The spring break of my junior year of college I spent entirely at home on Avenue R, while my mother and father were at work and my brother was at school.  I was thinking Big Thoughts over that spring break: I had brought a shoulder-bag full of books home, many of them hardcover, stuffed between two pairs of jeans and my baseball glove.  I wore my own jeans and my brother’s t-shirts, that week.  We had become the same size, nearly exactly, leveling off around maturity.  Our shoulders, in the mirror, were the same width. 



 



That week was the week after the tsunami wave and earthquake in Japan, when three nuclear reactors suffered a partial meltdown.  I had about fifteen books to read that I knew with only a small sinking feeling I wasn’t going to finish.  There was a price to be paid for every book gotten through, and that price was 60 minutes for every 60 pages read—at best—meaning that each paperback stacked in my blue bag was a collection of solitary hours that I had no choice but to attempt.  I had recently read an essay by Jonathan Franzen in which he said that he had come to the realization that he would read only a finite number of books in his life.  He’d calculated that finite number, and at his stage in life it was a three-digit one.  I hoped that mine was an order of magnitude more than that, but still, the tangibility was weighing. 



 



My brother was a senior in high school then and it was his last for-sure baseball season, surely the last that I would be able to watch with such ease, considering the difficulty of making a college baseball team and the by-no-means guaranteed proximity of our schools during the brief spring season.  That week he had a game every day, so my schedule revolved shadow-like around his actions.  I took the train or drove into the city to watch him warm-up.  I’d sit on the bench and talk to his coach, once my own coach, while he played.  I watched him lean forward too much on first pitches, anticipating fastballs.  He was hitting third that year.  Sometimes he struck out and sometimes he got hits through the hole between short and third.  He had become in my absence a quite remarkable fielder. 



 



Then at nighttime I would eat dinner with the family, go upstairs and help my brother with his calculus homework, try to concentrate on something like reading or internet television while my slowly-deafening father listened to too-loud television in the living room, wait until everyone but my mother was asleep, when we would watch “The West Wing” on my laptop at the kitchen counter, and then even she would drift off and the house would be mine, except for my father’s coughs, and every once in a while when my brother got up to go to the bathroom. 



 



I was thinking Big Thoughts over that spring break.  It felt then like one of those threshold moments, when the world asks of you what the rest of your life will look like: summer jobs, no summer jobs, graduate school applications.  My computer was slowly dying that spring break. The Genius Bar people said it was only a matter of time.  It was leaking power.  This turned my attention to the appalling emptiness of my bank account.  I conjured up and rejected various get-rich-quick schemes.  I considered application to Kings Highway Car Service before remembering my sense of direction. 



 



The Big Thoughts were centered around things like reading and writing, which I thought were things I had focal points of understanding for and wished that I could make everyone else see like I saw.  I just needed to translate.  Questions like, now what *really* is the experience of reading.  I looked at old bookshelves that my father had built incorrectly in the last millennium and tried to relive the experience of each and every paperback.  I looked at the fifteen unread ones in my blue bag and tried to absorb their knowledge and desire.  I chipped away at the longer ones among them, trading clumps of time for their middle pages, forgetting, afterwards, even the characters’ names.  



 



And all along I had nothing else to do on the dying computer but check the news from Japan.  Every time I opened my email or watched internet television the news sites began flashing with journalism and numbers from the East.  Headlines about the last fifty workers left in the nuclear reactors, battling fire and radiation, shuffling in and out, some to the hospital when they collapsed for no reason and others on the floor dry-heaving, their lungs frozen with hidden fire.  There was an invisible pollution seeping through the air, the reports said.  There was the regular destruction of ocean-front towns and the shaking of skyscrapers, but also this, fifty workers chosen to remain in gas masks and white radiation suits.  Who could say that the world was not at an end?



 



In *Freedom*, Jonathan Franzen’s book, there are a couple of things that characters keep saying, but one of them that I remember is “so and so didn’t know how to live.”  It’s just the way things are.  “They haven’t figured out yet how to live.”  This stuck with me over that spring break.  The way I read books then (still do, it’s ridiculous to refer to this in the far past tense) was to trace little things through them.  Franzen was great for this kind of trace.  Over the course of the book something became apparent, which was that no one knew or learned how to live. 



 



My roommate had (still has) a whiteboard on his desk.  He always insisted on having his desk in the common room, so he could be at the center of everything.  The rest of us just wanted to escape.  I thought of this at home.  On his whiteboard, at the top, it had a little improvised chart for how many miles he’d run on the days of the week.   And, included, his goals and personal bests for various distances.  2 miles, it said, question mark?  13:30.  4 miles? 27 flat.  Below that it said, “Life goals.” 1. Graduate.  2. Teach back home in California.  3. Teach abroad in Spain.  4. Graduate school of education. 5.  Principal.  And then 6: Secretary of Education?  Next to “abroad in Spain,” he had a questioning squiggly line, off onto a separate column.  “Astrophysics?” it said, question mark?



 



I read a lot of journalism, a lot book chapters, sitting on the Q train into the city.  The baseball games started at 4.  The sun was at a good point then, baseball-wise, not so high it hurt pop-flies, not gone enough to make shadows.  And you could see it, when the train went over the Manhattan Bridge.  There’s a moment after the East River as Chinatown disappears above you and the tunnel consumes the first cars, when you wonder if the Q could take you into the future.  Canal Street opens to its usual stench.  Next stop, you tell yourself, putting the book away.



 



The final day I was home for spring break was the last chance I thought I’d get to see a baseball game of my brother’s.  It wasn’t.  I bussed home later that semester, because I didn’t know what else to do, and watched the first round of their playoffs.  They won.  He hit a double down the fast alley an out-of-place centerfielder and left-fielder make, on a hot day and with a quick Astroturf.  Even that wasn’t the last chance.  He played over the summer with a local team, the Hurricanes, with a friend of his from high school whose mother had just died, cancer.  The kid was going to City College next year.  He was going to make the team, god damn it. 



