I.

He sat up in bed. He was still wearing his suit from the night before, coat thrown on the floor, his brown vest half unbuttoned and twisted around his torso. Beside of him lay a woman whose name didn't matter, still sleeping in the noon sunlight that glinted through her French blinds. Scratching his hind-parts, he stood up, nearly tripping on the sheets that lay sprawled around the floor. Too much scotch, he thought to himself as he walked into the shower. He reveled in the warmth of the water as it washed away the smell of expensive perfume, cigarettes, and liquor. Quietly he hummed a song in a language no one spoke anymore as he washed himself. He prided himself in his knowledge of the arts, of the little things that make humanity in particular so damned interesting.

While he dried himself with one of her thick, white towels, silently appreciating the heft of the cloth, he thought about the great diversity of eggs, of the phenomenal number of ways in which such a simple item could be prepared. Yes, this morning, eggs would taste good. But dammit, he said as he glanced at the clock, probably too late to get them today. Such was the price of sleeping late.

He pulled on a fresh suit exactly like that he had worn the night before. Green tweed with a brown linen vest. He fit a smartly tied red tie under his starched white collar, dropped his pocket watch into his vest pocket, and brushed his bright red hair three times. It fell into place like a charm, and he followed it up with a spritz of cologne, something of his own design (again, he enjoyed the finer things in life).

Finally he fitted a small white daisy into his jacket pocket, and sat down on the bed to tie on his simple brown shoes. As he tied them on, he quietly observed the breathing of the girl laying there. So soft, so delicate, like a breeze blowing over a field of green-yellow grass, the silk sheets heaved with her life. He lay a small bouquet of daisies beside the girl, picked up his ancient brown overcoat, and walked out the door, whistling Mozart and thinking of eggs.

II.

The man in the green suit rolled down the window of the taxi, letting the wind reshape his hair just as it had reshaped the earth and skies for millennia. The taxi smelled slightly stale, though in a not entirely unappealing way. The driver was quiet, but would occasionally glance back at the man in the green suit in his mirror. The driver's eyes were dark brown, his skin chestnut, his hair black. He was clean shaven, but a slight stubble was already beginning to peak through his chin. The tiny gold cross around his neck said he was Catholic while the wedding ring on his left hand lied as he pretended his wife was still alive. His passenger wanted to tell him that she had gone well, that she had been ready when her time came, that she wasn't in pain, that she didn't know what had happened until she was already on her Way. But he couldn't. No, no. That was a lie. He could tell that man in the front seat, he could whisper it in his ears. But what would it achieve? Perhaps it would drive him insane, perhaps he would begin the mourning process all over again, perhaps he would stop the taxi and bloody the man in the green suit's lip. No, he didn't need to know. And so when the taxi stopped the man in the green suit instead gave his driver a five-dollar tip and walked away, comforted by the tap-tap-tap of his simple brown shoes.

III.

The air still had a chill in it, and the man in green suit thrust his hands deep into his overcoat pockets to fend off the cold. The sun glowed white in the light blue sky, and a quiet breeze blew through the newly flowering trees. The man in the green suit had decided to get out of the taxi a mile from his destination so that he could walk through this small park. The way was lined with dogwood and cherry, and the path seemed to be a long hallway, clad in pink and ivory wallpaper. A goldfinch landed about six feet to his left, and the man in the green suit paused to watch it pick open a seed it had been carrying with it. One year, three months, twelve days, fourteen hours, twenty-three minutes thought the man in the green suit.

"Dammit," he whispered to himself as he walked on. "I have got to stop thinking about work in my off-time."

As the man in the green suit continued on, he shook his head and thought: one year, three months, twelve days, fourteen hours, twenty-two minutes.

IV.

