The Kernel

The War Hero

2012-01-02T13:14:00.000-08:00

It was Ron’s third tour that brought him back. The first two had been imposed, mandatory under the necessities of war and the shortage in man power. This latest was pure escapism. Ron and Alicia had begun to discuss their wedding when Ron broke the news that he had decided to return to his squad and his men, still halfway across the world.

“But our wedding…” she said, knowing that he was already somewhere else, his mind unable to fix itself around the idea.

Ron looked out onto the quiet suburban street that sat outside the window of their split-level. The leaves were beginning to change color and he realized that it was probably time to rake up the ones that had fallen and now dotted the lawn in decaying mounds of yellows and reds and browns.

“Promise me,” Alicia began, “just this last time. No more after this.”

---

Ron arrived back at base, where everything was familiar. With the distant sound of gunfire and mortars, he was once more able to sleep. With every choking morning when the temperatures rose to the 90s and 100s shortly after sunrise, he was once more able to breath.

But this time around, there was also Doug – free-wheeling, undisciplined, loud-mouthed, new to the desert, and assigned to Ron’s squad. Ron, with his brooding, disciplined countenance, and a wide, muscular, pitbullish stature, instantly found himself disliking the gaunt man and his harsh, chiseled face, his striking blue eyes.

“Hey Doc,” he’d say to Ron as he’d pull up next to him in the dining hall. The name came from one occasion when Ron correctly suggested talcum powder for a mild rash on Doug’s inner thigh and managed to quell Doug’s fear that it might be a spreading venereal disease.

Technically, Ron wasn’t a superior, so he couldn’t reprimand Doug for not saluting or being more formal with him. “Call me Ron,” is all he said, and then forcefully dug his fork into his mashed potatoes for emphasis, making the mess hall table shake.

“Doc, what do you think of this brisket today? Pretty shitty right?”

For his part, Doug refused to notice or was completely oblivious to Ron’s antipathy towards him, and would proceed to launch into long narratives about his life. After a few months, Ron knew everything there was to know about Doug’s childhood in the suburbs of Cleveland where he was the only kid from an Italian-Australian-Native American background in town, his failed first marriage to a high school sweetheart who ended up leaving him for a horror movie director who seduced her into doing softcore porn vampire movies, even the way he almost got drafted into the majors to play baseball but then screwed up his arm during a drunken arm wrestling match against an Elvis impersonator.

“The dude looked kind of chubby and weak, like the older Elvis, so I thought it was a done deal. Boy was I wrong!”

Most of Doug’s time in the Army had been spent doing desk work and making an extra buck on the side by running small-time gambling rings in bases across Europe and Asia. And apparently there were major generals who still owed Doug money for lost bets, but inevitably it was hard to collect from these people.

“If you only knew the size of the goldmine I’m sitting on…I could buy myself a nice chunk of this place and turn it into another Dubai, but one where you could drink and wear shorts and do all sorts of things without anyone breathing down your neck about it.”

Doug seemed to be someone who was in the Army out of boredom, perhaps because he had screwed up his life back at home and couldn’t figure out what else to do with himself. This, more than anything else, was why Ron couldn’t stand Doug – in Doug’s eyes, Ron’s beloved Army was a joke.

“He’s a fucking POG,” ranted Nate, another soldier in the squad, using the derogatory term for non-infantry personnel. “Don’t pay him any mind. I’m just thinking that he better not get us all shot up. Don’t those boys at central know who they’re throwing down here with us?”

Nate was referencing “the fear,” both as a generic idea and as it applied to the way the crass and obnoxious and cocksure Doug would turn into a 6’2” pillar of salt whenever they would go on their standard forays into neighboring towns to survey the scene and to gather information. Doug would hold his breath on the ride over and then hover near Ron as they spoke with villagers, all the while keeping a death grip on his rifle. The slightest odd noise would startle Doug into stiff attention and his eyes would begin to dart around in their sockets, trying to see through walls and deep into narrow alleyways and past the smiles and nods of the villagers who would politely assist the Americans one day and aid the enemy the next.

“Your friend, he is OK?” asked one bearded man who received regular visits from Ron’s squad. His beard was an unusual shade of orange and rolled down towards his chest like the wave of a sputtering flame.

“He’s fine. He’s just not used to all of the sand.”

The man laughed. “Then maybe he is in the wrong job.”

Ron understood that Doug’s condition was a danger to the squad and felt it his responsibility to speak with his commanders about getting Doug transferred out, back to a desk job or some other forgettable role in a distant corner of the Army bureaucracy. But the best he could manage were assurances that the commanders would look into, and as far as he could tell, Doug didn’t seem to be going anywhere.

---

“There are so many stars!” Doug said one evening as the two men found themselves on a night watch shift.

“They’ve always been there. You’ve never noticed them before?” asked Ron.

“I have. I just react that way every time I see them. Makes you think about how insignificant we all are, huh?”

In the darkness, Ron rolled his eyes at the cliché.

“Are you afraid of anything?” Doug asked after a few moments of silence, of them staring off into the dull shine of battles in the distance, the soft lights that in any other place in the world could have been the collective glow of TVs turned on to the local 9 o’clock news.

“What do you mean?”

“Doc, you gotta be afraid of something. Like dying.”

“I’m not afraid of dying.”

“So then what? Zombies? Enclosed spaces? Heights?”

“I don’t know.”

“Come on.”

Ron thought about it for a moment. “Maybe feeling empty. Feeling like you’re dead.”

“Feeling like you’re dead? Like what happens after you die? Like you’re afraid that it’s all just one big black hole of nothingness?”

“No, it has nothing to do with death,” answered Ron. “I guess I’m afraid of being alive and feeling nothing. Just cold, blank.”

“So…you are afraid of zombies?”

Ron sighed and Doug nodded as if he understood.

“Well I’m just afraid of dying.” Doug added. “Mine is simple.”

The men stopped talking and listened, so that soon all they heard was the hollow sound of the sand being kicked up by the wind and ricocheting against the steel and canvas and stone of their little base among the dunes.

---

It was a few days later that the squad came under attack. They were once again visiting the bearded man when they began to take gunfire from neighboring rooftops.

“Cover, cover!” yelled Nate, as he led them behind a burned out wall that still held the skeleton door frame and windows of the house it had once been.

Doug instantly fell onto one knee and cowered.

“Up! Now!” commanded Ron as he pulled at Doug and got him to his feet.

They ran behind the rest of the squad and just as they were about to get to the wall, Ron felt a flood of pain rip through his leg. He dropped to the ground and his dead weight dragged Doug down as well.

There was a moment of confusion where Doug didn’t know whether he had been shot himself. But then he saw the growing pool of blood alongside him.

“Fuck!” Doug began to scream like a siren, spacing his expletives in timed intervals.

He grabbed Ron by his pack and began pulling him towards the wall as bullets smacked into the rocks around them and tossed up little clouds of dirt and debris into the air. A couple of the other men in the squad stepped out and began to shoot at the snipers poised on the roof, giving Doug extra cover as he pulled Ron behind the wall.

“Call it in!” he heard someone shout.

There were bursts of machine gun fire that continued for a few more moments, but then the thunder of jet planes drowned everything out. They came like a crash of horses from the east and whistled as they passed overhead. In their wake there was quiet, followed by an earthquake rumble tearing through the ground and then a delayed ripple of explosions that temporarily severed consciousness from body before violently hurtling it back.

Ron lay on his back and stared up at the open sky above him. He felt a tug at his leg but he didn’t have the energy to look down to see what was being done. Somewhere that seemed far away he thought he could hear Alicia voice. She was saying something to him, something mundane about doing the dishes or taking out the trash. But her voice quickly became severed, overcome by the sound of a man crying something in Arabic. The anguish of the man’s shouts filled his ears as he drifted into the empty space, the blackness of it all.

---

“The good news is you’re not dead!” said Doug as he stood over Ron’s bed. “And you get to go home,” he added morbidly.

Ron shrugged. “This was going to be my last tour anyway.”

“Turns out they clipped you pretty high up on your leg. More ass than leg really, if you ask me. Although I won’t tell anyone.” Doug winked at him furtively.

After a few weeks in the hospital, Ron was back on his feet, with little to show for his injuries other than a small limp and a standard issue Army cane.

“They want to give me a medal, can you believe it?” asked Doug.

Ron couldn’t believe it. In a few mindless seconds, Doug had gone from being the guy who would likely get everyone killed to being a body-dragging hero. Ron glanced at Doug and was struck by the reality of what had happened.

“I never thanked you for what you did.”

Doug waved away his comment. “I know I’m mostly a coward, so whatever I did out there, I don’t really know where it came from.” He looked up at the ceiling. “Maybe it was just a moment of divine inspiration.” Doug smiled at him. “Who knows?”

“Whatever it was-” Ron said and then let his words drift off.

Ron knew what it was like to take a life, to fire his gun and watch something heavy drop in the distance. There was an intellectual sense of success that came with it, the thought that he had done his job and was helping his side complete its mission. But there was nothing beyond that. No feeling of joy or sadness, no regret, nothing that was definable as either good or bad, light or heavy. There was the plain reality of the act, the mathematical, statistical significance of body counts and the basic human striving towards being successful at what you do. Beyond that, all was blank, flat-line.

But what was it like to save someone? If death was the ultimate subtractor, then here was Doug, the opposing equalizer, who now seemed to radiate with some new-found power. Ron longed to feel what it meant to be on Doug’s side of the equation. Maybe that’s what had been missing, the thing he had been searching for all this time in the face of the hollowness inside of him. And now it seemed that he would never find out.

“What’s up with this cane? You need to get something a little more stylish and bad-ass. This is the kind of shit they give grandmas.” Doug patted him on the shoulder for reassurance. “Don’t worry buddy, we’ll find you something a little more suitable.”

Doug seemed to linger in the hospital a lot for someone that still had his regular duties to attend to, and each time he arrived with a new piece of get-well mail that had come from back home. Most everything was from Alicia who insisted on sending him cards and stuffed animals even though they IMed each other and video chatted when they could. But Ron often found himself getting frustrated with the attention, preferring to be left alone to think about the fact that he was never going to get a chance to come back to the squad.

“Check this out,” Doug said one day, and presented Ron with a wooden cane topped by a miniature skull. “It’s in the shape of a falcon head,” he noted. “And the cane itself is a piece of palm driftwood.” He waited for Ron to react to this information. “Do you know how hard it is to find driftwood in this country? It’s like gold.”

“Thanks,” said Ron, and placed the cane alongside his pack which was already filled for the return trip.

“Go ahead, test it out!”

Ron grudgingly pulled himself from the bed and hobble around the room. His normal gait had mostly returned to him, but he still made a show of using the cane.

“Awesome, totally awesome.” Doug nodded at Ron as if the cane had been his own handiwork.

“I’m sure,” said Ron.

Doug laughed and slapped his leg. “I’m gonna miss you Doc, with all of your seriousness. You’ve been my one only real friend here.”

Ron shrugged, not knowing how else to respond to the sentiment.

“But this is good for you! You’re going home, you’re getting married soon. That’s great. Real great. And your leg should be good as new soon enough. A lot to look forward to. I’m telling you Doc, you have it made.”

Ron nodded and ran his hand along the contours of the cane’s skull-shaped handle.

“I wish I knew what I was going to do when I got out. I wish I had it all figured out like you do.”

“Why don’t you come stay with Alicia and me when your tour is done?” Ron said, surprising himself with the suggestion. “Until you figure out what your next move is.”

“Are you serious?”

“It’s the least I can do.”

---

When Ron’s plane landed he disembarked in his neatly pressed uniform and found Alicia standing with his parents, his sister, and a big cluster of multi-colored balloons. They all took turns hugging him. He nodded along and smiled.

“What is that horrible thing?” Alicia asked, pointing to his cane.

“My wooden leg,” Ron joked.

“It’s so ugly.”

“It was a gift from the man who saved me,” he said pointedly.

Back at home Ron began to slowly reacclimatize to the world he had left behind only a few months earlier. During the day, when Alicia went off to work, he took his cane and strolled the suburban streets of their town, abandoned at midday. Sometime he walked in one direction for miles, precariously limping his way across the narrow highway and over to the state park by the river. He sat by the river bank and let the breeze flush over him before turning around and heading home in time to catch Alicia pulling into the driveway.

Alicia tried to coax Ron into conversation but mostly Ron preferred to sit in silence, with just the clanking of silverware or the dull hum of the TV filling the space between them. At night he lay awake and listened as she would begin to snore lightly, and then, after a moment, gulp at the air as if she were drowning, before finally catching her breath, inhaling deeply, and falling silent, only to repeat the entire sequence a few minutes later. Sometimes she would twitch as she fell asleep or when she was in the middle of a dream. He wondered what sorts of things she dreamed about.

On occasion he would crawl out of bed in the middle of the night and walk onto their front patio to stare up at the stars above their house. Nothing seemed as clear here, the haze of surrounding light pollution and smog combined to cloud the view and none of the stars were luminous in the way he had seen them before. Still, he strained his eyes and looked, searched, for the things that had been familiar.

“Why are you telling this to me now?” Alicia asked in hushed anger. “Why didn’t you consult me?”

Ron considered her but didn’t say anything. He turned his attention back to the white cloth in his hand. Then he dipped the cloth in a container of polish and proceeded to rub at the black boots propped on the kitchen table.

“You can’t just go and invite some stranger to stay with us without asking me.”

“He’s not a stranger.”

“Where’s he even going to sleep? On the couch?”

“Yes, on the couch,” answered Ron, and then stopped to consider the effect made by the polish. “Perfect,” he said quietly.

“Can you stop doing that and look at me for two minutes?”

Ron released the boots and turned to look at Alicia.

“So?” she asked.

“So what?” Ron sighed. Alicia didn’t understand. “You don’t understand.”

“I don’t understand what?”

It was pointless trying to explain.

Alicia bit her lip, she didn’t know if this was a battle worth fighting. She tried to tread carefully around Ron during the weeks since his return, giving him the space to get comfortable with their life together again, being patient while he lazed around the house and sometimes stared off blankly at nothing in particular, waiting on him to decide that it was finally time to start looking for a job again. She had even gone out of her way to call up a few of Ron’s old friends and arrange for some part-time work for the time being, until he was ready for a more permanent position. But when she offered him the neat list which noted all of the opportunities she had found, Ron just thanked her and never bothered to call anybody back.

“For how long?” she asked.

“How long what?” asked Ron distractedly.

“How long will he need to stay with us?”

“I don’t know,” he answered.

---

Alicia took a dislike to Doug as soon as she met him, in much the same way that Ron had. Doug tried to be charming by kissing Alicia’s hand when she extended it to him, but it just ended up disgusting her. That first evening g while they sat around having dinner, Doug excused himself before dessert because of a “chick” he had met on the bus into town who he was going to “make it with” that night.

“Don’t wait up mom and dad,” he added as he left the house.

That night Alicia lay awake alongside Ron as they listened to Doug return. He bumped into tables and knocked keys and change onto the floor. Then there was the sound of commotion, and the house began to throb with a steady, sustained rhythm of movement.

“Are you hearing this?” she asked Ron in the darkness. “Is this seriously happening?”

Somewhere below them, fabric was being rubbed vigorously, the couch squeaked, someone scratched at the walls, and then moaned.

Doug kept saying that he didn’t want to impose, but soon after arriving, he turned the house into a staging ground for his get-rich-quick schemes. First there were piles of old Playboy magazines that he tried selling as collectors’ items on eBay. Then he rented a bunch of computers and tried to simultaneously play ten games of online poker, but that only ended up blowing the fuses. One day Alicia returned home from work to find that Doug had sectioned off pieces of the first and second floors, as well as the garage, as temporary office spaces that he was renting out to local entrepreneurs.

“Get them out of here!” she fumed.

Later, she found Ron sitting out on the grass in the backyard, the skull cane laying next to him.

Ron squinted at her. He twisted onto his side and rose to his feet, picking up the cane and leaning onto it.

Alicia grabbed at it.

“You don’t need a cane. You only have a mild limp. I don’t know why you keep insisting on walking around with this thing. Stop acting like you’re a cripple.”

Ron wavered on his feet, he looked vulnerable without the cane.

“Things need to change Ron. I’ve been patient but I can’t keep doing this. I need him out of the house now. I need you to start being a normal human being.” She said it calmly and directly, without anger or frustration. It was just a matter of fact, an order.

Ron’s silence in the face of Alicia’s request seemed to represent his assent, but instead he found himself frustrated and angry. How could Alicia ask him to throw Doug onto the street? How could she expect him to treat a hero, the man who had saved his life, so dismissively? Doug had become a brother, he was family now, whether Alicia liked it or not. But she just didn’t understand any of that, didn’t know what it meant to be on the base with the men and go into combat with them and face the prospect of killing and dying on a daily basis. Everything was simple here, without risk. Life consisted of eating and working and mindless, polite conversation, until it was time to close your eyes and go to sleep. There was no purpose to any of it, the monotony had no beginning or end. It continued for the sake of itself, feeding and perpetuating its own existence without any meaning or intention underlying any of it. Nothing made sense here, it seemed illogical and pointless in a way that war with its winning and losing, living or dying, didn’t.

As Ron stewed in contemplation for a few days, trying to figure out what he would do with Doug, Doug surprised them with an announcement.

“The winds carry me west,” he said during dinner later that week as he cut through his steak and his knife squeaked against the ceramic dinner plate.

“What does that mean?” asked Alicia.

“It means I am leaving you two wonderful, hospitable people. Tomorrow. I have a train to catch.” Doug paused, for effect. “To destiny.”

“Oh really?” asked Alicia, perking up, her eyes brightening.

“We’ll be sorry to see you go,” added Ron.

“I gotta do this Doc. Big business opportunity waiting for me. Keep your fingers crossed.”

“They’ve been crossed for a while,” Alicia murmured under her breath.

“Can someone give me a ride to the station in the afternoon?” asked Doug as he picked at a kernel of pepper stuck in his teeth.

---

With Doug out of the house, and on Alicia’s more firm insistence, Ron dug up the list of part-time jobs that she had put together for him and called up some of his old friends. He began imposing new routines to make himself, once more, an active, involved member of society.

“You’ll see,” she said. “It might seem strange now but you just need to start working and doing regular things and then you’ll get used to it all again.”

Get used to what? A life he resented? And to what end? For what purpose? But he went along grudgingly, if only to please Alicia and make her stop constantly hovering over him.

“And can you please throw that awful cane out?” she added, thinking that she was beginning to swing the tide of the battle.

Ron promised to take it out to the trash but secretly shoved it to the back of the broom closet where he knew she would never find it unless she went looking.

On weekends Ron and Alicia would sometime go to the movies, or head through town to get pizza and ice cream, or even walk along the pier and watch the moored boats rock together with the waves.

“You can see the stars better here than you can from outside the house,” Ron noted.

“I’m cold,” said Alicia, ignoring him.

“There’s Orion.” He paused. “And there’s Venus. It’s bright tonight.”

“Can you put your arm around me?” she asked, because it seemed to her that she had to ask for everything with him, remind him of everything, of what you were supposed to do when you were sitting next to someone and they told you they were cold.

Ron draped his arm around Alicia and let his hand drop limply against her shoulder. Alicia closed her eyes and leaned into him, breathing in his smell.

---

Soon, Ron and Alicia began planning their wedding again, and after some back and forth disagreement on the subject, Doug was added to the guest list.

Against Alicia’s hopes that he had vanished from the face of the earth and despite Doug’s failure to send back an RSVP card, Doug showed up to the wedding a few months later. It was the first time they had seen him since he had moved out. But there he was, tan, dressed in a sharp pin-stripe suit, with a tall woman in 4-inch heels and a short sequined dress giggling into his neck. His blue eyes stood in handsome contrast to his browned skin.

“To Doug,” said Ron when he toasted the guests and thanked them for coming, “the man who saved my life.”

Doug raised his scotch and proceeded to drain the glass.

Later Doug came over to where Ron and Alicia were seated and toasted them in return, “You guys are great,” he said, slurring his words, “Alicia, you’re great.”

“Thank you,” she said, leaning away from him as he stuck his face forward.

“And Doc, you’re great too.”

Ron nodded.

“Salut!” he shouted and took a sip of his refilled scotch. “You took me in when I had nowhere else to go, and you put up with all of my entrepreneurial ventures.” He looked at them and paused for effect. “And that means a lot to me. I just want you to know that.”

Alicia forced a tight-lipped smile. “Yes, ‘entrepreneurial’.” She looked at her nails.

“I hope you guys have a great life. You deserve it! I hope you go on to have oodles of babies. Little Alicias and little Docs.” He giggled to himself and poked Ron with his finger.

“Thank you,” Alicia said with finality and waited for him to leave.

“Doc, can I ask you something?” Doug began again, turning to Ron.

“Sure Doug, what is it?”

“Outside. Private. Just one minute.” He stuck up his index finger to hammer home his point. He showed the finger to Alicia. “One minute. I promise.”

Ron stood and led Doug out into the hallway.

“She’s great too, that one over there,” said Doug, indicating his date. She was seated at the table and checking her makeup in a little vanity mirror. “Margie.”

“She seems nice.”

“She’s my business partner’s sister. Totally unexpected! I thought I was just going to Oregon to make some money but then I meet her too. Two for one!” Doug took another moment to absorb the site of Margie – who now scratched her leg and pulled at a stocking – to let her presence sink in. Then he turned to look at Ron and placed his hand on Ron’s shoulder.

“Wow Doc, it’s been a while.”

“Yes,” Ron said wistfully.

“Seems like only yesterday we were fighting the bad guys, protecting liberty and freedom. ‘The American Way!’ And now here we are, like none of it ever happened.” Doug bit his lip. “Just feels like something is missing.”

Ron nodded slowly. He had spent the last few months trying to ignore it all, bury the pulse of reality that kept beating underneath the things he made himself do and say so that he could lead a “normal” life. But with one sentence, Doug reminded him of everything he had been feeling.

Doug took another sip of his scotch. “We were brothers out there. You know? We had each others’ backs.”

“It’s not the same here.”

“No,” Doug said stiffly. “It’s not.” He took a moment to collect his thoughts. He sighed. He shifted uncomfortably on his feet and then decided to drop his weight onto a leather bench. “Which is why this business thing has been such a wake-up call…It feels like the first real thing I’ve ever done – you know what I mean – and I really want it to work out. I believe in it.”

“How is all of that going?”

“Wonderful! Just wonderful! Lot of potential.”

“What is it exactly?”

“It’s complicated. Really technical stuff. My partner is an engineer.”

“What sort of engineer?”

“Mechanical or something. Biomechanical. No, wait…Medical! Biomedical? Biomedical!”

“Sounds interesting.”

“Thanks, yeah. It is interesting. It’s just that this is a sensitive time right now. Hit or miss. We’re right on the cusp of making it big but we’re a little short on resources. And wherever I’ve looked for help, from people I consider friends, from my own family, I’ve gotten nothing. Would you believe it? They have no vision. They don’t understand.” Doug leaned forward and rested his elbows on his knees.

“It’s hard for them to understand. They weren’t there.”

“No one gets it, you know? But I think we get it. Right? We get it, you and I. You get it, right?” Doug licked his lips. He swirled his drink which was all just melting ice now, and swung a cube into his mouth. “That’s what I wanted to ask you.”

“What?”

“Do you think you might be interested in investing?”

“I don’t know Doug. This is a tough time for us. With the wedding and everything. We don’t have a lot saved up.”

“We just need this one final push and it’s a sure thing.”

Ron hesitated. “I don’t think I can.”

“OK.” Doug dropped his voice and looked at the floor. “OK that’s fine.”

Without another word, Doug slowly lifted himself up from the bench and started moving back towards the reception hall. His whole demeanor changed and Ron watched the way the man’s strength had been completely drained from him. He looked as if he might collapse. Ron thought about what Doug told him back in the hospital – “I’m a coward,” he had said, or something along those lines. And yet this coward had done more for him than anyone else ever had.

“Maybe,” Ron called out. “Maybe we can manage something to help out.”

---

“He’s a loser Ron,” said Alicia as she leaned against the kitchen counter and chewed on her fingernails. “Forget the money that we’ll never see again because of your investment in his ‘business’ – I don’t even care about that anymore. It’s not like we need money because, you know, we’re independently wealthy, aren’t we? We don’t need to fix this old kitchen, or the leak in the bathroom. We don’t need to start saving. You and I both knew the money was gone as soon as you gave it to him.” Alicia’s eyes looked wound and wild. She exhaled loudly and tried to calm herself. “I’m done with that, I’m over it. But he can’t keep living with us! That’s just too much! I thought we went through this the last time. You’re not responsible for him Ron. He’s a grown man and made his own decisions. He ran his business into the ground despite the fact that you helped him. He’s responsible for himself.”

“What am I supposed to do?” asked Ron, getting exasperated. He was struck, perhaps for the first time in his life, by a sense of fear, by the approach of something inevitable.

“Get him out of here! I don’t care how you do it! I just want him gone.”

Ron heard Doug’s heavy snoring in the living room.

“For real this time,” asserted Alicia. “No more losing your nerve.”

“At least let him sleep for now. I’ll tell him in the morning,” he said dejectedly.

“I know he saved your life, but we can’t go on being his adoptive parents just because he doesn’t know how to run his own life.”

“I know.”

“I’m sorry,” she said more tenderly, and came over to embrace him. She kissed him on the cheek and moved away to head back upstairs. “Coming?”

“In a minute,” he told her. “You go ahead.”

When Alicia had gone, Ron walked over to the broom closet and reached for the object that lay hidden in the dark corner.

When the cane with the skull handle was in his hand, Ron tested it out, placing the tip of the driftwood on the ground and leaning his weight against it. He moved toward the living room slowly and thoughtfully, trying to remember what it had been like back in the hospital when he was still limping from his injury and made a show of needing the cane to support his movement.

Ron approached Doug and looked down at the man on the couch, lost in a deep sleep. He wondered about where he would go and what he would do, how he would manage. Did he have enough money to take care of himself? Did he have other people who would take him in? Ron suddenly realized he had never asked Doug any of these questions, had never really gotten to know him as a friend, and didn’t actually know all that much about him.

Doug shifted on the couch and his breathing changed as he choked on his snore.

“What’s up Doc?” he said groggily, wavering on the precipice of consciousness. Doug smiled to himself at the thought of something. “Like Bugs Bunny.” He yawned.

Ron felt the weight of the cane in his hand. “Go back to sleep.”

“OK Doc, whatever you say.” Doug turned to face the cushions of the couch. “Yes sir,” he mumbled as he drifted off.

The morning would bring a new reality, Ron understood that now. It was a reality that he had resisted but which was now rushing at him with an impending sense of conclusion. Ron was alive, and yet he pitied the man who had saved him.

As Ron walked away and began to climb up to the second floor, he tapped the cane against each step and listened as the hollow sound became a familiar rhythm. It was a sound both ancient and foreign, something from the dessert, like the dull drumming of callused hands against darbukas in the villages where he had patrolled. He remembered the men sitting with the drums between their legs, letting their fingers and palms fall against the vellum as others swung their arms loosely and danced with their heads bowed, the dust and smoke in the air making their eyes seem glassy in the light.

There was so much that he missed, so much that was lost to him forever.

The Pawn

2011-11-25T08:38:00.001-08:00

The ones who come in by day are not much different than the ones who come at night. They are the men with the vacant, milk-white eyes and colorful bicep tattoos that pledge allegiance to women, money, country, and God.

“How much can I get for this?” they ask, and extend their scraps, their trinkets.

I don’t ask too many questions, I don’t want to know about the rings or the wedding dresses or the false teeth. I don’t let myself wonder whether they’re trying to pay the rent or looking for enough to buy a hit. I exam and I weigh, I run my tests, and then I tell them what I see. Up until the moment I speak, there’s still hope that warms their faces, an idea, however small, that they have brought me a treasure worth a sum large enough to change their lives.

“This isn’t real gold,” I find myself saying often. And then I will look down, turning the thing over in my hand and holding it up for them to take back if they like. “I’m sorry,” I add.

But they never take it back, and no matter how much I’m willing to offer them, they never argue. They resign themselves to my valuation and their faces sink, the blood draining out of their cheeks and running to pump through more vital organs that can keep them alive for another day, just one more day, one other lifetime that isn’t this one. They sell anything and everything for a few more bills, a few more pieces of change, the unloading of the past to purchase temporary respite in the present.

Sir Walter glances from across the shop, judging me and all who come before the counter to be judged. This is the name I have given to the man who hangs on the wall above me, sandwiched between shelves of vases and lamps, books and old telephones. He is a serious fellow, entombed in his gilded frame, dressed in a dark navy suit which has since become black from the soot and dirt wafted in from the opening of the shop’s front door. But despite the darkness and grime brought on by the years, his countenance has not faded, and he remains a constant companion.

A young man sold him to me, together with several boxes of items that looked as if they had come from an estate sale. But true to form, I did not ask for the truth. I merely looked through the boxes and gave him a number. At first I didn’t want to take Sir Walter, but the man was insistent. He glared at me with the look of rebellious youth and demanded that everything be sold together or not at all. Eventually I relented, convincing myself that perhaps the portrait was worth it after all, if only because I could find value in its intricate frame.

And yet Sir Walter is still with me, after several offers for the frame but none for the man featured within it. No one cared for the painting itself, for Sir Walter’s stern visage and the cunning that I sometimes see in his eyes, which reminds me of the young man’s eyes. Once he was up, I just couldn’t bring myself to take him from the wall, to remove the frame and leave him on his canvas backdrop leaning against a column or thrown into some dusty corner, a discarded remnant of a life lived and forgotten. I will admit that this sort of sentimentality is unusual for me, but I understand the dignity inherent in all things even if I don’t have the luxury to recognize it as often as I might like.

I am a mere peddler, a pawn. But in this back alley shop in a part of town loaded with dime stores and liquor stores, populated by pimps and prostitutes and junkies, I am also a purveyor of souls, of objects that all have a history, that are all imbued with memory.

I have a particular affinity for the rings, their inside surfaces discolored by years of fingers rubbing their way into the metal, sweating and bleeding and aging, getting arthritic within the chokehold of the band. Sometimes they are purchased as presents that will be used to signify something important in someone else’s life. And sometimes the rings go to scrap buyers, who take them apart and sell the individual components, the metal melted down into pennyweights and the stones sized for their karats, all of it to be repolished and resold and stripped of character.

An old woman came to me once, dressed in a fur coat that had surely seen better years. It was the middle of summer and the fur coat looked rich despite its musty smell and oily appearance. The old woman looked at me through her heavy foundation and stenciled eyebrows. She smiled and little strands of spittle stretched between her lips.

“How can I help you?” I asked when I thought she wouldn’t say anything.

Silently, she presented me with a simple but beautiful gold band, narrow and thin, with a solitaire diamond in a setting that made it seem as if the diamond was not attached to the band, but floated just above it. As I held the ring and brought it under a light, it was as if the band moved with my fingers but the diamond followed just a moment behind, chasing after it.

I was mesmerized.

“How much?” asked the old woman in the same voice that my other clients ask in, in a voice that did not at all suit her.