 



That last spring break game, that hadn’t happened yet.  The last play of the game, if I remember it right, was a roller to my brother at third.  The important thing about those is that you have to take the right step first.  I mean you can shuffle on the way, but it better be damn near perfect.  We practiced these on the softball fields in the park, better after it rained, so the dirt was wet and smooth, without the possibility of bad hops.  The kid who hit the chopper was quick, you could tell when he’d walked up to the plate.  The coach of my brother’s team from the bench had made that motion with his hands, a roll of two fingers: wheels.  So my brother had to move fast.  You have to catch a ball like that on the right bounce.  He got it on the long one, didn’t even glove it, just open-handed it, and that was all off his left foot, and then he landed on his right foot and used the torque from that landing to throw.



 



Now once the ball left my brother’s hands it needed to be moving at 75 miles per hour, or, because he was so close, and I’m being generous, let’s say 90 miles per hour, or 132 feet per second, to get the quick runner in time.  Let’s say 50 feet away, and the runner more than three-quarters of the way to first.  The throw, at that speed and distance, would hit the glove in less than .45 seconds.  This was all through my head while the ball kissed my brother’s fingers, before he leveled his other foot down.  Other numbers: 9.0 on the Richter scale, 72.0 sieverts of radiation doses, enough to kill a person in minutes.  One book a week, 50 a year, 3,000 left.  Quick quick quick, yelled the coach on the bench.



 



It was a smooth pick, smooth throw.  The first baseman stretched and caught it.  The ball got there in time, and we all went home.  My brother was flush with suspense.  

The yellow light in the lobby moves through the door’s framed glass and out into the street at midnight. It understands my shape on the asphalt out front, with my outline propped delicately over the sidewalk, whose burnished edge looks weirdly razor-like in the glow. My hand is on the glass behind me, and the heat from my fingertips gets pulled off in moist prints on its surface. The door closes with a hard sound, and I take the three steps down slowly. The night is brisk and dry. All along the Seventh Avenue sidewalks, lampposts form a colonnade that guides the eye toward Flatbush Avenue on the right and the Prospect Expressway overpass on the left. Overhead, stars defy the bright communion of the metropolitan night, shining.



  I’m already walking toward Flatbush Ave. when I realize that there won’t be any cabs tonight. I’ve stayed later than I should have, I know: longer than I usually do on nights like these. The walk uptown is long and strange, and there is something about the particular air that settles in the streets at night that fills men with a sense of death or cosmic loneliness. Maybe I should’ve stayed, tried to patch things up. Maybe that’s what she was hoping for, keeping me there so long. I can still go back.



  It’s been this way for three months, but it only feels like a couple of weeks, and it could have actually lasted for a half-century the way it all cycles back on itself. We won’t speak to one another for days, a couple weeks at most, and then she’ll call. Sometimes I call too, but I’ve tried not to these days. She’s sensed it. She doesn’t even pretend to have reasons anymore. And then I’m there, and a cigarette is lit and a cockroach is smashed and a star collapses and we’re screaming at one another as if nothing had changed, as if we were still together. Or we’re so quiet we could both be underwater. The period that Ellie and I were together is most easily remembered as the period where we were breaking up.



 And tonight is the same, but maybe she really does want me to hit the buzzer, to apologize and we’ll go to bed and wake up in the morning baffled and miserable and smiling like machines. On either side of me, the night renders the dignified and crumbling facades of the old brownstones completely obscure. I can still go back. The light inside the slouching afterthought of the Seventh Ave. subway stop is bright and depressive; a light that strikes out against secrets. Inside the turnstile, there is a sort of abbreviated antechamber tiled from ceiling to floor in off-white ceramic with hints of flower-vine patterning at the eye level. An almost life-and-a-half sized wooden bench, wrought with illegible carvings and magic marker scrawl, sits on the landing between two staircases. The left, a sign indicates, takes you to the platform for the Q and B trains running uptown, toward Manhattan, toward home. The right, says another, leads to the same trains running downtown, through Sheepshead Bay and Brighton Beach, past the Aquarium, all the way to Coney Island.



I’m not going back. In this truthful light, I study the blue blood beneath my skin, and I’m filled with the giddy and melodramatic impulse of all true children: to become lost beyond all responsibility. I am certain I will board the next train that arrives, and I’m certain that it will take me downtown, towards disaster and Coney Island. I imagine Ellie waiting up countless hours until she decides that I really have gone home. It’s satisfying enough to know that she’ll be wrong. I erase any thought of rest or reconciliation from my mind. Already it feels as if I’m about to board a spaceship, momentous and apocryphal.



I can hear the nondescript rumbling of the Q moving into the station, and I take the stairs to the downtown platform, where a boy with green slacks, white t-shirt and an olive complexion is standing beneath one of the only working bulbs on the platform. The youth’s hands are in his pockets. He could be about 15, but tall for his age, and he stares past me as if I were invisible. His eyes are black, or appear to be, and his mouth is shut tight. There’s something about his posture that makes him look either highly dangerous or chronically ill. When the train finally pulls in, he never moves. I walk past in silence, watching him. Maybe he has some other agenda. There’s no one in my car when the automated bell sounds and the doors of the train slide shut. Maybe he’ll get the next one. It doesn’t matter. The trains run all night.



We move. The night is indifferent to elaborately vandalized concrete walls of the trench that accommodates the BMT Brighton Line, and the only thing I can see in the window is the reflection of the car’s interior; empty plastic bucket-seats, vertical handrails, rows of leather hoops along the aisle, and my own face. Above the windows, advertisements prod those passengers absent of mind or without any other recourse, “Earn Your GED,” “Give Blood,” and “Ask For Help.” On another, a cheerful blond child is running through the spray on a beach somewhere warm with the caption, “Jimmy Doesn’t Know He Has Lymphosarcoma.”



