The Broken Window

slip along an alleyway, make a purchase—cash, of course—then plunge into a desertedarea of the city, formerly industrial, becoming residential and commercial, near SoHo. Quiet here. That’s good. I want it peaceful for my transaction with Myra Weinburg, 9834-4452-6740-3418, a sixteen I’ve had my eye on for a while.
    Myra 9834, I know you very well. The data have told me everything. (Ah, that debate again: data . . . plural or singular? Data has told or data have told ? Merriam-Webster’s assures us either is correct. By myself, I tend to be purist: data plural. But in public I try hard to treat the word as singular, like most of society, and hope I don’t slip up. Language is a river; it goes where it will and if you swim against that current you get noticed. And that, of course, is the last thing in the world I want.)
    Now, the data on Myra 9834: She lives on Waverly Place, Greenwich Village, in a building the owner wants to sell as co-op units via an eviction plan. ( I know this, though the poor tenants don’t yet, and judging from incomes and credit histories, most of them are totally screwed.)
    The beautiful, exotic, dark-haired Myra 9834 is a graduate of NYU and has worked in New York for several years at an advertising agency. Her mother’s still alive, but her father’s dead. Hit and run, the John Doe warrant still outstanding after all these years. Police don’t pull out the stops for crimes like that.
    At the moment Myra 9834 is between boyfriends, and friendships must be problematic because her recent thirty-second birthday was marked with a single order of moo shu pork from Hunan Dynasty on West Fourth (not a bad choice) and a Caymus Conundrumwhite ($28 from overpriced Village Wines). A subsequent trip to Long Island on Saturday, coinciding with local travel by other family members and acquaintances and a large bill, with copious Brunello, at a Garden City restaurant of which Newsday speaks highly, made up for the solitary evening, I imagine.
    Myra 9834 sleeps in a Victoria’s Secret T, a fact I deduce because she owns five of them in a size too big to wear out in public. She wakes early to the thought of an Entenmann’s danish pastry (never low-fat, I’m proud of her for that) and home-brewed Starbucks; she rarely goes to the coffee shops. Which is a shame, since I do like to observe in person the antelope I’ve had my eye on, and Starbucks is among the best places on the veldt to do so. Around eight-twenty she leaves her apartment and heads for work in Midtown—Maple, Reed & Summers advertising, where she’s a junior account executive.
    Onward and upward. I continue on my way this Sunday, wearing a nondescript baseball cap (they account for 87.3 percent of all men’s headgear in the metro area). And, as always, eyes down. If you think a satellite can’t record your smiling face from thirty miles up in space, think again; somewhere in a dozen servers around the world there are hundreds of pictures of you taken from on high, and let’s hope all you were doing when they snapped the shutter was squinting away the sun while you glanced up at the Goodyear blimp or a cloud shaped like a lamb.
    My passion for collecting includes not only these daily facts but the minds of the sixteens I’m interested in, and Myra 9834 is no exception. She goes for drinks withfriends after work with some frequency and I’ve noticed that she picks up the tab often, too often, in my opinion. Clearly she’s buying their love—right, Dr. Phil? Possibly had acne during the adolescence terrible ; she still sees a dermatologist once in a while, though the bills are low, as if she’s just debating dermabrasion (completely unnecessary from what I’ve seen) or checking to make sure the zits aren’t returning like ninjas in the night.
    Then, after the three rounds of Cosmopolitans with the gals, or a visit to a fit-and-start health club, it’s home to phone calls, the ubiquitous computer and basic, not premium, cable. (I enjoy tracking her viewing habits; her show selections suggest extreme loyalty; she changed networks when Seinfeld did, and she blew off two dates to spend the night with Jack Bauer.)
    Bedtime follows, and she sometimes enjoys a bit of distraction (buying double-A batteries in bulk tells the tale, her digital camera and iPod being rechargeable).
    Of course, those are the data on her weekday life. But today’s a glorious Sunday, and Sundays are different. This is when Myra 9834 climbs aboard