She seemed to agree to my price before I had even said it. As I handed her the money, I watched as she took the set of folded bills and shoved them into a pocket of her coat without counting them.

“Can I ask you for a favor?” The woman motioned to the ring that now lay on the glass countertop. “If I give you my telephone number, will you call to tell me when you’ve sold it?”

I agreed. Even Sir Walter seemed a little perplexed.

For months I kept the old woman’s phone number tacked to a little board above my register. The ring became one of my most prized items which I tried to showcase by putting it front and center in my display case. Eventually someone did inquire about it, and after some haggling, I made the sale. I couldn’t tell you what the ring’s fate was to be, because the purchaser was a nondescript middle aged man who could just as easily have been a scrap dealer, a collector, a married man looking for an anniversary present, or a man in the middle of a passionate love affair with a younger woman. How was I to tell? Who was I to ask? These are questions I don’t allow myself.

I felt Sir Walter judging me that day, his stare digging into the back of my head, pushing me to ask more, to care, if only this once. But I resisted his entreaties, and when the man had left, I let out the breath I had been holding in.

“What would you have me do?” I asked Sir Walter. “It’s not up to me what happens. It’s not for me to concern myself with such things.” I shrugged. “I am sorry old friend, but I’m not responsible for any of it. I’m just the peddler. I am merely the pawn.”

I pulled the old woman’s number from the board and quickly dialed it, tapping my fingers impatiently against the counter while the phone rang continuously, endlessly.

A voice finally answered. “Hello?” it inquired.

“This is the pawn store,” I said. “I’ve sold your ring. You asked me to call.”

And now there was the silence of contemplation, of a new reality that had been imposed, the corollary and continuation of the one that had allowed the ring to come into my possession in the first place. “Thank you,” the voice said, with neither regret nor sadness, but equally without appreciation or satisfaction. It was matter of fact, resigned, and after it had spoken, an old hand, wrinkled and frail, returned the handset to the receiver and the line cut out.

A Tuesday in September

2011-09-11T21:17:00.000-07:00

Photo by Jose P Isern Comas
Licensed under Creative Commons

I was 18years old when I saw the Towers up close for the first time. As an NYU student,I had always been able to spot them from campus, from Washington Square Park,the two stark monoliths rising up from the tree line on the Park’s southernedge. But during my sophomore year I got a job in an office building at 200Broadway, just a block away from the World Trade Center.Every evening when I left the office at 6:30,I’d make a detour past the front of the Towers on a circuitous route to thesubway. There they were, a glaring, powerful sight, illuminated in thedarkening sky and forcing you to crane your neck to follow them up into theheavens. They made me feel proud, they made me feel like I was somewhere thatmattered, a boy who had somehow found himself at the center of the world.

It was overa year later that I woke up in my dorm room on Lafayette Street, just south of Canal, and turned the TV onas I did every morning. By that time the news was already beginning toreverberate with the images that would be replayed for months to come – thefirst plane hitting, the second plane hitting, and then the incomprehensiblecollapse, an instant that shifted history off its axis. It started that day,the constant, throbbing pain of a country, mindlessly beating its rhythm insideof us.

“Did yousee what happened?” a friend from upstairs yelled into the phone. “The firstplane woke us up when it flew by the building.” I heard crying in thebackground, confused shouting. “We saw people jumping.”

I couldn’twrap my mind around the idea. “It was just debris,” I her and her roommates aswe quickly packed day bags and decided to escape uptown. We didn’t look at eachother, we didn’t glance back. Somewhere behind us was a devastating new world,one that had wrapped its rough fingers around the neck of the City, squeezingand strangling and sending a cloud of dust billowing towards us from thedepths.

On thestreets, there were spatters of conversation, commentary laced with speculationabout the perpetrators, about the cause, about the future.

“We hadthis coming,” someone suggested.

“Those poorpeople…” another mused, shaking her head and staring at the poke-markedsidewalk.

“They’llpay,” more than one fellow NYU student wanted to believe, “whoever did this,we’ll kick the shit out of them.”

The cellphone lines all jammed, and after connecting with a few people whosewhereabouts I hadn’t known,

I finally got through to my mom in the far-off,safe haven of Long Island. She insisted that I meet mygrandfather, who worked in midtown, and take a train out of the City with him.I was torn, I had friends who were ready to buckle down at temporary sheltersfor the night, the week. There was talk of going down to the Towers, despiteall the warnings to stay away, and help with the search effort. I looked at myhands and wondered what I was capable of doing, what help I could be in theface of something so monstrous.

I obeyed the parental voice andwalked away from campus, up past Union Squarewith its chaotic traffic and gathering crowds spilling out onto the streets,and dragged myself along 5^th Avenue.Businessmen floated by, dressed in their sharp, pressed suits, carrying attachécases, with just the lightest coating of gray and white powder salting theirhair. Some women walked barefooted, their shoes hooked onto their fingers, theblacks of their soles exposing themselves with ever step. Eyes were vacant,consciousness was banished to the edges of the mind. Our bodies carried usaway.

I kept glancing up at the EmpireState Building as it stood there just as incredulous as the rest of us, tiltingits head to observe everyone below, scanning the horizon for more airliners. Iheld my breath as I waited for another plane to come barreling into it and everythingto start all over again.

After I met up with my grandfather,we made our way towards Penn Station. Besides for the quantity of policegathered outside, it seemed like a normal rush hour throng. When we were on atrain and streaming under the East River on our way over to the Island, Iglanced at my grandfather and wondered what this man, who had survived WWIIwhile fleeing east from the advancing Germans and who had managed to escapefrom the Soviet Union to come to America years later, thought of all of this.His face spoke his sadness, the injury to his beloved country that had takenhim in like an adoptive parent when little of the rest of the world wanted totolerate his Jewishness. I saw that on his jacket, as always, he wore hisAmerican flag pin, the stars and stripes fixed in a steady, metallic flutter,and I knew that this quiet, thoughtful man who barely spoke English but lovedthis country with all his heart, was having his own private vigil.

That evening I stayed with mygrandparents in Flushing. Sprawled out on the couch, Ikept the TV on all night as the images of the day replayed on every station,CNN’s and FOX’s and CBS’s cameras showing every angle, offering every possibleanalysis. The Mayor bustled around town, from press conference to briefing,donning a fire helmet while he toured the destruction. There was the President– and whatever you thought of him before or after that day, on that day he was thePresident – his voice cracking, but his eyes pressed together tightly andsternly, trying to convince us that we would all live to see a better day.

The following morning my mom pickedme up to take me to the hospital on Long Island where mybrother had been admitted a few nights earlier because of stomach pains. He satup in his bed when he saw us, and smiled. He was OK she told me, just someunfortunate reaction to something he had eaten. When my mom stepped out of theroom, my brother leaned back in the bed and looked at me.

“Before it happened, I had adream,” he said. “I saw burning buildings and everything was…broken.” He didn’tknow what to make of it. I wondered if he had, in a fever or under medication,somehow conflated dream and reality.

“What do you think will happennow?” he asked. And maybe I was his older brother, and it seemed liked the sortof thing I should know, but I didn’t know, I was just a kid myself.

---

My dorm reopened a week later andlife insisted, stubbornly, on returning to some degree of normalcy. There wereclasses to attend, jobs and internships to return to, friends to see,short-lived college relationships to recommence. As if finally sensing it wassafe to show their faces, thousands of American flags appeared on the streetsand made it feel as if some silent, magical force now encased the City andbound each of us to the other.

At work, the window in the hallwayof the elevator bank overlooked the gash of steam and steel girders and ashthat was overrun with seemingly helpless little beings that kept digging andsearching and hoping that somehow, there was still hope to be found.

I felt the purity of both sadnessand anger. I played loud, violent music through my headphones and dreamed uprevenge fantasies as I walked to and from the area. I watched the NationalGuard troops in their fatigues and with their rifles at the ready, pointlessly standingguard over the smoldering mound of rubble that would spew toxins into the airfor months to come.

And then there were those days whenI looked through all of the smoke and the pop-up chain link fencing, and foundthe stoic observer, the statue of a Wall Street business man who sat on a benchin a little park across the street from what was now being called “GroundZero,” like the origin point for some epidemic. His briefcase was open on hisknees as he leaned forward, looking at his hand and the nonexistent documentthat should have been there, held up between his fingers. There were no peopleweaving past each other, there was no throng of traffic and noise, just theghostly white that dusted his head and arms and everything else around him. Hesat silent and thoughtful, as he had always been, but now contemplating what hadbeen wrought with fire and blood.

So much had ended, so much had beentaken from us, and yet the man’s eyes stayed fixed on something the rest of uscould not see, the new markers of life and industry that did not yet exist,might never again exist as far as we knew back in September 2001, but in whichhe believed.

Like him, we wanted to believe, andin time, we did too.

The Matchmaker

2011-07-14T18:27:00.000-07:00

“He’s dating the wrong people,” Meredith says.

We’re sitting in the living room, sharing a pint of Ben & Jerry’s Half-Baked. It’s already beginning to melt around the area where her hand is in contact with the container.

“It’s 2011. You’d think they’d figure out a way to keep ice cream from melting so quickly.” I lap a spoonful into my mouth. “Can you maybe just put it down on the table?”

Meredith looks at me and rolls her eyes.

“I thought we were talking about Max.” She places the pint down and leans back on the couch. “He’s your friend; I’m just trying to help.”

“I know. And I appreciate it,” I say as I scoop up some more ice cream. There’s some reality show that’s playing on the TV, but the sound is muted. I glance up for a second and catch a very tan woman in a very short skirt yelling at someone. After a moment she throws her drink in some guy’s face and storms out of what looks like a club. I’m suddenly reminded of college. “It’s just that…he’s drawn to very specific types of people.”

I’ve known Max for almost three years now. We met at a shitty acting class I found while flipping through the Village Voice when I found myself bored on a Sunday afternoon. The ad featured this guy in black pants and a black turtleneck. He was standing there with his arms crossed in front of his chest, taking up half a page, looking all serious, like he really meant business.

“You owe it to yourself to say things the way you want to say them,” it read in bold letters right underneath him. I had to process the catch-phrase before I understood what it meant to me. The rest of the ad went on to talk about how acting classes were not just for actors anymore, and how people from all walks of life should take an acting class because it helped to make you more presentable and taught you to better balance your emotions while speaking.

I tend to wear my heart on my sleeve, which is not the best way to be when you do what I do, so I admit that I was intrigued.

In class, the man from the ad was wearing the same black pants and turtleneck, except he now sported a little bit of a belly paunch that rounded out smoothly against the tight material of the turtleneck. I noticed Max immediately because he was wearing a Newsies-style cap, the old school one made of brownish tweed, or whatever, like from the 1920s, and I thought to myself, “who is this douchebag?” Hats like that make me very judgmental. I see them and I can’t help but think the person wearing the hat is just trying to draw attention to themselves because they’re insecure and are trying to show a slight alternative edge.

The man in the turtleneck claimed to be an actor that had studied with the Royal Theater Academy of London, but he was more like a wanna-be therapist, and tried to psychologically dissect each of us in order to assign a specific exercise. Max was identified as someone always looking for affirmation, often from the wrong sources; his assigned exercise was to stand on a chair in front of the rest of us, and alternate between saying “I love you” and “thank you” to the crowd for five minutes.

I yawned and looked at my watch.

The turtleneck guy determined that I was very conservative and set in my ways, and so the obvious remedy was to make me narrate a stream-of-conscious storyline without pause.

“No, no, no!” he yelled when I started speaking. “Don’t think, just feel. Let it flow out of you.”

I kind of liked my story, thought I made some pretty daring decisions, but the acting guy kept saying it was “boring” and “too logical,” and as soon as I felt like I was getting going, he’d stymie my momentum.

“What an ass,” said Max as we took the elevator down together. There were other people in the elevator who were also from the class but they just looked at their feet.

“Seriously,” I answered. “So I’m ‘conservative’ and ‘set in my ways’ because I came from work in a button-down shirt and slacks? Who does he think he is? Freud?”

The elevator moved slower than an elevator should move, and lurched as it got to the lobby. Everyone filtered out and we found ourselves surrounded by scaffolding and homeless people. The class had been held in one of those seedy “rent a studio” building on the West Side in the 30s.

“Max,” said Max as he extended a hand. Except he didn’t just say “Max;” he said his full name – Fritz Maximillian Grossman – before adding that he went by Max because it was easier.

“That’s quite a name,” I understated.

“My dad loves everything German.”

“Interesting…”

“You don’t know the half of it. Needless to say, it’s sort of a complicated relationship, being Jewish and all.”

“Right…”

“Thus the ‘Grossman’ part.”

“I see…”

Back in the living room, with the ice cream still melting, Meredith turns the volume back up on the TV, and continues to talk over the commercials. “All I’m saying is that maybe he has to change his approach a little bit. If it’s not working for him then he’ll never meet anyone.”

“You can teach a man to fish, but you can’t just go around changing his approach.”

“What does that even mean?”

“It means that the way he views women, and the type of women he’s attracted to, is a testament to the type of person he is. He’s not going to suddenly be into a different type of woman because someone else said so.”

“So then maybe he has to realize that for himself and grow up a little.”

“Grow up? What does it have to do with growing up?” I look down at the ice cream and find that it has gotten to soupy to continue eating. I pick it up and carry it off to the freezer.

“How old is he now? 30? 31?”

“32!” I yell to Meredith from the kitchen.

“32! Exactly. He’s not a kid anymore. And yet he keeps dating these women…sorry…these girls who are not going to be solid, consistent partners.”

“The women he dates are around his age. It’s not like he’s dating teenagers,” I say as I return to the living room, only to find that Meredith’s spoon is still in her hand.

“It’s not about their age, it’s about their outlook.”

“What’s wrong with their outlook?”

“Well, they just seem immature. That’s all.”

Meredith is suddenly distracted by the reality show which has returned from commercials. “What a slut,” she says to the TV.

“Listen,” she continues, this time to me. “I have this great girl for him, a friend of mine from work.”

“Have I ever met her?”

“No, she’s pretty new, but she’s perfect – smart, successful, motivated. It’s about time he dated someone like that.”

---

“Is she hot?” asks Max when I tell him Meredith’s idea.

“She said she was ‘attractive.’ I don’t know what that means.”

“Really that can mean anything. What is it with women and not being able to accurately assess their friends?”

“Let’s find her on Facebook…see for ourselves.”

We hop on the computer and do a little sleuthing. I click through a few of her photos. “I think she looks cute.”

Max tilts his head and takes over the mouse. He clicks back and forth between three photos. “OK, well, see here, there’s like a ton of light, so it washes out her features almost completely. You can’t really tell how old she is. And then in this one – you see – it’s like more natural light and she looks a little old, doesn’t she? I kind of like this angle, but I feel like there might be something false about it, as if she chooses this side of her face for some specific reason.”

He bites his lip and moves ahead to a few more photos.

“See!” he continues. “She has this pose in a few of them. Is the right side of her face like hideously deformed? Does she have a lazy eye? I don’t know…it’s weird dude.”

“Whatever, stop nit-picking. Meredith is just trying to help out.”

Max releases the mouse and walks across to his kitchen table. He pulls out a chair and falls back into it. I swivel around in the desk chair.

“I know,” he says, throwing his hands behind his head and stretching his legs out.

“Look, you’re the one always complaining. You’re always telling me how things never work out with any of these people you go out with.”

“It’s because they’re all psychos! I don’t know what it is! They’re all warped in some fucked up way.”

“So why do you keep dating people like that?”

“I don’t know they’re like that until they’ve roped me in!” He lets out an exasperated sigh. “I’ll meet someone and she’s all cute in her summer dress or she’s got these cool glasses on and she’s all well-read and shit, going on and on about some boring writer but she’s all into it for some reason and, damn, that’s just hot, she’s passionate about it, she’s convinced it’s the best thing in the world, and that just draws me in.”

“OK…”

“And then I go on one date and we’re making dinner and she’s drinking wine and then she’s looking at me all lovingly like I’m her soul mate. Next thing I know, we’re having sex and afterward she’ll either tell me how she is fresh out of a break-up or she had an abusive relationship with some musician or something. Everything will seem fine at first but then she’ll start going on and on about how her parents are getting a divorce or she’ll tell me she’s depressed and on meds, and she’s on them just because, like no one knows why she’s on meds, its just that she is and the world is all complicated and difficult and twisted. And then I’m like ‘fuck dude, I don’t even know you! Take it easy.’” Max exhales like the psychological weight of all of all the hipsters in Brooklyn is resting on his shoulders. “Why does it need to get so fucking heavy right away?”

I think about his question. “Maybe you shouldn’t be making dinner on the first date?”

“Why not?”

“It just seems rushed. No?” I tread lightly here, because I know Max takes his dinner-making talents very seriously and I’m trying not to offend him. “Making dinner, that’s kind of intimate. That’s more a boyfriend-girlfriend sort of activity, don’t you think?”

“I don’t know that it’s such a big deal,” he says defensively. “Girls like it when guys make them dinner.”

“Still, maybe having a cup coffee in a public place might work a little better for a first date, especially if you’re finding yourself helplessly drawn into bed with these women so early on.”

“Maybe.” Max says flippantly. I know a part of him recognizes what I’m saying and agrees with it. But another part of him really wants to disagree with me, because my being right and his realizing it, would mean reworking his entire dinner-at-my-place approach.

“Look at it this way – you’re plying them with wine on the first date, in your apartment. You’re creating an environment that’s going to lead to more intensity early on, so you can’t really be surprised when someone starts opening up to you so quickly. Why not hold off on that a little? Keep that bottle corked, if you know what I’m saying.” I chuckle a little and wink at him. “What’s the rush?”

“When did you become so old-school? It’s 2011 my man. People have sex on the first date. It’s not a big deal.”

“I’m just hearing what you’re saying, and I’m telling you – if you want to slow things down a bit, don’t invite them over for dinner and drinks at your place.”

“I’m not saying I want to slow things down, I’m just saying that I don’t want them to be crazy…at least not so quickly. Crazy later on…that’s fine…when I know them a little better…Crazy can be good…The right kind…”

“Just figure out something else to do on the first date. That’s all.”

“I’m not doing some stupid coffee date. So lame.”

“So do something else. Take a walk. Go get ice cream, brunch. Toss a Frisbee. I don’t know. Something a little more traditional.”

As I say it, I look around Max’s apartment, gazing over the walls that are filled with his art, all a mix of styles and mediums and subject matter. There are oil landscapes and water colored shapes and stenciled portraits. Max has the sort of artistic mind that constantly wanders in some dreamscape and can’t seem to wrap itself around one concept or idea. He’s super-talented, and I find myself both impressed and jealous of how vast his abilities seem to be. So I guess that when I hear him voice frustrations about his dating life, I can’t bring myself to believe that he doesn’t actually enjoy the psychoses of the women he dates. There must be something about it that he craves.

“Yeah that sounds really good,” he says sarcastically.

“Don’t be a douchebag.”

“I’m not,” he retreats. “But dinner and drinks is traditional! You can’t get more traditional than that. I just don’t know what the issue is.”

“Well fine, so what happens after the first date?”

“Wow, I don’t even know where to start.” Max exhales and leans forward onto his knees. “Some of them become possessive and so if you don’t return a call or a text within minutes, they’re all angry and out of their minds. Then there are the fiends, and all they want to do is have sex. Which is fine! Don’t get me wrong. But only for like a week, because then that gets old, just having sex all the time, and I think to myself ‘what about all those cool books you told me you read and those hobbies you claimed to have? Can’t we talk about those? When do you even have time for them if we’re always having sex?’ Then there are the ones who start looking at me like I’m some savior, like I came into their lives to help them figure their shit out and help them deal with their issues. So then I find myself in the position of being a therapist, talking them through their problems and helping them process stuff.”

“You’re good at that.”

“Thanks.”

“Like when you helped me realize that I’m not actually a jerk, just opinionated. It really helped my confidence in my relationships.”

“Well that’s great, except why can’t I process my own crap?”

“I think it’s like that for most people.”

“Ugh.” Max stands up and walks over to his fridge. He pulls out a big jug of ice tea and drinks from it. I see the paint marks running along his hand and down his arm, disappearing into his tattered sleeve. “Want some?” He extends the jug to me.

“No thanks.”

He takes another swig and then places it back into the fridge. He sits down and exhales again. “So what’s this girl’s name?”

“Sarah,” I say with enthusiasm. I find that I’m becoming emotionally invested at Meredith’s attempts to be a matchmaker. There’s something about the idea of helping Max out of his cycle of unfulfilling relationships which is suddenly very motivating.

“Sarah,” he repeats, as if handling the name in his hands like one of his art projects, seeing how it feels.

---

“Well, like, a little of everything really. I dabble in a bunch of styles.” Max takes a long sip of his wine that’s more like a border-line gulp, and looks at us.

“Does it every throw you off?” asks Sarah, simultaneously forking a few pieces of penne and swirling them around in her bowl. I also got the penne, and I’m thinking that the sauce is really good.

“What do you mean?” Max is struggling with his burger, trying to keep a grip on the collapsing bun.

“Well, if you’re focused on so many different art forms all at the same time, doesn’t that prevent you from concentrating on any one of them? Really building up your skill in a particular style?”

Max looks at Sarah and then turns to Meredith and me with this thrown-off look, as if no one has ever thought to ask him this question before. He takes a bite of his burger and places it back on the plate.

“I don’t think so,” he says, mid-chew.

I wait for him to finish his thought, and there’s this awkward moment where we’re just watching him ground the food in his mouth so he can swallow it. But the follow-up never comes. Max just shakes his head and smiles.

“He really is a talented artist,” Meredith throws in. The placement of the complement feels all wrong. Meredith, once again, is trying too hard, and it’s uncomfortably obvious.

“Well, I’d like to see it sometime,” adds Sarah, and gives Max this look, like she’s really curious about him, like she wants to know what’s going on with this guy.

How does it happen, I wonder, that Max always gets this sort of attention from women? It must be the art thing, some underlying edginess mixed with his outward niceness, his charm, his floppy head of hair that falls onto his forehead and is always disheveled but in just the right, stylish, sort of way. I don’t know, maybe it’s none of those things at all. Whatever it is, women fall for Max. Always. It’s a rule.

I know, I know, why should I care? I’m here with Meredith, she’s my girlfriend, we’re in a relationship. But I still crave at least some sort of positive attention from women; that doesn’t go away just because you’re dating someone. And, besides, a part of me is just curious about why I fail to draw these sorts of looks. Maybe it’s because I lack the mystique, the confidence. Maybe I don’t have the right attitude. Maybe what I do is just not as cool as being this artist guy who always smells like a mixture of iced tea, Old Spice deodorant, and paint thinner.

Except, of course, Max doesn’t notice the way Sarah looks at him, or he acts like he doesn’t notice. He just swirls his tongue around in his mouth and then he sticks a finger in to unhinge something stuck at the back of his teeth. He takes another, more controlled sip from his glass of wine to try to wash it down.

“Yeah, for sure,” he says eventually. “That would be cool.”

Sarah smiles, but you can tell that it’s totally code for “yeah right.” She gets it. She’s not as oblivious as some of the other women I’ve seen interacting with Max.

There’s a pause in conversation during which I look down into my finished bowl of penne and wish that I hadn’t run through my meal so quickly.

“I’m going to run to the bathroom,” says Meredith, and begins to get up from the table.

“Oh, I’ll come with you,” adds Sarah, and stands up to join her.

The two head through the dining room and disappear behind a corner.

“I think she’s into you,” I say when I’m certain they’re out of earshot.

Max is silent and picks at his fries.

“And she’s hot,” I add, figuring I’ll appeal to Max’s visual sensibilities.

“Eh, she’s OK.”

“What’re you talking about?”

“She’s OK. Maybe a 7.”

“You’re crazy. She’s totally a 9.”

“No way is she a 9. In whose twisted world is she a 9?”

Max makes me second-guess my assessment.

“And what’s up with this double-date crap,” he continues.

“Meaning?”

“Meaning why is the whole family along for the ride?”

“Well, I think she told Meredith that she felt more comfortable meeting you in a setting with other people.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know.”

Max sighs. “We’re grown-ups dude. Why couldn’t I just hang out with her one-on-one? I’m not a freaking serial killer.”

“Do you like her at least?”

“I don’t know, she’s sort of boring.”

“No she isn’t!”

“She’s an accountant.”

“So? Who cares? She’s into art and she’s smart. She’s pretty witty too. Seems like she’s comfortable with herself, has her shit together, which is way more than I can say about some of the other people you date.”

Max laughs. “If you like her so much maybe you should date her.”

I feel the blood rush to my face and I involuntarily reach for my cup of water.

“I’m just not feeling it,” continues Max as he picks at his fries. “I appreciate it, of course,” he adds, looking up at me and nodding, perhaps realizing that he is being a bit of a dick.

“Whatever,” I say, all frustrated, like I have some personal investment in his decision to be or not be into this Sarah girl. Even though Sarah isn’t even my friend and I only met her for the first time at dinner, it does feel like Max’s rejection of her is also a rejection of me. It’s a round-about conclusion to draw, I know that, but it’s there, and it’s bothering me more than anything else about this evening.

Just then I hear Meredith’s rather loud voice rising over the general mumble of in the restaurant, and I see her returning with Sarah. The two of them have a few more exchanges I don’t catch as they sit back down at the table. Sarah’s face is red, as if she has been laughing about something. She looks at Max as she settles down into her seat and, with a big smile still on her face, chuckles.

“What?” asks Max as he shoves a few fries into his mouth.

She looks down at her lap to try to quiet herself a little, then she looks back at him. “Oh, nothing.”

“OK,” he says with a smile of his own, and lets the moment pass.

---

I see Max a few days later. We meet up for coffee near his apartment and then head into Prospect Park. The weather is getting better, and we walk through the meadow, past sunbathers and Frisbee tossers. A group of people is having some sort of color war tournament that involves potato sack races, water balloon fighting, and tug-of-war feats of strength.

We’re silent for most of our walk, except when Max notices the occasional cute sunbather, which elicits a “wow” followed by a little elbow jab to my side and a head nod in the sunbather’s general direction. I offer up some “yeah”s in confirmation.

“So many women,” he says, and I can see that he’s all exasperated, eyes darting around frantically, a morose look spread across his face. He looks like a rat in a maze, anticipating the eerie electrical hum that precedes a shock.

“Maybe we should have gone to see a movie.”

“Nah man, this is good for the soul.” He places his hand on his heart and tries to make the moment much more solemn than it needs to.

“So nothing ever happened with Sarah?” I ask, even though I already know the answer. I helplessly pass my eyes over the people lying on the grass.

Max shrugs. “Not really. I didn’t call her after the dinner, if that’s what you’re asking.”

I nod and look at my feet. I feel bad for having played a role in putting Sarah in front of Max. It doesn’t make any sense to me, because I thought she was cool and way more interesting and attractive and smarter than other people I’ve known Max to have fallen in love with, but I guess this sort of thing isn’t about what makes sense.

“Don’t look so bummed out,” Max continues when he notices my sullenness. “Like I said at the restaurant, she just wasn’t my type. Don’t take it personally.”

“I’m not,” I lie.

“But the good news is that I met this other girl who’s awesome.”

I’ve heard him say this, I don’t know how many times now.

“Yeah? Who?”

“Some girl on my block actually. I’d seen her before – like at the coffee shop, at that bar on the corner I’ve taken you to a few times, even on the subway platform in the morning – but we never spoke. She was walking her dog the other day, and I didn’t even know she had a dog, so I just started talking with her and we hit it off.”

“You started the conversation with her by asking about the dog?”

“Yeah, I was like ‘oh you have a dog.’ That sort of thing. Mentioned that I had seen her around, but not in any creepy sort of way, just from noticing that she looked familiar based on all of those places where we happen to cross paths.”

“And?”

“And she’s really cool. Plus she loves my chicken and mushroom recipe,” he says and starts laughing. “Yes, I made her dinner. I’m sorry! I couldn’t help myself!”

Of course I can’t help but smile. “Whatever man, forget what I said before – it works for you.” Because really, who am I to try to change Max.

“That it does.”

“So what is it about her? Why are you all of a sudden so smitten?”

Max thinks about this for a moment. He takes another sip of his coffee. “It’s just this sense. You know what I mean. You meet someone and they affect you in some way and you realize that there’s something special in your connection. She’s cute and has a great laugh, awesome legs. She’s a fashion designer of some sort, but not for some lame, corporate label. Really cutting-edge stuff, using all of these biodegradable materials, being green whenever possible. A percentage of the proceeds go towards environmental awareness or something.”

“Nice.”

“Yeah dude. I think you’ll really like her when you meet her.”

If I meet her. I wonder if this is a cycle that just isn’t meant to end.

“And how’s Meredith?” he asks, his voice dropping down an octave to underline a heightened level of seriousness.

“Good,” I answer with a nod that surprises me with its vigor. “You know, the usual.”

“Is she still making you watch those awful reality shows?”

“That, my friend, has not changed.”

---

Later that night I’m watching the ice cream melt in the pint Meredith is holding. I tap my spoon against my leg as she laughs at something said by one of the characters in the show we’ve got on; I forget the name, of both the character and the show. Whatever it is, I miss it, I zone out for a moment. She likes it though, this show, the ridiculousness of these situations that they put the people in. This can’t be their real lives, I tell myself. At least I hope not. How can anything be real in a show where cameras are always following you around? Doesn’t behavior automatically change when you know you’re being watched? You’re more polite around your parents, more vulgar around your friends, more grounded and professional at work. So I have to imagine that you’d be something else completely if there was this lens that was always hovering around you.

“This guy is insane,” Meredith says to no one in particular as I stare at the ice cream.

My phone vibrates on the coffee table and I pick it up to check the message.

“I’m in love!” It says.

“Who is it?” Meredith asks when she notices that I’ve stopped pretending to pay attention to the show.

“Max,” I say.

“Max,” repeats Meredith, with a tone she reserves for disapproval. “And what does he have to say?”

“Apparently he’s really into this new girl.”

Meredith rolls her eyes and stares at the guy on the screen, the one with a lot of tattoos who seems to use every conceivable moment to take his shirt off.

“He’s never going to change,” she says.

Maybe she’s right, I tell myself.

The guy from the show, he points his finger menacingly at someone.

I frown and put my spoon down on the coffee table. I decide that I've had enough ice cream for the evening.

Jews Gone Camping

2011-06-30T20:40:00.000-07:00

Part 1 - http://alefnext.com/shabbat/jews-gone-camping-part-1/

Part 2 - http://alefnext.com/shabbat/jews-gone-camping-part-2/

Memories of Maya

2011-05-26T15:48:00.000-07:00

Teddy sat on the steps, cast in the shadow of the school as it stretched its broad, barrel-chested profile across the courtyard. He looked up from his book and glanced towards the playground. A yell rose up from the children as they hung from the jungle gym and played tag and kicked around a ball in a poorly formed game of soccer. One group screamed from the swing area, each kid trying to propel himself higher. They avoided the area with yellow tape at the far end of the playground, but moved around it fluidly, acting as if it wasn’t even there, oblivious to the story it told.

Ms. White walked into the shade and sat down next to him. She sighed and forced a smile. She was always trying.

He shook his head.