The last time Ellie and I went out together, when she was still living with me, we rode the train after midnight back from a late movie at a revamped peep-show theater in midtown. She insisted that we take a cab, and I can remember using a sort of dismissive, parental tone I knew would irritate her. She wouldn’t talk to me then, not even about the movie, which I knew she had loved, and which I knew I had ruined for her. It was a surf-flick from the 1950’s called “Hang Ten For Two” starring a bronzed half-Latin heartthrob named Johnny Lamar. The main character was a shy surfer-girl who tries to impress the beach crowd by surfing on her hands during high tide at the infamous Big Lip Cliff. But she doesn’t realize that there’s a shark in the water, and in the nick of time Johnny Lamar paddles in to the rescue, cruising back to shore with a foot on the nose of each of their boards, performing the title’s trick—the ‘hang-ten-for-two.’ Afterwards, there’s a luau and a barbeque, and the film’s final shot is the silhouette of Johnny and the heroine in an intimate embrace as the sun goes down. Ellie always had a way of getting embarrassed at how much she enjoyed things; I could see tears in her eyes as Johnny played guitar around the campfire. She looked beautiful then. I had regretted it, felt sick to my stomach about it even as I belittled her, but that never changed anything. She had put her things in boxes a week later. After a few stops, I remember a place my grandfather used to talk about from when he lived around this neighborhood, and I get off at Ocean Parkway to see if it’s still around.



  It’s a short walk down a few blocks of single-story cafes and all-night Chinese groceries where men of indeterminate age sit behind counters, utterly motionless. The bar occupies a small section of an otherwise-vacant complex whose tenant could have been a YMCA or an insane asylum. The edifice is plaster matted in concrete for three stories up, and above the sign that says “Odd Hour Tavern & Grille,” I can see the bottom half of an enormous mural of a black and gold mermaid that covers the whole side of the building. She has long blue hair replete with starfish and wistful gray eyes. A man in a heavy flannel shirt leaning against the wall outside the door is smoking a cigarette and seems to be laughing at me but he doesn’t make a sound. I ignore him and go inside.



The Odd Hour is clearly a locals-only dive, evident from the huddled conversations that collect at its corners. Its back wall is taken up by a bar whose arms reach outward at either end across half the width of the room, leaving a serviceable space in the center with tables and stools. The bar is at capacity, so I order a drink and sit at a table where two people are talking; a man in a black turtleneck and a blazer, and a woman in a blue dress who only seems to nod.



I spent most of last year in Buenos Aires, working for a friend who owns a hotel there. Beautiful country, really lovely people.”



Uh-huh.”



 “Of course, I couldn’t speak a word of Spanish. It wasn’t too difficult getting around though, especially in the city, where most of them speak English anyway.”



 “Uh-huh. I’ve always meant to go.”



The city was beautiful, but only parts of it really, you know? Parts of the region are still undeveloped, so the outskirts tend to be pretty seedy. Filthy, even. I’d say that for the most part, Buenos Aires is a filthy city, with some beautiful parts.”



Filthy, yeah.”



And you get that way too. It’s not just the place. It gets on you, you know? On your clothes. It’s in your food. I was taking showers twice a day, on average. I couldn’t stand the way I smelled and I didn’t want to get used to it. When it got hot enough, which it did plenty of the season, even though its supposed to be winter there when it’s summer here, I would have to stand on the roof of the hotel just to get above the smell of the garbage.”



I’ll bet you couldn’t stand it.”



 “I couldn’t fucking stand it sometimes. Disease too. Something like 60% of the people between 18 and 35 have a venereal disease of some kind. And none of them get treated. One of the clerks had to take off work because of an untreated case of syphilis. This is supposed to be a democratized nation—the Americas are supposed to be developed. It’s worse in the mountains too. And don’t get me started on the rats.”



No, I don’t think I want to go there.”



It’s the same everywhere, really.”



Anywhere.”



It’s enough to convince me that these people are either schizophrenics or some sort of malfunctioning animatronic puppets, and I take my drink to the stool at an end of the bar that’s opened up. I sit elbow to elbow with a woman who, unless I’m deceived, is strikingly beautiful. She wears a long gray dress that barely reveals the tips of a pair of black flats, and short brown hair in bangs over a sharply featured face. Her eyes are green. She seems to be staring at me—back at me.



Never seen you around here,” I say automatically.



 “Nice try,” she smiles.



How about a drink then?”



I already have a drink.”



Right, well. It’s a standing offer. It’s extended, like, temporally, you know?”



You’re funny,” she rolls her eyes.



That’s not the way the metal men here talk.”



The lushes around here have their own language. I don’t pretend to understand it, but how they unwind is their business. I saw that Oskar over there was entertaining you.”



They shouldn’t let a guy like that on the airlines. He’s a paranoid for sure.”



They don’t. Oskar lives with his mother. He’s never left the city. The threads are his deceased father’s. He watches the Travel Channel obsessively.”



You his nurse or something?”



He’s got a new story every week. I can do math. We get the Travel Channel in my building too.”



And where is your building?” I say, with a smile. Risks are the type of thing that one takes in a new environment.



My building is in Shangri-La, pal. Why don’t we start with names? And where’s that drink?”



Lily laughs at my dumb lines, one after the other. I haven’t used some of them in years—haven’t had to. Even when we were barely speaking to one another, I found the idea of infidelity with Ellie repulsive—beyond forgiveness—mostly because I knew how it would crush me if I ever heard something on the other end. But tonight I’m free, and I’m as lost as I can be, and the faces down the bar are like masks of solemnity and confusion, as if a funeral procession had forgotten the name of the departed, and all stood still for a moment longer than they could to ever escape. And the two of us are alive and real. I can feel in her mocking laughter the grain of softness that could be affection or love or nothing. Before the end, Ellie accused me of being an essentially methodical person; “You’ve always already made up your mind about someone, and that’s why you’ll never reach out to anyone. I feel sorry for you.” If I had wanted to say something back, it would’ve been, ‘It’s extraordinary that you know how to break what’s already broken.’



The drinking has come to the point where physical pain is no longer an issue. Lily keeps ordering a drink called a ‘Cyclone’ and I keep paying for them. I’ve let my advances fall by the wayside—I’m forgetful, if nothing else—and I’m becoming restless. I suggest we go for a walk.



