bright, and stereotypically beautiful enough (stick straight blonde hair, acne-free skin and a 32D frame) that she never needed to partake in any more questionable activities to make rent. The most questionable activity in recent memory took place tonight with the delivery from Indian restaurant Taj Mahal Delight.

Bustling home from work, her high heels pounded the pavement like quick, single blows of a jackhammer. “I can hold it. I can hold it,” she chanted to herself as her stomach cramped and gurgled. The barback, who she had a major crush on, had suggested getting Indian as a late-night snack. Stephanie had never tried Indian and lived on a bland diet of ramen noodles, sushi, salads and the occasional pizza slice. But the self-consciousness resurrected by a cute boy, resembling that which plagues most junior high school girls trying to mold themselves into the most popular girl, inspired her to say, “I’ve been dying to try Indian!”

Before she got to her front door, she had her key in hand ready to go. Then with a twist of the wrist and a fast tromp up three flights of stairs, she made it home. Her purple leather purse dropped from her hand onto her bed as she rushed to undo the button of her jeans and get to the toilet. And then she let herself release and push. Just like a woman in labor, she thought, as she let one rip.

The sleeping Jessica sprung up to a sitting position as though the fire alarm had gone off. But before jumping out of bed and worriedly, frustratingly evaluating the public wear-ability of her pajamas (flannel pants and a worn out T-shirt), she paused to make sense of the situation. Then she heard the toilet flush.

“Hi Mary!” says Jack to the short, eggplant-shaped brunette as he settles himself in the smack, dab center of the available space. The doors close. The elevator continues down.

“Hi there,” Mary answers.

“I’ll be coming by later today. Going to build out your IT space,” he says.

“Oh great,” she says without a hint of sarcasm. The elevator stops at the next floor. Another two people step in. The already present bodies shift to redistribute the personal space. In the move, Jack notices Mary’s plastic water cup. It’s clear with prints of large, yellow and pink Gerber daisies.
“I like your cup. Did you paint it yourself?” he says. The quiet, cornered audience in the elevator studies her cup. Plastic probably $1.99 from Duane Reade’s picnic merchandise.

“No, it’s just a plastic cup,” she says with a tone read by Jack as kind and by the other six passengers as placative.

The elevator stops again. Doors open again. Three more people get in. It’s like chromosomes multiplying inside a nuclear membrane.  “I like the colors. Very summery.”

“Thanks,” she says.

The doors close. Passengers calmly stand uncomfortably close to each other with nothing to do but inspect each other. A woman notices a brown growth on the back of a man’s neck. It’s got two hairs sticking out of it. She holds back gag reflex. The man notices a mysterious balding patch on crest of a woman’s head. He wonders if she’s aware of it. The passengers see each other as pointillistic figures, as millions of little, repulsive pieces.

Well this is true for all passengers except Jack and Mark, the Guy Who Even Uses His Laptop on the Subway. With each additional passenger Mark has been pulling his laptop closer and closer to his face. It’s as if he’s trying to read the fine print on a coffee table book.
Jack is amused. “Are you on the computer in the elevator?”

“I, um,” mumbles Mark.

“That’s dedication. Are you online?” Jack says.

A flicker of something to say popped into Mary’s head and it traveled straight out of her mouth.  “Some people have cell phones. He has a computer!…Actually he’s a big guy. He could use it as a phone.”

Mark, The Guy Who Even Uses His Laptop on the Subway, holds it up to the side of his face. “There’s a microphone right here.” He smiles. Each passenger cracks a smile back at him. Good humor is catchy.

“Yeah, what’s the difference between the phone and the computer? Same thing nowadays,” says Jack. The elevator stops again.

“Oops, we’re on the local,” someone jokes.

“Excuse me, gotta get out,” a Non-Descript Guy in the Back asserts.

“Everybody out!” genially directs Tony the Formerly Quiet Businessman standing in the front as the doors open. Everyone complies and pours out of the doors like kids at a bus stop. And after the Non-Descript Guy in the Back get outs, Tony hollers “And everybody in!”

The doors close.