“I don’t want to,” he said as he kept looking at the children.

He saw the grins on their faces, the straight lines of short teeth that gleamed white with fleshy, empty gaps between them. There was something about their games, their short, choppy movements, that stirred a worry inside of him. He remembered the accident.

“I’m scared,” he added, and hovered over the words for a moment, unsure of what else to say. He didn’t want to play with the kids, he didn’t even want to be outside.

Teddy kept staring at their teeth, he peered inside the gaps, the spaces that disappeared into the dark chambers of their mouths. An idea formed itself in his mind, but he suppressed it.

He shook his head again. Ms. White, defeated, nodded to herself and walked away.

Teddy shifted his attention in the direction of the library and its row of windows that looked out over the courtyard. He saw the little girl, the one who sat at the desk, and wondered what it was that she was reading today, why she didn’t have to be outside with the rest of the kids. Perhaps she noticed him looking at her, or felt the curious pierce of his eyes, because she picked her head up from her book, turned to him, and smiled.

---

At home, Teddy spent most of his time in his room, sitting and reading on his bed or in the fort of stuffed animals and pillows he had built for himself in his closet. When he got tired he would walk into the bathroom and wash his face. Then he would spend the next few minutes looking at himself in the mirror as the water ran down his cheeks and dripped off the tip of his nose. He would rub his eyes and they would stare back at him, green irises and bloodshot veins, blankly taking note of his straight brown hair, his right ear that stuck out a little more than the left, the small mole partially hidden on the underside of his chin.

Sometimes he would wander down to his parent’s bedroom and stand over his sister’s crib, contemplating her as she slept. On occasion she would stir and start crying, her face becoming pinched and red as tears streamed down onto the sheets, leaving dark, wet spots on them. In those moments his mom would come rushing up to attend to the baby, picking the child up in her arms and cradling her against her shoulder. Teddy would stand and watch as the baby was slowly calmed, lulled back into a hibernating stillness. His mother would then shoot him an accusatory look.

“I was quiet,” he would say. “I didn’t make any noise.”

Babies cry sometimes, he reasoned to himself. Sometimes they sleep and sometimes they cry and all he wanted to do was look at her, watch her little chest go up and down as she breathed and her little chubby hands grabbed incomprehensibly at nothing in particular, at the space above her crib, reaching up towards him or the neon-colored mobile that hung suspended in the air.

Teddy didn’t like to speak about the accident. He left his thoughts bottled up inside of his head and kept mostly to himself, wandering about the house dolefully. His parents, if they had at some point tried to get him to speak about what he was feeling, had grown restless with trying, and spoke less to each other as well. The hushed mechanical hum of distant electrical currents and household machines became the most prevalent noise in the house, accented only by the echo of the old piping rattling behind the walls as someone started up a warm shower in the morning.

During the night, he had trouble sleeping. He would often lay awake for hours, reading with a flashlight under his blanket or looking up at the ceiling in his bedroom, thinking about the girl from the library. He remembered when he had first seen her, several months earlier when she was being led through the school hallway on the first day of classes. Her white skin and sunken eyes, her small frame with stockings that climbed her skinny legs and disappeared under a skirt that was on the verge of sliding off of her boney hips. She seemed fragile, ready to crumble at the slightest touch.

A man pulled her along. He looked stern and tired, his unshaven face sprinkled with sharp hairs that ran all the way down his neck. On future encounters he would again see her being led through the hallway by this man, or alternatively, by a woman whose demeanor was completely different, a woman with a round and warm face, a brightness in her eyes. She seemed to regard the girl tenderly and kept glancing behind her as they made their way through the school. The girl always smiled at Teddy, even as he stood there dumbfounded, staring at the apparition with the rest of the children. The children liked to take note of the way the girl regarded him and how curious he seemed to be.

“Teddy! Teddy! In love with a ghost!” they teased. “You know what happens if a ghost kisses you? You become a ghost too!”

“I don’t like her,” Teddy muttered under this breath, as he looked away. An anxiety gripped him, one that made it seem as if he stood before a precipice, so dangerously close to the edge that he wasn’t yet sure if he’d go over or manage to stay safely on the ground. It was the same feeling he would later have when looking at the blinding neon tape that ran like scars across the playground, demarcating the place where the accident happened.

---

Teddy stood on the steps and watched the children playing in the sun. Their cries pierced his ears as they squealed in excitement from being tagged or, for the younger kids, being found in a game of hide-and-seek.

An errant ball came rolling up to the steps and a little boy ran towards him to retrieve it. Teddy watched as the boy’s features – one moment illuminated, his eyes and hair glistening – were quickly swallowed by the frame of the school’s shadow. The boy automatically slowed his pace as he stepped out from under the light. He stopped and glanced back towards his classmates who stood awaiting his return with the ball.

“Come on!” they yelled, and their voices seemed far away.

The boy turned back towards the ball and slowly approached it. It was only when he was near, when he crouched to pick it up, that he seemed to notice Teddy. He looked startled, surprised to find someone alone on the steps, apart from the rest of the kids.

“Get it!” his classmates reiterated, as if reminding him why he was there in the first place.

The boy seized the ball in his hands and went running back towards the crowd. They cheered his return, and the game continued as if it had never paused in the first place, as if nothing had ever interrupted its steady and continuous momentum. This game, the children seemed to think, was one that they would always play, that had no clear beginning or end, that would always be there for them.

Teddy wondered if he would ever again play with the children, if there would come a day when the fear didn’t seize him the way it did now, tightening his arms and legs and sending a paralyzing notion to him, an emptiness that bubbled up and widened until it felt as if he was in a dark space removed from everyone and everything else.

He shook off his notions and entered the school, pushing through the doors and moving through the empty hallway. The noise from outside grew muted as the door slowly swung shut and settled into its latch. His sneakers squeaked against the shiny stone flooring as he walked past the line of orange and red lockers and the tattered edges of art projects that momentarily flapped in the air like the fingers of a thousand hands waving goodbye, before settling back against the wall.

Teddy turned left at the first intersection and found himself in an identical hallway, another indistinguishable piece of the school’s labyrinthine layout. He could no longer hear the children at all, realizing that the playground lay somewhere beyond the walls and classrooms and windows that separated him from the outside.

And then he was there, at the entrance to the library. It sat undisturbed at this point in the afternoon, a world that was silent and pristine. He peered in through the glass walls, taking note of the rows of books on the shelves, the computers resting in their workstations, the set of round tables and white cushioned chairs that surrounded them. Patiently, thoughtfully, he twisted on the door handle and stepped inside.

Old Mrs. Ryan was in her usual place, behind the large oak office desk placed awkwardly at the library’s entrance. She sat straight-up, a sentry keeping watch over her domain, the two half-closed slivers of her eyes peeking out from under wrinkled lids. He froze in a spot near the door, hoping that he blended in enough with the surrounding in order to go unnoticed. And then he heard the soft rumble of a snore filling and rushing out of her lungs. She was asleep, he determined, although perhaps ready to leap to attention at the first sign of danger, in the event of a threat to the integrity of the space she had been entrusted with protecting.

He went towards the stacks and passed through them, running his fingers against the contours of the lined books, feeling the rounded edges of their spines. His eyes quickly scanned the titles, and he convinced himself that he was looking for something new to read, something to occupy his time while he waited through recess.

“I like this one,” said a voice.

The little girl stood at the front of the stack and held a book out to him. Her skinny arm trembled from its weight.

“Alice in Wonderland. I just finished it, so you can have it.”

Teddy knew the book. He vaguely recalled reading it but he couldn’t seem to remember the details. Had he read it or was he just imagining that he had?

“Don’t you have to return it?” he asked.

“No, I never checked it out. I don’t need to. I just stay here and read the books while everyone else plays outside.” She motioned with her head towards the windows that overlooked the courtyard, the ones at which Teddy had seen the girl so many times during the afternoon, the ones through which she had smiled at him the other day.

“Why do you stay inside?” asked Teddy.

“Why do you sit on the steps by yourself?” the girl retorted.

“I don’t know,” Teddy shrugged. He took a deep breath. “I don’t like being in the playground anymore.”

“The yellow tape,” she said, and then nodded in understanding. She considered him for a moment as she scratched her knee through her dirtied white stockings. “I don’t like it out there either. My mom says I need to stay put so that I don’t get more sick.”

Teddy took a step back.

The little girl noticed. “Don’t worry! You’re not going to catch anything from me.”

“What’s wrong with you?” he asked, realizing a little too late that the sound of his voice was distrustful.

“Nothing!” the girl responded angrily. “Nothing is wrong with me! What’s wrong with you?!” She dropped the book she had been holding and stormed off. He heard her muffled crying, her feet scraping against the carpet and carrying her to another part of the library.

Teddy was startled by how suddenly everything happened. He held his breath, listening to her movements, to her sobbing in a distant part of the library. And then there was silence. Teddy walked towards the front of the stack. He picked up the book and leafed to the inside of the cover where the library placed its check-out cards in a little manila holder. The card wasn’t there, which meant the book had been checked out but never formally returned. As far as the library was concerned, the book no longer existed within its four walls. It was somewhere out in the world, its possession attributed to the person whose name was on the card that was kept neatly, in alphabetical order, inside Mrs. Ryan’s index box.

Teddy cautiously peered out from the stack, but he couldn’t see where the girl had run to. He walked back out onto the library’s main floor and looked at the circular tables with their surrounding chairs, he glanced into some of the other stacks and peeked into the computer stations, but he couldn’t find her.

The bell began to ring, announcing the end of recess, and he knew he needed to leave before Mrs. Ryan awoke.

Not knowing what to do with the book, he took it with him and slipped out of the library.

---

At home, he dropped his backpack on his bed and shut the door to his bedroom. He threw himself down amongst the stuffed animals in his closet and breathed deeply, looking up at his ceiling. The room was dark even though it was still only late afternoon. He kept his blinds down, his curtains pulled shut, preferring the dark because it calmed him, it settled the thoughts that would sometimes twist and reel and spiral off into too many directions for him to keep track of.

His ceiling was dotted with glow-in-the-dark stars that had grown paler and duller through the years. He stared up at them and imagined the drifting clouds of the Milky Way Galaxy that he had discovered in a book once. He knew the stickers were poor imitations of the real thing, of the gaseous balls of light that spun around in the expanse of space and appeared so slight and unassuming in the suburban sky above his house. But he loved them nevertheless.

Then he remembered the book. He walked over to his backpack, pulled Alice from the front pocket, and lay back down in the closet.

He read for what seemed like hours, flipping through the book and recalling certain moments and passages but constantly unsure as to how or why he knew them. There was something about the book that was familiar and yet completely foreign, lost to him. It could be that he had read it and forgotten. The accident and its effects continued to surprise him even now, and perhaps this was yet another symptom of what had happened. There was the hazy memory, the fear of being outside with the children, his inability to talk to his family about how he felt, about what was going on in his head.

The closet light ached to brighten, to better illuminate the words in the book just as the world began to edge its way into night and Teddy could hear the movement of his family downstairs, the opening and closing of doors and the clanking of dishes and utensils in preparation for dinner.

And then his door creaked open. His father had come for him, to remind him that he needed to eat, that he couldn’t just sit around by himself and read all day. He peered at the dimming light in the closet, trying to make out the shape of a boy who was sprawled haphazardly over the limp bodies of the stuffed animals.

Teddy closed the book and followed his father down to the dining room.

---

The next day, during recess, Teddy walked straight to the library. Mrs. Ryan sat in the same position behind the desk as she had the day before. Her head kept dipping down to her chest and then perking back up as soon as it had gone too far. She was a robot caught in a perpetual cycle of short-circuited repetition.

Teddy looked around the library for the little girl.

“Hello?” he whispered as he walked around. He realized he didn’t know her name.

“Hello,” he heard her say from behind him. He turned and found her sitting at one of the circular tables, her feet dangling above the floor. She sniffled and wiped her nose against the sleeve of her red cardigan.

“Where did you run to yesterday? I couldn’t find you.”

“I was upset,” she answered.

Teddy blushed and looked down at her dangling feet. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to upset you.”

“It’s OK. I just don’t like when people think there’s something wrong me.

“Me too,” he said and nodded in agreement.

“What’s your name?”

“Teddy,” he answered, stepping forward and extending his hand in truce-like fashion.

The girl laughed and shook his hand. “Like the bear!”

“Yeah…” he sighed, having heard this pronouncement many times before.

“I like that name. It’s nice.”

Teddy blushed and looked down at her dangling feet. “What’s your name?”

“Maya,” she announced triumphantly, as if she was thrilled they were finally getting somewhere.

“I like that name too,” he answered, not knowing what else to say, how else to compliment someone who had just complemented him.

“Do you want to sit and read with me?”

Teddy brightened. “OK,” he said, and simultaneously placed Alice onto the table.

“My book! The one I gave you yesterday!”

“I started reading it,” he reported. “I thought I read it already but I can’t remember.” He paused and considered the situation. “It’s strange. Maybe my head is being funny from the accident. It feels like I know what happens but I don’t really know.”

“That happens to me sometimes. I’ll read a whole book and I’ll really love it and then a little while later I don’t remember so much about it, and I think ‘why did I love it?’ But you can still feel that it was a good book even maybe if you can’t remember everything.”

Teddy thought that he understood what she was saying, but didn’t know for sure. “Did you love this book?” he asked, pointing to Alice.

“Yes! It’s one of my favorites.”

“Why?”

She threw her hands up above her head. “I don’t know!” Maya laughed again. “But I still love it!”

---

Teddy started coming to the library everyday. Outside, he could only hear the muted murmur of the children beyond the shut windows, playing in the snow that seemed to fall incessantly. Sometimes he would glance up from his book to watch, and a pang of regret would run through him. Part of him wanted to be back there with them, wanted things to return to way they had been before the accident when he played with the rest of them and shouted and yelled and hung from the monkey bars. But even now, as the yellow tape had been completely removed and all indications of the accident erased, as the children returned to that part of the playground that had been off-limits, he still felt the weight of what had happened.

Little by little, he pushed himself to ignore their sounds and he began to take pleasure in the solitary moments he had with Maya, locked away in the library. This was their world, and Mrs. Ryan, the sleeping but reliable guard at the entrance, made sure that nothing would disturb the space.

Often they read their books together, with Teddy trying to get through Alice (for the second time, for the first time, he didn’t know) while Maya was always flipping through some new book, moving the pages so quickly that he was never sure if she was actually reading the words or just absorbing what they looked like bunched up together. Sometimes they would hide in the stacks, pressed up against the books, with their legs folded in front of them. They talked about their families and about their lives, what it would be like to grow old and what it was like being the age that they were, the two of them stuck in the gray area of adolescence, unsure exactly of how to categorize themselves.

Teddy told Maya about his baby sister who slept in her crib and cried sometimes, about the closet of stuffed animals in his room. He told her about his parents and how they now, only rarely, spoke to each other, moving through the house like people living in parallel dimensions.

Maya spoke of her many visits to the doctors and the time she spent in hospitals while her mother or father would alternate keeping watch over her. Her father seemed tired, exhausted by all of it, and she felt bad about this, felt as if she was responsible for him being that way. Meanwhile she described her mother as someone who always wore a smile, and Teddy recalled the woman he had seen leading Maya through the hallways at the beginning of the school year. Maya was an only child and had prayed for a baby brother or sister, like the one that Teddy had, but she stopped when she learned that her mother could no longer have children. This fact made Maya’s mother all the more resilient to make sure that Maya got better.

One day, while they were sitting in the stacks and Teddy was telling her about a summer camping excursion he had taken with his father, Maya, without warning, put her hand on top of Teddy’s and squeezed it. He stopped and looked down at her fingers and knuckles that glowed red from the ferocity of the grip, then back up at her.

He faltered for a moment, trying to restart the story, but he couldn’t collect his thoughts.

“Go on,” she said calmly.

Then he found his voice, and continued to speak, trying to pace himself even while the feeling of her hand thrilled him.

---

During breakfast, Teddy sat down at the kitchen table across from his mother who attempted to feed his baby sister as the little girl fidgeted in her high chair, constantly turning away from the approaching spoon. He watched as his sister raised her arms up and then dropped them down on the little plastic tray table, sending a bowl of baby food flipping into the air. It sailed for a moment and then crashed on the white-tiled floor.

“Shit!” shouted his mom. She dropped the spoon and went to clean up the mess.

More than anything, he wanted to speak with his mother about what was on his mind, about all those days spent in the library away from the kids, and, most of all, about Maya. He missed the way he used to be able sit with her in the mornings before school and talk of the things he look forward to in his day; she could always sense if something was wrong. But when had they last spoken?

“What is it Teddy?” she would ask when she saw that he wasn’t eating, just moving the floating Os around methodically in his cereal bowl.

Now he watched as his mother returned to his baby sister with a fresh bowl of food. The little girl had started crying and was no longer interested in what was being offered to her. His mother closed her eyes and pulled a wave of errant hair back behind her ear.

“What happens,” he wanted to know, “if a ghost kisses you?” The question had been on his mind ever since the moment in the library when Maya grabbed his hand. He knew it was a ridiculous idea, he knew it had come from a bunch of stupid kids who just wanted to scare him and make fun of Maya. But still, he just wanted to be sure.

His mother opened her eyes and glanced at him, took him in, and for a moment it seemed like she noticed that he was troubled.

But the sound of his crying baby sister stole back his mother’s attention. She turned to the little girl, poised for another attempt to make her eat her breakfast.

Teddy sat at the table and absorbed the sound of his little sister, he listened to the deep moans that echoed through the kitchen and filled it with a single, constant throb of sound. He looked down at his hand, at the spot where Maya had held it, and didn’t ask anything.

---

A new routine began to develop, and now every one of Teddy’s visits to the library was accented by a single instance – the moment that Maya would hold his hand in hers. They never spoke about it, never discussed what it might mean or how they felt. It became just another shared experience between them, something that happened while they moved through the world they had created.

It never happened at exactly the same moment or in the same way, but he came to expect it, to anticipate it during his visits. Sometimes, as soon as he would walk in, she would come up next to him, take his hand, and pull him towards a table near the windows where they watched the spring rain fall and glide along shiny blacktop surfaces. Sometimes it would happen just as it had that first time, in the stacks during a moment of conversation, a comma calmly placed into the middle of a sentence, a pause going almost unnoticed except for the frenzied sensation Teddy would feel rising in his chest.

And then there came a time when, just as Teddy was making his way out of the library before the noise of the bell that was bound to rouse sleeping Mrs. Ryan, Maya held him back, she grabbed his hand and pulled him to try to make him stay. He playfully tried to release himself from her grip and was surprised at how strong she seemed to be. She held on and stared at him with a ferocity he had never seen before. He began to buck against her, becoming panicked as he watched the clock edge its way towards the end of the period. But just as it was about to ring, Maya let go, and Teddy raced out of the library, relieved that he was making it out in time. He glanced back and saw Maya watching him beyond the glass doors.

“Hi Teddy!” Maya greeted him as she always did.

“Hi,” he said distractedly, still shaken by their last encounter. There was also an additional, sudden realization that he had earlier that morning – he couldn’t find the copy of Alice he had been shuttling in and out of the library undeclared. “Did you see my book?” he asked as he looked past her and towards the circular tables, trying to recall when and how the book had gone missing, how long he had been reading it. “Did you see the Alice in Wonderland that I had?”

“Oh no!” she said. “Did you lose it?”

“I don’t know,” he answered, sensing a dimness at the periphery of his vision. “I can’t remember. I might have just left it behind here yesterday, or...” He stopped and turned his eyes towards her. “Some other time…When you didn’t want to let me go…Was that yesterday?” He began to feel light-headed.

She smiled. “Well maybe it’s here somewhere. Maybe someone put it back on the shelf.” She thought for a moment. “Or maybe someone else checked it out. I hope not!”

Teddy nodded.

“Let’s go see.”

Maya walked up to him and took his hand. His body froze.

“Come on,” she said as she tugged for him to follow. “Let’s check.”

She pulled him along, towards the literature section, where they began looking through the titles organized by author names. The section for “C,” for “Carol,” was too high for them to reach, so Teddy rolled over a short step-ladder. He climbed up and peered at the books on the shelf.

Sure enough, neatly sandwiched between two other versions of the same book, was the copy of Alice that Maya had offered to him.

He held it up. “Here it is,” he announced.

“Yay!” she shared in his excitement.

He saw the way she looked at him, the way she absorbed him with her wide eyes, and he faltered atop the step-ladder. Without warning, he lost his footing and fell towards the floor.

Images began to pop into his mind. There were thoughts of stumbling, flying, and then falling. Visions of white and grey holding him aloft for a moment, on a cushion of air, and then greens and blues rushing past in a torrent that choked and crushed him. He felt a mixture of euphoria and fear that lingered long enough for him to know it was there but not to understand it completely. And then there was the deep hole of silence, a numbness that held him and bathed him in its warmth. His eyes peered beyond the interlacing lashes of his clenched lids and he saw a sea of concrete, lit by the sun and stretching past sneakers and shoes and a tumble of limbs, stretching towards a shadow that cut the sea in half.

“Teddy! Teddy!” He heard his name and he was reminded of the children from the hallway, the ones who teased him as Maya passed.

Maya.

He sat up and looked around. He was in the library. Mrs. Ryan sat near the door, unstirred by the commotion. Maya was on the floor next to him. Everything was as it should be.

“Are you OK?” she asked. She bite at her dry lower lip.

“Yeah, I think so.”

“You scared me.”

He considered the step-ladder. “I slipped.”

The book had fallen along with him, and he took it up into his hands.

He stared at it, at the cover with its picture of a blond girl with bows in her hair, wearing a red summer dress, peering into a wide, dark hole. He tried to understand why it looked so familiar to him. Of course it was familiar, he thought, he had been reading it ever since Maya had given it to him. But there was something else. There was an idea that sat very close and yet seemed very far away. He didn’t know what to make of it, and as he tried to ground his thoughts, his head began to pound.

“I don’t feel well,” he said as he picked himself up. “I want to leave.”

“OK,” said Maya, and he could hear the disappointment in her voice. “You won’t stay with me in the library today?”

“No,” answered Teddy. “I just want to go home.”

Maya put her hand on Teddy’s shoulder. Without thinking, he jerked his body away from her. He was surprised at his own reaction, at his sudden and inexplicable revulsion.

He saw the sadness return to her eyes, that same look he had seen in the very beginning, on that day in the stacks where she had turned and run away from him.

“I’m sorry,” he said, and even while he wanted to stop himself from doing it, he couldn’t help but take a step back, to inch away with the book in his hand.

The pounding in his head began to pick up, and it got louder and faster, so that a sound began to fill his ears but he didn’t understand where the sound was coming from. The pounding grew, becoming more furious, becoming so fast that the individual beats began to fuse into one constant, consuming noise that reminded him of the sound of his sister crying, his sister who would sometimes cry when he would watch her in her bed, who would cry when he sat near her in the kitchen as his mother tried to feed her, as he longed to ask a question, to speak after having gone so long in silence.

He pressed the book tightly against his chest and ran.

---

When he got home, it was already dark, and he ran past his mother and his sister in the living room. His mother lay on the couch and picked her head up. His sister looked at him from the floor where she sat with a coloring book.

He moved swiftly and went straight up to his room. He shut the door and threw his backpack onto the bed, launching himself into his closet of stuffed animals. Something struck the floor behind him, and he sat up to find that the book had fallen onto the blue carpeting and slipped under the bed.

Downstairs he heard his mother’s voice saying something that he couldn’t make out. And then he heard his father’s voice saying something in response. Moments later he heard the heavy steps of his father’s body climbing the stairs. The wood creaked underneath him and sent tiny tremors through the house.

Teddy poised himself. Then the door slowly edged open and his father stuck his head in. He looked around the room, at Teddy’s bed and at the stars stuck to Teddy’s ceiling, then towards the closet with its little light still glowing resiliently but seeming dimmer every day.

Teddy’s father stepped inside the room and noticed Teddy’s bag, he noticed the book on the floor.

“I’m OK,” said Teddy from his spot in the closet. “I just don’t feel well.” Teddy wanted to be left alone, left to the quiet and darkness of his room and to the empty marble-eyed stares of his stuffed animals.

Teddy’s father stepped further into the room and approached the book.

“Did I ever read that?” asked Teddy suddenly. “Did I read that book before?” He exhaled and looked at his father’s face. “I can’t remember.”

His father picked up the book. He flipped it open to the inside of the cover and stared at the check-out slip that was sticking out of the manila holder.

“Teddy,” his father said, as he looked at the slip and shook his head. “You never finished this.”

Then, as if remembering something, his father walked up to the closet and carefully placed the book down amongst the stuffed animals. He smiled, and slowly backed his way out of the room, hovering for a moment in the entryway before stepping back into the hallway and shutting the door.

Teddy could hear his father walking back down to the living room. He heard him say something and then he heard his mother’s voice respond. And somewhere between them, soft and far away, was the tiny voice of sister, who tried to speak up, to be noticed and acknowledged.

The book lay cradled on the head of a horse and the back of a triceratops. Teddy watched it for a moment, as if he expected it to speak and reveal some secret, help him to see or to understand that which he didn’t.

But when nothing happened, Teddy opened the book to the inside cover and removed the check-out slip. There, he saw the names of children he didn’t know, couldn’t know, because of the dates that went back to a time before he was even in school, dates that revealed names of people who by now were probably adults themselves, off and away in colleges, married, maybe even with children of their own. But as he went through the list and the dates progressed, he saw two names that he recognized. There, perched near the top of the card, was Maya’s name. And just above it, he saw his own.

Teddy sat with the book open in his hands. He thought about his family sitting downstairs and he was happy to hear all of their voices mixing and interacting with each other, to hear the house alive with conversation instead of the silence that had dominated it for what seemed or felt like a long time. Somewhere he heard his mother laugh, and he felt that perhaps it was the best sound he had ever heard in his life.

Then he dug himself deeper into the warm cushion of his stuffed animals and flipped the book open to the page where he had left off.

---

Maya noticed Teddy walk into the library, but didn’t move from the table where she sat with her feet dangling above the ground, her boney knees outlined by her soiled white stockings.

Teddy walked passed her and straight to the stacks. He went in search of the rolling step-ladder and pulled it up to the literature section. At the top of the shelf, he could see an empty space between two books. He climbed onto the ladder and slipped Alice back between the books, back to where he had taken it from. There had been a day when he had first seen the book, had held it in his hands and wondered about it before making the decision to begin reading it, to check it out of the library. It had all happened before Maya, before the accident. That much he knew, even as time had become lost to him.

He approached Maya, saying her name to get her attention. But she kept flipping through the book she had in front of her, and didn’t acknowledge him.

“Maya,” he repeated.

She dropped her head in frustration and he saw that her eyes were red.

“I finished the book,” he told her.

She nodded, trying to force the smile that had greeted him on so many occasions “Did you like it?”

“I did!” he answered. “It was a good suggestion.”

“I knew you would like it!” She seemed a little more composed, and took the moment to consider the possibilities that lay ahead. “There are so many more books for us to read!” She passed her eyes over the library and wondered about what would come next.

Teddy put his hands in his pockets. “Maya,” he began to say once more, realizing what her name had come to mean to him. “I can’t,” he said. “I can’t stay here with you.”

She was silent for a moment but her face didn’t show any reaction. She must know, he told himself. She must understand why he needed to go, to return to the playground.

“You can come with me,” he suggested.

She shook her head. “No,” she answered. “I can’t do that.”

“Why not? Why stay here?”

She indicated the book on the table. “I haven’t finished it yet.”

Teddy didn’t say anything. He didn’t know what to do.

“A little longer?” she asked. “Can you stay for a little longer at least?”

The two of them sat at the round table with the white chairs. They laughed at the way Mrs. Ryan snored and how she always seemed on the verge of waking up or tipping over, but always corrected herself at just the last moment. They went into the stacks and read through the titles on the shelves, thinking about all that there was to still discover and learn. And then they sat on the floor and leaned back against the books, their legs bent and pressed up against their chests.

Quiet set in and just as the time between them was coming to an end, Teddy felt Maya take his hand and squeeze it tightly. He looked over at her and saw, for the first time, a face that wasn’t sunken or sickly, a face that wasn’t frail and pale from illness. Instead, here was Maya, as she had been, as she would always be, a young girl with big, bright eyes, and a warm, soft complexion, a blush perking up in her cheeks.

She squeezed his hand harder, and then she closed her eyes, leaned forward, and kissed him.

---

Teddy took a deep breath and pushed through the doors, walking out into the warm breeze and descending the steps.

The shadow was long this afternoon, consuming half of the courtyard. He saw the children beyond it, playing under the sun. Ms. White stood beside them, her arms crossed in front of her, as she kept watch over their games. She seemed to hold a permanently stern look on her face, and kept glancing nervously in Teddy’s direction, towards the steps leading into the school.

Teddy waved to her. She squinted and put her hand up to her brow.

He stood there, not knowing what to do, unsure of whether he was ready to be with the children again. He had been certain only moments earlier, but here he was, wavering.

The children shouted all around him, their excited cries beckoned for him to join, to run to them, to be part of their world again.

Teddy gave one final look to the library. He had hoped to see Maya, standing and waving at him, or smiling from her place at one of the tables. But she wasn’t there. All he saw were the reflected images from the playground, warped shapes floating across like specters in the glass.

Ms. White seemed to be waiting for him, they all seemed to be waiting for him. And so Teddy turned towards the patch of sun beyond the shadow, and ran into the light.

A Blackout, for Just a Moment

2011-04-20T14:51:00.000-07:00

As far as blackouts go, this one went relatively unnoticed. In fact, it’s debatable whether you could even call it a blackout, considering it lasted for only a few milliseconds, an amount of time which is practically imperceptible to humans.

If you happened to be up during this co-called blackout when it struck at 3am on a work night, you may or may not have noticed the lights flicker, or your TV dim and then brighten, or the animals, the ones that are sensitive to these sorts of things, begin to howl and cackle and meow.

Most people were, of course, asleep, and didn’t notice a damn thing. But for those poor souls with electronic alarm clocks, the power went off for long enough that, when it came back on, a dismal, blinking “12:00” was all the clocks could manage.

---

Greg was one of those poor souls who had an important meeting later that morning. So when he casually cracked his eyes open and saw the flashing numbers, he began to panic. At first the panic was distant, obscure, trapped somewhere between the world of waking and the world of sleep. But then it began to fester, to spread, first into his mind, and then rather quickly, to the rest of him.

“Fuuuuuuuck,” he moaned to himself.

He pulled his arm out from underneath his body and looked at the wrist watch he always wore to bed.

7:45.

“It doesn’t seem late,” he tried reasoning. But his brain transistors were not yet firing at full strength. He was still unsure of what day it was – did he have a presentation today or had he already done it?

“No!” he suddenly realized. “The presentation is today.”

He propelled his legs off the edge of the bed and disappeared into the bathroom.

---

Somewhere else in Brooklyn, Leah was awoken by construction that seemed to be perpetually taking place outside of her apartment.

“Fuuuuuuuuck,” she moaned. For a moment she was livid enough that she swore to write to the City about the construction, the way it was creating a nuisance in the neighborhood, creating an unsafe environment. But then the burden of wakefulness made her forget about this plan and she became more concerned what time it was. After all, she had an audition to get to.