A hotdog can be a wonderful thing. A hotdog can warm your hands when they are cold. Its mustard and onions can open your nose, and teaching you how to smell all over again. The flavor of chili reminds of your mother in January, when she would spend hours hovering over a pot of beans and beef and canned tomatoes. As a whole the hotdog cries of the spirit of baseball, which is itself a distillation of everything that is good about America. When you are hungry a hotdog can fill your stomach and make you feel content and ready for a good nap. Hotdogs are wrapped in paper or foil (with a paper backing), materials perfect for crunching into balls and making lay-ups (normally unsuccessfully) into trash cans and girlfriend's purses. As the man in the green suit ate his hotdog, he thought about these things, occasionally wiping his mouth with a small white napkin. He noticed the manner of hotdog vendor, his fading accent (Mississippian), the stains on his apron, the way he closed his eyes briefly each time he opened the his cart to make another, taking in the smell, enjoying it, reveling in it. The vendor's cart had an umbrella, red and yellow. The cart itself reflected the surrounding cityscape, a world of skyscrapers and trees, an empire of pedestrians and buses. "Hurley's Dogs" was written in bold black uppercase letters on the side of the cart and steam crept out of a small flaw in the sealing on its far left door.

The man in the green suit finished his hotdog and lifted himself off of the cold, smooth marble bench which had been his home for the last twenty minutes. He finished off the last sip of his coffee and tossed his garbage into a nearby wastebasket. The air had warmed around him, and he neatly folded his ancient brown overcoat over his left arm. He considered purchasing a hot pretzel, but instead turned and began walking down the street. Hurley saw his customer leaving, and waved behind him, and the man in the green suit smiled and nodded back, never stopping. Tap-tap-tap.

V.

No one noticed the man in the green suit get on the elevator. No one noticed him get off that same elevator and onto the observatory deck. When he climbed to the top of the radio tower (no small feat for a man his age), not a single person so much as twitched an eyebrow. As the man in the green suit settled into his seat, he began scanning the world of glass and stone which surrounded him. Like the hives of some surreal race of termites, humanity's creations rose high above the earth, fighting wind and gravity with steel and cement. Far below, in the realms of the normal, men and women were engaged in a thousandfold ventures. Here a construction worker was leaning against a great steel beam, remembering the day he first kissed his wife. There a secretary was eating a Caesar salad, wondering if she was pregnant. A hundred yards to her left, in a department store, a husband was shopping for diamonds. He was telling the girl at the register that they were for his wife. They weren't.

In a nearby school twenty-seven children sat in a class, their books open to a story about a bear and a crocodile. Only four were actually looking at their books. One little boy, with coal black hair, was drawing a picture of a purple monster with four heads. The teacher saw him, but decided to let it pass, since the little boy, whose name was Jacob, was making excellent grades in reading. She smoothed her soft blue dress against her dark brown skin, thinking about the upcoming weekend, about her husband, about mowing the lawn (he was sure it was going to need it), about how good it would feel to just sleep in his arms late into the day. She smiled, and straightened her brown turtleshell glasses.

Noiselessly the man in the green suit turned to face a hospital. The hospital, a brick and marble building, sat on a hill to the south. The hill was covered with thousands of flowers and trees of every imaginable species, and. It was a beautiful place, a Monet come to life. The man in the green suit ran his fingers through his hair and stared at the building. Three police cars sat parked in the front lot and a white ambulance rested just outside of the Emergency room. Inside that hospital thirty-four people would die today. Yesterday it was twenty-six. Tomorrow it will be eleven. The man in the green suit looked down from the hospital, down at the streets below, at the termites scurrying from this steel mound to the next. Slowly a sad smile crossed his face and even more slowly (though again, making good time for a man of his age) he climbed down from his precipice, wondering if there were enough daisies in that garden on the hill to make a good bouquet.

VI.

The halls of the hospital were tiled in a blue the color of a Carribean sea set against other tiles of white flecked with pink and green. The air smelled of inhuman things, of ammonia and rubbing alcohol and cleaning liquid. The man in the green suit did not like hospitals, not because of the work he had to do there, but because of the entirely inhuman, or perhaps ‘unhuman' feeling of the places. They were not the domain of termites, but of inhuman automatons, robots cleaning, robots healing, robots carrying away the dead.

