Diary of a people watcher
Strangers I secretly watched recently—they didn’t see me, but I saw everything.
I love people. Everybody. I love them, I think, as a stamp collector loves his collection. Every story, every incident, every bit of conversation is raw material for me. My love’s not impersonal yet not wholly subjective either. I would like to be everyone, a cripple, a dying man, a whore, and then come back to write about my thoughts, my emotions, as that person. But I am not omniscient. I have to live my life, and it is the only one I'll ever have. And you cannot regard your own life with objective curiosity all the time…
— Sylvia Plath
1. Morning. Financial District. A professional. Late 30s.
His neck looks like it used to be fatter. He walks like he’s late to punish someone. His shirt is the same faint blue as a dead jellyfish I once saw on a beach. His brows are permanently furrowed. Maybe he was born like that. A peasant’s face—pasty, European, sullen—remade with a fresh shave, you could see the provincial boy in the way he glances at his own reflection in the building’s glass and preen, with eyes squinted from the light, his reflection darkening the glass so that his silhouette reveals a groups of summer interns wearing backpacks over their suits (cardinal sin), floating about the shiny, air-conditioned lobby like anxious moons. He keeps walking and a strong gust of wind sends a long sheet of receipt to grab his ankle like a tentacle. The harder he tries to shake it off the more it twists, so he picks it off with his fingers and the thing goes flying backwards to strangle its next victim.
I wonder if he ever goes to bed before 10:30PM. I wonder if he gets baby botox. I wonder if he goes to Barry’s. I wonder if he’s ever gotten his salad stolen. He’s got no ring so I wonder if he’s a bachelor or a divorcee. I wonder if a woman has ever loved him without resenting his arrogance halfway through.
He reaches the revolving doors of the banking Mecca, and there, just for a blink, he stares into the lobby and waits for someone to tell him what to become next.
2. Late Afternoon. Chinatown. A grandmother.
She sits just outside the herbalist’s shop, the kind that smells like camphor and ginseng when you walk by. She sucks on thickly cut sections of orange, scrunching the emptied peels in her hands before popping them daintily between her orthopedic shoes, right into the basket under her pink plastic stool.
Her cardigan is a soft gray, like the pigeons on the power lines. She mutters to herself in slurry Cantonese with the clack of complaint. Behind her, boxes of dried shiitake and deer antler pile in little pyramids, and a young boy in a red T-shirt hovers around restlessly, occasionally stopping by her side to offer her a candy or whatever it is, which she waves off with monastic restraint, the beaded bracelet on her sun-spotted wrist jiggling slightly.
Is she thinking of Hong Kong? Of smoke? Of a lost husband? Or perhaps of nothing at all—just the warm wind and the smell of dust. A phone rings. She sits still. You can tell she’d once been lovely, in the way fruits have a sweetness sharper in memory.
3. Sunset. Patio in Yorkville. A man. 60s.
He’s got the physique of a retired tennis coach and the bronzed skin of decades of SPF-less sun exposure. The chair beneath him—a lattice of spray-painted aluminum and summer sleepiness—creaked in small protest whenever he shifted his weight. His stomach rests in his lap like a little dog—familiar, a little sad, stubbornly loyal. A soft, convex monument to years of good beer and better excuses. The fabric of his shirt buckles slightly where the gut pushes forward, the planetary swell making the word “Nike” look three-dimensional. A good beer gut doesn’t hang, it perches, round and assured like an old English king’s, with the poise of something that outlives what other people think of it.