Without her glasses, she had to squint at the funky digital alarm clock that sat on her dresser. What one moment had been just the dim blur of a yellow box, became a mother figurine wagging a finger at her son who held a cookie behind his back. The unusually large wagging finger moved at the tempo of real-world seconds. Above the pair of characters, she spied the flashing digits.

Confused, she rubbed her eyes and sat up in her bed to get a better view of the clock. Then, when her original analysis had been confirmed, she opened the laptop which always sat perched on the side of her bed.

7:50 said the little, much more reliable, computer clock.

“Crap crap crap,” she said. Just like that, three times, in quick succession.

Growling in discontent, she threw herself off the bed, stumbled over the sheets which followed her halfway across the room, and flew towards the bathroom.

---

Greg’s wet hair dripped onto the wooden floor as he stood over his computer with a towel wrapped around his waist. One errant drop landed on the “x” of his keyboard and slipped into cracks between the letters.

“No no no,” he muttered to himself. As he checked his work email he saw a request sent by his manager at some point after he had already left work the previous day. The email attempted to project warm feelings and good will, and the manager expressed relief that he had “caught you [Greg] before you [Greg] left for the day.” This email, from the manager who always managed to leave at least an hour before everyone else and who was exceptional at knowing very little but delegating a lot, asked Greg to make some last-minute changes to the presentation. “They shouldn’t take you more than a few minutes,” said the email, as Greg recited it in his manager’s voice, using his manager’s physical mannerisms. The more he embellished the message, the more frustrated and unnerved he got.

He glanced at the clock – 8:00 – and with his towel still wrapped around his waist, he sat down in front of his computer and began making the requested changes.

---

Leah showered quickly, so quickly that when she was stepping out of her shower and onto the bathroom rug, she wasn’t sure if she had washed her hair. She rubbed the steam off the mirror to look at herself.

Wet hair, so at least that was taken care of. Her eyes were still puffy, a symptom of sleeping on her stomach with her face crushed against the pillow. She loaded her toothbrush up with paste and began brushing her teeth and combing her hair. This was a technique she had perfected while at her last job, the one in which she was practically a slave laborer, working long hours for very little pay, and justifying it all to herself because it was a job in the “entertainment industry,” which was, after all, the industry she wanted to work in. At some point she could no longer reconcile an acting career that was focused on making connections and building relationships but which never created any actual acting opportunities.

Someone knocked on the bathroom door.

“Hello?”

“Hey,” said Leah, “it’s me.”

“What are you doing here?” said the annoyed voice, the voice of one of her five roommates in the six bedroom/one bathroom illegal loft they all shared.

“Sorry!” shouted Leah, over the sound of the running water, over the muffle of toothpaste lathered in her mouth. “I overslept.”

“But I need to use the bathroom.”

“I know! Just one second.”

Leah half-assed the rest of her morning hygiene, leaving her teeth half-brushed and her hair half-combed, and then turned to open the bathroom door.

The door wouldn’t budge.

“Are you coming out?” asked the roommate on the other end.

“I’m trying!” answered Leah. “I think the door is stuck again.”

The roommate knocked on the door, as if that was going to help the situation, and then proceeded to push her weight against it. But it seemed to be true – the door was stuck. This was not surprising considering the entire apartment, including a second floor perch where Leah’s room was fixed in a corner with interlaced piping crossing at the ceiling that was a mere six feet off the floor, was built over the course of four weekends. The door hadn’t been cut evenly (you couldn’t worry about such details when you were building a loft over the course of four weekends), and though it tended to work most of the time, sometimes the combination of heat and steam made it warp just enough that it would get stuck.

The roommate pushed and Leah pulled, and together, they helplessly attempted to open the bathroom door, the door that would eventually open, but on its own time.

---

At 8:45, while Greg was putting on his suit, he cursed again – he was going to be late, he was almost sure of it. It was now becoming a tic for him, glancing at his watch every few seconds, as if time would slow down or stop altogether, or speed quickly ahead to a new life, a new world, without these presentations and these deadlines and a manager who acted like his friend but always made sure that Greg didn’t rise much in his position with the firm. He hated suits, and he only ever wore them for the presentations, or for the job interviews that offered a hope of escape. But then again, he thought to himself as he glanced at his watch yet again, did he even want to work in this field? Somehow he got pulled in a direction he had never wanted or expected to go in, and now here he was.

He looked at himself in the mirror and nodded away the creeping impressions that were sure to make him even more anxious than he was already. He should have shaved, that was one thing he missed. And now his tie, as he laced it around and knotted it down, just wouldn’t cooperate. He untied it and retied it and began to feel a warmth rising up his back.

8:50.

He began to sweat between his shoulder blades. The tie finally looked okay, and so he turned to go. But as soon as he stepped forward, he felt a tug, heard a rip, and looked down to find that his pocket had become snagged on the edge of a dresser drawer. A three inch tear exposed his naked leg underneath, and in a fury, he began to take his clothes off.

He would have to wear his “bad” suit, the black one he usually only threw on for funerals.

---

Leah was finally out of her apartment and the cool air was a welcome relief after the 15 minutes she had spent stuck in the windowless, ventless, airless bathroom. Her roommate was surely pissed, considering Leah had broken an unwritten but cardinal rule of their apartment – you had your designated block of bathroom time, and you never infringed on someone’s else’s slot.

But Leah couldn’t worry about her roommate, not right now, not with an audition to get to and a train to catch. She pulled out her cell phone and checked the time.

9:00.

Cutting it close. Cutting it really close. It was anyone’s bet at this point, whether she’d make it there by the time she was scheduled to be in front of the casting director.

Her subway was just down the street, which was perhaps the one saving grace of her apartment situation; if nothing else, she could appreciate that she could get to the City relatively quickly and easily. As she approached her stop, she focused on the clicking of her heels against the asphalt, at the sound that echoed down the mostly empty street. The absence of others was striking, as usually there was a stream of people heading to the subway at around this time. Perhaps it was just a few minutes that made all the difference, perhaps if she had been on the street only moments earlier she would have seen the stream, been part of the flood of straphangers. But now, she was alone.

She noticed it from a few feet away. It was one of those blue and off-white MTA posters that announced service changes in as convoluted and indecipherable a manner as possible. Whenever she read these posters, she imagined little gnome-like scribes sitting in some tunnel somewhere, mixing up the trains and the lines and then sinisterly delivering the message to people in a way they would never understand. It was a complete temporal and spatial and linguistic manipulation, and she couldn’t help but feel a little defeated.

This time, she understood as much as she needed to – her train was out of commission. She stood motionless for a moment, staring at the sign, and then belted a primal cry of frustration. She turned on her heels and began to run, towards a new reality that didn’t include her crappy apartment and her angry roommate and the time she had wasted in avoiding the things she cared about.

She ran between the set of warehouses that overlooked either side of the street, in the direction of the next closest subway line.

---

Greg scrambled down the steps and simultaneously pulled his MetroCard out of his pocket. Somewhere beneath him he heard and felt the rumble of his subway pulling into the station, followed very soon thereafter by the screeching sound of brakes.

He pushed his MetroCard through the reader smoothly, patiently, the way you were supposed to if you wanted it to be read by the machine on the first try. This was an art that set someone like him, a native New Yorker, apart from the tourists who kept swiping helplessly, staring at their MetroCards blankly while they tried to figure out which direction the black strip needed to face for it to work.

But something about his momentum was off, and the card reader beeped, the turnstile stayed fixed.

“Please swipe again at this turnstile,” it read.

Somewhere in the tunnel below him, there was the electronic voice of a man.

“Stand clear of the closing doors please,” he announced.

Then there was that painful, shrill sound, the one you heard right before you understood that you were too late, that the subway would be leaving without you.

---

Leah got to the bottom of the stairs just in time to see the red tail lights of the train. They glowed like raccoon eyes before retreating away from her, backwards, into the dark tunnel that run straight and then snaked sharply to the right.

She might as well give up. She would be late. She would get there and the casting director would have someone else in the room – the girl who was supposed to go right after her and who, when Leah was five, ten minutes late, would be called in early. Because of course the other girl would be there already, because the other girl took this opportunity seriously and didn’t allow herself to oversleep, she didn’t keep a stupid electrical alarm clock with a plastic mom shaking her finger at some stupid kid who had a cookie behind his back.

She would throw the alarm clock out when she got back home.

Leah began to pace the platform. She shook her head at herself. Then, sensing somebody nearby, she looked up.

---

Greg stared at the girl in the flower dress pacing on the platform. She looked as disgruntled as him after missing the train. This was their shared New York experience, something most everyone, no matter who they were, can relate to.

He shrugged at her, as if to say “oh well, what can you do,” and she smiled in return.

He turned away and together they stood in the silence of the empty platform. His presentation crept back into his mind, the fact that he would be late and his boss would chew him out. He thought about his ill-fitting black suit.

And then much too soon after the last train had left, another one pulled into the station.

---

Leah stepped into the car that pulled up in front of her and watched the guy from the platform enter the same car. In the far end of the car, she spotted a woman sitting next to a little girl. The child had a book open on her lap and was mumbling something, happily pointing to a picture and then clapping her hands.

“Ladies and gentlemen, because of last night’s blackout, and the resultant delays in the transit system, this train will run express into Manhattan to West 4th St. For all bypassed stations, please transfer to the Brooklyn bound train at West 4th St. Stand clear of the closing doors.”

A wave of relief passed over her body and she felt the tightness release from her shoulders. She checked her watch and realized she might just make it to the audition on time. Maybe there was something to all of this. Maybe, when all was said and done, she was meant to get on this train, to make it to the audition, to get the part even.

She sat down and stared at her own dim reflection in the window of the train. From the corner of her eye she noticed the guy from the platform, leaning against a pole, and turned to look at him once more.

---

Greg would be on time after all. Already he had started forming the excuses in his head, began prepping himself for the barrage of reprimands he would have been bound to endure if he had been late. And now that was all irrelevant. He’d make it to the presentation, no one would notice the things he noticed about his own suit, and everything would be fine. Then he would have to start asking himself the bigger questions about where he was in his life and whether he was happy doing what he was doing.

The girl in the flower dress, he looked at her again. She returned his glance, but then turned her attention to something else, to her own reflection in the window of the train.

There was something odd about her, something that made him anxious once more.

As the train picked up speed and rolled over the tracks, passing crowded platforms in a blur, a sense of urgency began to mount in Greg’s mind.

---

She didn’t understand why, but Leah began to think about him, about his black suit that didn’t seem to fit right but was charming for some reason.

She suddenly found that she wanted him to say something to her.

---

Greg was drawn to her without really knowing why. She didn’t look like the sort of girls he was usually into. But he made a decision – he would say something to her. He began to muster the courage he needed for the approach.

As the train passed more stations he noticed that they were getting close to their first stop. What if she got off at the first stop? He was running out of time.

---

What if he didn’t say anything? Maybe she should be the one to speak up?

But all of this was ridiculous, wasn’t it? She had an audition to go to, that’s what she should be focusing on, not some random guy on the subway.

She didn’t know who he was, and yet she felt compelled to speak with him.

---

The train slowed as it approached West 4th, and then lurched before coming to a complete stop. Sure enough, the girl got up from the bench, but seemed to be taking her time as she strolled over to the door and stood by it just before it was set to open.

Greg needed to act, before she walked out of the train, but he still hadn’t figured out what he would do.

Something tugged at him, and just as the doors seemed to stay closed for a moment too long, he stepped forward.

---

The doors opened and Greg saw the girl, he saw Leah, step out of the train. As she began walking away, heading down the platform towards the exit, she looked back at him and smiled. She seemed to move slowly, as if she was stalling, waiting, hoping for things to play out the way they were supposed to.

---

Greg needed to run up to her and say something, anything. He didn’t know why, but he understood that he didn’t need to know why.

And yet a part of him couldn’t come to terms with the idea of going after her, after a stranger he had noticed on the train. He couldn’t arrange his thoughts in a way that would justify doing something like that. It would be thought of as odd, as weird. Maybe she’d get scared.

And what about his presentation? He couldn’t just miss it to go after some girl.

So Greg, standing at the threshold of the train, his foot hovering right at the edge of the gap, smiled back at her and watched as she finally turned away and disappeared out of view.

The doors closed, the train began to pick up speed, and soon it was back in the darkness of the tunnel.

---

“I should have said something,” Leah decided, shaking her head at herself. “I wonder if I’ll ever see him again,” she wondered as she emerged onto the street and began to walk towards the direction of the studio.

---

“I should have said something,” Greg realized when it was already too late. He sighed and glanced at his watch. “But I’m sure I’ll see her again.”

The Forgotten

2011-03-21T06:27:00.000-07:00

The old women, with their red and orange and yellow handkerchiefs wrapped over the tops of their heads and tied into tight knots just under their chins, looked indistinguishable from each other. They jabbered about something and it seemed to him as if they had been standing that way for hours, in the middle of a conversation that wore on in several highs and lows, beginnings and ends.

His grandmother had already put his coat on, had already pulled the boots over his feet so that now, as he sat on the stiff green couch with the cushions held in place by buttons that kissed the fabric taught, he felt himself warming up, and he began to squirm. It was a little kid squirm, the sort that starts as a dull, high-pitched moan, and then tracks its way towards a half-yell.

“Wait,” his grandmother instructed him in the vernacular, in the Russian that held more gravity for him, and because, in any case, she couldn’t speak English.

But already he felt his gloved hands getting warm too, and his neck began to itch under the scarf that wove its way around his neck and sprinkled his face with flimsy tassels that tickled his nose and rested against the edges of his eye lashes. The noise he was making began to get louder.

“OK, OK,” his grandmother finally said, turning away from her friend and walking over to him.

He jumped off the couch and rushed over to the door.

“Put your hat on,” she instructed, “you will be cold.”

“No,” he insisted, holding on to the knob. The three locks that kept him from running out without them, were daunting, large and immovable, and their coded latching, the way in which one needed to be turned in a specific direction while another needed to be flipped in the opposite direction, seemed indecipherable to him. He just liked the sound they made, the way they clicked and crunched.

“We are not going anywhere until you put your hat on.”

“No!” he moaned. “I’m hot! I was sitting so long.” Didn’t they understand that he was uncomfortable? That he didn’t need a hat? They didn’t know anything, these old women. They just clucked to each other like big feathery birds. He didn’t like the way he felt talked down to, as if he was the one who didn’t know anything. As he stared at the locks on the door, and reaffirmed to himself that he couldn’t even reach the top one, not even on his tiptoes, he felt the frustration of being treated like a child.

He watched as his grandmother grabbed his hat and put it into her bag. She turned to her friend and sighed. “He gets in his moods, this one.” She looked down at him while she moved to unlatch the door. “You’ll see, he will be cold in a minute. You will be cold I’m saying. You will want the hat.”

As the door opened into the building’s hallway, he ran down the green carpeting towards the elevator. He paused for a moment and then used both of his index fingers to press the lower button, the one he had been taught would make the elevator stop on its way down. When the elevator didn’t stop immediately, as he always expected, he pressed the button again, this time pushing harder.

“Patience, it will come,” his grandmother said as she approached with her friend.

“How long is his vacation from school?” the friend asked.

“I don’t know!” his grandmother responded, seemingly overwhelmed by the question. “Already he doesn’t have school for a week.” She shook her head. “I don’t know what they imagine for kids in this country. School for a few months and then–” She slapped her hands together for emphasis and the clap was loud enough that he turned his head to glance at them, taking his attention away from the elevator for a moment. “–No school, just vacation. Children running around with no one looking after them. They’re lucky they have me. I don’t even want to think what happens with families where it is only the parents.”

“Parents!” her friend exclaimed. “These days, lucky if they have one parent.”

“Exactly! And these kids, always they are light and easy with them. Vacation! Five years old and he has vacation. I didn’t even understand this word until we moved here. These Americans with their vacations. Working only a little and then, right away, vacation.”

He started getting anxious. Why hadn’t the elevator arrived yet? The way they were speaking, it made him wonder whether his grandmother had the power to send him back to school before it was time to go back, before any of the other kids had to go back. He imagined himself being led by her to the empty building, pushed into the darkened classroom and told to wait until the rest of the kids returned at the end of their time away. He would sit and wait in the room, alone.

He pressed the elevator button again.

“I already told you,” his grandmother said, “it will come.”

And just then the porthole in the elevator door brightened and the door itself slid aside.

He jumped in and pressed the “L” button, holding his breath as the door closed and there were those two to three seconds when nothing at all happened, right before it felt as if the floor was being pulled out from under you. He loved that feeling of falling, it was like being in a rocket ship, except this one was flying downwards, into the depths of the earth.

There was silence in the elevator and he was reminded of the movie his father had recently shown him – “Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.” While most of the movie was an incomprehensible blur, he did remember a few crucial details, namely the crazy hat that Willie Wonka wore, the fact that Willie Wonka himself was a scary man, the name of the good boy (Charlie), the way Charlie’s grandfather had messy hair, the orange faces of the fat little men that helped out in the chocolate factory, and, most importantly, at the end, the way Willie Wonka’s elevator flew out of the factory and sent everyone into the sky, gliding through the clouds. He wished that this elevator was like that one, that with the press of a button he could end up high above the city, looking down on everyone the way they were able to do in the movie.

The elevator jumped as it got to its destination and he almost lost his balance.

“Here, let’s go.”

His grandmother took his hand as they walked out onto the marble lobby floor, preceded through a drafty side entrance, and then exited onto the street.

The cold air slapped his cheeks and he felt it rush up against his body from under his coat, as if it was finding a way to penetrate through every opening. His grandmother considered his disposition, let go of his hand, and reached into her purse for the hat. She held it out to him.

“Maybe you want this now?”

How did she know? Was she inside his head? He looked at his grandmother, then at the hat. But a sense of stubborn resolve rose up inside of him and he decided against saying anything. He shook his head.

“No,” he reiterated. “It’s so hot.”

“Oh,” she said, “so you don’t feel cold?” She lingered on the question, and then curtly added, “OK,” and slipped the hat back into her purse. She turned to her friend and the two of them began to hobble onwards, reengaging in some conversation that he didn’t understand. It might have been a continuation of the conversation they were having back in the apartment, but he had no way of knowing.

They walked too slowly for him, and their pace was mildly infuriating. He ran ahead of them, and then stopped abruptly, standing rigidly, mockingly, maintaining his best soldier-in-formation stance until they came up beside him, and then he bolted again, repeating the stop-and-go pattern a few times. When he got bored with this game, and realized that it wasn’t doing any good in speeding up their progress, he reverted to a slow, slouched amble, letting his shoulders droop. He let them pass while he continued to slow down and edge forward with a choppy, scrape-scrape-scrape sound that his sneakers made against the concrete. He kept his eyes fixed on the ground.

His attention was drawn to the forgotten world of the sidewalk. He spotted a lone cockroach emerge from a grate, turn its head to analyze whether the coast was clear, and then, sensing no danger in his noticing, scuttled across before disappearing into a pipe. He noticed the sparkles in the stone and wondered, for the millionth time, if they weren’t actually ground diamonds worth millions of dollars, and whether this was a discovery that only he had managed to make. When he got to a crack or an etched line that demarcated where the slabs had been poured, he neatly stepped over them, so as to be sure that he wouldn’t fall into a secret chasm. Along the edge of the sidewalk, with its rounded cap of steel trim, he watched an urban stream carrying loose leaves and small rocks and even a plastic bottle cap that looked like a wobbly, circular raft. He traced the stream back up the street to the source – a dripping fire hydrant – and then shifted his attention to the direction of the current, peering ahead to the place where it was destined to end at a sewer opening.

He sighed his boredom and started to walk normally again. But as he revived his pace, he quickly realized that he no longer knew where he was or where he was going, and after a few quick glances around him, realized that his grandmother and her friend had vanished.

He stood in one spot and kept turning around, looking for the oranges and yellows of their headscarves. But all he saw were the dark hues of winter clothing, faces hidden behind upturned collars and long, monstrously long, swinging arms, propelling the walkers forward and past.

His face suddenly felt very warm, a tightness gripped his throat, and something seemed to be descending onto his chest, making it difficult to breathe. He held his breath, because the one thing he did not want to do, was cry.

He shook his head and closed his eyes, then quickly opened them again, expecting to find himself back in a world where his grandmother and her friend hadn’t disappeared. But there was nothing.

Someone, a woman, passing him at that moment, must have sensed his alarm. She slowed, glanced around her in search of some parental confirmation, then, finding none, approached him.

“Are you OK?” she asked, simultaneously lowering her furry earmuffs so that they hung around her neck.

Was he OK? He didn’t know. The word seemed so complicated in his head. His mouth opened but he couldn’t say anything, it was that damn tightness that held onto him, wrapped its fingers around his windpipe.

“Are you lost sweetie?” the woman asked, and looked up without waiting for an answer. “Excuse me,” she said to another passerby, “but I think this boy is lost.”

“Oh?” said the white-haired man she had stopped. “Are you lost?” asked the man.

Not knowing what else to do, not wanting to get in trouble for something he wasn’t sure whether you could get in trouble for, the boy shook his head.

“No?” the man asked. “You’re not lost?”

“I think he’s lost,” the woman interjected, crushing her lips into a tightly pursed formation. She seemed annoyed. “Where are your parents? Did you lose them? Did they leave you?”

His parents? Where were his parents? He had no idea. Why was she asking him about his parents? Had they left? Were they gone too?

A mother pushing a stroller came upon the scene, the white-haired man glanced at his watch.

“He’s lost,” said the woman with the earmuffs. “He doesn’t know where his parents are.”

“Poor thing,” the mother said. He glanced into the stroller and saw a sleeping baby safely tucked away under a blue blanket that was wound tightly around its body and only allowed its head to peek out.

He suddenly missed his own mother, and the thought entered his head that he might never see her again, that this was the singular, defining moment of his life, and that all else was lost. This idea, perhaps more profound than any other, stabbed him sharply enough that he broke into a deep, soulful sob, a sob of the type reserved for pure tragedy, representative of a moment that spelled a disintegration in the fabric of a life.

“Don’t cry little boy.” The white-haired man bite his lip.

The mother rushed over and bent down to his height. She put her arm around him and pulled him towards her.

“It’s OK honey, you’ll be OK.”

He let loose with more tears, and the sob transformed into a sharp, siren-like wail.

Another person stopped by, an older woman with a plump, rounded nose who pulled two young kids, a girl and a boy, behind her. The kids were older than him and stared incredulously.

“What is he crying?” she asked, and he picked up on her foreign intonation.

The girl slid her body behind the woman’s, going into hiding. He felt embarrassed, angry and embarrassed that this girl was watching his collapse.

“He’s lost,” said the woman with the earmuffs, the one who had stopped first, the one who had discovered his distress, the one who now seemed to be trying to maintain her authoritative position over the group.

“What should we do?” asked the mother while cradling him.

“I’m sure he’ll be fine,” said the man, again checking his watch and then taking a moment to consider the other people walking past. “His parents will probably come back any minute now. It was probably just a mistake. They probably just misplaced him.”

“You don’t misplace a child,” said the first woman. “A child is not a thing.”

The white-haired man sighed.

“We can’t just leave him,” said the mother.

“He is cold,” said the older woman. “Dima,” she turned to the boy who was with her. “Give him hat.”

Dima looked confused. “My hat?”

“Yes, yes, give him hat.”

Dima skeptically removed his hat and handed it to him.

The mother took it and put it over his head.

“There now,” the mother added. “Now you’ll feel warmer.” To make the point, she rubbed his back.

“Maybe I should take him home?” suggested the earmuffs woman. “Until we get this sorted out.”

“Maybe we should just call the cops,” retorted the grey-haired man.

The cops? The police? What would they do? Would they arrest him? He panicked, he wailed louder. He forgot that the girl and Dima were still watching the scene.

“See what you did?” snipped the earmuffs woman. “You scared him.”

“I scared him?” asked the grey-haired man. “I didn’t scare him, I just said we should call the police. That’s a completely sensible suggestion to make.” He was getting wound up. “You’re crazy,” he added with emphasis.

The earmuffs woman seemed nonplused. “Here,” she said, reaching out to him. “What’s your name? You can come home and stay with me until we figure this out.”

Dima lifted his mittened hands to cover his exposed ears and grimaced.

This is how it would end, he decided. This woman with the furry earmuffs was going to take him home and he would never see his family again. She would raise him as her own, as her only son. He had seen this sort of thing on television, on one of those early-afternoon shows his grandmother was always watching when he would come home from school.

Gone would be the ways of his old life, the Russian cooking and his annoying little brother. Gone would be the soccer games in the living room that he played with his dad when his dad got back from work, the ones that made the downstairs neighbors knock on their ceiling with a broom handle and made his mom “pull her hair out” because of the way the ball would occasionally hit the chandelier and cause little shards of glass to rain down. Gone would be the weekend trips to Coney Island for fried perogees, cheap produce, the sounds of the overhead train racing past, and the amusement park games at Luna Park that his dad occasionally played to win him stuffed animals. He remembered one stuffed animal in particular, a little red bear he had named “Dipsy.” Farewell Dipsy.

He bowed his head, he felt the crying begin to subside as the numb recognition of his fate, of inevitability, began to take over. He reached for the hand of the woman with the scary earmuffs. But just as he was about to take it, he noticed a flutter of color on the edge of his field of vision.

“Nu?” said his grandmother, who was suddenly standing within the little circle of people as if she had been there all along. “You are here?”

A chorus of redemption welled up in his head and he felt the dried crustiness of his tears at the corners of his eyes.

“Excuse me, who are you?” asked the earmuffed woman.

His grandmother continued in Russian and the old woman with the plump nose stepped in to translate.

“His grandmother,” she reported to the group. “It is the boy’s grandmother.”

The earmuffed woman looked at his grandmother suspiciously, as if she was a stranger who had come to confuse him, whisk him away, and then sell him on some Russian black market that peddled in caviar, blue jeans, and child labor.

“Is this your grandmother?” the earmuffed woman asked him.

He nodded his head vigorously.

“Now you are ready?” his grandmother asked.

“Fantastic,” said the grey-haired man. “I told you someone would be back to get him,” he added as he glanced once more at his watch and walked away hurriedly without looking back.

“You should really be more careful with your grandson,” said the woman with the earmuffs. “Something could have happened to him you know.”

But his grandmother didn’t understand, and pulled him away.

“My hat!” shouted Dima.

“Ah, now you are cold? Now you need a hat?” She pulled it off his head and returned it to Dima, who handled it as if it was a waste product.

He and his grandmother walked away from the group and towards his grandmother’s friend, who stood at a distance from the action with her face buried in her scarf. Behind, he could still sense the watchful eyes of the woman with the earmuffs, but he was terrified to look back. His grandmother’s hand lingered by the side of her body and he grabbed hold of it, feeling her coarse skin against his fingers.

The three of them walked for a few blocks and during that time he had an opportunity to take stock of all that had happened. His breathing came easily now; he inhaled deeply and smiled from the way the cold stung his lungs. His eyes were bright, focused, and he traced the outlines of the church he recognized as the one very near his home. The understanding that they were now close, that things were familiar and that he had returned to a world that was his own, made him feel invincible, as if nothing could happen to him so long as he knew where he was.

They rounded a corner and there was the building where he lived. They stepped through the double set of entry doors and he waved merrily to the doorman who, in a show of male-male understanding between them, gave a short nod and lightly touched the rim of his cap.

Right before they were about to enter the elevator, his grandmother turned to him and nonchalantly added, “so you will not tell your mother that you got lost.” It was a half-question, half-command.

He raised his head and squinted at her.

“Maybe she will get upset.” She shrugged and looked away, subtly implanting the idea into his mind. “Better that we don’t tell her so she doesn’t worry.” She nodded in confirmation of the decision.

Without thinking, he agreed. Then he turned his attention back to the elevator.

When they were upstairs, when they had walked down the hallway to his apartment and his mom had opened the door for them, he made an especially active show of being bored and disinterested. She hugged him and put her cheek to his ears.

“His ears are so cold!” she said to his grandmother. “Didn’t you put his hat on?”

“This one doesn’t like hats,” she answered as she removed her coat. “He is too ‘hot’ he tells me.”

His mother, displeased with the explanation, looked at him and shook her head. “You know better. Your ears are cold. You want them to fall off?”

Before he had a chance to consider this dreadful possibility, she continued with more questions.

“Did you have fun today?” she added as she unzipped his jacket and pulled his scarf off from around his neck.

“What did you do?”

He thought for a moment about her question, and his mind formed a transcendental idea, one that was so magnificent in its philosophical scope that he hadn’t yet developed the capacity to express it.

He smiled. He scratched his nose. He pulled the sleeve of his sweater further down the length of his arm.

“Nothing,” he answered, and then ran off to look for Dipsy.

The Path Less Traveled

2011-02-20T16:52:00.000-08:00

We follow the path of lighthouse signs for most of the morning before we decide that no matter how much we tell ourselves “oh it’s probably just around this corner,” the lighthouse is nowhere to be found.

“Where is this damn thing?” asks David from the passenger seat.

In the rearview mirror I spot Ben looking out the window and chewing on sunflower seeds. He sits nestled in the mess of his slipshod packing, all sweaters and camping equipment and his obnoxiously large backpack, with its many straps and compartments, that we have dubbed “the octopus.”

“I hope you’re using a spit cup or something,” I say. Ben just smiles and keeps watching the New Brunswick countryside emerge from a rain shower. Large puddles dot the road, adding a green hue to the red, yellow, orange reflections of the wooly trees. Somewhere out in the tall grass, the marshes inhale and swell from deep breaths of newly crisp fall air.

“Relax,” he says, “it’s a rental.” Ben, the neurotic who, during the bed bug infestation of 2010 went around New York City with a cut-up black garbage bag to drape over public seating, is telling me to relax.

“I know,” I reply, considering the slightly obnoxious-looking burgundy hatchback that Hertz insisted was perfect for our road trip. “I’m just saying. You’re always leaving a mess in here.”

“Fuck. Dude.” David chimes in. “Pull over. This is ridiculous.”

David, a part-time yogi/part-time marketing exec, is a chill-out master, a diffuser of bad vibes, and I envy him for this. The way he describes the universe, as a conscious, calculating place that you just have to settle into and learn to appreciate, makes you want to kick back on a lawn chair and wait to be showered with blessings and good fortune. Although, ironically, David is as prone to sudden and intense agitation as the rest of us, maybe even more so. He’s the last person you’d expect to get worked up about anything, so when it happens its as if this universe he talks so dearly and dreamily about has short-circuited, sent sparks flying, and managed to start a brush fire under his ass.

I roll the car into the gravel parking lot of a little convenience store that I’m surprised to find in the middle of all of these fields. David jumps out, edges his way between two pick-up trucks, and disappears inside. When he comes out a moment later he’s shaking his head.

“Wild goose chase,” he says when he’s back in the car.

“What do you mean?”

“This road we’ve been following with all the signs, it’s just the ‘Lighthouse Path,’ as in ‘a road that keeps you close to the edge of the water so you pass all the spots where the lighthouses used to be.’ There’s no specific lighthouse.”

