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NEW YORK UNEASY
February in New York
On February 2nd I became so enchanted with the fact that the date could be written oh two slash oh two that I wrote out a series of checks dated oh two,
slash, oh two, slash, oh two: 02/02/02.
"Cool!" I thought, and then I went with the paid bills, carefully addressed on envelopes with imprinted stamps, a cheerful little bird of a one cent stamp sitting alongside the imprint because the postage had just gone up, outside to the mailbox on the front sidewalk, the streets and sidewalk all black with late winter rain. I looked up at the shapes of the skyscrapers in the foggy skies and mailed all the bills away to their recipients, reflecting that although a substantial amount of money was flying out of my hands, none of it was going to make anyone truly happy. An hour later I realized that the year was not 2002, but still 2001. A feeling of deep embarrassment spread through me, which could be summarized as saying once again I considered myself too dreamy to live in a place like New York, and wondered how many of those checks would pass unhindered through the banking system. Not that any of my creditors are concerned about the viability of my checks, nor have I ever had to worry about my credibility with any of them. Of course.
The time confusion brought to my mind an odd problem that had been happening to me for a while. I had been arriving ahead of myself.
I would prefer you regard this as a true story since I am making up none of it, but in reality it is not I who is attesting to the underlying truth of the phenomena. Others notice me arriving ahead of myself, and inform me of it after I have, in reality, arrived. In fact, I myself am a little skeptical of the whole thing.
I have been working at the same job for over a decade, and most of the other people have also been there for at least the same time. (This in itself is hard to believe.) The Director of Public Relations has her office a few doors down from me. She is a tigress with the press, handling the New York City tabloids with total aplomb, and sees and deflects byzantine and nefarious press schemes that pass right by me. I respect her very much. However, the strange thing is that this teller of the truth to the people is one who keeps noticing the phenomena of me arriving ahead of myself!
One day a few years ago, the Director of Public Relations was working with an assistant named Nancy. I breezed by the door to the room where they were working and yelled into the two of them: "Hi, guys!" I went into my office, sat down at my desk, and began to interact with computers, voice mail, faxes, and looked over the morning mail and deliveries. The Director of Public Relations, a tall woman with a great deal of presence, crept into my office with a nervous smile on her face. She usually doesn't creep around since she is close to six feet tall, and her nervous smile made me extremely nervous in return. I wanted to bark "Out with it!" but when I bark I sound like a chihuahua and I am otherwise rather cowed by the power and stature of the Director of Public Relations, so I waited quietly until she explained her odd behavior.
"Why did you just walk by our office and say 'Hi, guys!'?"
"Because it's what I say to you every morning," I answered evenly. If this was some kind of integrity test, it was certainly taking me off guard.
"But you came in and said the same thing an hour and half ago."
I had a perfectly clear idea of what I had been doing an hour and a half earlier, and it had been pleasant and nowhere near the office.
"No, I didn't."
"Yes, you did. And you were wearing different clothes."
I found it extremely strange to be defending my location at a certain place in the continuum of time, and even stranger to be insisting that the clothes I had put on after my bath, worn on the subway, and arrived in at work were the only clothes I had worn that day. After all, getting up and carefully dressing in "professional" clothes, riding the subway and arriving at the office embarrassingly late in the morning is bad enough that you only want to do it once a day.
"No, I just arrived. And these are the clothes I put on this morning."
The Director of Public Relations retreated from my office with a puzzled look on her face. A few minutes later she came back in, this time with Nancy. Nancy also insisted that I had arrived an hour and a half before and had greeted them both. I insisted that I did know where I was, when it was, and that in fact I had just arrived.
Then the kicker. An old lady with a connection to the company had apparently died the night before, and the press started calling the Director of Public Relations about the death. Pimento, a deep pessimist who was a driver for the company, overheard the story. "Jeez," he said, "it was you who died."
"No, Pimmy," I said firmly. "It was the old lady who died. I am still alive."
"But who was walking the halls when you weren't here?"
"Someone other than me, because I wasn't here at the time." Pimento, Nancy, and the Director of Public Relations all looked at me with the kind of expression in their eyes that suggested that they might be back later with stakes and burning torches if the situation merited it. The story became an office legend and in time I laughingly told it to my family, all scientifically oriented people who thought the story was the fantasy of credulous people.