No, this was not entirely true, he reminded himself. The doctor with the green surgery scrubs who brushed against him, for instance, she had two children and collected Elvis Presley records. She claimed to love opera, but it was her husband who really loved opera, not her. Nevertheless she studied it diligently, could recognize any great aria, debate the underlying psychological meaning of any major Italian piece, or discuss (at considerable length) which parts of Mozart's Requiem were really written by Mozart. But in truth she loved Elvis, the way he moved, the energy he exuded, the way his music made the world seem to sway to the back-beat.

The man in the green suit smiled.

In Room 423 a woman was dying. Her name was Rebecca and her family had all moved on, all over the country. The nearest would arrive two hours after Rebecca died. She had been walking down the street when the stroke came, walking to a nearby grocery store. Her first thought as she fell was not about her life, but about her glasses, which fell from her face and broke against the hard sidewalk. She lay there on her side, staring at those glasses and thought about the day she had gotten them, nearly two decades before, with Thomas. Tom. She missed Tom.

Now she lay on a bed in a cold room. For the first time in her life she found herself unable to talk, but that was not so distressing to her as one might imagine, since she had no one to talk to. Then slowly she became aware of someone sitting in the dark, watching. It was a man, with a suit, sitting in a chair pulled into the corner. He sat, watching her, his eyes catching the faint light teasing in through the shades.

A nurse came into the room and checked the old woman's signs, scribbled some notes, changed an IV bag. She noticed the furniture was a little disheveled, and straightened it up. She was procrastinating, the man in the green suit noticed, because the man in the next room had been crying all night with pain, regardless of the drugs he was given. He had been burnt severely in a car accident, had seen his child die. The man in the green suit swallowed hard thinking about the child, about his lovely brown eyes, his tiny little hands.

The nurse finally left the room and the man in the green suit walked up to Rebecca. He rubbed her soft white hair with his thumb and looked into her light blue eyes. One shone, one was dim. He might have winced if he had not seen it so often before. But he had.

He leaned down and whispered in her ear that she didn't have to worry anymore, that she would not leave this place alone, and that her children had been raised well. A tear welled in her good eye, and the man wiped it away, smiling his sad smile. She wanted to know who he was, he could tell, and he just smiled and said he was just someone who understood. She managed a half-smile (my God, thought the man in the green suit, how strong, how incredibly, beautifully strong) and he bent over and kissed her cheek. He noticed that she smelled of perfume and baby powder and he paused over her, taking in the comforting odors. Then he turned around and sat down in the chair.

Two hours later the doctors rushed into the room, carrying their tools and devices, the pride of humanity. A man with a gray beard shouted out orders. The orders were carried out with the swift precision of a well-oiled machine or a finely tuned military unit. The air was filled with the scream of alarms, the odor of inhuman cleanliness became overpowering. The man in the green suit watched them, artists of the human frame, trying to replicate the majesty of creation, and he delighted in their inventiveness. The dance lasted for six, seven minutes, until finally the doctor called an end, and a young nurse pulled a sheet over what used to be Rebecca. The man in the green suit noticed how the nurse paused and looked into the old woman's now vacant eyes and found himself strangely pleased by her compassion. Gradually the screams and whines of the machines were silenced, gradually the room emptied. The man in the green suit looked at his pocket watch, replaced it into his vest pocket, and stood up. It felt good to stretch his legs.

As he left the hospital, the man in the green suit again noticed the odors, the sound of his simple brown shoes tapping on the floor. He danced to a bit of a Frank Sinatra to a song that was playing over the hospital's intercom system, and as he walked out of the hospital's sliding glass doors, he smiled.

VII.