I don’t know if I’m equipped for that,” she indicates a third empty cocktail glass. “You should probably just take me home,” she says in complete seriousness.



Shangri-La?” I can’t help but smile.



Charming. No, Beverly Road. You’re going uptown anyway, right? Manhattan? Mr. Heartbroken. The trip won’t take so long with some company.”



She fits herself underneath my arm and asks that we walk slowly. I forget about Coney Island and every promise I’ve made to myself. I kiss her once, gently on the lips, and she smiles. Clouds are growing paler out over the sea. Our shadows are faint and doubled by the overlapping orange light of the lampposts. We walk past the cafes and the groceries all over again, and the mermaid diminishes and finally disappears at the turn onto Ocean, its gaze barely penetrating a moment close to dawn in early autumn. I am suddenly overcome by a tension and a fatigue in the whole of my body, of waking from a dream of the world.



I never learned to swim,” I say, and my voice cracks.



What?” Lily leans her face into my cheek. Our pace is slow and the walk seems interminably long. I feel as if I could cry at any second. I’m not sure if I really can’t swim. I can’t remember if I ever learned or not, but something hurts me and those are the words for it.



I never learned to swim, its nothing. I just—let’s not stop. It’s not a big deal.”



She turns in to kiss me again, this time more forcefully. She has the lapels of my jacket in her hands and pushes her body towards mine. I can feel the hope in her eyes, which are closed. I can feel her expectations rising. She’s forgotten she has no idea who I am, and I remember. I’m certain at this that moment I’d rather be holding on to anything else. The sound of the Q pulling in to the downtown platform rips my thoughts away. I set her back on her feet and walk toward the turnstile.



Where are you going?” Gone is the nonchalance. She’s adamant in a way I didn’t anticipate. She stumbles forward and steadies herself on the ticket-taker. Something is wrong with her balance, I realize, that has nothing to do with the alcohol. But it doesn’t matter.



I’m going this way. I don’t think either of us need me to go that way. We’re both better off if I’m on this one.”



You’re not making any sense… What’s wrong? Tonight was so…” I can hear in her voice the sound of something slipping away, something frantic that can’t be undone. Her posture has become unhinged, and she’s listing back and forward. Lily falls over the metal spokes of the turnstile and onto the concrete on my side. She catches herself with the heels of both hands, sparing her chin, but fails to totally conceal the obtrusion of a hard, flesh-colored plastic mass where her right leg ought to be. A sudden gust of wind carries the beginning of her sobs and blows the sound inward to reverberate off the walls like some guttural language, as I put my hands under her arms to pull her upright. Hot tears are flooding her cheeks, tears that aren’t proportional to anything that, in an instant, could be clear. I understand that her tears have always been missing. But then the truth of it falls away from me, and it’s never near enough to grasp again, as if everything were behind an asteroid belt or a great reef. I leave her standing against the turnstile and as I walk down to the awaiting train, I can hear her or someone like her repeating the word pig over and over in the stairwell that has become an echo chamber.



Between Brighton Beach and Coney Island, the line moves out of the trench and onto an elevated track that has a view of the surrounding neighborhoods, whose inhabitants, come dawn, have either returned from their sleepwalking or awakened from the hypnosis that, by night, seems to take this city by the throat. The morning is dewy and overcast, and clouds heavy with seawater fill the sky. I don’t think I will ever see Lily again in any of our lifetimes.



Maybe it’s been so difficult to put a stop to all this because I can’t remember when it started. Is that what you want me to say, that I’ve wasted a year—it may as well have been ten—searching for someone I know I’ll never find? She was always so good at hiding, Ellie was—did I tell you that? She was like a child in that regard. She always had a way of fitting herself behind a bookshelf or in the folds of our comforter in just the right way that I would never know that she was still there. And that’s what it’s like now, except that I know she’s there and she doesn’t. Or I only know one thing and she knows everything. Or I know everything, but I keep forgetting the most important parts, and she couldn’t care less. Christ, it’s enough to make a man drunk! Where to now, Ellie? Coney Island? Is that where I lost you, where it all dissolved like a strip of film in an acid solution or a sea of ghosts? Is it that easy for me to forget the question? Or is it some new question? But the question never changes, only the answers.



The train station at Coney Island is built like a cathedral whose narthex is a shooting gallery. I pass down flights of green iron stairs with slats between them. I walk through a sort of cavernous passageway filled with grotesque mosaics; a minstrel clown, a thief and a dog. It’s still too early in the morning for the vendors to bring their carts around, and barely any customers move through here during the fall anyway. The mist is heavy over the beach as I move toward the boardwalk. A small pavilion striped in purple and white has been erected in the sand about 25 yards away, and a woman in possibly her early seventies is sitting in a folding chair, with an absent but contented expression, holding a sign that says “THE CHAMBER OF THE ASTRAL MIRROR: KNOW THE FUTURE AS ITS WRITTEN IN THE STARS. $7. NO REFUNDS.”



What’s inside the tent?” I ask when I reach her.



Oh well, what to say, it’s different for everyone I suppose!”



But what do you see when you go inside?” I’m almost pleading now. I notice that her face looks much older when she speaks, because her wrinkles stretch themselves tight at the strain with which she appears to constantly smile.



Oh well, what to say, what to say? I don’t go in much anymore, not me. Not much of a future left for me, but the Mirror—now it’s perfect for a young fellow such as yourself, I think! You see, the stars sit in the sky for billions of years—believe you me, I’ve been around the block quite a few times! But for them, our lives can be understood in the blink of an eye. When the light from our planet reaches them, they send it back in a superwave that moves so fast it catches things that we don’t know have already happened! Yessir, its no accident neither—how did you think I got the idea? I saw myself get the idea in the mirror itself! But just this mirror. It’s the one that catches the special kind of light you need. Yessir, and we take it out in the nighttime and then trap it in the chamber you see behind me. Just seven dollars! Step right in—no refunds.”



