Ne’mine, Susannah says you look like about a seven. These’ll do.

Well, no, she hadn’t quite finished that last part, but Trudy was sure that was what the woman had meant to say. Only then her face had changed. Like a comic getting ready to imitate Bill Clinton or Michael Jackson or maybe even George Clooney. And she’d asked for help. Asked for help and said her name was … what?

“Susannah Dean,” Trudy said. “That was the name. I never told Officer Antassi.”

Well, yeah, but fuck Officer Antassi. Officer Antassi with his bus shelters and little stores, just fuck him.

That woman—Susannah Dean, Whoopi Goldberg, Coretta Scott King, whoever she was—thought she was pregnant. Thought she was in labor. I’m almost sure of it. Did she look pregnant to you, Trudes?

“No,” she said.

On the uptown side of Forty-sixth, white WALK once again became red DON’T WALK. Trudy realized she was calming down. Something about just standing here, with 2 Dag Hammarskjöld Plaza on her right, was calming. Like a cool hand on a hot brow, or a soothing word that assured you that there was nothing, absolutely nothing to feel ningly-tumb about.

She could hear a humming, she realized. A sweet humming sound.

“That’s not humming,” she said as red DON’T WALK cycled back to white WALK one more time (she remembered a date in college once telling her the worst karmic disaster he could imagine would be coming back as a traffic light). “That’s not humming, that’s singing.”

And then, right beside her—startling her but not frightening her—a man’s voice spoke. “That’s right,” he said. Trudy turned and saw a gentleman who looked to be in his early forties. “I come by here all the time, just to hear it. And I’ll tell you something, since we’re just ships passing in the night, so to speak—when I was a young man, I had the world’s most terrible case of acne. I think coming here cleared it up, somehow.”

“You think standing on the corner of Second and Forty-sixth cleared up your acne,” she said.

His smile, only a small one but very sweet, faltered a tiny bit. “I know it sounds crazy—”

“I saw a woman appear out of nowhere right here,” Trudy said. “Three and a half hours ago, I saw this. When she showed up, she had no legs from the knees down. Then she grew the rest of em. So who’s crazy, my friend?”

He was looking at her, wide-eyed, just some anonymous time-server in a suit with his tie pulled down at the end of the work-day. And yes, she could see the pits and shadows of old acne on his cheeks and forehead. “This is true?”

She held up her right hand. “If I’m lyin, I’m dyin. Bitch stole my shoes.” She hesitated. “No, she wasn’t a bitch. I don’t believe she was a bitch. She was scared and she was barefooted and she thought she was in labor. I just wish I’d had time to give her my sneakers instead of my good goddam shoes.”