Three City Scenes

I just saw this happen, I swear. A white-haired man walked into the car and sat on a sleeping Korean man. Like sat on him, not halfway like he was trying to fit into a small adjacent space. There was plenty of adjacent space. He just sat on him, and there they were like two nesting plastic chairs. The Korean man woke and was understandably startled. He seemed afraid but frozen, unable to comprehend what events might have occurred to bring about this configuration of humanity. Everyone stared. Two stops later the white-haired man rose from his seat, half-turned and nodded to the Korean man as if to say, "it's been nice sitting on you" and walked off the train. I didn't make this up. I couldn't have. 

—

Yesterday I watched two firemen suffocate. Actually, one suffocated inside a building that was on fire. The other made it out of the building, collapsed in the street, and couldn't be revived. He died in a coma two days later at University Hospital. I looked it up. He didn't have a wife or any kids. Both his parents were dead, and his only sibling, a brother, was astranged for an unmentioned amount of time. I wonder if the brother will find out. I wonder how the astrangement came about. Would the brother be saddened to hear of the fireman's death? Did he even know he had been a fireman? I can't decide if it's more sad or less sad that he died with no relatives. For me, I mean. After all, death is only for the living. 

"Andrew Merton, 47, is survived only by Brian Gentry, an unrelated onlooker at the scene of his demise."

—

1919 was a good year for rats. The city was overrun. My grandfather used to relay a story that his father had told him about rats. At that time my great grandfather and his first wife, Lillian, lived on Water Street. They didn't have any children and lived in a basement level apartment with two windows that let in light from the recessed area on either side of the stoop. That summer was hot and damp and rats came in those windows to access the cool, dry basement. They chewed right through the wooden window frames and when my great grandfather replaced the windows with plywood they chewed through that too. All their neighbors had similar problems and several moved out of the area or tried to get apartments on higher floors. One woman woke at night to rats chewing on her hair. Later her husband told her that was impossible, that rats wouldn't care to eat human hair, but it wouldn't have mattered either way. She had been thoroughly enough shaken that she went to stay with her mother on Long Island. After she left, my great grandfather saw a number of other women coming and going from the husband's apartment at all hours. The wife never returned in the two and a half years my great grandfather continued to live there. 

My great grandfather himself was strangely un-phased by the presence of the rats. The attempts to keep them out were at the insistence of his wife, but he was secretly happy when they continued to circumvent his barriers. He liked to study them and would come home during his lunch breaks to watch them. He would sit as still as possible in a chair at the table and try to recognize specific rats by their markings, tracking them that way, trying to discover something about their social habits. It was strange behavior to be sure, and once Lillian found out she flew into a rage and told him he could become a scientist if he wanted to watch rats so badly and he could do it in a laboratory somewhere but not in her house. Certainly not in her house. Of course he understood, he was a rational person, but it saddened him when he finally tacked sheets of copper over the window holes and the rats were kept out for the rest of the summer.