“Used to be? They’re not there anymore?”

“It’s the future dude! No lighthouses! This sucks!”

Suddenly the world, its absence of lighthouses, seems incredibly unjust. David is particularly distraught because somewhere back in Maine a few days earlier, during an accidental stop-off at a squat and otherwise underwhelming lighthouse near Acadia National Park, he had a premonition. As we stood with our hands in our pockets, watching the waves, a young woman emerged from the water and the rocks, all mysterious-like, hair wet and up in a bun. She walked in our direction.

“Excuse me, Miss,” said David, in his “I’m asking you a question but I’m really hitting on you” tone of voice.

She stopped and looked at us. I noticed she was a little older than she had appeared in the distance.

“Would you happen to know anything about this lighthouse?”

“I know a little,” she responded, “but you’re probably better off reading the placards they’ve put up everywhere. I’m sure they explain everything a lot better than I would.” Then as she was about to nod, turn away, and leave us to the description panels that dotted the perimeter of the property, she stopped. “Sad thing about lighthouses, you know? Most of them standing around just for show, not actually doing much of anything anymore, not with everyone having all that fancy equipment on the boats. The captains, they don’t need to be staring out at blinking lights like they used to. And so these houses, they’re just shells, they’re ghosts. They keep turning and flashing their lights like nothing has changed, like they’ve been doing all along. Someone should tell them things aren’t how they used to be.” She paused and now here was the nod, the actual farewell. “You boys have a good day.”

She walked away from us and we watched as she began to disappear down the road we had come on.

David, perhaps sensing some incomplete interaction, a message not fully relayed, suddenly ran after her. When he was alongside, he tapped her on the shoulder to get her attention and then said something. Ben and I watched as she leaned in towards David, as if she was about to give him a kiss on the cheek. She whispered something into his ear that made him blush, and then continued away from us.

“What did she say?” we asked.

But he ignored us, was bashful all of sudden, didn’t want to talk about it. He just looked back at the lighthouse, all wide-eyed and pensive, and said, “there are others.”

The trip, which up until that point had been centered on camping and nature walks, suddenly transformed into an active search for lighthouses, a survey of spinning beacons along the East Coast.

“Fine, so there’s no lighthouse,” says Ben from the backseat, between chews and spits. “Not the end of the world.” I sense he’s getting fed up with all of this lighthouse business. He was never really that enthusiastic about it to begin with.

“Just go,” David tells me.

Back on the road, the GPS system, or “Sandra” as we have named her, happily perks up and tells me I should continue in the direction I’m going for another few miles. Our goal for the day is to be deep within New Brunswick by evening time, to camp out in a spot we picked because of its entertaining name – “Fundy” – and because it was designated on the large 2005 road atlas I have left over from a trip to Chicago in college by a big graphic box of woodlands and a small tent icon.

I follow the straight green line of eastward motion and all I can hear is the crunching of seeds from the back and an occasional exasperated sigh that escapes from David. Then from the corner of my eye I catch Sandra beginning to recalibrate her calculations.

“Left turn in 300 meters,” Sandra tells me, in her soft hybrid American/British accent.

“Stupid metric system,” I say out loud, to no one in particular. “Sandra is being feisty. She keeps changing her mind.”

“Sounds about right,” says Ben, and chuckles to himself.

“Left turn,” she reminds me as I get closer.

I slow at the instruction and we find ourselves at the head of a small country road that leads into the farmland.

“Turn here?” I ask the others.

“Sandra doesn’t know what she’s talking about,” says Ben, as he sits up and looks out through the windshield, suddenly attentive to what’s going on because it doesn’t seem to correspond with our plans. “That’s not the right way. Obviously. I mean look at that thing.”

He has a point. The road seems a little too quaint, as if it is was built to accommodate carriages and horseback riding 150 years earlier.

“It’s the right way.” David is animated again, his eyes blazing. “That’s our road dude!”

“Seriously?” asks Ben. “Come on, that’s ridiculous. It. Sandra. Whatever. Made a mistake.”

“Where is your sense of adventure?” asks David. Look at that thing, it’s awesome! There’s a reason we’re being told to turn here. That’s our road! You gotta believe in the greaterness of things my man.”

David likes using that phrase – “the greaterness of things.” It’s his go-to proclamation of higher purpose, of following a course of action because the universe is telling you to do it, even when it might not totally make sense. The hunt for the lighthouses, our time on “Lighthouse Path,” its all part of the same plan, and this, at least to David, seems to be the next step.

I’m influenced by David’s enthusiasm, encouraged by his aura of certainty.

“This is such a bad idea.” Ben reiterates when he sees me twisting the wheel.

I laugh and pull us onto the country road. The car lurches and jumps in response to the potholes and sediment peaks that have dried and hardened after the rain. I try to keep us centered on the carved-out tire tracks of vehicles past, but at some points there’s the scraping of stone against metal, our underbelly traveling too close to the ground.

“Slow, slow,” Ben instructs.

“We’re off-roading!” I proclaim. The rental burrs unhappily.

The single-lane cuts between high stalks that rise on either side of us. Beyond is the open horizon with its choppy strips of clouds sandwiched between sections of purple and orange sky. After a few minutes we can’t see where we came from.

“How long are we going to stay on this thing?” asks Ben.

“Don’t worry, it’s taking us where we need to go,” David answers.

We cut sharply to the left and we’re led towards a narrow passage in the woods, framed by trees and thick roots and fallen branches. Our tires hit soft moss and mud as the ground under us melts away into a sea of loose, moving glaciers. The back of the car fishtails as it struggles to grip the loose soil.

But we’re still moving, and after half an hour even I begin to wonder if this road leads anywhere. Sandra doesn’t have anything to add, guiltily sitting in the corner with her tail between her legs. On the read-out we’re just a small blue arrow on a screen of black.

“You know,” I say after I realize no one has said a word for several miles, “this seems like the sort of road that ends at a big, locked gate.”

Ben chuckles bitterly. None of us consider turning back because we’ve just gone too far. At this point it would be a surrender that even Ben wouldn’t feel comfortable with.

Eventually we see a clearing, and as soon as we’re out of the woods, we find ourselves passing fenced-off properties.

“Are we in some massive backyard or something?”

What moments earlier had been us in the middle of nowhere, a blip on a screen traveling towards some unknown edge of existence, is now an embarrassing trip past porches and patios and lawn chairs. We pass a small, pale child sitting in a blow-up pool with arm floaties slipping down to his elbows. He slaps his hands against the water, watches it splash up, and then turns his attention towards us, to this rented burgundy hatchback passing behind his house. I half-expect to hear him yell “mommmmm” in that confused tone that kids reserve for situations where they’re unsure of the merits of something.

“This has to link back to a main road,” suggests David, returning to more practical considerations. He fiddles with Sandra and points to something on the screen.

David is right, and soon there’s the sound of traffic running alongside us, just behind the section of land with the row of houses.

“You hear that!?” he yells. “I told you! We probably just cut out like an hour from our driving time, went straight to the source.”

We head towards the sound, and follow the road to its conclusion.

“I hope that thing isn’t locked,” I say when we see the gate in front of us. It’s plastered with red Canadian maple leafs and blocks of text that start off with the words “Attention!” and “Attention!” and then taper off into two columns of very official-looking signage in both English and French.

David hops out and I watch him push at the gate only to find that it is, indeed, secured. He passes his hand down its length and walks to the pivot-point. There, shining in all of its metallic glory, I spot a massive steel lock, happily clanked into place. David inspects the sides of the gate, factors in the space on either side of it and then runs back to the driver-side window.

“Dude, pop this thing through that area on the left of it. I think there’s enough room to go around.”

I gauge his instructions, stare at the sharply banking ground that rises up on the side of the gate, and then turn back to him.

“You’re crazy. No way is that going to work.”

He looks annoyed. “Fine, then lets turn around and head back.”

“Fuck!” I yell. “This sucks.”

“I’ll drive.”

“You have an opinion about this?” I ask Ben whose body has slid halfway down the seat, into a frustrated position of repose.

“I don’t really care. You guys do what you like.”

I let David take over. I stand at a distance so I can direct him in his attempt to make a twenty-point U-turn in the tight space.

“You’re going to hit that tree,” I yell, but it’s too late, the bumper knocks into a small tree and I hear it crack and then tip over onto its side.

“Now someone is going to run out here with a shotgun and tell us we’re destroying state property.”

“All part of the plan,” adds David as he tensely maneuvers the car. He gets it so that it’s perfectly perpendicular to the road and I wonder how he’s going to manage to get it to face the other direction. I shout instructions but he’s ignoring me. Inside the car he leans against the steering wheel and keeps moving his arm to shift the transmission from forward into reverse and back again. His tongue hangs from the side of his mouth, and his face is fixed in a state of turgid concentration.

And then the car stops moving, and with every one of David’s presses on the accelerator I just watch as brown mud flies up from under the front wheels and gives the side of the hatchback a paint job.

“Are you stuck?” I ask.

But David doesn’t hear me and there he is shifting and reshifting the transmission, over and over, and the wheels spin in one direction and then the other. With every exertion the car seems to be dipping lower into the ground, sinking into a bed of quicksand.

“Stop! You’re making it worse!”

David pauses and looks straight ahead. “OK I think you guys are going to need to push.”

I shake my head at myself and Ben emerges from the car, unfolding his towering 6’2” body to glare on the whole scene.

“Are we stuck?” I ask him, this time sounding dumbfounded.

Ben glares at me, a vicious smile curls up on the sides of his mouth. “Yeah,” he says with sinister joy, “maybe we’re stuck.”

I feel the blood drain away from my face. It’s not that I’m scared or nervous but I feel incredibly foolish. I cringe when I recall the way I had, moments earlier, shouted “we’re off-roading it” out the window.

“We’re not stuck,” reassures David. “Just push.”

So we push. Ben and I put all our weight into the car and we rock it, we nudge it, we dig our feet into the mud and throw ourselves against it. And there are definitely a couple of moments when it looks like yes, maybe, we have it. But then just as quickly it becomes obvious that we don’t. After more attempts than we probably needed to assure ourselves of the inevitability of the situation, Ben steps away from the car and throws his hands above his head.

“I’m done with you morons.”

---

The old man in the house, the one who answers the door after we knock for a good five minutes, he’s really nice about it. When we tell him what happened and ask to use his phone to call a tow-truck, he informs us that this isn’t the first time people have come asking for help after getting stuck on the back country road, goes on a tirade about the unreliability of GPS systems.

“And just a few months ago – maybe you boys heard this story – a young woman, she followed her GPS and it led her to some queer spot up in the mountain. Got stuck in the snow there, dead of winter. Found her frozen like a Popsicle, sitting behind the wheel like she was listening to the radio.”

We nod politely and call a few tow companies. We have to ask the old man to speak to the only one who answers because the guy on the line has pretty terrible English and keeps shouting “merde” at us when we try to explain the situation to him.

“You’re lucky I speak French,” he says. “Most people in New Brunswick couldn’t care less about it.”

Sid, our tow truck drive, is a stocky dude whose jeans hang loosely around his hips. He moves around our vehicle, attaching hooks and grabbing at levers. He uses the oily rag dangling from his pocket to wipe his hands and then his face. Sid carries himself with a French-Canadian dignity that says he’s simultaneously proud of and better than the work he’s doing.

When we ask whether we can all ride in the truck with him, he just shakes his head and says, “deux, two,” then points to the hatchback dangling from the back. “Un.”

“Is that safe?” asks Ben.

“Un,” Sid repeats.

David volunteers for the hatchback and climbs into it. Ben and I get into the truck with Sid, sandwiched on a wide passenger seat. The whole thing smells of cigarettes and wood chips. Sid revs the engine and the old man, who happens to have keys to the gate, unlocks it for us so that we can drive out.

“That old guy has the key?” asks Ben, shaking his head. “David is so footing the bill for this.”

Sid insists on driving us to Saint John, where his shop is, so that he can check out the car, make sure that we didn’t damage the suspension or the transmission or whatever else we put at risk during our activities.

“Saint John,” he says. “Check the car.”

There’s mostly silence in the truck except for the light sound of French music coming from Sid’s radio. When it stops, Sid pops out an old-fashioned tape, flips it, and reinserts it into the player. The music comes back on. Somewhere from behind the hum of the trucks engine I hear a woman with a high-pitched voice singing thoughtfully.

“You live in Saint John?” asks Ben.

“Live, yes,” answers Sid.

“You were born there?”

“Born in Quebec.”

“When did you move? How old were you?”

“Many years in Saint John.”

“OK.” Ben pauses for a moment, seems to consider whether he should keep asking questions. “What kind of town is it?” he decides to continue. “Is it like a town-town or is it bigger? Like a city? I guess you guys gauge that sort of thing differently over here, right?” Ben nods. “I guess it’s all relative really. I mean, a ‘town’ for me might be a ‘city’ for you. Right?”

Sid doesn’t say anything.

“I really like it out here though, really nice country you guys have. So much nature, and it’s so quiet. It’s funny, you know? Like we’re from New York,” Ben motions to me and then points to the hatchback dragging behind us on the highway. “And meanwhile, all you have to do is drive for a few hours and you get all of ‘this’---” Ben gestures at the highway and the thick lines of trees on either side of it. “And it’s like we don’t even know it’s here. We fly down to Florida or out to California or Europe or, I don’t know, Australia or something. We don’t even take the time to drive up to New Brunswick, it just doesn’t cross our minds. I mean, where are we?! New Brunswick! It’s wacky.”

Sid glances at Ben when he’s done, then turns his attention back to the road, smiles wryly to himself, and just mutters, “New York.”

Sid says little else for the rest of the trip except for what sounds like the occasional mutter under his breath, in-sync with the music still trickling out of the speakers. The truck, the attached burgundy hatchback with David nestled somewhere in it, descends into the fog that hugs the coastline and rolls over Saint John in white plumes.

“Are we here?” I look out the window at the near-empty streets and shuttered storefronts. A sign on one building reads “Hayward and Harwick, 1855” and I wonder what sort of business Hayward and Harwick ran back in the day. Furniture? Hats? Were they blacksmiths? A grayed church spire rises up out of the thick air and casts a critical gaze over everything.

“This is weird.” Ben stares at a lone woman standing at a bus stop, occasionally glancing up in anticipation of something that doesn’t seem as if it will ever arrive.

Eventually we come to what looks like Sid’s garage.

“Out,” he says at us, and it sounds charmingly Canadian, more like “oot.”

We leave the truck and walk over to the hatchback. At first we can’t see David, but then we find him asleep across the back seats, a sleeping bag draped over his shoulders and a packed tent under his head.

“Wakey wakey,” I whisper when I open the door. “We’re in beautiful Saint John.”

David stirs, he has a moment of disorientation where he rubs his face and considers the nature of his hands, and then he’s up, standing alongside us.

Sid reverses the truck and pushes the hatchback into the garage. A small contingent of squat men flood around the sides and begin inspecting it curiously. There don’t seem to be any other cars being worked on. Sid walks into an office and emerges with a largish, ruddy-faced woman. He whispers to her, points at us, and furiously gesticulates with his hands. I can’t shake the impression that he’s over-dramatizing the events surrounding our needing to be towed.

“I’ll give you a receipt,” she says eventually, when Sid is done with his explanation.

“How long is this going to take?” I ask.

“Don’t know. Two, three hours? They need to check the car. There might be some damage.”

“Really? I mean we only got it stuck in the mud. It’s not like we wrecked it or anything.”

“Just to be safe.”

I rub my hands together nervously. “And cost?”

“Not so much. If they find something they need to fix, it will cost more.”

I look at the guys and they shrug their uncertainty. City boys who don’t know the first thing about cars or their transmissions or what a damaged axel might look like. Even the words themselves – “transmission,” “axel” – have an abstract glow to them.

“I changed a tire once,” offers Ben. “It was pretty messed up though. Drove over like a two inch nail sticking out of a piece of wood.” He shows us the size of the nail with his fingers and then pauses to think things over. “Maybe we should leave the car. You never know if something could have happened. We still have a long way to go and the last thing we want is breaking down in the middle of nowhere.”

“Right,” I say, pointing out our current location. “Unlike now?” I pass my gaze over to the fog suffused town square across from the garage and watch a dog emerge, pulling a leash that eventually reveals a man holding the other end of it. The dog, in imitation of the man, droops its head low, as if looking for something in the grass.

The woman writes us a receipt. I grab it in frustration and we turn to go.

“The Grand Old Search for Lighthouses,” I say while shaking my head. “What is there to do around here anyway?” I ask, completely irritated. “Is there some place where we can sit around, have coffee or something?”

She thinks for a moment, puts her pen to her chin. “You can always check by the water,” she offers and points us in the right direction. “There might still be a place that’s open down there.”

I look at my watch. “Things close that early?” I see that it’s only 5p.m.

She looks as if she’s morbidly offended. “Most things, yes,” she answers pointedly. Then she turns on her heels and hobbles back into her office. “You’ll have to see for yourself,” she calls back at us.

Sid shrugs, either as an apologetic gesture or as a way of showing that he has no idea what we’ve been talking about. For a moment I don’t mind the guy, even while I feel we might be getting screwed over with the car.

We leave and head in the direction she has indicated. A silence sets in between us and we amble along for a couple of blocks before David sighs.

“What?” I ask.

“Never mind,” he says smugly, acting as if he didn’t mean to be heard.

“Come on. What is it?”

“It’s just that, it’s all part of the plan my man.”

“Fancy rhyme scheme you got going there.” I roll my eyes. “It’s funny, you said that right before you got us stuck in the mud. What’s part of the plan?”

“All of it! That we got stuck, that we ended up here, that we’re walking down this street in this town. It had to happen this way.”

I look to Ben, the go-to naysayer when David gets into his fateful moods, but Ben is smiling, enjoying himself, not really paying attention to what we’re talking about.

“I’m really digging this place,” he says. “It’s just so…Canadian.”

“Canadian?” I ask, agitation swelling up on my face.

“Yeah, all foggy and quiet. I feel like we’re in a different world.” He laughs. “Like where the hell are we? There’s no one here! This is awesome!”

I can hear the water, I know it’s there, an invisible wall of sound, a rush of movement over rocks coming from somewhere behind the mist. There’s the distant chiming of a bell buoy, a high-pitched ship’s horn that makes us feel as if we’re in the middle of the ocean, stuck on old boats with flapping sails. As we get closer, I hear what seems to be a group of children shouting at each other, cackling and hawing in some eerie game of tag. But then I notice the seagulls circling overhead, diving towards the water with their shrill calls.

At the seawall there’s the wet air, waves hitting rock and tossing droplets that float momentarily and then settle on our faces. There’s no breeze, just the stillness, a melancholic stagnation mixed with the disparate noises. The sea speaks, but it doesn’t breathe.

We turn left, in a direction that feels like south because we have to descend a slope. Brownstones line the street, their darkened windows keeping sleepy watch over the empty piers.

It’s then that we see the promise of an open door and the waft of temperature-controlled air spiraling into the mist.

“Are you guys still open?” I ask when we walk in. All three waitresses look up at us.

“Yes!” the one behind the counter says. She leans forward excitedly. The two other waitresses scatter. One moves to clean tables while the other retreats to the back. “Except we close in 30 minutes,” she adds with a frown. “But you can stay until then if you like.”

The place seems to be some hybrid mix between a stationary store, tourist shop, and coffee establishment. One wall is lined with glass shelves piled with Saint John memorabilia, with mugs and t-shirts and pens and shot glasses and other general kitsch. I wonder whether Saint John is actually the sort of place that people come to on their own, looking for an experience and a keepsake to remember it by.

David laughs. “You see that!? Check that out!” He points at an image that’s repeated on most of the items. Right there, under the letters, is a little lighthouse logo.

We sit down at a table because the waitress refuses to take our orders at the counter. She comes by with a little notepad and hands us menus.

“The lighthouse…” says David, letting the words trail off as he ignores the menu placed in his hand.

“Excuse me?”

“The lighthouse,” he repeats. “Are there lighthouses in Saint John? I see they’re all over the shirts and the other stuff.”

“Well yes, we have one,” she answers. “It’s down by the water,” she adds for factual emphasis.

David’s eyes perk up. “Really? That’s awesome. How do we get to it?”

“Well, you want to keep walking down this street” The waitress scratches her head. “And then you follow the water until you get to it.”

David stretches a satisfied smile across his face. “Thank you,” he says and then turns to us. “You see that. A lighthouse. Conveniently placed exactly where we end up.”

“How’s the coffee here?” asks Ben, oblivious to anything David has said while completely absorbed in making a decision about his order.

“Good,” she answers.

“What about the espresso drinks? Like your lattes. How are your lattes?”

“Also good.”

“Really? OK…” Ben looks back at his menu.

“Everything here is good,” she notes.

“Just pick something,” I tell him.

“What’s the rush?”

“They close in half an hour.” I turn to the waitress. “Actually, why is that?”

“Why is what?”

“Things closing. It seems like things shut down here pretty early. The town looks practically abandoned.”

The waitress chuckles to herself. “Well yeah, you’re right. Not much to do around Saint John. Nothing like Halifax. Ever been to Halifax?”

“No.”

“You have to go there. It’s something else.”

“What’s so special about it?”

“Lots of people. Everything stays open real late. Halifax is great,” she tells us, her eyes looking off into some distant memory. “This place, maybe it used to be like that, but now it’s different. People left, moved on. The rest of them, they seem to stay in. Everything moves sort of slow.”

“How come?” continues David.

“I don’t know. Maybe when the fishing industry started dieing down? There weren’t as many jobs so people went looking for work somewhere else.” The waitresss pauses, and then she shakes her head. “I don’t really know.”

“So this used to be a fishing village?”

“Sure was. Still is in some ways, just a lot less of that than how it was before.”

“What do people around here do now?”

“Hard to say. Everyone has their own thing. Like me, I have this place.”

“You’re the owner?”

She balks at the suggestion but she blushes, visibly pleased with the thought. “Me? No not me. I just work here. But I was just saying, this is what I do. Work here that is.”

“What about the rest of them? What about all the fishermen who stayed.”

“Some of them still fish, there’s a little of that here and there. Some went into other types of jobs. But I guess a lot of them, they work for Irving. Big bad Irving.”

“Irving?” Ben looks up from the menu.

Irving. I imagine some evil overseer, a man who walks around all hunched over, jaundiced skin, jowls. I imagine Montgomery Burns.

“You guys don’t know Irving?” She’s suddenly skeptical and shifts her weight onto her left foot. “Where’re you from anyway?”

“New York,” answers Ben.

The answer disarms her. She smiles.

“That’s funny. Well,” she continues, “Irving owns this town. Irving owns Canada.”

“But what is it?”

“A company. An oil company. They got a bunch of their rigs out there in the water somewhere, drilling away. Like I said – big bad Irving. Last thing we need around these parts is one of those things that happened to you guys down in the Gulf of Mexico.” She looks down at her little notepad. “So sad.”

We eventually give her our orders, and after a few minutes we get our coffees. I stir some milk into my cup and stare down at the miniature whirlpool. David and Ben talk logistics, about estimates of when we’ll be back on the road and how long it’ll likely take us to reach the Fundy campground. Meanwhile I think about dark and gloomy Saint John, about the blank stares of the departed fishermen. I think about what the docks must have sounded like before, the waterfront filling with the sounds of men shouting nautical phrases, the slap-strain sound of sail and rope, chain links clanging against themselves as dropped anchors sink into the sea.

“Sorry guys,” our waitress says eventually. “Have to lock up now.”

“No problem,” says David. “Thanks for the coffee.”

“You’re welcome. I hope you enjoy the rest of your stay.”

“Thanks.”

“And enjoy the lighthouse!”

We walk out and behind us there’s the sound of a shutting door, a bolt from a lock extending its arm and settling into a latch.

“Are we really going to go see this lighthouse now?” I’m not happy about it.

“Of course. We still have time to kill. What else are we going to do?”

“I don’t mind,” adds Ben. “It could be interesting.”

Outnumbered, I follow them. The slope of the street rises for a moment and we ascend a short hill. At the high point, right before the angle sharpens and drops towards the rest of St. John, we have a view of the whole city. There’s the sea wall straight out ahead of us, resting quietly against the waves that roll in, paw at its door, and then settle back. The wall twists off to the left and meets the skeletal, wooden planks of a dock. The water, when it recedes, exposes the algaed and barnacled faces of the support beams that disappear into the dark swirl. Long masts rise up towards the sky and rock in tick-tock fashion as the boats sway. And right out on the edge of land by the dock, is the white-washed paneling and red trim of a lighthouse.

“Is that it?” asks Ben. From where we’re standing, it looks to be about two-stories tall. “Sort of small.”

“It just looks that way from over here,” suggests David, and leads us down the hill.

But as we approach it becomes apparent that our height estimate, even from far away, is correct.

“Are a lot of lighthouses this short?” Ben wonders. I think back to the squat lighthouse in Maine, the one where David had that interaction with the mysterious, wet-haired woman. What has she said to him? David still hadn’t told us. “And why isn’t the light on?” continues Ben.

It’s then that I notice that the tower is dark, uninvolved. I can see the lens at the top. It doesn’t spin or flash, it just stares out at the scene of the town and the fog, an unblinking eye with neither thought nor comment.

On the tract of land where the tower stands is a single park bench facing out towards the water, offering a 180 degree view of vastness that ignores all of Saint John. To the side of the bench there’s a cardboard cut-out of misshaped adults and children waving and “Welcome to Saint John”-ing all the passersby. Some of the figures smile, some laugh with open mouths that expose block teeth, others look around coyly, their lips pressed together tightly as they hold in some secret conclusions about the world. They all appear aimless, confused and out of place, the color bleached from their faces by the sun.

“Well that’s not very inviting,” notes Ben.

I walk to the side of the lighthouse and read the inscription on the plaque affixed to the wood.

“It isn’t real,” I announce.

“What isn’t real?”

“Any of this. This lighthouse. It’s a stand-in. They literally built it for people like us who come to Saint John and then go around wondering where the lighthouse is.”

David walks over to the plaque and reads it himself.

“A faux lighthouse!” I add, amusedly.

Ben laughs. “So that’s why we ended up here?” he asks David. “We were meant to find this? Well that’s sort of lame.” He laughs again. “What does it all mean?” he asks comically, waving his arms in the air for dramatic effect. He places himself down on the bench and faces away from us. “It’s so quiet,” he says as he glances out towards the sea.

“It’s weird,” I tell David.

He looks pale, the valleys under his eyes appear darker, more pronounced.

“Yes,” David answers, but he’s not hearing me.

We sit down next to Ben and for a few moments none of us say anything. I imagine a bunch of Irving oil rigs out in the middle of the sea, chugging away, bull horns going off at random times, lost somewhere in the fog. I guess that Ben might be wondering about when we’re finally going to eat again, anticipating getting to the campsite, setting up the fire, tossing meat and corn onto it, and then staring in silence as everything sizzles. And David, he’s probably thinking about the lighthouse, about why we were fated to end up here. Maybe he’s thinking about the next one, the one that we’ll accidentally hear about or come across, the one that will propel us into a new direction we could not have anticipated. And we’ll go, because we’re open-minded, because even Ben and I, as much as we might roll our eyes at David, want to believe in the deeper meaning, to believe in the “greaterness” of things.

“What did she say to you?” I finally ask, realizing that I’ve remained curious all of this time. It seems necessary to understand that piece, to know what sent us after the lighthouses in the first place.

“Who?”

“That woman. The one who came out of the water near the lighthouse in Maine.”

“Yeah,” Ben chimes in. “What did she say?”

David smiles to himself.

“You’re really not going to tell us?”

He pauses, “it’s stupid.”

“Come on!” Ben presses.

“Fine,” David relents. “She said she was flattered.”

“Flattered?” I ask, unsure of what he means.

“Yeah. I told her how beautiful I thought she was and she said she was flattered but much too old for me. And married.” David laughs. “Everyone’s married! Married or dating someone or too old for me or whatever. So it goes!”

“Flattered?” I ask again.

“Women!” says David. It’s something I often hear him say, a word unattached, spoken on its own, but always tightly bound with a variety of sentiments.

Ben looks confused. “Wait. She didn’t say anything about lighthouses?”

“No,” David answers nonchalantly. “I didn’t ask her anything about lighthouses.”

“But what about your whole thing with the lighthouses,” I ask. “You wanted to go look for them, you made it seem important.” I feel a little frantic.

“It is important. It’s our history.”

“What are you talking about?”

“You know what I’m talking about! Look around. We’re a world of water. Even the clouds, the fog. All of it. We’re basically made of water. Most of the planet is covered by water. We grew our cities by ports. We traveled long distances by ship. And meanwhile, we’ve moved so far away from the sea.”

I roll my eyes during David’s exposition but he continues.

“We’ve become a society that lives in some strange virtual world where we can get from one place to another in milliseconds. When we need to travel, it’s easy, we don’t give it a second thought, we take it for granted. We fly when we need to get somewhere. We jump in a car. We hop on a train.”

“When’s the last time you took a train?” I ask.

“That’s not the point. The point is that we don’t get it anymore, we don’t understand what any of it means, to have to take a ship, to be on the ocean and to take months to get from one place to another, to navigate by the stars and, all the while, not really know where you are or when you’ll get somewhere, being exposed to the elements. I thought it would be cool for us to chase it down a little, look for pieces of the past.”

I’m not so much angry as disappointed. The intention has brought us here, but it has been a false intention, or at least an intention that wasn’t what it seemed to be. I had been thinking of fated run-ins, of mysterious mermaid women whispering shadowy and cryptic instructions, of following some pre-destined path. But it hasn’t been that at all. It was just David on some history kick.

So what does that make this? Why are we really here? What of the purpose and reason that was the driving force behind all of it? Are the moments as pure? In the end, does any of it even matter?

I let it go. I don’t say anything more about lighthouses, and the three of us just return our attention to the soft rumble of the sea. It hums an old tune, a melody which seems starkly outdated, forgotten, and yet, sits at the core of everything.

Ben shifts his weight on the bench and I hear the fabric of his nylon jacket scrape against the wood.

“You guys hungry at all?” he asks. “I really hope we get to eat soon. I’m starving.”

I glance at my watch. “Maybe we can start heading back for the car now.” Its 7:30 and I’m surprised that it’s not yet pitch-black outside.

“Yeah, I think we should,” says David.

“We’re not going to be at the campsite until really late at this point, right?”

“Probably not for a while,” I admit.

Ben sighs, disappointed. “Alright well let’s at least start moving.”

We stand up in unison and begin to amble back up the little hill alongside the water, until the lighthouse is just a dull silhouette in the distance. Tracing our way back through the avenues, we find the garage with its front door wide open and Sid standing outside smoking a cigarette.

When he sees us he flicks the cigarette aside. “New York!” he shouts, and his voice is loud, spilling out over the empty square across the street. He pops inside the shop and then we hear a motorized grinding as the garage door peels back and spills light onto the sidewalk. Sid stands alongside the burgundy hatchback, which is still as muddy as we left it. I can’t help but think that nothing has been done to the car.

Sid fishes into his pocket and pulls out a piece of paper. He unfolds it, smoothes it out, and hands it to David.

“Cheque,” he says.