I give her three bills and I pull the flap of the tent aside. There is a fine scent of rotting seaweed inside, and propped against one of the pavilion’s poles I can see the Astral Mirror, a corroded antique looking glass with an ornate wooden frame whose white paint is chipped. Next to the mirror, four people are sitting at a picnic table in the shadows eating McDonalds hamburgers wrapped in wax paper and drinking orange juice from clear plastic cups. When they look up, I realize that the youth I saw on the platform on Seventh Ave. is among them. He’s sitting next to his younger sister, who wears her dark hair in pigtails. He doesn’t recognize me. The boy’s father, a round and balding man with a full, dark mustache, turns around and looks surprised, and then gestures to his wife, who’s similarly shaped and wears her hair in a bun. The woman looks at me.



Did my mother let you in? She’s very old, she forgets we don’t start for another hour with this. I’m sorry, we’re right in the middle of breakfast.” She whispers something to the father, who takes out his wallet and offers me seven dollars.



You’ll never get your money back from that one,” he chuckles. “She didn’t just make the policy, she is the policy.” I make a motion without words to refuse the money, and I walk back out the way I came. The old woman’s expression has changed. I can’t tell if she’s heard what her family has said, but her face is even more haggard now. She has a look as if she’s been thinking with great difficulty, as if she had discovered that it was her life through which the course of human history must proceed before there can be any rest. She looks at me, only now realizing I’ve returned, and forms her trembling mouth to the words.



What did you see?”



 



* * *



 



In the winter, the beaches and the boardwalks of Coney Island are deserted, and at dusk on this day, it would be no different except for the solitary gray form, leaning against the railing, of two people in an embrace. They stand bundled in coats and scarves, indifferent to the wind that cuts from off the surface of the water. The man and the woman never speak to one another, or if they do, their words are muffled or lost in the wind. It’s difficult to say when it begins to snow, but when the flakes fall, they collect in the man’s collar and in the long brown hair that falls from beneath the woman’s cap. The sun, almost setting, casts veins of ochre light from behind the elongated clouds. They do not turn away from one another, but in the wild of the near-night, neither man nor woman has ever seen the sky so close as it is for them at this moment on earth. A long time seems to pass, and they don’t so much as shiver, nor even seem to breathe. They remain, holding one another away, as if concealing each other from some hidden name, or a world into which they are not yet born.



 

2.



It was chaos in the Bluffs. No one was prepared for the temperature drop and the snow, and though no one was ever prepared for the weather off the Peak, this was different. In the middle of the night, someone had gotten up out of their tent to pee and, on seeing the silent blanket of white building on the ground, trees, and cars, had shouted, “Snow!” No one had paid him any notice at the time. In the morning, the first ranger to get up just stood at the door to her cabin until the cold woke her roommate.



Tents were being dismantled and clothes torn down from clotheslines by first light, and concerned fathers and mothers were revving their vehicles’ engines to make sure they still worked. Many of them were convinced that they were caught in the middle of a system or a storm. Of course, the rangers knew that the Peak was just shedding some precipitation, but the snow was so unexpected and the panic so general that the order to evacuate came down from regional first thing that morning—just in case some big weather did come in the next night, trapping hundreds of people beneath a wrathful Peak.



After trekking seven hours down from the ridge, Jake stood atop the Little Bluff above the campground that afternoon and surveyed the madness. Campers and vans had churned the snow into a grey paste, their windows lined with hands and eyes that had never seen the stuff before. Their engines and tires groaned louder against the mush, and the exhaust from their back ends choked out darker and darker. To help people dig their cars out, rangers were handing out tagged shovels and stopping cars to collect them by the exit, but most of them had their hands full directing traffic and fielding questions. In the end, they got about a third of the shovels back.



“Shit,” Jake said. It was the first thing he had said all day. He hadn’t even shouted for Steve when he had found him gone this morning. He had looked over the bluff and into the next saddle, but he was gone, his tracks leading up and over the hill, then disappearing amid the snow-choked rocks, and on toward the Peak. He had frozen up when he found Steve gone, and, surprised at himself, didn’t know what to do. He had to talk to someone, let someone know Steve was out there, but it would take hours for him to get a hold of someone in this mess. He didn’t like knowing (though it was true) that he was in the same boat as everyone else. And that Steve was out there with no winter gear except a pair of crampons.



He walked over to the ranger’s office, a little wooden shack with windows and a sign that said “Ranger Station” by the campground entrance, but it was empty. Everyone was out doing damage control. He peered  into the unlit shack and saw a plastic bag with three shiny brass tubes tapered at the end. Instinctively he turned behind him and checked the rocks for movement. There was nothing except two squirrels chasing each other up and down a whitened tree trunk.



Beyond the entrance, two cars staggered on through the snowy two-lane highway like dogs slipping on hardwood while a camper followed them out of the mouth of the exit. As the camper rounded the corner on to the road, its back-left tire hit a snow bank by the exit sign, jumping its the rear end about a foot into the air, knocking snow off its roof and flopping from side to side on its front two wheels. It tried to get out of the snow bank, but the back-left tire was in deep, and by the way they spat out snow every which way behind them, Jake could see that those weren’t snow tires.



Jake walked back through the empty access road up toward the long press of vacated and partly-vacated campsites. It was like they were fleeing a white plague, leaving behind possessions that might weigh them down—clotheslines left knotted up on trees, five half-visible canisters of propane by a set of wheel tracks, a dirty diaper tossed into a snowbound fire pit. From here, he could see the long line of cars backed up to the far group of campsites, the occasional honk prompting exasperated looks from the other, anxious drivers.



One site over from the propane canisters Jake saw a man struggling to start a small coupe. It looked about twenty years old, Jake thought, twenty at least, something that would have needed breaking-in in high school. Years ago, he had driven a sedan at least a decade older than this one, and whenever he thought of it, he still thought of Diane and him lying in the back seat like tired children, holding each other and then doing what they both wanted, what young lovers do, as the song would play over and over again on the half-broken tape player.



Jake wiped the memory off his lips and called over to the man. “Say!”



