for Kit Schluter

“And stay out!”

It was just like the cartoons: two hands and a boot kicking the man out the door and headlong across the sidewalk into the gutter, where he landed with a sickening thud. The door slammed theatrically. The man lay in a heap groaning, as I hurried to his side to help him, unsteadily, to his feet.

The man had scraped his chin and forehead on the sidewalk. I took the handkerchief from the breast pocket of his dingy suit and dabbed at the oozing wounds. He looked dazed, though his face would have looked haggard at the best times.

“What happened?” I asked. His gaze suddenly snapped into focus.

“Step foot!” he cried. “Step foot!”

The man was clearly mad.

“It’s ok,” I said, drawing him along by the elbow. “Lemme buy you a coffee.”

We entered a nearby Starbucks. The manager was on us in a flash.

“Not you!” she said, glaring at him. “Not today!”

It was worse than I thought. I led him to the Starbucks across the street. Here he was unknown. I deposited him at a table and bought us a couple coffees. When I returned he was blotting the scrape on his forehead with his handkerchief. He clutched the coffeecup eagerly, almost crushing it as he drank with a trembling hand.

“What happened?”

“Step foot!” he nearly shouted. Then, lowering his voice and whispering bitterly: “Step foot!” He ran his fingers through his hair.

“What do you mean, ‘step foot’?”

“Exactly!” the man cried, his eyes shining in triumph. “What does it mean? Not a goddamn thing!” This again almost shouted, but the man grew suddenly aware of his surroundings, and looked around, afraid of attracting attention. Restraining himself with an effort, he hissed out: “Not a goddamn thing.”

He took a gulp of coffee and seemed to settle down.

“I was once,” he began, “like you —”

“I doubt it,” I said, though I quickly sensed this wasn’t a dialog.

“— a productive member of society, with a job, no, a career, successful even, in my own way. Making it! Sure, I bemoaned the increasing vulgarity of both language and manners, but I didn’t kid myself, I was part of it too. It’s just life now, end of story, and not some Argentine novella type story, either.”

“Christ, is this a millenni —”

“Idioms got mangled, turned into initials, became little pictures, then little pictures that moved. I LOL’d it up with the best of them. Had to; life was faster and that’s what it took to keep up.

“Then one day I noticed this phrase, step foot. It was in some trashy publication, like Hollywood Life, some celebrity gossip thing I read online at work, and I probably thought, “This simpleton doesn’t know how to write,” because the phrase is set foot, and only a TV-recapping fuckwitted fool of a Hollywood Life writer could possibly imagine the phrase was step foot. Step foot? As opposed to what: Step head? Step hand? You set foot in a place. Or you step into, on, over, wherever, it doesn’t matter, step means you use your fucking foot, you fucking fuckwit!

“Normally, such evidence of decayed literacy would only cause me fleeting annoyance, and I would move on with my day, but this was different. There was something positively revolting about the redundancy. And I no sooner had noticed the phrase than I began to see it — not everywhere at first, but more like a rash gradually spreading over the course of several years. But each time I encountered it, in increasingly respectable publications, The Atlantic, let’s say, or Harper’s Bazaar, my almost physical revulsion grew. I started making involuntary noises, audible, I was sure, outside my cubicle and definitely noticed on the subway. I had to stop reading my phone in public lest people think I’m crazy, but then not being on your phone makes people think you’re crazy.

“The phrase spread like an insidious disease that only I could detect, while my own symptoms grew increasingly alarming. Then one day at work, at the very end of an article about Miami’s Little Havana in the New York Times, I read: ‘it has a lot to offer travelers looking to experience Cuban culture without having to step foot off the lower 48.’ Now I’d encountered the phrase in the Times before, but as reported dialog — Marco Rubio, for example, debating Donald Trump in the Republican primary and vowing to end DACA ‘as soon as I step foot into the Oval Office’ — and granted this was only in the travel section, but seeing the phrase uninflected in 9-pt. Gray Lady provoked a violent spasm within me. I felt my nostrils flare, and air filled my lungs until I thought my chest would burst. My head was thrown back, my mouth opened, and out came the most hideous scream I had ever heard, morbid and wrenching, like the howls of a thousand Nosferatus caught outside at sunrise and bursting into putrid flames. A scream of terror and death.

“I immediately lost consciousness, only to awaken some time later in a hospital room, where a doctor was frowning over my chart. Afraid we don’t know what happened, never heard anything like it, some sort of episode, all the useless verbiage of a man of science confounded by phenomena blathered from his mouth, but I knew what had happened, or at least what made it happen. I had crossed some sort of toxic threshold with the phrase step foot. I knew I could never lay eyes on it again, or else I would fall victim to its dreaded physical side effects.

“But it was impossible! They were understanding at work the second time it happened, but after the third time, I was let go. The scream was worse every time. I was bruising ribs and cracking glass. It’s been years of torment since. I have lost four jobs, five wives, six boyfriends, seven apartments, eight teeth, nine therapists! Short of not reading at all, I can’t avoid the phrase. It forces itself on me. I can’t make myself forget how to read!”