The ocean. Few things are so great, so powerful, so vibrant. The man in the green suit thought of the ocean, of the swelling of blue-green waves touched with white, of the unending roar that was really an infinite collection of smaller noises all jumbled and entangled, weaving thunder from whispers. Few things could be compared to it. No, that was not right, thought the man in the green suit. Many things could be compared to the ocean. It was only that few things could meaningfully be compared to it. And this, this was one of those things.

In front of the man in the green suit lay an ocean of men and women and children. None of them were truly connected, none of them truly understood the others, but there they were, thousands of them joined together in one place, unconsciously creating something greater than themselves. The odor of their bodies, sweaty with the heat, filled the air with salt. Skin and hair and clothing mingled into a single vibrant blur. Their voices mixed into an indecipherable whole, an unintelligible humming, churning sound. Yes, thought the man in the green suit as he pulled sweet-tasting cola though a straw, these people, these teeming masses, they are an ocean in the most real sense, weaving thunder from whispers, and he smiled at his cleverness.

The game slowly transpired below him. One man threw a ball, one man swung at it. With each subtle movement the crowd reacted, with each crack of the bat nine men moved as one, like birds in flight. Eighteen brightly clad harlequins united thousands of ordinary people in a dance about a stick of wood and a small white ball. The man in the green suit smiled to think of it, and then let out a yell, just to hear his own voice. The water felt good.

VIII.

Purple and orange and red crept into the sky, gradually nudging out the light blue of day. Here and there a few bright stars began to appear, glittering white or red or yellow. The wind rustled the newly green leaves softly, like a mother stroking the hair of her first-born son. Lights began to come on, flourescent sunshine of every imaginable hue. Bats and owls left their hiding places, intent on finding morsels and fostering humanity's lingering fears and superstitions. Somewhere a train was passing nearby, clackity-clack, clackity-clack. A boat sounded from the river, its horn bellowing like a blinded cyclops. The air was cooling, and the man in the green suit pulled on his ancient brown overcoat. The weight felt good on his shoulders, and he admired his reflection in a plate-glass window as he walked past. Dew settled on the grass and trees, materializing as if from nothing. The man in the green suit smiled and felt a distinct kinship to the dew, which, he thought to himself, was an unusual thing to feel a kinship to. But it didn't concern him, and he shrugged his shoulders, buttoned his overcoat, and kept walking.

IX.

Fettuccine Alfredo, considered the man in the green suit, ranks with the greatest creations of humanity, just above the Great Wall of China, but slightly lower than Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn. He took a pull from a bottle of Italian beer and paused from his meal to peel off its label. The man in the green suit smoothed the damp, brightly colored label on the red and white checkered tablecloth (why, he wondered, do all Italian restaurants have red and white checkered tablecloths) and admired his handiwork. The candle in front of him flickered with his own breath.

Not far away sat a woman. She had light brown hair with the slightest highlights of red. Her skin that was slightly tanned, to the color of an almond, perhaps. She was alone, and sat pouring over a book, which the man in the green suit knew was a copy of The Three Musketeers (another of the finest creations of humanity). He admired the way her clothes fell on her, revealing the shape of her body in the most subtle of ways. She wore jeans and a sweater two sizes too big, and when she ate she immediately followed each bite with a dab of her napkin.

The man in the green suit called the waiter to his side and told him to send a bottle of a particularly good merlot to the woman with two glasses and his best wishes. A few minutes later the waiter returned from the cellars and carried the wine to the woman, bending over to answer questions that the man in the green suit couldn't hear. He finished off his fettuccine, scraping his plate with a crust of bread, then looked up to see the woman standing beside of him, the bottle of wine in one hand, two glasses in the other.

"I can't finish an entire bottle myself," said the woman as a slight smile crept across her features. "Would you be willing to help?"

X.