“Wow, this carpet is nice. Really beautiful carpet they put in here,” Mary announces with sarcasm.

“Yeah it really matches the—What is it? Fake wood grain? Leopard print? On the ceiling,” says Mark.

“Whoever designed this elevator was color blind! And look at the light falling down. Great job,” says the Tony.

Nothing brings people closer faster than the opportunity to share disapproval.

But Jack, the original party starter, doesn’t join in. He holds his breath, curls his toes and bites his bottom lip. The elevator renovation was his job.  He wishes they’d all just shut up.

The owner, Fern, a 45-year-old hippy, India-phile who was born and raised on the Upper West Side but now lives in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, makes CDs of her favorite music and plays them all day, every day. She bought the salon with inheritance money as souvenir of her year teaching English in New Delhi, and then renovated it to more Western tastes. Now it resembles an East Village bar with gray walls, rock music and an abstract logo. On her Facebook profile she announces, “Americans should think more of India than just curry, dysentery, Slum Dog Millionaire and call centers.” She regularly fantasizes that threading, the exacting, low-overhead hair removal process popular in India, will be the new California Roll, General Tso’s Chicken or Chipotle. And she will have started it all. It will be her contribution. That’s why it took so much nerve for her to hire Christine.

Christine, the only non-Indian working in the salon, is strung up like a Marionette. White thread zigzags from her mouth and down around both hands forming an X between her palms, almost like Cat’s Cradle. She puts the crisscrossed center of the X against the brow of a slightly overweight, young blonde. She shimmies the X of the thread a few millimeters forward and back to trap delinquent brow hairs in its twisted center. And she pulls. The blonde’s face tightens holding back a cringe. Little golden hairs fly up like confetti. She starts the process again. Loosen, trap, pull. The blonde remains taut.

The depressive singer croons, “When I rip off the mask/You wanna hang with Slash/Smoke bong hits by a heated pool.”

The blonde, over her initial fear, starts to chat. “I was thinking of treating myself to some Rugala at the Jewish deli down the street. They make the best, ever Rugula. I love it. It’s my reward for going through this.”

Christine doesn’t pause. She’s used to distraction. At the Korean salon where she used to work, she’d chat all day with her co-workers. Loosen, trap, pull. They’d talk about Rain, the Korean Michael Jackson. Loosen, trap, pull. About Jang Dong-gun, the hot leading man. Loosen, trap, pull. About their kids. Loosen, trap, pull. About their families back home. Loosen, trap, pull.

Pop! Christine’s thread snaps in half against the girl’s uneven brow. “So sorry!” she whispers flicking her eyes up to the owner working the cash register. Did she hear? Did she see? Christine grabs the spool in her apron pocket and unravels a new piece of thread with a swift pull.

The blonde opens her eyes. “Have you ever been there? To the deli? Had Rugala?” she asks with almost forceful friendliness.

“Deli?” Christine whispers, jostling her mind from the thread to the girl. “No, no,” she says and grabs the new thread between her lips. The blonde closes her eyes. Christine begins again. Loosen, trap, pull. Hairs fly up and hairs float down. They’re like snow in a just shaken snow globe. Loosen, trap, pull. Loosen, trap, pull. Christine’s head bobs forward to loosen the X and leans backward to tighten it. Then back, then forward, then tighten, then loosen. Over and over and over again.

“Oh, you should definitely try it once. The chocolate Rugala is the best. But, god, I shouldn’t eat it. Too many calories. But you’re so slim. You don’t have to worry about that,” he blonde continues, eyes closed, mind avoiding the hair-pulling pain.

“You read half a book/Then you say, “take a look/T.S. is my new best friend!” the singer gripes.

He sounds miserable, thinks Christine. Loosen, trap, pull. Strange these young ladies like to listen to this, she thinks. Loosen, trap, pull.

Pop! “So sorry! So sorry!” she yelps. The apology louder than the thread’s pop. She looks up. Fern is staring at her. Christine bows her head down in to a deep nod. She’s doing a bad job, bad job. Bad job. She scolds herself.

“It’s ok. I’ve got strong hairs,” the girl explains.