Ghosts of bicycles past

I was in a hurry to get somewhere in Manhattan and I had to take my bike to get there. Normally it takes an hour or more for me to bike to the city but this time it was something like 20 minutes. I got my bike out of the basement and paused for a minute on the street. Instead of my Lemond bike, Orville, it was the too-small blue road bike I found at Binghamton on the grass one day in early spring. The brakes hardly worked, the wheels badly needed to be trued, but I was in a hurry! I threw my bag into the oversized basket in front (a new addition since I saw the bike last) and was off. On the way there the bike slowly transformed back into Orville. Midway through the transition I noticed that I was riding the old red Kabuki I bought for $25 at the bike shop on Brighton that was going out of business.

I crossed the Brooklyn Bridge, which looked more like the Verazanno Bridge that day. Everything was glowing the way it does after a thunderstorm. My destination turned out to be a weird coffee shop on the corner of a broad empty street downtown. Inside a 60 year old man was speaking at a podium about something very boring. There were three girls with short brown hair at a bench carved into the wall on the far side of the place. I carefully stepped through people seated on the floor listening to the man and sat down with them. I don't remember what we talked about, or what I did after that until the next morning.

I woke up at my house with the intent of making the same trip. I got Orville out of the basement. This time it was mostly the right bike except it was a fixed gear without any brakes. The Brooklyn Bridge was still the Verazzano Bridge. Everything was still glowing. Orville stubbornly remained a fixed gear bike.

Only one of the girls was at the coffee shop that day. As I sat down with her a metal buckle on my bag hit her head. She forced me to "kiss it to make it feel better". I pretended to be nonchalant and friendly about it but I was uncomfortable with this. Her two friends arrived in a white van outside. They honked for us to come out and we did. I started unchaining my bike from the pole. They offered to drive me home. I should have taken them up on it because my ride home was now mysteriously 3 times longer than it should have been, but I said no. I started to pedal away.