All day yesterday I thought someone was following me. It was not a vague sensation of doom, or a baseless instinct interpreted as foreboding. I heard things. Real things, misinterpreted. Rustlings of leaves or branches, papers tumbling up the street behind me, I thought my awareness had transmogrified and anthropomorphized these objects to a point where I experienced synaesthesia. But the awareness and the all-allowing intake of sounds had a tamping effect. For all that I heard in the tiny cacophony in my head I eventually concluded that I heard particular things at absurd volume. A crackle of old newspaper, rolling behind me like tumbleweed, caused me to turn sharply around. I deliberately cleared a path for the human being that I thought I heard approaching me from behind on the sidewalk of the Honeywell Street Bridge. I turned and found no such human. As usual, the bridge was deserted save for me and an occasional taxi cab racing to or from the nearby dispatch station. And there are motorcyclists. Hot-rodders, wheelie-wonders, whatever they are called, this bridge is a magnet for them because of its desertedness and for the acoustical resonance of its metal walls. The gut-crunching sound of a roaring motorcycle, made exponentially louder as it echoed off the surrounding walls, failed to drown the feeble noise of a sheet of newspaper that continued to follow me. I think the most violent noise of a hundred jackhammers could not have wrested my attentions from that tiny sound. Similar innocuous rustlings followed throughout the day, and I saw the pattern of my reactions, laughing at myself for my tiny insanities as I panicked a little at what turned out to be the muffled sound of a passing vehicle’s loud music. The car’s windows were all shut, making the sound nondescript and thus threatening to me.
I remembered a night on Mulberry Street. I stopped at Mulberry and Jersey Street to look through a fence at what appeared to be a cemetery. I had no expectation of seeing a little graveyard there. I made a note to learn more about this place (I never did). I pecked out the street intersection into my phone and e-mailed it to myself. It was dark and the street was busy with human beings. Loud music emanated from some place on Prince Street. Through that little carnival of noise and activity I heard a man say “Excuse me,” the words as clear and crisp as if they were spoken inside my head. To my left, from whence the words came, I turned sharply. The words had been spoken by a man on Jersey Street, a narrow street which is basically an alley. Standing about 20 feet away from me with his left foot on the sidewalk and his right foot on the street he knew that I had heard him, and from my reaction I sensed that he felt he had made a catch. Why would he have said “Excuse me” from so far away? Certainly I was not in his way, and my attentions to the cemetery notwithstanding I was not engaged in any activity that was particularly conspicuous. Did I look vulnerable? I momentarily asked myself these and other questions as my always-on cloak of invisibility disappeared. Do people actually see me? What do I even look like? My reaction to the man’s half-whispered cross-the-street question lasted a fraction of an instant but the questioner caught it and followed me as I walked toward East Houston Street. I heard him again, from behind, say “Excuse me” once more, his thin voice possessed of a remarkable capacity to penetrate the surrounding noises of the busy street and land directly inside my head, as if the words were already there. Three more times I heard his words. My gait never increased but I managed to cross East Houston a moment before a wall of vehicle traffic made it impossible for him to follow, cutting off the chase as the man disappeared. It was a tiny drama and, unlike yesterday’s crystalline sounds of paranoid encroachment, it was real.