When I told the story accompanied by laughter, I didn't admit that a confusion similar to this has subtly colored my whole life. When I was born, I was the second born of twins, and inasmuch as we were premature, my sister died after three short days of life. In these days, her life could have been saved; but that was the way it was then, and my parents were grateful that my life had been spared. I have no memory of it of course, and all I ever knew of my sister was the metal marker the undertakers put up in the green grass for babies.
Not that anyone could know for certain at the time, but it was said that we were identical twins. The twinned birth was enough of a rarity then that a lot of the kids who came to our yard had heard about it. An older child came up with this question when I was six: "How," he said, screwing up his eyes, "do you know that you're the one who lived?"
 Gee. I guess it was because there was Mom
and Dad and our little house with the great playground equipment Dad had built and my big sister and my little sister, and the fact that everyone under twelve had matching plaid raincoats. I felt like I fit right in. Or
did I? The question haunted me in a small nagging way.
Time passes and odd incidents occur that one tends to forget, or in my case, to repress. Then, just
this week, the Director of Public Relations came up to me, speaking in what I have come to recognize as her confidential tone. "It happened again," she whispered conspiratorially.
Since all sorts of things happen at one time and often very similar things happen later, I waited for her full explanation.
“I saw you by your closet an hour ago. I was in a hurry to pick up a phone, so I didn't stop to talk. You waved at me, but when I came back, you were gone."
Since I was struggling out of the complicated gear that is New York City winter dressing, there was no point in discussing the irrefutable fact that I had just arrived. I
didn't bother to inquire if another person with my name had just died. Whatever phenomenon was occurring, it was clearly not connected to me because I was not the person seeing my faux self.
I mentioned this to my sixteen year old daughter over dinner at Dizzy's that night. "This is great!" she said. "You can really use this!" It was no secret in my household
that I was not a morning person and my time of arrival at work had slowly slipped later and later. "Maybe you can get the apparition to show up at nine, make you look good,
and then the real you can come in the back door when you feel like it."
My mind was distracted with another angle. Sainthood. The Director of Public
Relations, a devout Catholic of unquestioned integrity, unquestioned verity, and utter rectitude, had witnessed two events that some might call miracles. Despite my
disavowals, she still associated them with me. She was not one who took things lightly, and was a good and eager conversationalist. I said to my daughter, "If I can manage to
do a few things that people recognize as really good, I might qualify for sainthood after I die! If you believe the Director of Public Relations, there's been two witnessed miracles
-- and that's the hardest part to get down to qualify as a saint!"
"Do Protestants believe in saints?" asked my daughter.
"Not the ones in America," I said.
Ah. The old schism, the great spoiler in my plans. Could I convert to pull it off?
The Methodist church in our neighborhood is so liberal that it performs gay marriages, and I have attended a few heterosexual weddings there of various friends. Plus, the
Methodist Church's annual lobster dinner is ecumenical and shouldn't be missed. However, each time I attend a religious service, the time in the church seems to suck all
the life out of me. If that Methodist church is too confining for me, attendance at one of the Catholic churches in the neighborhood was going to bring on an anxiety attack the
first half hour I was in a pew. Anxiety attacks in churches are no laughing matter. I had one at the funeral of a prominent man that I had cared for a lot, and as I was hemmed in
by dignitaries, escape was out of the question. I then had an asthma attack and nearly concluded my portion of the service by collapsing on the floor in extremis. I would not last as a devout Catholic.
After I finished eating my veggie wrap at Dizzy's, I concluded that these unexplained appearances ahead of myself would have to remain unexplained, and that I
was lucky in that I had absolutely no concern about this at all. I had no desire to prove that these phenomena had occurred since I had never seen the apparitions, nor to be
reassured that others believed in them, because I frankly didn't care. I had no feeling of creepiness, because I felt a great disconnect from all of the speculation. I was proud
that my daughter had come up with a practical use for an unexplained phenomenon. Feeling contented, we started for home, where I knew I had been before and would be
again, and not only that, frequently met myself coming and going, saw myself in mirrors, and despite the multiple apparitions of myself, none of them were anything but comforting.
Your New York Uneasy Correspondent.
© 2001 by Sarah Scott
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