On a beautiful summer evening I sat down on a green bench in Washington Square Park to watch the pigeons and sparrows as they swooped across my shoulders and the people as they crossed down the asphalt path in front of me.  There were guitars playing in two different directions, and discrete babbling wells of conversation, and the noise of cars from beyond the edges of the park; but altogether the day’s noises conspired to cancel out into a sort of muffled emptiness.  The long curving shapes of the bird flights sounded in my head like the phrases of a spoken language.

An aging man in shorts and high black socks walked past, wearing a cap, unshaven, leaning forward, walking with a threatening swagger that, from his appearance, hardly seemed justified.  I tried to make sense of it; then suddenly it broke on me that he must be crazy.  A Pakistani man with a broad but pressed-in face, his thinning hair colored with henna, passed in a rolling walk that jogged his shoulders from side to side.  After these two came a fat man shuffling reluctantly; an older couple in from Long Island gripping each other fiercely; a younger punk couple on their way home to fuck; a skinny boy gesturing with his long-fingered hands, trying out a new personality on two skinny friends; and I wondered–when I stand up, will I look as strange? Will I reveal myself, unawares, as lucidly as all of them? Could I find some neutral way of walking? or is there any such thing?

There was a man on the other side, a few benches down.  He was in his fifties, homeless, lean and muscular.  He was wearing a turquoise baseball cap, gray plastic sunglasses, a red t-shirt, and filthy jeans, and he had a suitcase and a couple of bags lashed to an old stroller with a bungie cord.  A half-full bottle of ginger ale was sitting on the ground under his bench.  He was wearing nylon running shorts under his jeans–I could see this because he had pulled the jeans down to his ankles and was scratching his right leg compulsively with a small shoe brush.

I glanced up as a pigeon stalled down onto a thick black power cord that was strung from lamp post to tree top.  The bird set the cord swinging as it landed and found its footing.

The man stopped scratching and produced a jar of something white, some kind of soap or skin cream, and begin lathering it all over his right thigh.  I felt no particular empathy as I watched him; I didn’t relate in any way to his humanity because I was absorbed in the quality of his motion–every person that crossed in front of my eyes had a different way of moving, but his way was more different than the rest.

I glanced away at something else–at the deepening blue of the sky away between the last buildings, for example–and when I looked back, he had pulled up his jeans again.  There were four pigeons on the ground right in front of me, scrambling and scrapping for crumbs on the asphalt, whipping their heads back to peck in their feathers for mites and then, with no interval, pecking again.  They moved in sudden, discrete impulses, with no join or continuity between them, like the homeless man scratching his leg.

Done with his leg, he decided to move over one bench, and I watched him carefully unlock the brakes on his stroller, and move it aside; lift up his half-full bottle of soda and replace it under the next bench; spread out a plastic sheet to sit on; and light and begin puffing on the stump of a cigarette that he held right in the middle of his mouth.  It was the weary way he unfastened the brakes that disturbed my fascination–for that moment he was no longer moving like a wind-up doll, but like a tired, beaten man, like an ill and broken human being, and I had to look away.

The sun was getting too hot, anyway; I stood up to leave, but as  I started walking, I saw a beautiful woman from the corner of my eye, and decided to sit down again, once more, near her.

But when, after sitting down, I turned discreetly to look at her, I saw that I had been misled: What had seemed, from the corner of my eye, to be a beautiful woman, was actually a girl, very pretty, but not more than nineteen or twenty years old, whose adult bearing was a pose, fresh and still birth-wet.

She was wearing a printed dress and formal shoes, and she had dark hair to her shoulders and black glasses on.  She was reading a paperback book and drinking a white can of diet orange soda.  It seemed to take all her little strength to continue sitting upright, alone in the park, reading a book and wearing a pretty dress.

I looked across the path toward the man in the turqoise hat again.  Now he had taken out a walkman, and he was putting the earphones on his ears and taking them off again, playing with the volume dial, and shifting back and forth in place.  When I first started looking at him, I was fascinated only by his behavior, and I didn’t wonder what he might be thinking–I didn’t suppose he was thinking anything except that he needed to move his possessions all one bench to the left.  But now, as he moved back and forth on the plastic sheet he had spread out, his compusive movements looked like an affliction, a heavy cross borne by a man who might otherwise be healthy and free.

I glanced at the pretty girl again.  She was taking something out of a brown paper bag–it was a second can of diet orange soda.  Carefully she wiped the condensation off with a paper napkin; carefully she wrapped another napkin around the can, to protect it; carefully she stowed her spare soda away in her purse, next to her copy of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest; and then carefully, desperately, with heartbreaking courage, she stood up and walked away.