I should have known, when the New York Knicks began winning in November, that some sort of rift was opening up in the firewall that keeps our dreams separate from our collective reality. Just in time for the holidays, the Knicks were starting to resemble NBA contenders: the team had pulled out eight straight victories; Amar’e Stoudemire scored 30 or more points in nine consecutive games, a franchise record; Raymond Felton was proving himself a premier point guard under the harsh glare of the NYC sports spotlight—It was too much. The universe was tilting.
On a Tuesday evening during the Knicks’ winning streak, I walked into a wine store on Eighth Street and tried to use my debit card to buy a cheap bottle of red. “Card declined,” the clerk told me, handing me a little slip he’d torn from the credit card machine. The scrap of paper backed up his assertion in greasy print: DECLINED. He looked at me impatiently, hoping I’d switch to cash. I handed him my card again, sure that it would work on this second attempt. Again, declined. “There’s no money in this account,” the clerk said to me, and when I heard those words I felt an urge to call my wife, who didn’t pick up her phone, no doubt because she was baby-wrangling, trying to give our wriggling, squirmy infant daughter a bath. I left my wife a message asking her to check our account online when she had a chance. I had no idea what I’d find when I got home.
The other unimaginable thing that happened in New York sports during this time was the Sal Alosi Episode. Alosi, the (now suspended) strength coach for the New York Jets, stuck his knee out and intentionally tripped a Miami Dolphins special teams player named Nolan Carroll as Carroll was sprinting down the sideline, covering a kick return. Coach trips player! Man bites dog! The New York City tabloids covered the incident, of course, and the video of Alosi’s blindside cheap shot traveled all over the web. Almost as strange as the trip itself, the Dolphins actually won the game. This, too, signaled some kind of bizarre rupture in the fabric of the space-time continuum.
When I walked into our Brooklyn apartment after my failed attempt to purchase wine with my debit card, I discovered my wife, pale with worry, staring at the screen of our laptop. “Someone’s stealing our money!” she whispered, frantic but quiet. She didn’t want to wake the baby. My wife was on hold, the phone cradled to her ear, trying to get through to the bank. In the past three hours, a faceless stranger in Philadelphia had spent $3,500 of our money at a shopping mall 95 miles away from where we sat. We could see it all there on the screen, fraudulent charges stacked in neat rows revealing the time, amount and location of every transaction. The anonymous thief even spent $6.50 at the food court, taking his (or her?) sweet time, grabbing a bite to eat—on my tab. Why not? He (or she) must have gotten hungry, spending other people’s money like that. In my mind, I pictured the thief as a slovenly man seated at a counter in a generic food court, bending over a cafeteria tray, shopping bags scattered around his thick, ungainly ankles. But then I realized that you can’t get much food for $6.50, so I pictured someone skinny, parsimonious, a driven, efficient identity robber picking at a stolen salad.
A week later, after a series of agonizing phone calls and an in-person visit to my bank branch (my wife had to be there, too, because we have a joint account, and it took so long to open up a new account that the bottle I’d brought along ran out and my wife had to breastfeed our baby right there at the bank, but that’s another story), I eventually wound up in an interview room in the 72nd police precinct in Brooklyn. While I sat there alone in the police station, filling out paperwork, I heard a pair of detectives bantering in the hall:
“Nah, fuck it, if you don’t want to give to the toy drive, it’s fine. Just some kid without a present on Christmas day. Not a problem.”
“Go fuck yourself, okay? I didn’t know about the toy drive.”
“I totally understand! The signs have only been up by the front desk for the last month and a half. Fuck it, whatever, it’s only Christmas.”
“I’m going to bring a toy.”
“Don’t tell me—I don’t care.”
“I’m going to bring a fucking toy! What should I bring?”
“Forget about it. I guess if you really want to, though, you can just imagine being a kid on Christmas morning with nothing. What would you want?”
“Thanks. Thank you for the thought experiment. I will bring a fucking toy.”
For a decade now, I’ve lived in New York City. For most of that time I’ve been fairly certain that the New Jersey Nets would move to their new digs near my first apartment in Brooklyn before the Knicks made the play-offs again. But now—now anything seems possible. The Knicks are a real basketball team again, even if the Celtics and the Heat broke their winning streak. Strangers can reach out and steal money I’ve saved for my kid. Coaches can knock down players in the middle of a game. These violations should not be possible, yet when examined closely, the rules, boundaries and virtual shields that protect us from such breaches seem flimsy indeed. The most consoling words my wife and I heard that week were variations of, “You’re not alone—this is happening to more and more people.” Now my information is out there—my Social Security number, old passwords, even my mother’s maiden name.
Did you see the collapse of the Metrodome in Mineapolis? Unmanned cameras caught the whole thing: a pillowy ceiling, like the arcing inflatable inside of a zeppelin, starts to quiver like a gelatin sculpture, straining under an unseen burden. The first narrow rift opens in the expanse of gray fabric, unleashing a line of water and snow that splashes down on the green turf far below. Then, a moment or two later, the manmade sky above the empty stadium seats really starts to fall—a feathery ton of white snow pours in serene profusion from the torn dome and makes a 20-yard-long blotch of cold muck on the field. That’s it. No ball, no players, no fans, no game. Just winter breaking through the roof.
I don’t know who stole my identity. It might have been Russian or Ukrainian or Nigerian cyber-crooks, it might have been the server at a restaurant with a pocket skimmer who ripped my credit card information. Nothing personal. Just business. But lately, just in time for the holidays, I’ve been thinking about the malignant spirit that is out there in the world, or at least in Philadelphia, in a food court, where someone brought to his or her lying lips $6.50 worth of food-court nibbles on a chilly evening in early December.
