When I was still in school I had two roommates. One week one of them (we'll call him Rod) attended a fancy auction in New York where he bid on various high-priced tchotchkes such as a golden snow globe, a pocket watch and a gumball machine. The auction itself was bustling and chaotic while in contrast my roommate was (and is) a vortex of elegance and calm composure. As it turned out his friend actually once owned that snow globe or perhaps one identical to it. He later returned to our stark white apartment, adrift in a sea of melancholia, and sat himself down on the floor.

Meanwhile, my other roommate (we'll call him Thomas), in spite of being exhausted and visibly pale, visited a young girl who was having a birthday and helped her blow out the candles on the birthday cake. The birthday girl had an injured leg and left the apartment with Thomas but not before Thomas got hopelessly caught in a revolving door. The girl later tossed aside her crutches and hopped her way up a long stone flight of stairs at Morningside Park while Thomas went and lit candles at a shrine in a cathedral under a stained glass window depicting the Virgin Mary, while unbeknownst to him Rod was lurking in a nearby pew. Each was there for a different reason though: Thomas, a lapsed Catholic with a lifelong interest in spirituality, was presumably seeking redemption for unspecified past sins, whereas Rod, an avowed atheist with a thirst for the baroque, was presumably scouting fresh design ideas for home décor.

As all of this was taking place I was out in the neighborhood, watching in concern from the sidewalk as a blind man tried to cross the busy intersection, and then I smiled in relief when he made it safely to the other side. I tried to enter a brownstone, but broke my key in the lock. As I sat on the front steps with my broken key, looking glum and befuddled, a woman scurried up the stairs, unlocked the door, and slipped inside before I could react. As the door swung shut on me, she shot me a saucy grin. (Her reaction may have been in part due to my horrifying hair at the time which was in a long, dry, frizzy perm.) I ended up taking the Roosevelt Island Tramway and dropped a letter out of the window, where it fell to the bustling streets of midtown Manhattan.

Back at our apartment Rod packed up all the tchotchkes he had purchased at the auction in a garbage bag and stuffed them in a trash can (in flagrant violation of New York City’s strict regulations against placing residential trash in a public bin). He thought he had been spotted and caught breaking the law as a kid in a tux approached but realized that he was possibly blind due to him making his way down the sidewalk by feeling along the wall. I spent the rest of the day pirouetting along the Brooklyn waterfront.

We all returned home that evening and gathered in a room completely devoid of all furnishing, loitering around, all sad and weary, shooting each other meaningful glances through heavy-lidded eyes. Rod sat cross-legged on the floor as we all arranged dominoes in the shape of a stylized question mark and subsequently watched them fall.