Do NOT Try This at Home.

In London I walked the city streets at night. There is little peace in a flat housing five young women, even in the throes of study hour, and I needed my regular dose of psychic and physical space to continue to function normally. I was warned repeatedly that walking alone at night in London was a quick way to get beaten and mugged or, being a woman, worse, and even while I accepted this intellectually, I ignored them. I liked to see the city pulse with the echo of the crowds after all decent people had returned to the familiar solitude of their homes, to let my eyes skip from the litter of food wrappers and glass bottles to my fellow insomniacs and not-so-fellow skeezy quasi-criminal types, to shroud myself in the childhood comfort-blanket of anonymity. But most of all I wanted to escape from the center of my own life.

I've always had a bad habit of people watching. I like to observe and analyze, but, well, staring is rude. So I try to be subtle, though it's hard to pretend to be looking at an advertisement for half-off cosmetics in the display window of the drugstore when the street is empty except for you and the other guy. Humans do that instinctively--seek out the closest sign of sentience to compartmentalize as friend, foe, or indifferent, especially in places that are all steel beams and concrete slabs and tinted windows. You look for life where you can find it.

I saw him a block away on the other side of the street, leaning against a phone booth and smoking a cigarette. I quickly discovered upon arriving in the U.K that almost everyone smokes in Europe despite the ever-so-succinct label on every pack of tobacco product that proclaims "SMOKING KILLS", so this would not have been unusual except that he wore the black, frock-coat-like rekel and trilby hat of an Orthodox Jew in the middle of his work week. He even had the peyos, the traditional uncut sideburns which always reminded me of the way girls back home curled their hair for prom--sleek, long, and perfectly cylindrical. He began to pace back and forth, but only two steps in either direction. As I got closer I could see that his eyes couldn't stay still, and that his cigarette twitched in his fingers. He might have been mumbling to himself, because his lips were moving. Then I saw him dash into the phone booth where he picked up the phone and froze, staring straight ahead.

I stopped too, to watch him. He stared for a long time, a couple of minutes at least, and I realized I'd seen the behavior before. The inside of London's phone booths are plastered from sidewalk to roof with escort ads using varying degrees of explicitness. While none of them are tasteful, some bother to artfully hide the offensive parts of the female anatomy with clothing or poses, while others, with a woman's legs spread dramatically, pixelated just enough to keep the ad from being torn down (and probably taken home). It wasn't the first time I'd caught a guy casually perusing the display, gripping the telephone like a bright blue plastic alibi.

I was right across the street from him now, forgetting to be subtle, so when he snapped his head around and looked me in the eyes I didn't even bother to pretend I hadn't been watching him. He dashed out of the phone booth and power-walked up a block to skulk under an awning and continue sucking on his cigarette. I turned around and walked in the opposite direction. That moment of tension had already been enough for me. Going the same way, even on the opposite side of the street, felt too much like confrontation, even though it was the way back to my apartment. By the time I came back that way he had gone.

Even as a Christian, I have a soft spot for Orthodox Judaism, because I maintain my respect for people who can manage such faith in the face of a world of chaos that mocks them. I've always pictured them as the Librarians of the Universe, keepers of old words and eternal truths. Somewhere along the path of whimsy, however, I'd forgotten that they had to be as flawed and human as the next guy, and I walked away from that phone booth feeling disappointed, and maybe a little cheated. Disillusioned. How dare someone of a conservative religious minority struggle with something as base as lust!

I was disillusioned because I saw myself in that man. Now, the man I saw probably wasn't a rabbi (he would have been young for it, I think), but he still represented something to me that was more than a man. A spiritual dedication to something higher, if you will. He had marked himself as a man of God. And he was alone and lost in the middle of an empty street against a background of black, gripping plastic as bright a blue as life.

He was as lost as I was.