“Horseshit!” I said.

The man was so startled he crushed his cup altogether.

“What?” he rasped.

“It’s a common mistake,” I said, pulling up the Times on my phone and popping “step foot” into the search. “The phrase step foot has appeared in the New York Times . . . 153 times. Look.” I held out my phone but it was like I’d offered Dracula a basket of garlic fries. He recoiled in horror.

“Well, trust me; it’s one fifty-three. It’s an old mistake too. All the way back to . . .” I sorted the results. “. . . 1858, it seems.”

The man looked at me with barely restrained hate. His neck veins bulged.

“Reported!” he cried. He looked around again, and hissed in a lower voice. “The 1858 reference is language reported over telegraph from Syracuse of the Liberty Party platform protesting the Fugitive Slave Act.”

I looked at my phone. He was right!

“You don’t think I checked, imbecile, back when I could stand to?”

“Fine,” I said, “1885 then”:

To these charges the electric wires which are to explode the mine are attached, and during the operation of putting them in place and thereafter until the time of their designated use no person other than the Government officers and workmen will be allowed to step foot within the limits of the Flood Rock excavation.

“That’s the reporter,” I said, “not the reported.”

He glared at me.

“It’s just a harmless mistake,” I said. “Christ, even FDR says it in a radio address in 1944.”

“He couldn’t walk!” the man almost shouted.

“He could talk,” I said.

Suddenly, the anger left him; he sighed, and held his head in his hands.

“How many times,” he asked, “does step foot appear in the Times prior to 1989?”

I counted: “Twenty-seven.”

“Twenty-seven times. Of those, three are accidental juxtapositions, like the reference to a ‘two-step foot rest’ in 1947, and one is a 1913 rerun of a 1903 puff piece about men at ladies’ lunchrooms. So it’s really 23 times, in the first 137 years of the New York Times.”

“What happened in ’89? Taylor Swift?”

That aforementioned look of barely restrained hate flashed across his face before he sighed wearily.

“Historians will one day study why the Reagan Era was strangely immune to the ravages of the phrase, but the fact remains that step foot disappears from the paper between 1980 and 1989. Since then, the phrase has appeared 126 times.” He pounded his fist on the table. “It’s only been 30 years!”

This last outburst definitely turned a few heads in our direction, but the man didn’t seem to notice.

“It’s killing me!” he hissed.

I took a long, slow slug of coffee and switched from the Times to my Notes app. I started typing as furiously as I could using just my thumbs.

“Look,” I said, “I’m a poet; you just need a poem to fix you up. Here . . . ”

I offered my phone again. After a moment’s hesitation, he reached for it, still eyeing me warily.

On my Notes app, I’d thumbed out the following bit of doggerel:

staring down
the passage of time
everyone knows
painful phrases

forgetting the city
of language is subject
only to the rule of
temporary endurance

He frowned, the way most people do when they read a poem.

“I don’t get it,” he said, poring over the screen.

“It’s an acrostic,” I said.

I’m uncertain how long I was unconscious. When I awoke, I was in a hospital room, where a doctor was frowning over my chart.

“Never seen anything like it,” she said. Her voice sounded faint, like she was speaking behind a pane of glass, or I’d just attended a rock concert. I closed my eyes and tried to remember what had happened. I had a fleeting image in my mind of the man looking at me in an agony of fear as his mouth dropped open. Then it all went black.

Over the next several days as my hearing returned to normal, through conversations with doctors, nurses, and a pair of homicide detectives, I pieced together what happened. The man had had another episode, a final episode. A large sonic boom had been recorded in Midtown Manhattan. The windows of the Starbucks had shattered, people were hurt, and the man himself had been almost wholly incinerated, leaving behind a few charred remains and a bloody handkerchief. My phone had been reduced to ashes, so my role in the incident remained mercifully concealed. I professed to be as shocked as everyone. Never seen him before, just a poor ol’ crazy guy I bought a cup of coffee, that sort of thing. The detectives believed me. They did ask, however, about the search recorded on my nytimes account not long before the disaster.

“Just working on a poem,” I said.

“Some poem,” one of them said.

I wasn’t a suspect. But the episode weighed no less heavily on my thoughts. It made no sense. As I walked the streets, recovering from the ordeal, I found myself still arguing with the man.

“But footstep is a word,” I said.

“That’s to distinguish step from stair, or measure. That makes sense!” he said.

It was useless, but I couldn’t make myself stop.

One night, after hours of aimless walking, I found myself walking down 6th Avenue. I stopped at the corner of West 48th, and stood in a small crowd, waiting for the light to change. I closed my eyes, and tried to concentrate on breathing, surrounded by a hive of a million urban noises. When I heard the light change, I opened my eyes.

It was there floating across my field of vision in lurid red letters, on the news ticker on the side of the News Corp. Building:

Trump is first sitting US president to step foot in North Korea

I fell to my knees in the crosswalk. I felt my nostrils flare and the air rushed into my lungs so quickly I thought my ribs would break. I threw back my head and howled.