“Try it now,” the man said. A raspy growling noise bent around the car’s hood. “Stop! Stop, stop.” The man leaned into the coupe’s innards again.



“Say, excuse me. Know where I can find a ranger?”



The man looked over from his car and a woman flopped a head of long, dirty blonde hair out the window.



“Hi there,” Jake said.



“Hey friend,” the man said. He was older, probably fifty or so, with jeans and wet cowboy boots and a bothered expression. “You stuck here, too?”



“Yeah.” Jake looked up at the top of the Peak between the trees.



“Crazy about all this snow, isn’t it? It’s just been impossible to get this thing started,” the man said. He shifted to one side expectantly.



“Yeah,” Jake paused. “Is there any place I can find a ranger?”



They both gestured over to the line of cars.



“They’re over there,” said the man.



“I know,” Jake said, “I just mean, have you seen any who aren’t helping get people out of here?”



“What?” the woman asked.



“I said, have you seen—”



“No, I don’t think I have,” the man cut in. “They’re all over there. Except, I did tell one I was having car troubles. But what do you want to talk to a ranger for? We should all just get on out of here. It’s just going to dump on us in another couple of hours, at least that’s what I heard, and I sure as shit am not going to be around when it does.”



Jake looked at the woman’s head protruding from the car window.



“So this ranger—” Jake said.



“He said he would be back with that antifreeze,” the man went on, his head twitching nervously around.



“Where’d he go?” Jake asked.



“Over to the cars with everyone else,” the woman said. She nodded her head again to the line extending like a taproot up toward the wall of the Big Bluff, after which it splintered off into fragments, each one a procession of white-capped vehicles inching nervously along the road toward the exit. “Said his name was Craig.”



“Craig?”



“Yeah I think so,” the man said, his eyes darting to the woman then back at Jake.



“Great, thanks,” Jake said, putting a hand up in farewell.



“Wait a second,” said the man, shifting over to the other side of the car by the woman. “Answer me a question, friend. Know anything about antifreeze?”



“No, I don’t think so,” Jake said.



“He means do you have any,” the woman said.



“No, I don’t have any antifreeze.”



“Are you sure? What about your car? Can’t we siphon some off?” the man asked, panic rising in his throat as he ran down his dwindling list of possible options. He was tall and lanky with tight, compact muscles, the kind you find on distance runners.



“I came in on my friend’s truck and I don’t have the key. Sorry.”



“Where’s this friend of yours?” the man asked. Jake bristled at the question even though he remembered it was he who had interrupted them.



“I don’t know.”



“You don’t know? How can you not know?” His voice cracked with strain.



Jake looked at the man with one eye and shifted his left foot back a step. “I think I’m going to go look for Craig.”



“Wait!” the woman said, trying to stick her head further out the window as if she were trapped in the front seat.



“Thanks very much,” Jake said.



The man walked from behind the car around to where Jake was. “Come on, buddy, I can get you into your friend’s car. We’ll get that antifreeze and I’ll give you a lift to town and you can catch the bus to wherever you want. We just gotta get out of here.”



“I can take care of myself,” said Jake. “Besides, I have to find my friend.”



“Some friend,” the woman said. “He just up and left you.”



Jake’s fist tightened. It was a mistake talking to these two. “Good luck with your antifreeze.”



“Come on, be a friend and help,” the man said.



“Thanks, but I really can’t. My friend is up on the mountain.” Jake turned and started walking, hoping to be rid of them soon. Steve didn’t have winter gear on him. The temperature at night must have been around ten degrees.



Jake heard the soft crunching of boot heels tamping down snow.



“Up on the mountain?” the man called.



Jake kept walking.



“Your buddy’s a goner. There’s no way he made it through that shit last night.”



Anger welled in Jake’s gut. He walked faster. Eight degrees, maybe. Too cold for September.



“You can’t just walk away like that! We’ll get you out of here. Hey! Hey, what’s your name?”



The man had caught up to Jake, who was moving slower because of his pack. It bore heavily down on his hips, and its weight tipped him off balance as he walked faster. The man was still there. Jake didn’t respond.



“I know you must be able to spare some antifreeze from your car. You can’t even drive it. Your buddy’s not coming back with those keys. Hey you!”



The man put his hand on Jake’s pack and pushed him to the left. Jake briefly careened on one foot, off balance, the weight of the air and ground beneath his foot giving him a sickly feeling in his stomach, and landed with that boot deep in a snow bank by the road.



“Hey hands off, asshole,” Jake said.



“Asshole? Fuck you.”



“Hey just back off.”



“Back off? Don’t tell me to back off,” the man said.



“Dean?” the woman called from just down the road. “What are you doing Dean?”



“This is ridiculous,” Jake said, and walked toward the road.



“You think you can just leave us here?” the man said.



“I have to find my friend.” Jake shot the man a look like the ones his mother used to give him when he broke a plate or locked the dog in the closet.



“Fuck your friend,” the man said, curling his lip and jutting his chin out. “You don’t even know where he is. He’s frozen up on the mountain. He’s a popsicle. Fuck him.”



Something broke inside Jake and he threw his left arm into the soft of the man’s abdomen with a grace and power neither man expected. As the man doubled over, Jake took his right arm and bent it up behind his back toward his shoulders, grabbing the nape of his neck and pushing down hard. A low hoarse cough came from the man below him. It sounded like the car turning over, except with the rattle of mucous and spit. It was one movement to Jake, welling at the tips of his fingers. This was more important than finding Steve.



“Get off!” the man screeched.



“Dean!” the woman yelled.



“Fuck you,” Jake said low, and kicked the back man’s right knee, driving his face ahead toward the road. The man kicked forwards and lost his balance, ending up down on the dirty gravel. Grey brown and teal stained his hands and knees, and the rocks stung like spider bites. The man yelled in pain and surprise. Jake responded by driving the man’s face into a pothole. It was filled with oily-looking slush, a rainbow of oil working its way around the edges with the mid-afternoon sunlight. Jake felt as if he could see himself doing it from over his shoulder. The man was gurgling under the slush. Was he drowning him? It was fluid and familiar and fast.