David looks at the paper and scratches his head.

“How much is it?” I ask.

“300.”

“300!?” Ben is incredulous. “That’s ridiculous. For what?”

“Bring the car. Look at car. Car is good now.” Sid gives us a thumbs-up and then rubs his hands on the outside of his jeans. “Fix.”

“It’s fine,” says David. “I’ll cover it.”

At first, neither Ben nor I say anything in response. But then our lack of comment seems awkward.

“No. Come on.” Ben speaks up first, his voice much calmer than it was a few seconds earlier. “We’ll split it. Easiest thing.”

“Yeah, don’t worry about it dude, we’ll all chip in.”

David doesn’t argue with us.

We give Sid our credit cards which he swipes for our respective portions. As if to show that there are no hard feelings, he extends a handshake to each of us. His hand is massive, a thick wedge of bone and muscle that seems almost too large even for his already wide, sturdy frame. Along the contours of his palm, and at spaces between the sections of his fingers, I feel rough calluses, tight mounds of packed skin that give the impression of stone and rope and wood. He’s not so much a man as a moving statue.

He gives his hand to David last, and David looks down at it.

“You know the lighthouse by the water?” he asks Sid as his arm is flung up and down in short, pronounced movements. David can’t seem to let it go. I laugh to myself and shake my head.

“Not a real lighthouse.” He responds. “No real lighthouse for a long time.” He finally pulls his hand away from David’s. “Many things different now.”

“Did you used to work on the docks?” David asks, and it strikes me that Sid, he might not have always been a guy with a pick-up truck and a garage.

But Sid doesn’t understand what David is asking and, after taking a moment to decipher the words, shrugs his confusion.

“Did you used to be a fisherman? Before? Going out on the boats.”

Comprehension changes Sid’s disposition. His face brightens, his eyes widen, a smile stretches its way across his wrinkled face, revealing deep etchings on the edges of his mouth and at the corners of his eyes.

“Yes, fishing, before.” He nods. “Now,” he puts his hands on the hatchback and pats its hood, “fix cars.”

“Do you miss it? Do you miss fishing? The way things used to be?”

Sid takes a moment, and I think that maybe he isn’t understanding David again. But then he purses his lips.

“Is OK,” he answers matter-of-factly. “Still there is ocean, still there are boats, but no fishing. No good to think too much about past. Makes you sad maybe.”

“Does it make you sad?”

“Hear the water, smell the ocean.” He takes in a deep breath. “I am happy.”

I smile. I believe him.

We say our thanks and start getting into the car.

“Nice to meet you,” adds Ben.

Part of me still thinks we might have been scammed a little, but I don’t really care anymore. He did, after all, pull us out of the mud.

David starts the engine and its sound is the music of forward momentum. There’s a relief in knowing that, soon, we’ll be moving on.

Right before we drive off, Sid walks up to the car and speaks to us through the open window on the driver’s side door.

“You like the lighthouses?”

“Very much,” answers David.

“There is a beautiful one. Magnifique. 100 kilometers. You must see.”

“Tell us,” says David, his voice confident, focused, convinced, again, that everything has come down to this moment, that it is crucial in the same way that every other moment was. “That’s why we’re here.”

The Guardians

2011-01-02T15:02:00.000-08:00

It was at the coffee shop on Astor Place that I first saw them. They seemed both odd and oddly inconspicuous, if only because New York teaches you to ignore people you might otherwise recognize as characters. I came in after morning classes, and there they were, sitting at a large table in the corner reserved for handicapped customers, a large blue and white wheelchair logo affixed to the table’s side.

At first I didn’t pay much attention. With my econ exam on my mind, the fear of having done poorly on it, I shook my head and looked at the floor. I didn’t want to dwell on the things I couldn’t change, I tried to dismiss my anxieties, focus on the mundane, and so I looked back up to consider what drink I was going to get.

My mind wandered, my eyes shifted focus back to the corner of the café.

There were two of them, old women dressed all in black. Their hair was tied neatly under headscarves, only the occasional wisps of grey slipping out from underneath. Their bodies were clad in long dresses with thick fabric that stretched down their arms, then disappeared behind the table before reemerging by their feet, bunching together and sweeping up the dust on the floor. By their side sat two black suitcases, pressed up against the wall, all packed and ready to accompany them on a trip they were, perhaps, ready to embark on. One of them leaned back in her chair, holding an empty coffee cup and mumbling something to her companion. The companion, her face powdered a mime-like white, held up a small vanity mirror as she traced her lips with red lipstick.

At the counter I gave my order. I kept thinking about my test. When I got my coffee, I stood around and absentmindedly kept adding sugar until my drink was much sweeter than I had wanted.

On my way out, I glanced at them once more. The mumbling one kept moving her lips but focused her gaze right on me. The one with the powdered face, she lowered her vanity and smiled a smile that was all red lips and no teeth. It stretched up grotesquely, meeting the wrinkles that descended from her eyes.

I turned away as I opened the door. I landed on the pavement outside the café, and walked off to my next class.

---

The black clothing, the suitcases, the moving lips of the one and the clownish smile of the other, they were all I thought about for the rest of the day. That night I dreamt that I was in an airport and I spotted the two of them checking in their bags for my flight. Later I saw them at my gate, and even though they had seemingly checked their bags, they still had them nearby. Moments later I was sitting on the plane, buckled into my seat. They approached, looking for their seats, dragging the suitcases through the narrow aisle. I wanted to tell them that they weren’t allowed to bring luggage like that onto the plane, that they should have checked everything before the flight. I don’t like the idea that they will be on the plane with me. I don’t trust them. But I know that it’s too late, and I feel that something will go horribly wrong.

The next day I attribute the dream about the airport, the plane, the old women on my flight, to an over-active imagination and lingering anxiety about my test. I don’t like flying as it is, so it makes sense that my mind would subconsciously revert to it when I’m nervous about getting a bad grade.

I get my test back and discover that, for the first time in my life, I have failed at something. I’m, perhaps, not as surprised as I should be. From there, things enter a downward spiral. As much as I might try over the next few months, I can’t seem to get a handle on my economics class. I never do better than a C. My father, an economics professor at a college in Westchester, is incredibly displeased. This is not what he had in mind for his son, this is not the sort of student I was supposed to be. I request some time with my school advisor and we have a serious discussion about my choice of majors, my plans for the future. He asks me to seriously consider whether economics is really the path I should be pursuing.

I decide to become an English major. My father agrees to look the other way. I come back to the coffee shop on Astor Place several more times that semester, but I never see the women again.

---

I might have forgotten about them altogether except that, a few months later, as my train pulled into the A/C/E station at Columbus Circle, I saw them again, sitting on the wooden bench on the platform, their suitcases nearby. They both noticed me, but there were no smiles or looks of recognition, just quick glances that did not interrupt the mumbling of the one, the lipstick application of the other. I hurried past and out of the station.

Later that day, quite unexpectedly, my girlfriend broke up with me. She said we were just different people going in different directions in our lives. I wondered where this analysis had come from, since it was the first time I’d heard her say anything like this. She sighed and looked away.

“Don’t make this more difficult than it needs to be,” she mumbled, as if she were reading a script.

Over the next few years I saw the old women all over the City, and each sighting portended something going wrong. I came to expect their appearance in my life, often at the most inopportune moments, just when things seemed to be working out for me.

In June 2001, I passed them on a park bench in Prospect Park. Later that day I found out that a good friend of mine who I was supposed to hang out with later that night had been arrested for DUI the evening before.

In February 2002, I saw them at a bus stop near Madison Square Garden as I raced by in a taxi on my way to doctor’s appointment. After limping for the previous week, the diagnosis revealed that I needed to have knee surgery thanks to a misguided attempt at trying to slide down a handrail.

Not even two months went by before I saw them again, sometime in April. They sat on lawn chairs alongside the Farmers’ Market at Union Square. That same day I came back to news of some unauthorized charges on my credit card incurred by someone in China with a preference for Apple and Louis Vuitton.

I don’t know if I’d call it bad luck or a curse or something of an entirely circumstantial nature. But I do know that the women, over time, foretold of another break-up, a ceiling collapse in my bathroom while I was at work, the loss of my first job, the loss of my second job, a vacation being canceled thanks to an approaching hurricane, and a speeding ticket.

---

Two years had gone by since I’d last seen them and things were going pretty well, well enough that when people asked me I would say, “I can’t complain.” My writing career was advancing. My relationship with my parents, especially my father, was the best it had ever been. I was living in a nice little apartment in a part of Astoria that I loved. And after a long absence from the dating scene, I was seeing a great girl I was excited about. Things were finally falling into place and I began to feel relieved at the thought that I was leaving the angst of my quarter-life crises behind me.

It was on Christmas Day that I found myself on the subway, making my way up to Grand Central to catch a train to Connecticut where I was to have Christmas brunch with my girlfriend and her family. I don’t celebrate Christmas and I had only ever been to a Christmas meal once, so I was looking forward to seeing the decorated tree and all the people wearing cheesy holiday sweaters, the smell of eggnog and cinnamon and whatever other scents one could expect to catch in a setting like that. She insisted that I not bring any gifts, but I bought some wine anyway, and so I carried a silver-wrapped bottle, accented with gold tinsel, under my arm.

My subway car was eerily empty, with most people locked away in warm homes somewhere, huddling with families. A gentleman in a big red coat sat snoring at one end of the car and I imagined him to be some off-duty Santa Claus, albeit one with a cleanly shaved face. A homeless woman wrapped in a blanket sat a few seats down from me, rocking back and forth with a paper Wendy’s cup in her hand. I looked at her and then looked away. Just before the subway pulled into Grand Central, I crossed over and gave her a dollar bill. It seemed a pitiful way of trying to make things right.

At Grand Central I found that I had just missed my train, which meant that I would be late, which meant that the meal would be delayed on my account, which meant that I would not be making the best of impressions.

I called my girlfriend to tell her the news and she sighed her frustration.

“Why didn’t you leave your apartment earlier?”

“It doesn’t matter when I leave my apartment. You know me, I get everywhere 5 minutes late.”

“I’m sure you could have managed it this one time.”

“I tried. It’s not like I purposely decided to miss the train and wait an extra half-hour.”

“Fine,” she said.

“Fine,” I answered.

“So you’re going to be here 30 minutes late is what you’re saying?”

“Well, not necessarily ‘late,’ just 30 minutes later than planned.”

“You’re quite the wordsmith. That’s ‘late,’” she asserted.

“Maybe,” I insisted.

“OK, I’ll tell daddy.”

“OK.”

“See you soon.”

I descended the stairs to the station’s food court, hoping to find an open café and have a coffee while I waited. Instead, I found the City’s forgotten, lost men and women with nowhere to go, communing in a place of absence and lose, a place that that on any other day would have been a hub for the moving pieces of the world.

And its there, right next to a shuttered bakery stand, that I saw them.

A decade since that first encounter on Astor Place and it was as if they hadn’t aged a day. Still the one mumbled to the other, while the other considered herself in the vanity, red lips pressed together, pursed in anticipation of another coat of lipstick.

Panic griped me and I tightened my fist around the silver wrapped bottle in my hand. I thought about my life and I wondered what would go wrong with it now. Was something going to happen to me on the train? Would my relationship come to a quick and forgettable end? Would some sort of tragedy strike? I wanted to run away, I wanted things to be different. I wished I had made it to the station on time, that I had tried harder to make my train, instead of being the same person I had always been. Always just five minutes later than I needed to be, five minutes “late,” five minutes that could mean everything. Had I been on time, I wouldn’t have come down here, I wouldn’t have seen them.

Who were these women, these goddesses of chaos? Why did they continue to show up and spin my life out of control? I thought about hexes and curses and wondered who had put one on me, why I had been unfairly saddled with these specters instead of with guardian angels who could look out for my interests.

I couldn’t let this go on. I couldn’t continue down this path and just wait for them to appear again, even if the next time wouldn’t be for another decade.

And so I approached them. I held the tinseled bottle in my hand and marched up to their table. The suitcases sat against a pillar that rose up behind them and I wondered what they had inside, what it was that they shuttled along with them as they made their appearances throughout the City.

“Excuse me,” I started, before knowing exactly what I intended to say.

They both looked up at me simultaneously. The mumbling one ceased her mumbling for a moment. The other put her vanity and lipstick aside.

“Who are you?” I asked, and my voice rose sharply.

They looked at each other and didn’t seem to know how to respond. They appeared unsettled, caught off-guard.

“What are you doing here?” I continued, not waiting for a response.

“Same thing you’re doing here,” I watched the red lips say to me. “Waiting for our train. This is a train station after all.”

The other cackled in response. “This is a train station after all,” she repeated to herself.

“Why do you always follow me? Why are you following me now?”

“Are we the ones following you?” she asked. “Or are you the one following us?”

These two, they were crazy. “I haven’t done anything wrong. I don’t deserve this,” I pleaded. “I’m a good person.”

“I’m sure you are,” red lips responded. “We’re all good people. In our own way.”

“Then why?” I asked. “Why all of this? Through all of these years. Why this curse?”

“Curse!” shouted the other. Her voice was sharp and clear and echoed against the marble columns and archways. “Blessing!” she shouted. I looked around the food court, to see if anyone had noticed me, if anyone had noticed us. But everyone just sat and stared off into the expanse of the quiet station. “There’s the one and there’s the other. Different and the same. The line is thin.”

“Please,” I told them, “please just leave me alone.” My life, its going great, I say. Don’t mess it up, not now, not anymore.

A station announcement rang overhead, my train had arrived, and it was waiting for me. I glanced in the direction of my track and feared for a moment that I had revealed where I was going, and that they would follow me again, follow me for the rest of my life.

“Please,” I reiterated before turning away and rushing off.

“Goodbye.” I heard one of them call after me. But I didn’t turn around, I didn’t look back at them. “Safe travels,” she yelled.

I ran to my track and sat by the window, keeping watch over the platform to make sure they weren’t coming after me. It was only when the train started moving that I began to allow myself to feel some relief. Maybe this was the end, I tried assuring myself. Maybe I would never see them again.

I pulled out my phone and texted my girlfriend, telling her that I was now on my way and giving a time for when she could expect me. She responded with a “” and I smiled to myself.

And it was only then that I began to go over everything in my mind, that I began to think about the encounter, about the previous ones, about the way life would play out after we crossed paths. I thought of curses, and then I thought of blessings. I thought about how different and how similar they could be. I thought of thin lines and perspectives and the ways in which things aren’t always what they seem.

The train rumbled out from under the tunnel and light streamed in through the windows. I thought of guardian angels, and wondered whether I had gotten it all wrong. Only then, when it was too late to do anything differently, I wondered whether they had been mine.

We're All Stars

2010-11-20T18:34:00.000-08:00

This trip down south, it was Andy’s idea. A chance to listen to music and talk, a chance to reconnect and get away from everything. And in some obvious way, it was also like Andy planning his farewell tour, acknowledging what seemed to be the beginning of the end of his fifteen minutes of fame.

As it was, Craig needed a vacation too. All those long hours at the firm, so he was overdue for some time off. Plus, he had a car, made enough money to park it in a Manhattan garage and everything. When he picked it up he said it was covered in this thick layer of dust.

“Someone wrote ‘clean me’ on one window, and then on the other window, it said ‘drive me.’” he told us as we packed our stuff into the trunk. “Cute.”

Craig’s girlfriend was annoyed that he was spending his first chunk of time-off in months by traveling with his friends instead of with her. She had wanted them to go on a resort vacation, some place like Cancun or Acapulco.

“Whatever, I see her all the time. There’re plenty of nice beaches on Long Island anyway. We don’t need to get all complicated about it.”

I had been planning on doing something a bit more exotic myself, saving up my vacation days to head off to Australia or India. Russia was also a possibility. But it just didn’t feel right to deny Andy, so I stayed Stateside. Who knows, in the end I probably wouldn’t have left the country anyway, probably would have found a reason why I couldn’t or shouldn’t go, whether because of cost or the loneliness that I would have felt from traveling on my own.

Last stop – New Orleans. Seems sort of fitting in a morbid way, although I guess it depends on how you look at it. This is very much still a land of ghosts, even with all the noise in the French Quarter. The hotel where we decide to stay for the night is, in all of our estimations, “classic” New Orleans. The outside has balconies with wrought metal railing, like the ones you see people standing on during Mardis Gras. It’s one of those shabby establishments, with a single lobby attendant, an older gentleman with a thick, white, Santa Claus beard and a charming accent. I imagine him in overalls and a straw hat when he’s not behind the counter, rolling around in some pick-up truck, a golden retriever sticking its head out of the passenger-side window.

“Do you recognize him?” Craig asks the attendant after we’ve checked in. He smiles broadly.

“That young gentleman?” He points to Andy, who’s standing by the door.

“Yeah, this guy over here.”

Andy looks away and nervously runs his hand through his thinning hair, absent-mindedly letting it linger over one spot which has grown particularly sparse in the last couple of years.

“Do you know who he is?” continues Craig.

The attendant peers at Andy’s profile. He squints, like its going to help him figure it out. “No, can’t say that I do.”

“Oh well.”

“Should I?” asks the attendant, getting a little excited about the interaction. “Is he famous?”

Craig shrugs. “Depends on who you ask.”

---

Andy is something of a celebrity, or at least he used to be. Or maybe these days you never really cease being a celebrity once you’re name is out there. Google Andy and all of these random links pop up. It’s like the Web has permanently absorbed his persona, crunched his being into algorithms. So even when nobody knows who the heck Andy is or what he did, even, maybe, when he’s dead and gone, somewhere locked in the circuitry of some super-computer sitting in the middle of the Pacific Ocean on some monstrous glacier of a floating server farm, his identity will forever be reconstituted in the form of binary zeros and ones, coded for eternity.

About eight months ago, Andy got this really unoriginal idea in his head – he was going to become a YouTube sensation. Unemployment was losing its appeal, and though the money wasn’t so bad, he was getting bored with the late wake-ups and the endless job searches, the mid-afternoon coffee shops filled with stay-at-home moms, trust fund kids, and mildly successful writers, artists, filmmakers, web designers.

“Blah,” he said. “These people make me sick. They’re all so smug.”

He had to make his statement, break out of the mold that made everything ordinary and gray. He’d probably never have more free time for the rest of his life, and a return to the day-in/day-out cycle of work – which loomed at some nondescript point in the future – terrified his creative sensibilities. Like so many of the rest of us, he never really liked what he did, felt as if it was already too late to start over from scratch. And even if he was ready to throw career and experience into the wind, he didn’t know what he would do with himself anyway.

“What do I care about?” he asked. “Like what do I really care about? If I had to find something totally new, I mean. Sometimes it feels like I’m just searching for what I hate the least.” We were at a tightly packed West Village café and he glanced over to the girl with headphones at the table next to us. She was flipping through printouts and highlighting the pages. “God, I wish I was still in school.”

And then, out of nowhere, came this YouTube idea.

“I want to make people think,” he told us, “I want to give them something real.”

We laughed at first. It all sounded a bit ridiculous, especially since we didn’t really understand what Andy had in mind, and in any case, we didn’t see how a YouTube clip was going to help him accomplish it.

“What’s it about?” I asked.

“What do you mean?”

“Like, what’s going to happen in this video?”

“I’m not totally sure, but I have a couple of things in mind.”

“Please tell me you’re not going to do something stupid just to get attention.”

In the end, Andy just talked, plain and simple. No fancy acrobatics or kitschy gags or floundering attempts to get a laugh at his own expense. He stared into his FlipCam and got all serious, went on a rant about his life, about being a guy in his late 20s without a job, without any sort of direction or idea for what he wanted to do with himself. Even had a moment at the end where he stood up, walked out of the frame, and turned the thing off. It looked totally unprofessional. But for him it wasn’t about what it looked like, but rather, what he was trying to say.

“It’s the words man,” I remember him saying, all Zen. We were making fun of him for how slip-shod the whole thing looked.

“There’s like some buzzing in the background,” I said. “Were they doing construction in your building or something?”

Andy just shrugged it off. “You didn’t listen to anything. Fuck the noise.”

The words man, the words. The content. That’s what mattered to him.

If you know Andy, you watch this thing and you might get a little emotional about it. There’s something about it that’s very real – just as he said he wanted it to be – but it also has this underlying tinge of desperation and sadness to it. I think that’s the part that gets me the most.

And then the most unusual part of it all was that people ended up loving the video, passed it around the Internet so that it became one of those things you just had to see. Ten million, twenty million hits? I can’t remember. Andy was, of course, ecstatic.

When people recognize him, which happens less now than it did for the first two or three months after the video came out, they always try to repeat some of his lines to him, imitate the way he speaks in this kind of high-pitched voice. Except they never get it right. When they mess up they’re quick to turn the attention back to him – “You do it!”

Andy will smile bashfully, as if he’s embarrassed to be recognized, embarrassed to do his shtick for a public audience. But he actually loves it, craves the attention, even while he might not actually understand why he’s getting it.

“I’ve never felt anything like this before,” he once said after a run-in with a “fan,” his breathing all elevated, pulse quickened, excitement showing in the increased blood flow to his face, cheeks and forehead glowing warmly. “It’s hard to explain. I don’t know, it makes me feel alive, like everything before was just this muted existence. I see that now. I’m on the cusp of something man. I’m affecting people, I’m shaking them up, tapping into some higher collective consciousness, into some core of humanity. It’s intense.” He exhaled and shook his head. “I wish you could know what this feels like.”

Like being in love, I thought. Or getting into a fight back at school, when the air would leak out of my lungs and I’d get all teary-eyed and jittery. Maybe it was like that. Maybe I’d never know.

---

“Food?” I suggest after twenty minutes of us walking in silence. An odd mix of blue grass, jazz, and hip-hop music boxes our ears, but isn’t enough to rouse us into conversation.

“I’m not hungry,” says Craig, glaring at Andy.

“Yeah, neither am I,” says Andy, looking sullen. He seems very small to me, in a child-like sort of way, a kid who has been disciplined, told to stand quietly in the corner.

“What do you guys want to do?” I ask, getting frustrated. “Let’s at least go into a bar. It’s annoying just walking around and tripping over beads.” Strings of the stuff, shimmery purple and green and yellow, are all over the sidewalk, swept onto sewer grates and sprawled across streets. More keep falling from the balconies, convulsing in the air on their way towards pavement or into someone’s hand.

And it’s so hot outside. It smells like beer and sweat. Fucking Bourbon Street. Who thought this was a good idea?

“Well?” I ask when I haven’t gotten a response from either of them. Craig, instinctively, pulls out his Blackberry and checks his messages. He does this whenever he doesn’t want to deal with something.

A group of red-faced fratty-looking guys pass us, leggy blondes precariously hanging onto their arms. The blondes, who are tripping over themselves and constantly tugging down on their skirts, look southern, with their small, upturned noses and thin lips. They survey us.

Andy has a moment where he seems to rise out of himself, where his eyes become pleading beams. But the blondes turn away and pass without consequence.

Craig, still looking at his Blackberry, shakes his head. “What a mess.”

I decide not to wait for an answer and force them to follow me into one of the many indistinguishable places lined up along either side of the street. A mustiness takes over and I feel a little lightheaded, but I walk deeper into the bar and go over to order a drink.

“What do you guys want? On me,” I offer, trying to make amends, trying to bring us back to the happy center of friendship I thought we had at the beginning of these two weeks, before we started on this steadily degenerating trajectory.

The guys lighten up a bit and by the time we’re sipping our drinks and trying to speak over the noise, we’re throwing arms over shoulders and leaning in for secretive whispers and furtive glances at the people in the place.

“You looking forward to getting back home?” I ask Craig without thinking.

Craig has been the most agitated one of us in the last few days and inevitably I wonder what it’s all about, whether he’s feeling antsy about getting back to his life, to his job and his apartment and his girlfriend. Or whether it’s something else, like maybe he can’t stand how needy Andy seems lately, even to me, how inauthentic it has all become. Of course it could be something totally different, something I don’t see or understand. Craig isn’t really the sort of guy who talks about how he feels.

“Sure, why not?” he answers. “We’ve been gone a while.”

“You missing your Saturday morning jogs in the park? Not getting your full daily serving of fiber at the road-side diners?” Andy laughs.

Craig ignores him. “I mean sure, if I had nothing else to do, I wouldn’t mind being away a little longer. But even then,” he turns to Andy, “eventually you have to go back. Right?”

“Or you can stay gone forever.” Andy smiles and raises his glass. “Up in the clouds.”

“Yeah, well, some of us have lives to return to.”

“Good for ‘some of us,’” answers Andy, totally nonplused. This might be the alcohol speaking, liquid confidence.

Just then a girl walks up to us. She looks really young, like she might still need a fake ID to get into places. She’s wearing a low-cut jean skirt and a tight Abercrombie t-shirt that’s fashionably ripped down the middle, forming a tattered v-neck. Her brown hair is viciously straightened, frizzing at individual strands that jut out perpendicular from the sides of her head.

“Sorry,” she starts, and then loses the words. She passes her hand behind her ear to keep some of her hair from falling onto her face.

Andy is used to this by now.

“You’re that guy right?” she asks eventually. “The one from the computer?”

Andy nods, all nonchalant, as if he hasn’t really been searching for this exact type of interaction since we left New York.

“That video was amazing!”

My skin crawls when she says it, it all sounds so fake. I guess this is what we’ve come to.

“Thanks,” says Andy. He’s keeping from smiling, from acknowledging any sort of emotional response to her. He has become a master at these interactions, usually at the cost of being himself.

“I knew it was you!” says the girl. “I told my friends, ‘that’s the guy!’ but they didn’t believe me.”

“Where are you from?” asks Andy without changing the tone of his voice.

“Savannah. Georgia. There’s a whole group of us here, just in the back.” She points to the part of the bar that opens up into an inner courtyard with a small fountain. It’s packed with alma mater-attire-clad kids, school names and logos emblazoned along sleeves and across chests and in the center of hats. They all seem so much taller than us Northeasterners.“Be back in a few,” Andy tells us as he follows her.

“Nice to meet you,” shouts Craig after them, his voice swallowed by the noise from the speakers. He throws them a mock wave.

---

“What the heck am I supposed to do when I get back home?” asks Andy. He’s staring out the window of the mom-and-pop waffle house we’ve stopped at just over the Mississippi border on our way to Louisiana. A half-eaten egg-over-easy sits at an angle on his plate, tilted by a mound of shaved potato strips congealed together with oil, onions, and paprika. Everything has cooled, stiffened into one mass of underappreciated consumerism.

“Maybe start looking for a job again?” I look out onto the parking lot. Craig is pacing on the grassy divide between the lot and the road. One hand is in his pocket while the other holds his Blackberry to his ear. Probably a call from work, something he might have forgotten to do, or more likely a question they have, because often he’s the only person who knows how to do something. Maybe it’s his girlfriend, although the vehemence with which he’s talking into the phone tells me it’s probably not.

“That’s fucking terrifying.”

“What? Finding a job?”

“No, it’s just…” Andy’s eyes track Craig’s movements. I realize he would never be bringing this up if Craig was in the room. “I can’t imagine everything going back to normal again, like nothing ever happened.”

Did something really happen, I wonder. Everything has gone so quickly. All of that “higher collective consciousness” stuff Andy used to talk about, it’s coming to an end, if it was even there to begin with. Instead it’s this same union of human minds and experiences that has, collectively, chewed on Andy, processed him, and regurgitated him back out, replaced him once more into the world of unemployment checks and overdue rent and credit card bills and collection notices.

“Andy, you’ve been had,” I’ve wanted to say for a long time, even before we’re in that bar on Bourbon Street with the girl from Savannah and it’s completely obvious. “Dude they played you. They made you feel important as long as they found you entertaining. And then they stopped, and that’s it.”

But I don’t say any of that, I don’t want to rub it in the way Craig does. I know Craig doesn’t mean anything bad by it; he’s not trying to be mean, he’s just a realist. And life, by default, always seems to return to what we’ve decided to call reality. There’s the gravity, the seriousness. There are the things we might aspire to and the limitations. There’s the glass ceiling. There’s Andy who took off and ran with something and made it work in his own way. And there’s Craig, with his calls in the parking lot and his girlfriend who wants to go on vacation and his dusty car.

With Andy off in the bathroom or sleeping in the back during portions of the trip, Craig keeps talking about him.

“He needs to grow up,” he’ll say to me in a whisper. I’ll bite my lip and look at Andy in the rearview, try to gauge whether his breathing tells me he’s actually asleep or just pretending so he can listen to what we’re saying. “He’s ordinary. We’re all ordinary. Those few milli-seconds he had when people recognized him, it didn’t change that.”

“He’s just having a hard time with everything. It’s probably weird for him to think about going back to an office, having a routine.”

“But what does he expect is going to happen? Does he really think he’s going to start making self-help videos or something? He’s going to write a book? Become the next Oprah? He’s kidding himself.”

“Give him some time, he’ll come around.”

I feel shitty almost as soon as I say it, because it means that Craig is right and that all Andy has to look forward to in the next few weeks and months is becoming resocialized to the way things are. Strap him down to a table, let the cravings pass, force him to go cold turkey, and eventually he’ll wake up and be content with not being special, yet again.

With the blur of green farmland all around us and the blank stares of brown and white cows along the road, I have this sudden urge to set Andy free, to pull over, hand him a few twenties and leave him.

“Run. Just take this and get out of here, before it’s too late, before we take you back.”

“You know?” Andy looks at me from behind his plate of drying food, his stack of uneaten toast with the soggy middle of butter shining translucent. He shifts his hands and sends a knife clattering against the side of his plate, that all-American sound of metal on porcelain that’s probably echoing, at this exact moment, in hundreds of diners around the country. Maybe we’re always part of something bigger, just not in a way that we allow ourselves to pay attention to.

“Yeah,” I say, really meaning it this time. “I do.”

---

Andy doesn’t come back to join us at the bar. He goes off with the girl from Savannah and we don’t see him again that evening. After a while we walk around the place, ask a couple of people if they know what happened to him.

“Shortish guy,” describes Craig, holding out his hand at about nose level, “maybe yay tall. Slightly balding. Wearing a blue polo.”

No luck.

I send some texts. I call his phone a couple of times, leave a few messages. No answer, no response, just Andy’s uninformative voice telling me he’s not there and asking me to leave my contact information so he can get back to me as soon as possible. Thank you.

Craig and I continue to walk around, staring down random people on the street in the hope that we’ll come across Andy and the Savannah girl, casually entering or exiting another bar. As I’m doing it, as I’m forcing eye contact, I think that this must be how Andy feels, expectantly widening his eyes for the satisfaction of recognition. There’s a moment when my heart pounds faster, there’s a sense of excitement mixed with anxiety, and the two of you are convinced that you know each other, that at some point in time you shared a beer or a cab, maybe a kiss.

But it’s not them. It’s never the people I think it is, that I want it to be. That second of contact on the street, it’s quickly replaced by quick blinks of separation. We look away, we continue on, and Andy is nowhere to be found in this mess of drunken stumblers.

We stop to get some Creole food which is too spicy for our tastes. I keep sensing a phantom vibration coming from my phone but Andy isn’t getting back to us. Craig is definitely not worried.

