But all this for what? She could lose her job, or her relationship. Or both. For what reason? To spend a day with a man she barely knew.

She looked at her watch again. She should leave, she thought, at least on principle … she should walk away right now.

But she made no attempt to go. Because under the ambivalence and apprehension simmered a feeling—and whether it was intuition or hope she wasn’t sure—that meeting Fire on this August day would change her life somehow.

She turned her face on the runners and bikers trickling back and forth; she marveled at their stamina in the liquid heat. As she sat there, suffering pasty licks of tongues of breeze, a Japanese man in a Panama hat sat on a stool across from her and began to weave standards on his box guitar. She began to hum along … quietly … to herself … getting up to drop loose change in his collection plate. Did she have a request? She asked if he knew “You Go to My Head.”

And as he played it for her she closed her eyes and thought of Fire: saw him standing in the kitchen at Claire’s gallery in his red T-shirt and baggy jeans; felt the madness of that first kiss; saw him as she left him at the phone booth, neither of them expecting ever to meet again. What a weird thing, she thought, just meeting a stranger and feeling a charge and then finding yourself in “like.”

Suddenly she heard a loud collision, and she opened her eyes to see a wriggling heap of spandex, flesh, and metal. Hands from the gathering crowd picked through the bundle, helped the victims to their feet. The crowd began to grow, pressing sweaty bottoms in her face, wilting her with its collective heat. She’d been waiting for over an hour now. And she really hated to wait. Where the hell was he? He had better come soon.

The crowd was stirring now. People were arguing, maybe even shoving a bit. She couldn’t see. Then as a woman grabbed her child and scurried away, the crowd erupted into a helter-skelter. People flying like shrapnel.

Sylvia saw a glimmering knife and a splash of blood, and two men rolling toward her, heaving and throbbing. She lunged away in time and they crashed into the bench. She scrambled to her feet, her knee bruised and her slacks torn, and ran, leaving in her wake a clamor of thumps and bangs and curses.

On the Brooklyn side of the bridge she leaned against a wall to catch her breath, trembling like a severed limb. Sagging from heat and fright, she slumped to the ground, her knee popping like a hot coal, pulling on the thread of air she’d snagged between her teeth as a squad car raced up the walkway, sirens barking, lights ablaze.

After a few minutes she began to walk back to the bench, but stopped when she made the turn to enter the bridge proper and saw that the crowd had remade itself.