“What the fuck are you doing?” the woman yelled, and kicked Jake with an outstretched, flying foot to the ribs. Jake breathed sharply and let go of the man’s arm to deflect her next kick.



Suddenly, Jake heard a deep, wheezing breath and felt a pressure against his chin. With his arm free, the man was pressing against Jake’s chest, and soon wrenched his neck free with a single, violent twist. He staggered across the road, not bothering to care about cars, and moved his arm across his dirty face like he was punching the air. “You motherfucker I’ll knock you out,” he said.



“Stop it, both of you!” she yelled, then looked at Jake. “You’re crazy!”



“Come at me from the front this time, I’ll kick your ass you pansy fuck.”



“Hey! Stop it now. Cut it out!”



Both of them turned and saw a ranger with a nightstick extended in one hand.



“Craig?” the man said. “This man—”



“Shut up goddamnit,” the ranger yelled. He looked a little sheepish, but still in control. His hand tightened on his nightstick. “What the hell is going on here?”



* * *



It was raining and they weren’t going anywhere today. Jake and Vanessa sat on the couch together looking lazily out the window, the water streaking down the glass in drops and streams.



“We could see a movie,” he said.



“You already said that!” she protested with a smile.



He laughed. “It’s all I can think of.”



Steve came in from his bedroom. “Hey guys,” he said and looked down at them. They were a tangle of hands and legs and feet.



“Hey,” they both replied.



“Still trying to figure out things to do indoors?”



“All he can think of is going to the movies,” Vanessa said.



Jake looked at Steve with a wide grin. Steve shrugged.



“What can I say?” Steve said, standing by the coffee table. “Jake, you’re just not the romantic type.” Vanessa felt her stomach prickle defensively. Who was he to say? These were days when Jake still had a spark behind his eyes.



“Shut up, Steve,” Jake said, and threw a pillow. The pillow hit Steve in the neck and shoulders, landing with a dull thud in his arms.



“What can I say?” Steve said.



Jake threw another pillow.



“Throw all you want. What can I say?”



“He’s perfectly romantic,” Vanessa said, running her hands through his hair with a satisfied grin.



Jake turned to face her. “Not too much, I hope,” he said with a grin.



“No,” she said, “just right.”



“I did find that Indian place.”



“Yes, you did find the Indian place.” She kissed him on the forehead.



Steve took this opportunity to interject. “What Indian place?”



“We were just walking around and he found it when he was looking for an ATM,” Vanessa said.



“Of course the irony of it was that I didn’t find an ATM and the place was cash-only, but that was one of the best lunches we’ve ever had.”



“Right, but I had to pay,” Vanessa said.



“You didn’t mind,” Jake said with mischief in his voice.



“Guess not,” she said, raising her arms as if to say, “Here I am!” They both had smiles on their faces, remembering that afternoon. Outside the rain quickened and the roof seemed to bear in closer on them.



They leaned in toward each other, and Steve went over to the kitchen. It was open air, and there was plenty of space to see them kissing, but, to Steve, somehow being flanked by chest-high countertops seemed safer and more removed.



After a few minutes, Steve turned away and pretended not to see them. He called out over his shoulder, “Want to see where we’re going?”



Jake responded immediately. “Yeah! Definitely.”



Steve got down a book from the shelf above the kitchen table and spread its fold-out map over the sugar and salt and bread crumbs from breakfast.



“So here—come over here, lovebirds,” he said.



Jake sighed and lurched upwards, his legs splayed in the air until he brought them down at the last second on to the floor.



“So here’s where I thought we’d put in.”



“This is where?” Jake said, “I don’t recognize the map.”



“Oh, right! This is the park around Mount Kennedy.”



“Ah. Are we trying someplace new?”



Steve looked up from the map. “Well, I didn’t think we could just go to the same place twice.”



“Hey, if it’s nice, I’d do it again.”



Steve went about explaining the hike he had planned. There was a lot of elevation gain because the trail straddled a ridge-like formation that ringed much of the mountain.



“I hear that between the ridge and the mountain the fishing is spectacular,” Steve said.



“Really?” Jake asked. Vanessa was lying on her side watching them talk. She and Erin had picked up the two best-looking men in the city that night, and she wished she hadn’t been the only one to hold on to hers. Steve had a friendly side when Jake was around.



“Yeah, apparently it’s amazing. Alpine lakes you have to bushwhack half a mile to get to. Fish just lined up against the surface.”



“Wow.”



“Yeah, bring the gear,” Steve said.



“Definitely,” Jake said. “You ready to graduate to a fly rod?”



“I don’t know. Last time it was a disaster.”



“Wimp.”



“I think I’ll stick to a spinner.”



“Pussy.” Jake looked over at Vanessa sheepishly. She started laughing that light but strident laugh of hers, making the room with the rain and the men and their eyes all shimmer.



“You two are ridiculous,” she said. “I can’t even take it.”



Jake walked over and kissed her on the forehead. “I’m going to the bathroom,” he said, running a hand along Vanessa’s back as he left.



In the bathroom, he heard them talking. About what? he wondered. It didn’t matter. Lately, he had had all the luck a young man could wish for. Good things had just started happening suddenly, and six months later, his life was different. Better, he thought. A better apartment with a better roommate. Better now that he had someone to hold at night. He loved holding her more than anything, their eyes flitting in each other’s vision like their first night together. They had gone for a walk alone after breakfast that morning, down a street with flowerbeds in the windowsills. Outside the door, they were talking about something, and as he flushed their conversation murmured to a close.



