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.

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.

“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.

This FedEx Drop Box was ideal. It was for express, expensive, VIP packages only, none of the ground shit, and it didn’t require much of a detour. It was just above the subway stop that he emerged from five days a week. When he looked online yesterday before bed, he learned that a true, full-fledged FedEx location was located one avenue to the west, but that was one avenue the wrong way and would add about 6 minutes of walking to his ultimate destination, a gray cube at an accounting firm.

Jacobson bee-lined across the lobby to the stout drop box. All he had to do was bend over, pull the branded express envelope out of the 8-year-old, soft, leather extension of his right hand, open the metal box, drop it in, close it, open it again to make sure it had disappeared from public view, and walk out, a 45-second operation. This was the last step of a long operation. He had already saved up two months worth of pay, gotten a cashier’s check, signed a handful of forms, found a notary public to stamp the contract, stole a Fedex Express Envelope from his office’s mail room, looked online for the most convenient drop box and made it 10 feet from it.

A marine, a front-liner, a young man with sharp jaw line, square chin, defined cheekbones and a buzz cut stopped him mid-stride.

“Sir, do you have ID?”

“Yes,” Jacobson said startled, sidelined. “Of course.” Who doesn’t carry around their ID? Do I look like an illegal? A Mexican? The Taliban? He knew he looked like a regular, old Joe. One with grey hair, a black, slightly faded suit, beige polo shirt and shoes in desperate need of a shining. He’d passed in front of this building every day on the way to work, which added up to at least 9,000 times. He marched this route when the piss ant security guard was still breastfeeding. He tried to keep moving past the desk.

“Sir, may I please see your ID?” the Marine interrupted.

Jacobson hadn’t planned on this distraction. His wallet was far from any pickpocket’s reach, at the crusty, dusty bottom of his satchel, beneath about 300 pages of spreadsheets and newsletters. He let go of his case, dropped it to the floor and bent over.  His knees poked forward because his old man hamstrings weren’t flexible enough for a waist-only bend. His backend strained the aged thread of his slacks. He dug deep.

A line of office workers formed behind him. A brunette woman holding a coffee in one hand, purse in the other. A young man wearing a teal striped shirt, wallet held out in his hand. The marine recognized them as building tenants. So he started to evaluate Jacobson from above, trying to assess how long it would be before the ID would emerge. The marine’s job was to protect the people who worked there, and they needed to get to work. Jacobson was in the way.

What Jacobson didn’t know is on the side of the security desk, directly above his straining spine tendons, glowed a small red light. When a tenant would swipe their up-to-date office ID in front of it, the light would turn green for go. Then the office worker would then be on his or her way to his or her 8-hour shift.

But Jacobson was still digging. The thread of his pants barely holding against the tension. His time was up. This bumbling, wrinkled, faded, stiff stranger must move aside, the marine thought.