“Whatever, he’s probably getting laid,” he says between gulps of water. He sticks out his tongue and waves his hand at it. “Shit, this is ridiculous. How do people eat this stuff?”

Eventually we go back to our hotel. The attendant is asleep behind the front desk with his chair leaning back against the wall and his feet propped up on the counter. He stirs a little when we open the front door, but only enough to peer out at us from behind narrowed lids.

In the room, Craig moves Andy’s stuff from one of the beds to the cot.

“If he’s not here, he doesn’t get a bed.”

I’m asleep when the front door of our room opens at some point in the middle of the night. I look out at the glow from the hallway and the hunched figure that walks in.

“Craig took your bed,” I whisper.

Andy doesn’t answer. I hear him knock against the sofa and then fall onto one of its cushions.

“Where were you?”

Andy breaths in a way that seems loud. But it’s probably just in my head, just the general silence, the rousing from sleep, the dark that amplifies every sound.

“I don’t really know. Somewhere nearby.”

“You were with that girl?”

“Which girl?”

“From the bar. The blonde one.”

“Stacy?”

“I don’t know, I guess. Whoever she was.” The name makes sense in my mind.

“We hung out for a bit.”

“Did you sleep with her?” I yawn.

Andy pauses and I see the blackened silhouette of his head turn to the side.

“I think so,” there’s humor in his voice. “I don’t really remember. Man I was so drunk.”

“So what happened?”

“I just know that at one point I was at the place she was staying, and then I was walking around somewhere, totally confused.”

“You blacked out?”

“I can’t remember how I got there.”

Andy seems far away, like he’s starting to drift down a tunnel. I realize I’m beginning to nod off and don’t want to keep talking anymore.

“I took a cab,” he continues, even though I haven’t asked. “It’s strange, it feels like I’m still there.” I have the impression that he’s just staring straight ahead, away towards the glass balcony doors and thin beige curtains at the other end of the room.

“What do you mean?” I ask, my eyes already closed, the words coming as an automatic question.

“Everything smelled of bleach. I still have the scent in my nose.”

---

That evening, I have this dream that we’re driving around New Orleans, looking for the highway but stuck out in the suburbs somewhere. There’s this feeling that we’ve been driving for hours, circling the same blocks, heading up and down the same streets, totally lost.

Andy’s behind the wheel, insisting that he knows the way out, but he’s just winding us around the same cul-de-sacs and into the same dead ends. My anxiety is mounting, there’s no one around, no one to ask for directions.

Andy twists the car around a potholed corner and takes us alongside a fenced-off field, grass interspersed with pockets of mud and sprouting dandelions. An end-zone goalpost leans precariously off to one side, tilting down towards a fading dotted line of white-frosted grass.

I’m surprised when I look out the window and see a kid come running out onto the road after a red ball that has found its way into the crosswalk. Andy brakes sharply and I lurch in my seat.

The kid grabs the ball and returns to the small yard of his house. In the sloped driveway sits a 70s-style trailer, white with mud stains along its concave shutter ridges, propped up on cinder blocks at the front end to balance out the decline. I see the trailer’s windows decorated with floral-print curtains that lie straight and plastic stiff, completely unresponsive to the wind that whips up the kid’s floppy hair. The porch of the adjacent house is an arranged line of kitchen appliances, dresser, and disintegrating couch. I see the outline of the front door peeking out from behind the refrigerator and a flurry of spray painted red “X” marks form an odd neo-modern art design above the hot plate.

“Why don’t you ask her for directions?” asks Craig. I hear him but I don’t know where he is. I look around in the car but it’s just his sound that I sense, no physical presence. “Otherwise we’ll be stuck here for-fucking-ever.”

A woman surveys us with a harried and tired expression. She holds a steaming pot in one hand and lets the other hang loose on the other side of her billowing form, all curves and folds and dips that have become one confused mass of body. She warns the boy – sternly, but not with any real anger – to not run blindly into streets.

Andy lowers the window.

“Excuse me.” He seems to shout but his voice is muted, shut down as soon as it passes out of the car. The wind has picked up and carries off the sound. “Excuse me,” he tries again, straining his throat, yelling louder. The woman’s eyes respond. “Miss, do you know how to get back to the highway?”

The woman, the muscles of her face tense and relax, as if she’s about to respond to Andy’s question. But she doesn’t say anything. She just turns her head and focuses her attention down the road. Then, from behind her body, she lifts her obscured hand, and it’s just a blackened branch of a limb, all decay and absence. She extends a crooked finger that collapses under its own exertion, drooping at the first knuckle, and tries to point in the direction our car is facing, in the direction we’ve been going all along.

My heart begins racing and I think I’m shouting at Andy, telling him to get us out of here. But my voice feels trapped in my own head, there’s no volume. He smiles and thanks the woman and we roll smoothly away from the house.

I panic, I’m convinced that she’s trying to trick us, that we can’t listen to her and head in the direction she has indicated.

“This is wrong,” I hear myself saying, or trying to say. “Andy turn around.”

We just keep moving.

“We need to go the other way.”

Andy adjusts his grip on the steering wheel and doesn’t respond.

We continue to lace our way down streets narrowed by storage crates and construction equipment, steel canisters filled with jutting dry wall and contorted aluminum metal casings and rods. Everywhere, nestled quietly between the homes, are the white trailers. Suddenly, that’s all I can see, a maze of crisscrossing streets and white trailers, and everywhere, the spray-painted markings.

We’re picking up speed, the same of everything passes by more quickly, but we’re not heading towards any highway, we’re just burying ourselves deeper in this eerie, silent world. I don’t know what else to do, so I calmly open the door to the car, glance at the blur of blacktop underneath me, and throw myself into the arms of the wind.

---

I wake up in our hotel room, drenched in sweat under the massive down comforter that’s twisted around my body. I see Craig in the bathroom, alternating between flossing and picking at his teeth. He leans into the mirror and tries to get a closer look at one particular spot of his gums.

Off to the side, by the balcony door, I see Andy, facedown on the cot.

Craig flushes his floss down the toilet and steps out into the room.

“Are we going?” he asks, his voice at a volume that’s purposely loud enough to wake up Andy. “We’re going to need to drive at least twelve hours today if we want to be back sometime tomorrow.”

I groan, still too disoriented to adequately respond.

“What the hell happened to you? You look like crap.”

After Craig leaves me alone and gets to packing, I finally lift myself out of bed and head to take a shower. At some point, while I’m running the water over my bowed head and watching it drip towards my feet, it suddenly goes cold and turns rust brown and grainy. I shout and jump back from the shower head, letting the water splash against the white porcelain and swirl its way into the drain. It only happens for a moment, and then it’s normal again, clear and warm against the edges of my toes.

“Had some trouble?” asks Craig after I’ve emerged back in the bedroom with a towel wrapped around my waist. “Did it go rust on you too?”

“Yeah. Freaked me out.”

“This place is a shit hole, what did you expect? They try to cover everything up by throwing some clean sheets on the bed and hanging these fancy curtains.”

“Should we get him up?”

Craig laughs. “Don’t think I haven’t already tried. Dude is a log.”

It takes us a good thirty minutes to wake Andy. We shake him, shout his name, watch him open his eyes and promise to get up, only to fall back asleep. Eventually he’s up and getting ready. I recline on the bed and watch CNN while Craig stays busy with his Blackberry. Andy moves painstakingly slowly. There’s a confused air about his movements and a tinge of sadness in his expression.

“I never got a souvenir,” he says as he’s stuffing some toiletries into the side pocket of his bag. “You think we’ll have time to stop somewhere so I can get a shot glass or t-shirt or something?”

“Sure Andy,” I say from the bed, solemnly. Then there’s the sound from the TV again, the sound of Craig’s typing. “We’ll get some breakfast and you can pick something up at one of those tourist shops.”

Andy ends up buying one of the most ordinary shirts you can get. All it says is “Bourbon Street, New Orleans” in a script that, I guess, is meant to give it a French or Creole feel. There’s also a lone string of purple beads hanging off the capital “N.” He throws himself into the back seat of the car and places the plastic bag with the shirt right next to him, his hand possessively gripping the handle even after we’ve started moving.

Craig insists on being the one behind the wheel. He’s particularly psyched about getting back home in record time and I get the impression that he doesn’t trust me to be as efficient as him.

“Just plot our route and tell me where to go.”

I enter the information in the Blackberry and tell him what streets to take to leave the City.

“Andy,” I say, intending to ask him something. When he doesn’t respond I turn in my seat and find him asleep, snoring. I have the sudden idea to grab his Flipcam and record him passed out. He might enjoy seeing it later.

I think the better of it. I let him sleep undisturbed.

I look back towards the road.

“This is going to take forever,” groans Craig.

Like Russian Dolls

2010-09-14T17:33:00.000-07:00

Michael sat out on the make-shift patio just off the back of the house. Its scramble of interlaced masonry stones extended towards the edge of the woods, right to the point where the cropped grass came to an end and everything beyond was just one vast space of dirt and brush and roots. The wind played the strings of branches while an operatic howl rose and dropped in tune with the movement. Michael sighed nervously and glanced over his shoulder, peering into the darkness that always seemed to swallow the woods regardless of the time of day.

“Misha, what are you doing?” his grandmother asked in Russian when she emerged from the house carrying a basket of freshly washed laundry. He rolled his eyes at her Russification of his name as she walked over to the clothes line that hung taut over the yard. She placed the basket on the ground next to her and gazed at him through the late-afternoon humidity.

“Drawing,” Michael responded in English without looking up. For a moment the insect chirping of the cicadas emerged from its monotonous hum, becoming loud and obvious, ringing in his ears, before receding back into background noise.

“What is it?” she asked as she walked over, a towel folded over one arm and a few clothes pins attached to the sleeve of her house dress. “Ah a very tall boy with fancy straight hair! What a face!”

“It’s a tree,” he corrected as he ran more green lines out from its top.

“A tree?” she paused and crinkled her brow. “Maybe you can change it,” she suggested, “a boy with green hair. It would make such a beautiful picture.”

Michael ignored her and turned his attention to the car pulling into the driveway. At first he thought it was his parents coming to pick him up, take him back home to the City, if only for a few days. He longed for a temporary respite from the wet country air, that grass-bark-mold aroma that aggravated his asthma and made him get up in the middle of the night. Sometimes, with the house absolutely still and only the sound of a distant drip coming from a leaky showerhead, he would descend the stairs to the living room. There he would throw himself onto the couch to watch the infomercials that played out like long soap operas about consumerism and teenage angst. More than anything he wanted his parents to take him back, just so he could spend a last few days in the apartment they would soon be moving out of. Things were already being packed away in boxes, in preparation for their relocation to the suburbs. He imagined his toys lidded-off, placed into dark tombs sealed with the sort of plastic tape that made a screeching noise as it was unrolled along the top of the cardboard folds. Somewhere in Queens a little room was being stripped of its history, undergoing an unrecording of time. When the next occupant arrived he would never even know that a boy once lived there, and in some small way, he thought, he would cease to exist.

But when he spotted his grandfather’s black Volvo he looked back down to his picture.

“You caught all the fish?” asked his grandmother as his grandfather stepped out of the car.

“Bah,” his grandfather waved her comment away. “Who needs fish when you find something even better?” He popped open the trunk and from among the mess of polls and pieces of tackle, he pulled out a small orange bucket. “Come look,” he said as he walked over to them and placed the bucket on the grass next to the laundry basket.

His grandmother looked down at it. “What is it? A rock?” she asked.

“A rock? A shmock.” His grandfather reached in and pulled out a small green shell. “It’s a turtle!” he announced.

“Where is his head?” wondered Michael. “Where are his feet?”

“Ah, he’s hiding right now. Maybe asleep.” His grandfather tapped on the top of the shell. “Matryoshka, come say hello.” He turned his attention back to his small audience. “You know why I named him Matryoshka?” There was a tinge of cleverness in his voice. “Because when I find him, I think ‘it’s just empty shell,’ but then I look inside, and I see there is something more!” Neither Michael nor his grandmother had anything to say in response. “So Matryoshka, you understand? Like Russian doll. You open and there is also doll inside.”

With that pronouncement, Matryoshka pulled a sleepy head out of his shell and grinded his jaw indifferently.

“What are we going to do with it?” Michael’s grandmother asked, already in near-hysterics, having skipped over practically every stage of psychological unease between nervous and insane.

“Keep him in the basement, of course.” He placed Matryoshka onto the ground and the three of them watched as he stuck out his wide feet and started plodding along, back towards the car.

“The basement! I need another animal in the house? I already have you. What do we need with a turtle? Who’s going to take care of him?”

“Misha will, yes?” He turned to Michael. A glint of perspiration gliding along the side of his nose looked like the soft dampening of tears.

Michael shrugged. “I guess.”

---

But for the first couple of days, Michael was too nervous to go down into the basement. It was a dark place one could only enter by way of precariously rickety old stairs that felt hollow and loose under his feet, as if his small body could fall right through and onto the grey, prickly cement underneath. He had never been down there alone, only ever accompanying his grandmother on her seemingly constant visits to the laundry machine, or his grandfather’s forays in search of loose screws or buttons or other oddities that sat in crusty old jars lining the shelves of collapsing antique furniture left by the previous owner.

Eventually, it was a sense of responsibility for Matryoshka’s well-being, albeit one that was dropped onto his shoulders by someone else, that drove Michael to the edge of the stairs and the dim yellow light that glowed at their base. With a bowl of water in one hand and a loose piece of chicken in the other, Michael descended to the shrill compression of the wooden boards underneath his feet. The stairs were cold and damp and by the time he got to the basement floor, he sensed the temperature difference that the dark and stone helped to create.

“Matryoshka!” he yelled towards one corner, as if expecting an old friend who was going to emerge with a smile and a hug.

He shook his head at the echoing of the long, strange-sounding name.

“Matty!” he corrected, calling towards the other corner, but still not moving from the base of the stairs.

When he didn’t get the welcome he had expected, he pulled in a big gulp of air and stepped further into the basement. At the far end, a set of short windows – placed high, right up against the ceiling – revealed the edge of dirt and grass outside the house. A few beams of white light streaked through and illuminated floating dust particles that passed through the still air, spinning stars in the galaxy of the contained space. Decaying shelves ran askew against one wall and were piled up with books placed horizontal and perpendicular and diagonal, most displaying titles in a Cyrillic script that Michael couldn’t read.

“Can I help you?” said a deep, low voice from the other side of the room.

Michael jumped and turned simultaneously, poising his body to face in the direction of the voice. Some water flipped out of the bowl and landed at his feet.

“You scared me,” Michael called out to the voice, as he stared down at the floor and looked for a sign of movement. His eyes hadn’t yet adjusted to the low lighting.

“I’m sorry,” answered the voice, sounding sincere in the apology. “It’s just that I’ve been on my own for so long now. What do you have there? Is that for me?”

“Yes!” answered Michael. “Some water and some chicken!”

“Chicken? Turtles don’t eat chicken. You’re not that bright, are you?”

Michael looked at the chicken dangling in his hand. “Oh…I thought…” he started saying as he turned to look back at the ground and spotted Matty taking short, contemplative turtle steps towards him.

“That was rude.” Matty shook his head at himself. “Maybe I’m just in a bad mood.”

“Will you drink the water at least?”

“The water I will drink,” answered Matty, his voice rising to a level of mild satisfaction that, Michael imagined, must represent the high-point of a turtle’s range of excitement.

Michael made his way over in three strides and sat himself down on the spiky cement floor. He placed the bowl down in front of him and watched Matty stick his head past the edge and lick at the water with his tongue.

“And you are?” asked Matty, trying to show interest in his question but mostly distracted by trying to get at the liquid, which was low enough in the bowl that he had to strain his neck to reach it.

“Michael. My family calls me Misha but I don’t like the way it sounds. Michael is what they called me at school.” He scratched his knee absent-mindedly and considered whether he wanted to say more. Matty was, after all, very much a stranger, and even though Michael often brimmed with thoughts and emotions he wanted to share with everyone he came across, to spill his heart at every opportunity, he was sharp enough to know that not everyone wanted to hear what he was thinking. “I’m moving at the end of the summer,” he continued, unable to help himself, to hold back this additional piece of information that was always on his mind. “To a new school. A new town.” He paused. “I wonder what they’ll call me there.”

“I see,” answered Matty, “That’s never an easy thing. To pick up and leave, to start a new life.” He contemplated what Michael had said. “And who am I?” he wondered.

“You’re Matty,” Michael giggled. “What a funny questions to ask.”

“Sometimes it’s easier to just ask instead of trying to figure it out yourself.”

Matty picked his head out of the bowl and stretched back the corners of his mouth into what Michael assumed might be a smile. Matty’s eyes narrowed into thin lines.

“How can you live down here?” wondered Michael, taking another moment to take in the layout of the basement, most of which still lay shrouded in dark corners.

“Well, it wasn’t really up to me. But it’s not too bad,” reasoned Matty. “It’s sort of comfortable actually. After all it has plenty of places to hide and go to sleep. No one to bother me. Figure I’ll stay a little while.”

“But what do you eat? How do you survive?”

“I manage,” answered Matty, stepping away from the bowl and shaking his head free of a droplet of water that clung to the top of his head, beading on his rough skin. “We all find a way to get by somehow.”

Michael nodded without really knowing why. He wanted to show Matty that he understood.

“Now if you’ll excuse me, I think I’ll go and take a little nap.”

---

“How is our friend doing?” asked his grandfather a few afternoons later, just as he was walking past Michael in the yard. He carried his flimsy orange bucket towards the kitchen, filled with fish to be gutted.

“What friend?”

“Matryoshka,” his grandfather reminded him. "The turtle.”

“Oh, he’s fine,” Michael responded and then looked away towards a neighbor’s dog barking at him through the fence.

“Ah this dog!” his grandfather shouted through the noise. The dog suddenly stopped barking and tilted his head to the side, contemplating this shirtless man with the round belly, green visor, and large Italian designer glasses. “Great,” he said to Michael. “You’re taking care of him?”

Michael nodded. “I brought him some water and some food.” Michael paused. “But why did you bring him?”

“I don’t know. Maybe I think you would like a pet. I had a turtle when I was a boy also, in Russia.”

“What was his name?”

“Matryoshka! You see, is a good name, much history.”

“What happened to him?” asked Michael. “To your turtle I mean.” He picked at the scab of an old mosquito bite on his arm.

“I don’t remember so good,” his grandfather said as he looked back at the silent dog that was now lying on its belly and panting. “He stay with me a long time. I feed him and take care of him. I grow up. I leave home.”

“And then?”

“And then?” his grandfather shrugged. “I think he’s old. He dies.”

“That’s it?”

“That’s it.”

“You don’t remember more?”

“Other things happen, and then you don’t think about a turtle so much.” He smiled. “You ask me to tell you more about the story of how I meet your grandmother,” he tilted his head towards the house, “I know everything. I remember excellent.”

Michael looked back towards the dog that had started barking again, but this time at a squirrel that had caught his attention.

“That dog is going to make me crazy,” he said to Michael as he disappeared into the house. “Tonight,” he shouted from behind the screen door, raising the bucket up to eye-level, “we eat fish.”

---

Michael’s parents came to visit for a weekend, and on-cue, as if to signify some greater emotional or psychological condition swirling in the universe, a hurricane decided to visit along with them. A hurricane named Bob.

As the wind whipped up outside, tossing leaves and branches into tumbleweeds that rolled across the backyard, Michael made preparations for disaster. The whole of the woods swayed and lurched, the trees creaked as if they would all topple at any moment. On the news he overheard word of possible tornados and after having seen them on the Weather Channel, he was fully confident in their power to uproot whole towns and grind them into rubble hundreds of feet above the ground.

“We need to hide right now,” he said to his family, flashlight and radio and water bottles tucked under his arms; the additional supplies of Motts apple juice, Fruit Roll Ups, and a loaf of bread, all tucked away in his He-Man backpack. “We need to get to the lowest place in the house.”

His parents sat together with his grandparents out in the sun room, laughing and eating with the TV on in the background.

“Calm down,” said his father. “Everything will be fine.”

“Here, have some potato knish,” said his mother, extending a fork with a piece of potato knish at its end, her other hand just underneath, ready to catch any wayward crumbs.

“Has anyone seen the bread?” his grandfather asked, looking behind his chair as if he might find it there.

“I’m serious,” intoned Michael. “We have to get to the basement.”

“The basement?” His grandmother looked up from her food, as if only now understanding what he was asking of them. “But it’s so dirty down there.”

“That’s the only place where it’ll be safe.”

“Go go.” His father motioned at him with his hand. “Go set everything up for us and we’ll come soon to hide with you.”

A new sense of resolve swept over Michael. He passed through the house looking for other items that might serve as useful for survival purposes. He found a couple of screwdrivers and a wrench. He grabbed a towel and stuffed it in with everything else in his bag, making sure not to crush the juice boxes. His book of drawings he hugged to his chest, deciding that it was probably his most valued possession and that he was ready to sacrifice all else if only he was able to save this one thing.

When he got to the basement he shut the door tightly behind him and then ran to the bottom of the stairs.

“Matty!” he yelled as his feet hit the cement floor.

“What’s all that noise?” asked the turtle as Michael spotted him walking between the legs of a dresser.

“It’s a hurricane.”

“Ah a hurricane,” Matty took in the information. He turned his neck to look towards the squat windows. “What’s a hurricane?”

“It’s wind and rain and lightening. It’s clouds, darkness, and just other bad stuff. But no one will listen to me. I’m telling them it isn’t safe but they just sit there and act like everything is going to be fine.”

“Well,” started Matty, turning around and going back under the dresser to explore its underbelly further, “what can you do?”

Outside, very nearby, there was a rumble of thunder. The light bulb at the base of the stairs flickered.

Michael turned on his flashlight and pointed it at Matty’s tail just as it disappeared.

“What do you mean?” he asked. “You have to help me convince them, show them that they’re wrong. I have to do something.”

“I’m sorry. I can’t help you,” Matty said from under the dresser.

“But you’re smart. You know the things to say.”

“It doesn’t work that way.”

“How does it work then?” Michael was growing impatient with his friend. He dropped down to the base of the dresser and pointed the flashlight underneath it. Matty’s eyes glowed as the beam passed across his face. “Why won’t you help me?” Michael leaned forward and peered at him.

“I’m just a turtle.”

“And I’m just a boy!” Michael retorted.

Matty chuckled. “That means so much more than you can even understand.”

And true to Matty’s words, Michael didn’t understand. “What am I supposed to do?” he continued.

“You’ll see,” answered Matty. “One way or another, you’ll manage.” He shrugged and then pulled his neck back into his shell. With his head snuggly inside, he closed his eyes.

Michael sat back and brought his knees to his chest. He turned the flashlight off and sat in the dimness, listening to the wind whistle through the trees and past the house and into the little cracks along the frames of the windows. The rain hammered onto the glass and collapsed into streaming rivulets that pooled on the outside, looking for access points in the foundation so that they could seep in and fall further, deeper into the ground.

After a few moments, when the sound of the hurricane became so complete that he couldn’t hear it anymore, Michael got up and walked back up the stairs to his family.

---

The hurricane passed without much incident other than a few downed trees that fell harmlessly onto empty roads and shingles that flew off of roofs and lodged themselves in chain-link fencing. There was one tree that fell on a car, but in that scenario the car had been empty, so it was all pretty much the same thing except for the added dramatic effect of bent steel and shattered glass.

He, his father, and his grandfather spent the next day clearing the yard of leaves and twigs. Above him, when he glanced up towards the tree canopy, all Michael could see were more leaves and twigs, endless amounts of them, so that he didn’t understand how the trees could shed so much and still be as dense as they had always been.

“I wish my hair was same way,” his grandfather responded when Michael shared this observation with him.

His parents made plans to return to the City and he was going to be left, once again, with his grandparents, left to count down the days until the end of the summer and the move into the new house.

“Can I come back with you? I want to be in my room.”

“But it’s so much better here,” his mother explained. “Here you have the fresh air and the beach. What do you have there? Just hot streets and smelly garbage.” She breathed in the air as if to solidify her point. “Delicious. I wish I could stay here all summer.”

“I like the City smell more,” Michael lied.

“And almost everything is packed up already anyway. There’s almost nothing that’s lying around, it’s all in boxes.”

“That’s OK. I don’t need much.”

“We’re both working,” his father chimed in. “There’s no one at home. Here you have your grandparents and you can speak with them all day.”

“They just talk about laundry and fish.”

“Well, in the City you would be by yourself all day, staring at the TV, and there would be no one to watch you.”

“I’m old enough to watch myself,” noted Michael.

“Can you mount a picture frame on the wall? Can you fix a leaking pipe or change a fuse?”

Michael thought about this for a second. “No,” he decided.

“Then you’re not old enough to watch yourself,” his father concluded in his own way of reasoning through things.

With that, his father added some final items to the trunk and started the car.

“We’ll see you soon,” he said from the rolled down window as he began to back the car out of the driveway. “We’ll come right after the move.” He glanced over his shoulder to make sure he was passing between the edges of the fence, so as to avoid clipping the side-view mirrors, which he had done on several occasions in the past. “And then we’ll all leave together to the new house and you’ll stop complaining about how the air is too fresh for you here.”

When the car had disappeared down the road, Michael went around trying to distract himself. He sat down to draw and started flipping through his picture book. He stopped at the picture of the tree he had been working on the other day and looked at it carefully. It seemed to him that maybe his grandmother had been right, maybe he had been drawing a boy with green hair the whole time and just didn’t know it.

Everything was moving too quickly, the summer had just started and now it was almost over. Soon he’d be in a new place with new people who were total strangers. He didn’t understand why his parents had decided to move, why the City suddenly wasn’t good enough for them. He was perfectly happy in their apartment. He had friends, a school he knew and was used to. And now everything would change and no one had bothered to ask him if he was OK with all of it. They always claimed they were moving because of him, for him, so that he could have grass and trees and be able to ride a bike without stopping at every block to make sure cars weren’t coming. But maybe he didn’t need all that, maybe he didn’t want it.

Michael considered the picture of the tree, or the boy, or whatever it was, and then he tore it out of his drawing book and crumpled it up. Confronted with a fresh page, he started drawing again.

“What do you think?” he asked Matty down in the basement when he had finished his picture.

Matty contemplated it. “Is that me?”

Michael nodded.

“That’s not too bad,” Matty decided and smiled. “Except you made me bigger than I really am. I’m quite small you know.”

“It’s just so you can see the details better. Like the tiles on your shell.”

“I would take it with me if I could.”

“You don’t have to leave,” suggested Michael, suddenly getting excited. “You can stay here and then when we move you can come with me to the new house. I’ll buy you a tank so you can be in the sun all day instead of in a dark basement.”

But as soon as he said it, he knew how Matty would respond.

Matty shook his head and took a deep, exasperated breath. “I’m sorry, I can’t come with you.”

Michael ran his fingers along the picture and felt the bumps on the paper, the thicker clumps of crayon that rose out of the lines he had traced and retraced.

“You have to go your way, and I have to go mine. That’s just how it is. You can’t keep a turtle like me around forever.”

“Not yet. Don’t go yet.”

“When the time is right.”

---

The final weekend of the summer finally arrived and Michael’s parents returned. The night before they were to leave for the new house, Michael’s mom sat on his bed and tucked him in.

“Are you excited about tomorrow?”

“Yes,” he lied, and then turned to face the wall.

“You’ll make so many new friends, your room will be bigger. And there will be stairs! You love stairs.”

Michael did love stairs, that part was true. He loved the way you could run up and down them and it was always like entering a new world, climbing or descending into a place that was totally different from the one you were just in. As much as the basement of the summer house was a dark and scary place, it was also a magical place, so starkly separate from the warm fabrics and curtains and wall paper, from the normalcy of everything else. He thought about Matty down there, emerging from under furniture and stalking the center of the floor, looking up towards the narrow windows that reminded him of what lay beyond the house, of where he had come from and where he was going back to when the time came for him to leave. Then he pictured the funny way in which Matty would stomp his thick legs and feet before aiming himself towards a corner so he could slink behind some new cabinet or dresser.

“Goodnight,” his mom said, and kissed him on the side of his forehead. “Tomorrow everything will be different.”

The next morning Michael opened his eyes and threw off the sheets from the bed. Light condensation had gathered during the evening and made the windows sweat from the inside. He went to the bathroom and started brushing his teeth. In the mirror, he surveyed his pajamas, the pattern of little yellow sailboats that dotted the white cotton top and bottom, and felt a sudden annoyance with how stupid and childish they looked. He considered changing before heading downstairs but then got lazy and decided against it. These pajamas lived in the summer house anyway, leftovers from a younger him who had spent previous summers here, sleeping in the same bed and sitting at the same outdoor table to draw his pictures.

Today, when he came into the living room, he found his whole family sitting around and fervently watching the events unfolding on TV.

“Misha! You are up!” said his grandfather. “Come, look what is happening.”

Michael turned his attention to the TV and saw images of an open square flooded with people. The square was outlined by funny-looking buildings, their tops all rounded and radish-like. The people shouted, they held their fists in the air. There were tanks and soldiers interspersed throughout the crowd, as if they too had just arrived to participate in the festivities. Some of the soldiers danced with the plain-clothed people, others stood on top of their tanks and just watched what was going on. One young soldier stuck his hand through a hole in a red flag, making a “V” with his fingers.

“It’s about time,” his grandfather continued.

Michael didn’t understand. “What’s going on?”

“The Soviet Union is collapsing,” his father told him matter-of-factly. “They are protesting.” He inhaled deeply and took it all in, then bent his head to take a sip from his coffee mug.

“What happens now?” Michael asked his family.

“Who knows?” answered his father. “We have to wait and see.”

Michael just kept staring at the images on the screen, he listened to the commentator’s voice roused into emotional exposition. Then he noticed something from the corner of his eye and turned his attention to a slow-moving Matty, making his way, focused and directed, from one end of the living room to the other.

“Even Matryoshka is celebrating with us!” said his grandfather.

“That creature,” his grandmother shook her head. “You had to take it out of basement and let it walk on my clean floor?”

“This is special day.”

“Good. Special day. You are going to clean my floor?”

Michael’s grandfather fell silent just as Matty reached one side of the living room and now ricocheted himself off the wall with every step, bouncing alongside the molding at its base. Eventually he reached a corner and kept walking into the wall, as if he would just suddenly find more floor to move across.

“Our friend is stuck,” his grandfather noticed. He got up from his seat, picked Matty up and turned him in the other direction. The turtle continued his plodding in the same manner, heading back to the side of the living room he had previously come from.

Michael’s family continued watching the news as Matty meticulously worked at crossing the living room, moving closer to Michael with each step.

“Now is the time,” he whispered when we got to Michael, stopping at his feet. “I think I have to be going.”

“Now?” asked Michael. “You can’t leave now. Everything is happening so fast.”

“It’ll always be this way. It can’t be helped.”

“I’m scared, I don’t want you to leave.”

Matty went silent for a moment, and turned his head to look out of the much larger and wider window of the living room. The sun was already sparkling through the white lace curtains and Matty’s diminutive body cast a stout shadow across the wooden floor.

“I can do this one thing,” he eventually said, glancing back at Michael.