Steve put the breakfast dishes into the dishwasher as Jake opened the door. Vanessa looked at Jake’s figure coming out of the bathroom, adjusting his jeans and his shirt. He looked like everything she wanted, just the way she thought of him when she closed her eyes alone at night. Just then, she had a feeling of motion inside her, her veins hardening and a shiver running to her fingers. She looked at the map on the table and crossed her arms, feeling cold all of a sudden. Jake came up behind her and kissed her on the head, sliding his left hand over hers. She knew this wasn’t how he liked to hold her, that he thought she looked funny with her arms crossed, but he did it anyway, as if to say that she was his, or that they belonged to each other, she did not know which. She looked up at him and smiled, sensing a deep remove when their eyes met. His mind was elsewhere. Her eyes flickered to the table then back to his, so fast so as to be imperceptible, but by then his face had already moved past hers, kissing her ear and neck underneath her wide, tumbling tresses of brown-red hair.



“We could go to the covered gardens. That’s romantic,” he whispered into her ear. Noticing the silence, Jake looked up at Steve, then at Vanessa. He loosened his hand. “Did I miss something?”





* * *



Craig, as it turned out, was less of a policeman than the nightstick made him out to be. Still, as he took their stories, he locked the one he wasn’t interviewing in his car, a brown and grey cop car that looked like a high country outfitter had gone to town on it in a body shop—high suspension, snow tires, and four-wheel drive.



At the end of it, Craig let them both go, and told them that if he heard anything more from either of them they’d both be going down to the county jail as soon as the evacuation was done. After that, he gave the coupe a jump from his car, which started it right up, and left the man and his girl to work on getting it out of the snow. He didn’t offer them a shovel.



“I suppose they’ll have to dig her out,” said Craig to no one.



“You think so?” Jake said.



Craig looked at him, puzzled. “You still here?”



“I have something to ask you.”



“I already said I wouldn’t call the real cops on you.”



“Thank you, I appreciate that.”



“Then, are we done here?” Craig asked.



“Well, I was looking for you when he jumped me, actually.”



“Looking for me?”



“Well, any ranger, but—”



“Any ranger?”



“No, no. You.”



Craig looked confused. Jake could tell that he was on the verge of leaving without giving him another thought.



“My friend Steve is out there. Up on the Peak I mean. Or going for it. We camped last night on the ridge.” Craig’s countenance fell. Jake kept on. “Steve has the permit. When I woke up this morning, he was gone and had taken our bear bag.”



“Bear bag?” Craig asked.



“Yes, bear bag. The guy who worked at the front office was out of canisters.”



“Jason.”



“Yeah.” Jake forced a laugh and tried to speak like Craig. “He’s a talker all right.”



Craig sighed and put his hands on his hips. “I thought we got all the stragglers off the mountain.”



“We were fairly far in,” Jake said. “Went up the eastern face.”



“Damnit.”



There was a long silence.



“Look, I’ll go with you to find him,” Jake said, “I was up here a few months ago with Neil, if you know him. I’m an experienced climber. He can vouch for me.”



“I was brought in to relieve Neil, so no, I don’t know him.”



Jake turned a bit so Craig could see the ice axes strapped to the side of his pack.



“That’s too bad.” Jake got a suspicious look from Craig. “Still,” he said, feeling the weight of a heavy obligation on his back, “can you find my friend?”



Anger flickered in Craig’s face, and the barking voice from before returned. “We can search, and that’s all we’ll do. The copters will have to be recalled—they’ve gone back down south. They’ll probably be up tomorrow morning, and so will we. I can’t go with you now with all these people here.”



“But you’re just one ranger. We could make it to the ridge tonight if we tried.”



“I’m not going up there without helicopters in the sky, and you don’t have a permit so you’re not going anywhere either. We leave tomorrow. Early. I’ll wake you.”



Jake acquiesced, but in part he felt relieved just to know he had someone to help him out. He didn’t ask for this.



He walked with Craig over by his campsite, back toward the ranger shack. It occurred to Jake to ask, “Why’d you tell him he needed antifreeze? He didn’t, did he?”



Craig laughed a deep belly laugh that was loud for a man his size. “Of course he didn’t. I just needed him out of my sight for a few hours.”



“You didn’t have time to give him a jump like just now?”



“You should have been around this morning,” Craig said. “I’ve never been screamed at by so many people in my life. It’s like they’ve never driven in snow before.”



“I bet a bunch of them haven’t. Our friend’s still stuck over there, moving that snow with his cowboy boots.” Jake couldn’t resist a small laugh. Craig said nothing, and at the nearby fork, Jake split off with a wave and went back to Steve’s truck.



The sun was setting, and Jake looked up at the sky. It was the same soft yellow-orange as two days before. Cirrus clouds streaked the upper reaches with wisps of absorbent texture, like grooves in a canvas for color to run into. They were green and yellow and red against what looked like the ceiling of heaven. Jake liked this sunset even better than their last one, and wondered whether Steve was seeing the same things he did—the same kind of fir tree, a patch of shinleaf, two young pine trees whose light green leaves had just darkened in time for this early winter. Of course, they wouldn’t be exactly the same, except for maybe the clouds, but he imagined Steve having looked at them before. The things he was noticing—they were all common in the Red Rocks, but the thought that they could help him reach Steve in his head made him look harder.



When he got back to the campsite, he opened the metal bear box by the car and took out the cooler. There wasn’t much left except for that half block of white crumbly cheese. He ate a little more than half of it, leaving the rest for his breakfast, and then ate the other apple, core and all. This time, with fewer people around, he swallowed the seeds and picked up the stray pieces of cheese. Afterwards, he closed up the bear box and urinated around where he had eaten. To a bear, though, all of these campgrounds must smell like human piss and food and shit, the way the wilderness smells like pine and wet rocks and snow to hikers. If a bear wanted his food, he would not hesitate to pay Jake a visit.



With that thought in his head, the bivy seemed an uncertain option for sleeping tonight, even though it would be comfortable on the snow. Jake took his knife out of his pack, bent open the small blade, and wiggled it into the lock on the door of Steve’s pickup, forcing the lock open without snapping any of the pins. He shoved his pack inside and then got in head first, stretching out across the two seats and the center console, twisting himself into a sleeping position on his back and his side. His eyes would only close after a few hours that night, and until then, he looked through the sunroof at Orion above him, creeping into his sky on silent, pearlescent feet.