The night carried on forever as the man in the green suit and the woman with the reddish-brown hair laughed and told stories. Or rather, as the woman with the reddish-brown hair told stories and the man in the green suit listened eagerly, urging her on with new questions and quizzical looks. She told him about her job (she was a doctor) and where she grew up (she was born and raised in a suburb of Chicago, in southeast Wisconsin). She told him about the crazy things she did in college (including the slip-and-slide incident at four in the morning, inside her dormitory, during exams and immediately following the mass consumption of far too much very bad beer), about the kind of music she liked (jazz, mostly), and about the time her date for the Christmas formal her Senior year in high school called her forty minutes before to let her know he was taking someone else. She told him about making out with Billy Robinson in a closet during church when she was fourteen and about how she would sometimes go to the movies alone, even though that was, in her mind, just about the most depressing thing anyone could possibly do. And the man in the green suit listened, delighting in every word, sipping on good merlot, noting the fullness in his belly, and feeling immensely content.

The woman with the reddish-brown hair had her right hand resting on her book, just off to the right of her wine glass. The man in the green suit looked at it, wondering at the incredible delicacy of the thing. He wondered how it felt (not how hands felt, mind you, but how her hand felt) and so he gradually moved his hand over until it lay on her own. She blushed slightly, but not for long, and as he looked into her green-blue eyes, he ran his thumb over her hand, feeling every crevice. It was smooth like marble or alabaster, cool on top but warm in the palm, which was just noticeably damp with perspiration. He felt the slick hardness of her nails, which were only slightly longer than his own, and ran his thumb in circles over her knuckles.

Around them the waiters had put up most of the chairs, laying them upside-down on the red and white checkered tablecloths, silently urging their patrons to leave. The man in the green suit pulled out his wallet and threw a good-sized wad of money on the table as he stood up. Shall we share a cab asked the man in the green suit, and the woman with the reddish-brown hair only smiled and blushed, picked up her book in one hand and looped her other arm into his own as they walked out the door.

XI.

White morning light flooded the room through the sheer curtains that covered the windows. The man stood up from the bed, moving aside quilts and blankets. He was still dressed, his collar opened and his tie laying at the foot of the bed. The girl with the reddish-brown hair lay asleep beside of him on her stomach, and he watched as she breathed, the quilt heaving ever so slightly. He walked into her bathroom, shut the door and started the shower. He looked at himself in the mirror, watching steam creep over his image until he was no more than a blur, a living myth, then he stepped into the shower. As he showered he remembered a joke he had heard a very, very long time ago about a priest, a farmer, and a barkeep and he laughed quietly to himself. As he shaved he noticed the way the shaving cream and stuble circled slowly around the drain before sinking, and then laughed again, this time at himself for being far too poetic for so early.

After drying off and dressing, the man pulled on a fresh suit exactly like that he had worn the night before. He knotted a red tie into a half-windsor under his starched white collar, dropped his old, brass pocket watch into his vest pocket, brushed his bright red hair three times and followed up everything with a spritz of cologne, again, something of his own design. He slipped a daisy into his jacket pocket and sat down in a soft pink chair that sat beside the girl with reddish-brown hair's dressing table to tie his shoes. He paused for nearly fifteen minutes between his left shoe and his right, watching her sleep. Her eyelids twitched, her lips curled into a faint smile, and a lock of her hair lay over her face. Her breathing made it sway side to side like a thin beech sapling in a breeze, and the man in the green suit watched it perform, relishing the ballet.

Finally, the man in the green suit finished tying his shoes and walked over to the bed. He laid a small kiss on the top of the woman with reddish-brown hair's head. He lingered, enjoying the smell and the way the light shone on her cheeks, then set a small bouquet of daisies beside her. As he walked towards the door, the man in the green suit stopped and turned, taking one last glance at the room and its inhabitant. Then he turned, pulling on his ancient brown overcoat. As he walked down the hall and out the door, he listened to the sound of his coat brushing against furniture. As he stepped onto the sidewalk, the swoosh of the coat was replaced by the tap-tap-tapping of his simple brown shoes, which in turn was replaced by the sound of a taxi's engine.

"Where to," asked the cabbie without turning around.

The man in the green suit paused, not certain what he should say, then he smiled and said, well, do you know anyplace around that cooks up good eggs?