Attention Must Be Paid

I never saw the man with another person, and I never saw him without his dog. The man was of advanced years, and so was the dog. It was a short-haired, short-legged, broad-shouldered dog, maybe some kind of a bulldog mix, who looked up from the sidewalk with yellowish, sickly eyes sort of like the suffering eyes of Saint Sebastian in one of those Renaissance paintings where he's tied to a pillar and stuck with arrows and looking heavenward. The dog moved very slowly and had an ugly growth on its back the size of a mushroom.

Then, one summer day, I saw the man alone, without the dog. And the next time too—alone.

We'd never conversed, I'd never heard him speak even once, but on one of those days after his dog disappeared, he suddenly erupted at me from out of the airtight silence that always enclosed him.

We were walking in opposite directions on the broad, sunny north sidewalk of Montague Street near the Promenade in Brooklyn and I was on the left side of the sidewalk, headed toward the water. I was rushing on some errand and as I crossed his path, he exploded at me, “Walk on the right!!!!” The command began at a conversational level and surged to max volume with its own uncontrollable momentum, like a cannonball. People stared.

This sort of thing happens in New York City. If psychological stress is a propellant for human conflict, it's ignitable at any moment in the constant friction of the big city. According to the last census, New York packs close to 30,000 people per square mile. No other American city touches even 20,000. That's a lot of human hearts, mostly unknown to one another, all jammed up together so that everywhere you turn someone's reliably in your way and doesn't care. Maybe you've seen Ratso

Rizzo, played by Dustin Hoffman in the 1969 film Midnight Cowboy, shouting “I'm walking here!” while pounding the hood of a New York City yellow cab. It's an iconic image of pri