The way home from Sally’s reeks with garbage, piss, and sweet rot pushing up through the sidewalk. I’m not much better. Hair stringy with grease, breath sour from ginger beer, I’ve danced off the week to a bar mitzvah medley of Def Leppard and the Black Eyed Peas.

The white bricks of my building cut into view. The front steps reel beneath me, and the front door—

It’s not usually closed. The second-floor entrepreneurs wad it with coupons and takeout menus so it’s always propped open for patrons. A takeout deliverer must have flubbed the system, or the moms on the ground floor were fed up.

My keys stick to my pocket—I got splashed in a contentious and life-affirming game of pong. I’m wearing more PBR than I will ever deign to drink. I go to unlock the door and hear a man’s raspy Hey.

I turn.

He has one foot on the steps, where he sits for hours. His yellowed eyes drink everything in: the passage of chihuahuas and revving of motorbikes, the misting hydrants and endless fireworks, the boys playing reggaeton and the men playing dominos. We’ve crossed gazes before, exchanged nods, but never spoken.

I say Hey back.

“I like your belt.”

The buckle winks in the streetlamps, a silvery metal with Western etching. The man raises his finger, mounts the next step.

“Thanks,” I say, my fist itching around my keys.

He wavers like a mallard on a rippling pond. I can’t tell what he smells like, what he wants. My zipper glints just below his sightline. He is smaller than I am, mid-fifties, wiry. I don’t know which way to hold my keys, if dread counts as premeditation, if the spillage at Sally’s bodes more. I don’t want to think this way. His finger advances.

His touches my buckle. I stare down—we both do—and as the uncertainties of our maskless, drunken, two a.m. encounter crowd us like hungry pigeons, it occurs to me that the stillness between us is all around. There are no block parties or fireworks, no throat-ripping screams. No revelers, agitators, or witnesses. In the muggy marble of darkness and artificial lighting, I feel the lingering warmth of other stillnesses: the tabby sunning outside the bodega, the vanilla wafting from Bakery Mocana, the hydrant kids ducking through rainbow mist.

I’m supposed to be home, showered, locked up, dreaming, but when the finger retracts I am not ready to go in.