Those

He lit a cigarette and smoked it slowly, tapping the ash out and into the water, not liking himself for the ash, or the smoking, but loving the gesture of smoking, the calm it seemed to bring him, a strange sense of purpose that was not available elsewhere. It was considered strange for a man to sit on a bench in the afternoon sunshine with his legs crossed surveying the scene, flowers, fresh mown grass, children and their young parents or nannies playing or being scolded, give that same man a cigarette and the whole action becomes full of meaning. He’s just having a cigarette people would say, as if it were any more normal to sit still having a cigarette than it would have been just to be still. On a grand scale it seemed some strange offshoot of the industrial and technological revolution, it was seen as a virtue for people to be always busy, staring down at their phones, taking pictures, sending e-mails, checking the stocks on the Wall Street Journal. It was strange for a man to just sit on a park bench and admire the nut hatches and pale grey statue of some old hero from the Civil War decorating a gravel path. The strangest part, or so he’d seen, was that these same curiously busy people, himself included really, were also often terrifically inefficient at their jobs, inveterate wasters of time, constantly checking e-mails, and phone bills, always in action, waiting for the next thing to arrive, the next ship to come in, to speak metaphorically. He could see that people hadn’t really changed much, and that the saying, “waiting for the next ship to come in” was probably applied to trains, then planes, and eventually cars, and now the rate at which a person’s life or circumstances could changed had been accelerated to every twenty minutes, and damn if it wasn’t intriguing to at least check every fifteen minutes or so, to make sure that things were not different, that the ship bearing our cargo had not arrived. It was this restless nature that had lead man, in his opinion, from the caves to the heights of the financial district buildings that threatened the supremacy of the sky with their tall dark pinnacles and one way glass windows.

And, on one of his patrols around the ferry where he pretended to be looking for something very important, putting a very serious look on his face, and even going so far as to carry around a scrap of paper with nothing written on it, but that he’d glance down at occasionally, and shake his head disapprovingly. When he tired of this method, or thought that perhaps the other regulars were on to him he’d put in his headset and stroll about the ship having a conversation with no one on the other end, providing mmmhmmms and okays at regular intervals, looking intently, as he searched every crevice and corner of the ship for the sight of the young girl he’d met on the ship so many days ago, and who had left and imprint upon his mind more akin to a daguerreotype than a photograph, etched was probably the right term. And now she lived as a figment in his imagination, grown monstrous with time. He knew that the woman he was looking for was not a woman he’d ever find, but that did not stop him searching.