If I dont get back into Manhattan soon, somebody is going to die.

Grateful as I am to be employed during our current economic crisis, I sometimes can’t escape how very, very much I miss working in the city. I miss my daily walk to the subway, miss the mindless ease of commuting underground, miss the sensation of New York as a living, breathing, bustling ultra-scene from which I’m separated by naught but a wall.

I miss it particularly now, when temperatures are climbing and the city has started coming alive again for summertime. Long Island has none of that. It is a comparatively dull place, a land of strip malls and medical office complexes surrounded by endless asphalt parking lots. When I worked in Manhattan, I would always silently mourn my various workspaces’ lack of a window to the outside world; now, I have one, but the landscape beyond it is so blah-inducing that I never look out. It’s depressing out there.

Being one to at least try to make the best of a less-than-pleasant situation, I’ve tried to explore the surrounding area. I tried walking at first, but crossing a four-lane divided highway in order to do laps around a parking lot in New Hyde Park is possibly the only pedestrian experience more horrible than attempting to walk through Times Square on a Friday at 5:00pm. (And I say this as someone who once had her ass grabbed by a total stranger, in broad daylight, on the corner of 42nd and Broadway. We’re not talking an idle pat-pat either; the gentleman in question somehow managed to grab my whole entire ass. Like, as though it were a single, palm-sized entity. The entire thing still makes me shake my head in bafflement; he must have had simply enormous hands.)

So lately, I’ve tried to get used to the idea of going out at lunchtime, getting in a car, and driving someplace. SO. FREAKING. CRAZY.

Those of you who live anywhere but New York, Boston, London, and possibly San Francisco are probably shaking your heads in disbelief right now. I don’t blame you, but good lord, you cannot fathom how weird it is to drive a car multiple times per day after six years of commuting by subway. I used to love walking aimlessly around the city during my lunch breaks, wandering in and out of stores, eventually slipping into a little restaurant for a fabulously solitary bite to eat. Getting behind the wheel at noon feels like… cheating.

But, as the clock struck one and I plodded miserably down to the parking garage, I was determined. Just because I’m on Long Island doesn’t mean I can’t enjoy idle shopping and some good food at lunchtime, I thought. I’ll just have to find the closest thing to a New York sidewalk, someplace with a lot of shops and restaurants all in a row. Yes, that’s what I’ll do! It will be awesome!!!

And that, in case anyone is wondering, is how I ended up at the mall.

Malls are undeniably scary places, but on Long Island, in the middle of a weekday, they are EXTRA STRENGTH scary. The stench of Cinnabon, the tween-pop cover of Donna Summer’s “Hot Stuff” playing from unseen speakers overhead, the washed-out blonde ladies of leisure who are laden down with shopping bags and who wander from store to store like glassy-eyed auditionees for The Real Housewives of New York: Zombie Edition… it’s enough to give even the most stalwart shopper the heebie jeebies. I was desperately studying the mall directory and my brain was loudly informing me that This is nothing like a New York City sidewalk, you irredeemable dumbass, when I suddenly felt warm breath on the back of my neck.

I whirled around and found myself face-to-face with a short, ruddy-looking man with curly reddish hair.
“Ex-chuuuuuuuuse me,” he said with a dribblingly French accent. I looked at his cheap-but-snappy suit, his earnest expression, and the item he was holding in his hand, and realized that he had come from a nearby stand – one of those pagoda-like installations that dot the central walkways in malls and sell things like calendars, tacky glass miniatures, clip-on hair extensions, or -- in this case -- personal beauty products so mind-blowingly terrible that they cannot even make the cut for inclusion on QVC.

Oh, hell no, my brain said.

I tried to step around him.
“Sorry,” I said, “I’m in a terrible hurry.”

French stepped in time with me, cutting off my escape.
“A moment of your time, miss!” he said.
“No,” I said, stepping again. He moved with me. “Look—“ I began, desperately, then stopped when he extended his finger toward my face.

This might be a good time to start screaming, said my brain.
I stared dumbly at the finger.
“Just one moment,” he said again, and then – without a word of explanation – his pointer moved another inch forward and poked the skin under my right eye.
“What the—“
“You see, you have ze AGE SPOTS!” he crowed.
“What?!” I said.
WHAT? KILL HIM, my brain said.

“I have to go,” I said quickly.
“No!” French shouted, and grabbed my wrist, babbling a mile a minute and beginning to uncap the tube of whatever-the-hell-it-was that he held in his hand. I tried unsuccessfully to pull away as he tightened his grip and muttered, “One moment, one moment, one moment.”
“Not one moment!” I said, and then, before I could stop him, he squirted me.
“There!” he crowed.
I looked at my wrist, which was now covered in what looked like sonogram gel.
“Please,” I said, “Just wipe this off of me so I can leave.”

“NO,” said French, “I SHOW YOU THIS PRODUCT.”

He grabbed my arm with both hands and began furiously rubbing the gel into my skin. I looked down at his working hands and noticed that he had some kind of yellow fungus growing under his index finger.

See? said my brain. First you fail to kill this man, and now you’re going to have to spend hundreds of dollars on Gold Bond crème just to stop shitaki mushrooms from growing on your forearms. Are you happy? ARE YOU?

“You will see,” he kept saying. “You will see.”
“Listen, pal, I don’t want to see. I just want to--”
“Look, it exfoliates! You see how it exfoliates?!”
I looked at my wrist, where his vigorous rubbing had caused a few infinitesimal specks of skin to come loose.
“Yes, but I don’t ca—“
“You will see! Come look in ze mirror,” he said. “Come look in ze mirror at your age spots.”

Say age spot again, you frog bastard, and see what happens to you, said my brain.
“I don’t have age spots,” I said.
“Yes you do.”
“No I don’t.”
“Yes you do!”
“No I—you know what, I don’t care if I have goddamn age spots, I want you to let go of my hand! I am not buying anything from you, particularly not after this!”

I was getting loud. One of the Mall Zombies gazed impassively at me as she floated past, Starbucks cup in hand.
French had stopped rubbing my wrist.

”What did you say?” he said.
“I said I’m not buying anything from you,” I hissed.
French stared at me, his lower lip jutting out like a hurt little boy. “Why?”
I stared back.
“Why?” he said again.
“What do you mean, why? Are you… have you been here for the past three minutes?”

French dropped his death grip on my wrist, stuck a hand into his pocket, and yanked out a wad of cotton. He angrily began wiping off my arm.
“Zees is an excellent product,” he said, quietly. “I do not understand.”

I felt momentarily bad for him.
“Look,” I said, “I just don’t buy this sort of thing.”
He made a huffing sound.
“Sorry,” I said. I pulled back my arm, now free of sonogram gel but still smelling decidedly peculiar. “Sorry.”

As I turned to go, he glared at me.
"You will be sorry with your big age spots," he said.

"That's fine," I said. "My brain wants me to kill you."