“What thing?”

“If you take me outside and let me go on my way, I’ll make sure everything will be OK.”

“You can do that?”

“Yes,” Matty quickly answered. He looked away towards the window again, adding a sense of gravity to his words.

Michael considered the promise and its possibilities. He glowed with excitement at the thought of a guarantee about the future, coming at just the time in his life when he wanted, more than anything, to know that everything would work out. Michael bit his lip. Then he crouched down, picked Matty up, and carried him past the TV and out of the living room.

“Where are you going?” asked his grandfather.

“I just want to take Matty down to the basement,” Michael answered. “I think he’s scared of all the noise from the TV.”

“OK.” His grandfather smiled. “You know what to do. He’s your turtle.”

Michael moved past the rest of his family and then as he approached the door to the basement, he quickly turned away from it and whisked Matty outside. He was careful not to let the screen door shut loudly behind him. When he was far enough away from the house that he could no longer hear the sounds from the living room, he placed Matty down on the grass and stepped back.

Matty closed his eyes and breathed in the air just as the wind passed a warm breeze over them.

“I imagine this is farewell,” he said to Michael, and then started trudging towards the bushes that lined the edges of the property, separating it from the disorder of the surrounding woods.

Michael watched him silently. He occasionally glanced around him as if expecting that something would suddenly change in his world, that Matty’s promise would create an immediate effect that he would feel. But so far nothing felt different, nothing felt solid and assured, the way he wanted it to be. Everything seemed as unknowable as it always had, as it had the entire summer.

Just as Matty was about to disappear into the deep and rich space of green that hugged the small summer house with its trimmed lawn and patio and arranged flower beds, he turned back to look at Michael one last time.

“I’m sorry,” he muttered.

“What do you mean?”

“About what I said,” answered Matty. “About telling you that I could make everything turn out OK.”

“You mean it won’t be OK?” Michael was confused, he felt a panic in his chest. The move and its consequences, the new home and life that awaited him, it all loomed once more as a dark and empty place he was descending into. There was no promise, no certainty.

“It might, but the truth is I can’t say one way or another.” He smiled. “You’ll just have to live through it and see for yourself.”

“So what happens now?”

“I’m not exactly sure,” answered Matty. “But I know you’ll manage.”

With that, he continued on his way, his slow and thoughtful steps carrying him into the woods. At first Michael could hear the crunch of leaves, the rustle of movement from something that could not be seen. And then there was nothing, just a young boy standing alone in a yard, looking out over a vast and unknowable world that had always been there, but which he had never ventured into before.

Snow Showers

2010-08-09T04:29:00.000-07:00

Micah called him when it was already clear that they were going to get a lot more than the few inches of snow the weathermen had predicted.

Phone jimmied between tilted head and shoulder, Simon used his free hands to pull apart the blinds and peer outside. The accumulation had already formed itself into a little mound on top of the AC unit he had never bothered removing at the end of summer. Outside, the wind tumbled in white spirals and icy shards chimed against his window.

“You want me to come over?” He breathed the cold air drafting in through the AC vent. “Now?”

He winced only after he said it, when it was already too late to change the tone of his voice. Too annoyed, too critical. He wore his heart on his intonations.

“Is that OK?” Micah paused. There was the sound of him shuffling across the room. “I know it’s a little crazy outside but I just really need to get my mind off all of this.”

“I know,” Simon tried consoling as he let go of the blinds and looked down at the oddly patterned rug in his living room. He rubbed his toe on a piece of loose lint and thought about how much he needed to vacuum the place. The dust bunnies had quietly reaccumulated during the past couple of weeks.

“Big favor,” Micah said as if to reassure him that this was a lot to expect.

“Dude, of course, don’t even worry about it.

Forty-five minutes later, as the F-train crawled around the collapsing bend of track above 4th Avenue, Simon pulled out his phone to glance at the time. Cranes and bulldozers glazed in ice announced that construction was ongoing. Construction was always ongoing, it never seemed to stop.

The small pocket of reception permitted by the brief emergence from the tunnel gave him a chance to send a quick text to Micah promising his impending arrival, albeit significantly later than originally anticipated.

Bowing his head, he thought about Micah waiting for him, alone in the apartment. The same apartment that, only hours earlier, Micah had occupied with Julie. From the beginning, they had been one of those feisty couples, the easy-going guy and the slightly uptight girl. Micah had a tendency to shrug things off, to let Julie take the lead. She’d get worked up about something, roll her eyes at him, and after a few back and forth, undercutting comments, he would fold for the sake of harmony. Most of the time it was just really small, insignificant stuff they’d get into spats over, nothing particularly out of the ordinary for a couple. They had the sort of energy that seemed to bring them closer precisely because of its antagonistic vehemence.

But Simon never quite understood how this tightly-wound dynamic managed to work for them. In fear of disrupting his friendship with Micah, he chose not to question things, not to bring anything up even when Micah told him that he was going to propose to Julie. Micah was happy, and Julie, after all, managed his quirks better than any other girl Simon had ever seen him with. It was now, in hindsight, that he felt guilty about not disclosing his reservations, about not saying something earlier.

Then again, what would he have even said?

“Dude, something just feels off to me about this whole thing”?

He didn’t think he had anything particularly noteworthy to point to. She’s too serious? She likes nice things and you, Micah, are more of a shlub? She gets annoyed a lot? She acts like she’s smarter than you, but then again, maybe she is?

He sighed as the tracks squealed underneath the train. They sparked in the exertion and sprinkled Brooklyn with fragments of lightning steel. The Gowanus stretched ahead, winding its way around the “Kentile Floors” sign on its matrix of rusted crossbeams and towards derelict mills and factories in this forgotten portion of the borough. The canal glowed a sickly, pale green in the shadow of the streetlamps, shrugging off its past industrial adventures from behind the falling snow.

---

The walk from the subway to Micah’s apartment was only a few blocks, but in the mid-calf depth of the snow, it turned into an inspired pilgrimage.

There were no cabs on this typically busy Saturday night, but still plenty of people smoking outside of bars, music and voices breaking into the stillness on the streets during the momentary opening and swinging shut of doors. The plows asserted themselves by running through red lights, honking aside pedestrians who tried to take advantage of the absence of vehicles by walking down the parallel yellow lines in the middle of avenues.

Spontaneous snowball fights erupted on corners, with casual strollers taking refuge behind buried cars and falling over from impacts, bodies collapsing into the white pillow of the ground. Some stepped precariously off of sidewalks and onto sloshy streets, trying to gain solid footing before committing their full weight. In the middle of 10th St., a girl in psychotic stilettos slipped on the incline slant of a parking lot entrance, and blushed red through her concealer when four passersby ran to help her up.

She nodded a silent “thanks” and tapped away, head held high, cheeks burning, heel spikes stabbing the pavement.

Micah’s apartment was in one of those doorman buildings with the faux-antique furniture in the lobby, the kind that keeps the requisite Christmas tree/Hanukkah decorations around for at least two months after the holidays are over. An old woman in a fur coat sat on one of the brown leather couches near a glass table with outdated copies of Esquire and Vanity Fair. She had already surrendered to the weather that was proving too complicated for walking the small schnauzer that sat poised by her side. Clad in doggy winter-wear, he kept glancing at her and then back out towards the street, still holding onto the false hope that, eventually, he would get to leave the lobby.

Micah’s doorman glanced at Simon suspiciously as he moved towards the elevator bank.

“Excuse me,” he said, his voice reaching out to pull at a shirtsleeve. “Who are you here to see?”

“Micah,” he answered, and then paused as if to indicate that this should be enough information.

The doorman merely peeked out from under his cap and reached for the intercom phone. “Room number please.”

“717.” His momentum formally stifled, he walked over to the desk and leaned against it with an exhausted weight. The schnauzer looked on pleadingly, his back leg twitching in anticipation.

“And your name?” the doorman asked, covering the receiver.

---

Simon had to knock a few times before Micah finally answered the door to let him in.

“Hey,” he said when he saw his friend.

Micah stood dazed and stared off towards the kitchen while Simon removed his boots.

“Sorry,” he added out of habit when he noticed the ice he had tracked in from outside.

Simon stepped onto the lacquered wooden floor and followed Micah’s plodding form as it moved towards the living room. It was there that he saw the firestorm that had erupted around Julie’s departure. Books had been pulled from shelves, frames were knocked over from tables and stands where they had once stood calmly between innocuous statuettes and clocks and potted plants. Random papers and photos were strewn around the floor as if the filing cabinet of the past had been broken into and its contents viciously sprinkled out of manila folders and albums, memories detached from their proper places and now deposited into mounds that were easier to forget. A corner of the rug was stained with a Rorschach blot of red wine that left a dribbling path to the coffee table where a single suspect bottle stood empty besides stacked, unused coasters and no glasses.

It was all very dramatic. He didn’t understand whether Julie had felt particularly inclined to make a point before she left or if Micah had gone through some irrational act of ravagement on his own, after she was gone.

“What the heck happened here?” He noticed a plate on the windowsill, a sandwich abandoned mid-chew. As he stepped forward, his right sock accumulated a bit of the red wine stain that hadn’t yet dried.

Micah shrugged, brushing off the question, seemingly as clueless about it all as Simon was. He moved towards the couch and lashed his hand against the decorative pillows with knitted patterns and fringes that lay spread out along its length. They flew off towards the edge of the room and landed neatly into a small pile of paper.

Simon thought about the couch, the one that was now adorned with the fancy pillows Micah had contempt for. It was the same couch that had followed Micah from his old apartment, the “bachelor pad” just off Greenwich Ave. that dated back to their immediate post-college days. It had rested along one of the walls, just opposite an inoperable fire place, amidst other dark brown pieces of furniture composed of wood and leather and accented by the occasional wedge of buffed steel or frosted glass. It had been a centerpiece, the thing that, over the years, had supported many an ass, reinforced multiple conversations, provided the foundational base for drinking and hookah smoking and movie-watching sessions.

When Micah moved in with Julie and had to go through a process of discarding pieces of the past, he just couldn’t part with the couch, with its worn armrest glowing in a muddied polished tan, its reek of afternoon naps and slept-off hangovers after nights of alcohol-induced pontification about the uncertainty of the future and the failure of relationships. This was the same couch Simon had slept on after he split with his girlfriend of two years, when the reality of what he had done suddenly sunk in late on a Saturday night and he needed to be somewhere other than standing in his shower, letting the sound of the water drown out most of the things popping into his mind.

“But it’s so ugly,” Julie had tried convincing Micah. “It won’t make any sense in the apartment.” To her it was just like his movie posters and kitsch tribal masks, the vestigial collection of ice hockey cards organized in thick, tome-like albums that he was forced to send back to Long Island to live in his parents’ attic.

It was a small battle and Micah thought he had gotten his way when the couch was grudgingly loaded into the moving van. But then Julie embarked on her war of attrition which involved burying the couch under as many accessories as it would take to shroud its true nature. More than anything, it seemed as if the couch embarrassed her, reminded her, perhaps, of who Micah was, of the man he would always be no matter how much she tried changing him, of all the incongruities that existed between them.

Micah sat down and the storied leather squeaked underneath him. He leaned forward onto his knees and stared at his muted reflection in the LCD screen on the wall.

The apartment held its breath. All was silent except for the sound of the refrigerator motor switching on and off and the steam drumming against the building’s old piping. Micah dropped his head into his hands.

“I seriously need another drink,” he said.

---

A bottle of scotch now stood half-empty next to the crusty bottle of wine. Micah was on the rug, leaning against the couch, swirling around some ice in his glass while crunching his teeth down on one of the cubes.

“You know what she told me before she left?” Micah asked as he looked towards the interior of the apartment and squinted, as if straining to see something. “She goes to me – sometimes we get away from ourselves.” He shook his head and smiled to himself. “Now what the hell does that mean? When did she become a fucking philosopher?”

Simon didn’t say anything.

“Just out of the blue dude. Like one moment we’re having dinner, we’re getting a drink – shit, we got a drink with you like two weeks ago, that crappy dive with the messed up darts that you couldn’t throw straight, remember? – and then she’s taking off.”

This was them going through the events of the past few months, trying to understand what might have happened, where the turning point was, if there had been some singular, instigating occurrence that helped precipitate the quick descent from newly-engaged to newly-separated young adults. Maybe it was easier to try to find a specific thing that had gone wrong rather than have to deal with the idea that there was just no way to predict any of it.

“She never said anything? She wasn’t acting weird?”

“I don’t think so, I mean, fuck, who even knows anymore?”

“You guys weren’t arguing?” Simon asked, taking another sip of the scotch, trying his best to keep himself engaged in Micah’s dissecting of moments even as he was growing tired from the drinking and the dimly lit apartment.

“We argued a bit, but not in any strange sort of way. The usual. You know how we were.”

Micah smiled dismally at the memory. Then he turned to look at his hand, he opened and closed it, watched its motion. It was as if he was assessing how odd it all was, the way that hands move, the way we have the power to make them move in the way we want them to. The tendons contracted and released, the fingers tightened themselves into a fist, into a grip that burned white as the blood rushed from it and he held on to something, to nothing, to the air in the room. Then he opened his hand and let go.

The wind, abandoned by the revelers who were finding it too cold and too late to be outside, whistled its lonely tune from the street. It bent its head around corners and loitered by stoops with lit entryways and corridors, still sleepless, giddy, hopeful perhaps, of finding some company even in the midst of the deepening night.

“Maybe it’s pointless.”

“What?” asked Micah.

“Trying to dissect it all, looking for something specific that could explain this. Maybe there’s just no sense to be made.”

Micah didn’t seem satisfied. “No, I don’t know if I believe that.” He paused. “There has to be something I’m not getting.”

“You’re liable to drive yourself nuts trying to figure it out.”

Micah turned to face the window. A shadow fluttered in front of the floor lamp, dancing precariously in its yellow warmth. In one moment, it wrapped itself around him, obscuring him in darkness. And then as quickly as it had come, it slipped away, passing one last, loving stroke across his cheek.

“You think she’ll come back?” he asked, glancing back at Simon. His face drooped pitifully, sunken and hollow, a forgotten jack-o-lantern with the bottom ready to fall out.

Simon wasn’t sure how to respond. The truth began floating up softly, naturally, aided by the drinking and the sense of prophetic understanding it brings on. But then his mind panicked and dug its claws in, keeping the words lodged firmly in his throat.

“She has to, right?” Micah tried answering his own question. “I mean, it’s too surreal. It happened too quickly. It was too rash. People don’t just disappear like that, right?” He sighed, the confidence draining out of his voice. “Maybe she just needs some time.”

Simon yawned and quickly raised his hand to cover his mouth.

“I’m gonna run to the bathroom.”

He got up and walked back past the foyer, into Micah’s bedroom, suddenly attacked with the nagging sense that he needed to leave the apartment. It was getting late and he was finding himself completely exhausted, unable to focus. He breathed heavy and shut his eyes, trying to will himself back into being a helpful, receptive friend.

But the weight of the scotch unpacked itself in his head and slid down to his legs. He sat on the bed and looked around him. The light from the rest of the apartment illuminated the bedroom and he saw the unkempt sheets tossed around and bundled in the corners of the mattress, outlining a space in the middle of the bed where he perceived a depression. Maybe it was where Micah had been laying earlier in the evening, trying to imagine it all away. Maybe it was where Julie had placed her suitcase as she packed it with the clothes she pulled from the hangers in the closet, letting them swing vacantly, pendulum-like, until they tired.

He imagined her a few hours earlier, filling the suitcase quickly and efficiently. Her face focused, locked in the concentration of her folding, with Micah standing in the door frame, leaning against it with his hands tucked into the pockets of his jeans. She didn’t look up, didn’t pay attention to his presence. When he asked her questions, asked things like “why?” and “how did we get to this?” and “are you going to say anything?,” she glanced at him for a moment, exhaled in a way that accented her silence with the notion that answers were unnecessary, that it should all be obvious, and then continued with her packing.

Simon rose from the bed and its springs creaked in response. In the bathroom he ran the water, washing his face, his hands. By the sink he noticed two toothbrushes staring out stiffly, judgmentally, from a water-stained glass, a tube of paste curled up timidly by its side.

Everything changes, he thought to himself as he walked back out. Everything changes, all the time, even when we’ve gotten old enough to not want it to anymore.

“Hey,” he said to Micah, who sat spinning the empty wine bottle on the rug, watching it turn methodically. “It’s pretty bad out and it’s getting late…”

Micah looked up and nodded. He reached out his hand and Simon helped prop him onto his feet. He fixed his shirt aimlessly, scratched his nose.

“I should probably go,” Simon continued quietly.

“You can totally crash here,” Micah offered. He peeked up at Simon and shrugged. “I can set you up on the couch.”

Simon looked back towards the door, at his boots sitting in the middle of a small puddle of water, and felt overcome by a mild panic that tugged at his hand, urging him to leave.

“Thanks dude, but I think I need to head out.”

Micah nodded silently.

“I have some stuff to do tomorrow. I wanted to get an early start.”

“Sure, of course. Don’t worry about it.”

Simon hated himself for leaving, but he couldn’t overcome his desire to flee, to escape from the suffocating sense of loneliness he felt himself being pulled into.

“You’re going to be alright?”

Micah put his hand on Simon’s shoulder and smiled. “Yes, I’m going to be alright. Don’t worry, I’m not going to kill myself or anything.”

They walked over to the foyer and Simon pulled his coat back on, slipped into his boots. Micah unlatched the door and opened it for him. From down the hall they felt the electrical hum of a TV and heard the muffled rasping of voices against hollow walls.

“Look,” Simon began as he stepped out of the apartment, feeling the need to add something reassuring before leaving, “this will all fix itself. Just give her some time to breathe, or do whatever it is she needs to do.”

“Yeah.”

“Maybe it’s all a bit stressful for her. I mean it’s such a huge thing, to be getting married. I can see how the realization of what it all means can suddenly hit you and seem freaky.”

Simon stuck his hands in his pockets and felt the ridges of his keys with the tips of his fingers. The sound of his own voice was odd to him, it trailed from a distance, contrived in the manner of things we say because we think we must. He heard it and thought that perhaps someone should silence its noise.

The wind howled at them from the empty stairwell.

“I don’t know,” he continued. “And she loves you dude, which is the most important part, right? You don’t just disappear on someone you love.”

“Right.”

“So I’ll call you in the morning then.”

“I might be sleeping off a scotch-ache but I’ll call you back when I’m up.”

“So I know you’re alive?”

“Exactly.”

Simon walked over to the elevator and pushed the call button. Micah waved and closed the apartment door, leaving him to wait alone in the hallway.

In the lobby, the doorman sat poised in his chair, writing on something hidden behind the counter with the vehemence of a novelist in the middle of a perfect passage. He seemed annoyed to have to look up in response to Simon’s emergence on the marble floor. Simon half-expected to see the old woman with the dog, still waiting to be walked, but they weren’t around anymore. He wondered if they had ever made it into the snow.

“Have a good night,” he said to the doorman who just looked back down to his secret scribing and proceeded to throw the full force of his arm into the motions of his pen.

---

Outside the snow had stopped falling and all was relatively calm. The storm, being pulled helplessly into the late night silence after a full day of activity, laid down its head before closing its eyes and exhaling a final breath. The sidewalks had been mostly cleared and only when he got to the corner did he find the mess of plowed piles, coalescing at a point that made it impossible to cross the street. He took a moment to look back up towards the 7th floor, to Micah’s apartment windows extending out along one line of the brick façade, trimmed by eroding, sand-colored fleur-de-lis moldings. Light from the inside of the apartment washed over the drawn curtains as, he imagined, Micah paced back and forth over the floor beams, biting his nails and fixing his shirt. Eventually he would sit back down into the mess in the living room, on the couch Simon had refused to spend the night on. He would stare at the TV, glance around at some of the photos on the walls, at the little feminine flourishes that decorated the entire place, and wonder about how, no matter what ultimately happened, nothing would ever be the same again.

Simon shook his head. He shouldn’t have left him like that.

A truck engine burred angrily somewhere nearby, trudging forward with effort over the ice-glazed blacktop on another street or avenue. It moved somewhere in the darkness.

The sound created the illusion of closeness, an impression that at any moment it should pass directly in front of Micah’s building. Simon, tricked by the way the City’s grid amplified the noise, began looking around for the source, but saw only the somber side-view mirrors of encased cars poking out from under the snow. Then, from seemingly out of nowhere, a lone walker emerged. The man, his collar upturned and hiding the contours of his face, kept his eyes focused on his feet, to the precariousness of his every step. As he passed Simon, nudged closer by the shoveled snow that narrowed the width of the sidewalk, the man didn’t look up, didn’t acknowledge that two people had found themselves on the same sidewalk, at the same moment, at the tail-end of a storm that had shut most everyone else inside their homes.

After he had passed, Simon turned his attention back to Micah’s apartment, and found that the lights had been switched off.

Bastion

2010-07-18T20:22:00.000-07:00

He looks older, Jon thinks to himself. The baby fat has disappeared from Bastion’s face and his skin, it’s flimsier. Thin marionette string endings lift the edges of his expression into a half-hearted smile. Bastion always had the sort of ordinary face you’d likely forget if not for the fact of his departure, the way absence suddenly makes you memorable.

When he passed Bastion on the street earlier in the day, on his way to work, he didn’t even recognize him.

“Jon!” someone shouted as he fixed a slipping iPod earbud back into his ear.

He turned around and didn’t see anyone he thought might be calling his name.

“Jon, what’s up?” said a towering, disheveled figure with matted hair lugging an oversized backpack, pants sliding off of his hips and dusty, tattered boots with disappearing soles sinking into the pavement.

Even when he finally understood who it was, he still couldn’t seem to process that it was actually Bastion. Someone had plucked his friend from a moment years earlier, from the last time he saw him, and without a thought just dropped him back down, all worn and tan and sand-whipped, on the corner of 38th St. and Park Avenue at 9:15 in the morning.

“Say something.”

He stammered at first but then caught himself. “This is weird. Where the hell have you been?” The words were all wrong, and they came out sounding loud and angry instead of the good sort of surprised he had hoped for.

Bastion just shrugged, as if none of it really mattered anymore, as if everything between then and now could be pressed into a kernel of nonexistence. “Everywhere,” he finally said. “And yet,” he looked around him, acknowledged the people rushing off to work who likely wondered at this odd interaction between a lumbering traveler and Mr. business-casual, “it feels like I haven’t gone anywhere at all.”

“Later,” Jon promised, already turning to go, “meet me after work, at my apartment.” Jon wrote the address on a yellowed piece of triangular paper, the ripped off corner from some dog-eared page that Bastion handed him. “We’ll chat more.”

Jon turned to go and only realized, after having walked several blocks, that at no point had he bothered to look back.

“You look good,” Jon says now, deciding on pleasantries in place of the things he’s really thinking, those that he wants to say. “Skinnier though. You lost some weight.”

Bastion sits across from him in the living room, leaning back on the kitchen chair he has pulled alongside the wooden coffee table. The two glasses of water Jon has placed on the table for them sweat condensation while remaining untouched, expertly centered on coasters that get tossed down whenever guests arrive. Bastion pushes himself back and crosses his legs. Jon notices the boots still on his feet and has a momentary sense of annoyance that he hasn’t asked Bastion to take them off.

“From always moving around,” Bastion admits. “Plus the diet is always changing, not as many opportunities to eat meat. Pulls the bulk right out of your body.”

“So you went vegan?” There’s a joke the two of them have about this, from their college days, when the dining halls hosted a once-a-year vegan event that always brought in a troupe of emaciated adults wearing flare button pins reading things like “Vegan 4 Life, Vegan 4 Health.”

Bastion laughs. “No way,” he says. “Although I’ve come close to being forced into it on occasion.” He absent-mindedly puts his hand to his chin and feels out its contours. His fingers move over the stubble and there’s a hollow scratching sound, a raspy melody of sharp hairs.

Jon imagines that sound echoing in cavernous Patagonian chasms, attracting monstrous alien insects and cackling Bonobo monkeys in the thick of the Congo. In India, at an ashram, perhaps Bastion does it automatically, a response to the occasional landing fly, and it agitates some of the more amateur yogis who are there just on a temporary retreat, on holiday. They let themselves be wooed out of the meditation and, without realizing the anger this causes within them, scowl at Bastion in his place of Zen, all jaw and cheeks and thick lips hanging loosely, like the slow churning mouth of a sanctified cow caught in mid-chew.

Jon’s last comment, his attempt at a joke, an acknowledgement of their shared past, feels like the best he can do. He’s suddenly exhausted by his visitor. After all, it has been so long, so much has happened and changed. What do you say to someone who has been gone? Time is a monument to the absence, it stretches a shadow along the ground that pulls us into the dark, into a paralysis of quiet.

Bastion turns his head and lets his hand travel to the back of his neck, under the fabric of the beige linen shirt he’s wearing that opens up into a widened V-neck with missing laces. He scratches at a welted bug bite just below his hairline and Jon watches as the skin goes white from the pressure of the motion and then brightens into the red of irritation.

“All your pictures are old,” Bastion says, and Jon realizes that he has been looking around the room at the photos, some on the walls and others placed strategically on flat surfaces. “They’re all from back in the day.”

“Everything’s digital, so, you know, it’s all locked away in the computer somewhere. No one prints that stuff out.”

Bastion nods gravely, as if just having understood what it means that albums and frames and scrapbooks have become a thing of the past, and seeing for the first time how this translates into the imaged memories displayed in a one-bedroom apartment in Manhattan.

“That one though,” he points to a spot just over Jon’s right shoulder, “it’s funny. You remember when we took it?”

Jon glances at the photo Bastion has indicated. It’s the two of them together with a third friend, Mark, who Jon only rarely sees these days, thanks to busy schedules and relationships, professions that no one remembers how they got into and circumstances that start off innocently enough but then turn themselves into commitments and responsibilities, so that things get to the point where people don’t even think to ask why they only rarely see each other. In the photo the three of them stand at a distance from the photo-taker, soldier stiff on a patch of grass, dressed in tank tops and swimming trunks. They’re looking at the stranger holding the camera, purposely forcing stoic, disinterested expressions onto their faces, nothing more than a boyish attempt to look displeased, throw gravity into an otherwise carefree moment from their history. Despite this, they can’t help but squint in response to the sun breaking through the palm trees around them, the draping leaves cast shadows that obscure their faces and make the lighting particularly unsuited for documentation. Just behind them is a small pale stoned sculpture that displays the time and date and the words “Miami Beach, Florida.”

“Of course I remember,” Jon says, he turns his attention back to Bastion who keeps looking at the photo. “Summer after freshman year.”

“How has Mark been?”

“To tell you the truth I don’t really know. He was good the last time we spoke a few months ago.”

“I should probably give him a call while I’m in town.”

“Definitely,” agrees Jon, “I think he’d be excited to hear from you.” He says it even though in his heart he knows that Bastion probably won’t call Mark, just as Bastion probably wouldn’t have called him. It seems they’ve gotten past that point, past the place where it makes sense to call when you’re back in town.

“Crazy,” continues Bastion. “I think that was the first time I ever left home on a real trip. Nineteen years old and I’d never traveled farther than New Jersey.”

“What was in New Jersey?” Jon asks.

“My grandmother lived there.”

“She’s not there anymore?” Jon has forgotten about Bastion’s grandmother living in New Jersey.

Bastion shakes his head. “She passed away a couple of years back.”

“Sorry to hear that.”

He sighs thoughtfully. “It happens you know.”

“How did you find out?”

“My mom told me. I only read the email from her a while after it happened. I was in Africa.”

Africa. Bastion says it in an easy way, the way most people would say “Brooklyn” or “baseball.” Jon has never been to Africa and he wonders what it must be like. All sorts of different places in Africa, of course, but the entire continent, even if he thinks about it as just one country, one vast land to get to and plant a foot on, seems terrifyingly out of reach to him. He will likely never see the sorts of things Bastion has seen, and he doesn’t know whether to feel sad or relieved about this.

Bastion who left everything suddenly, without warning, years ago. But how many years has it been? Bastion who, during the first few months after graduating college, when he was shopping around for jobs, trying to figure out the next steps like all of us do, decided to take a little break from the job market and travel for a week.

“Where are you going to go?” Jon asked him at the time.

“I’m not totally sure. I land in Panama City, but then I didn’t really chart it out past that point.”

“So you’re just randomly flying off to Panama City with no real plan?” Jon was incredulous. It seemed like the total opposite of something Bastion would do, even if it was for only a week.

“Pretty much.”

“Why?”

“Why?” Bastion repeated, his voice sounding annoyed. “I just want to. Do I need a specific reason?”

“I mean why Panama City, of all places, and why all of a sudden? Is everything OK?”

But Bastion didn’t answer. He just looked at Jon in this semi-mocking way and smiled. It was the sort of expression that said, “you don’t get it.”

Maybe there wasn’t anything to get, no psychological analysis to do. Maybe we have a tendency to look for the reason for something even when, often, there isn’t any.

Bastion left the next day, to very little fanfare, sort of like he just slipped out of the room during a party. Everyone milling around and drinking, laughing in response to comments and conversations they wouldn’t even remember the next day. And then eventually, at the point when people started to get tired of talking about themselves, someone just looked around casually for a moment, and asked, “did anyone see where Bastion went?”

It was a bit of a surprise when that one week became a month and then two months and three. But it became progressively less exciting to hear about Bastion’s new plans, since they were always changing. Slowly, everyone just got used to Bastion not being there, and his own gauging of time disappeared altogether, transitioned into a measurement of where he had and had not been. There was always another country to see, a whole region to visit. A continent, a world still unexplored.

For the first bit of time Bastion made an effort to stay in touch. He stopped off at Internet cafes to send messages. Sometimes he would randomly call and Jon heard his voice coming through as disorganized static electricity, an entity dialing from another dimension. Jon dreaded those calls because of how difficult they were to decipher, the chops and cuts in the conversation sounding like some new-age Morse Code.

“Market…that…today…but then I…she…drop.”

“What?”

“Nevermind.”

It was at some point during Bastion’s time in Chile, perhaps as he transitioned out of cities and busier towns into villages and hikes and extended trips through mountain passes, that Bastion began to disappear. The emails stopped coming as regularly as they had, the calls ceased completely. Then relatively soon thereafter, there was nothing at all. The way it happened was rather natural, a comfortable sort of receding into the quiet of sleep, at first just drooping lids and yawns, until it took over all at once, and the eyes clamped shut, the breathing shallowed, the mind regressed back through a tunnel and found itself apart from everything else. Bastion had slipped into the place of dreams.

Jon sees it now with Bastion sitting across from him in the living room. Bastion’s slimmed body and his head, which seems too large, bobbing around at the top of his neck, a neck that climbs out of the linen shirt like a sprouting vine. The expression on Bastion’s face, it’s curious, searching, the reflection of light from the outside shines in his eyes. Jon has the impression that Bastion is translucent, that he can see straight through him to the front door of the apartment.

“You going to stick around a while?” asks Jon, as he finally reaches down to take a sip of water from his glass. It’s cold and biting, it drives a little wedge of chill down the undersides of his arms.

Bastion glances at his own but doesn’t touch it. He smiles in that same way he smiled before he left for the first time.