Mark Chiusano

For a while there was only one air-conditioner in our house. It was in the living room, and we put it on during birthdays or the fourth of July. It covered the heat in the kitchen from my mother burning things, like the half-sausages, the hot ones, which had a black crust on the bottom from where they were touching the pan for too long.



The air-conditioner being in the living room was the reason that Lorris slept in my room during the summer, even though he had his own room, because mine had a ceiling fan. It had wooden slats with small holes at the edges so that in the winter we could hang our model planes and cars off the ends. After our mother had dusted the top of the slats, we would set the fan going on a low frequency and the planes and racecars would spin around, getting higher and higher with the centripetal acceleration, until the Lego ones started to break apart, and Lorris ran shouting from the room.



Our parents had been arguing in the living room with the air-conditioner masking the noise a little, and we were building Lego cars in my room, when finally I came and sat on the stairs and started reading a poem I’d written the week before about how cold the pancakes were that morning.



The pancakes, I said, were cold this morning. I was sitting with my knees together on the top step and Lorris was lying on his stomach clutching the two-by-two Lego piece I had asked him to find. I started over, The pancakes were cold this morning.



That’s enough of that, said my father.



I’m just trying to help, I said.



He’s just trying to help, said Lorris.



It’s none of your business, he said. This is an adult conversation. From downstairs we could hear



the kitchen cabinets being slammed shut. Conversation, he repeated.



One day my father came home carrying a second air-conditioner. He was carrying it the way



you carry Christmas packages, as if someone was about to stack more boxes on top. He had to put



the air-conditioner down to ring the doorbell, even though Lorris and I had seen him through the upstairs window, and our mother went to answer it, us behind her, her shoulder and neck cradling the portable phone. She put a hand over the receiver to say, I don’t even want to know.



My father was a driving instructor. He worked at the place on Kings Highway under the train tracks, where the storefronts grow on top of each other until one of them covers up the other. The office for the Kings Highway Driving School was on the second floor, and they were ignoring Department of Health requests to make it handicap accessible. They posted a sign that said, “For handicapped, please call up. Will come down and get you.” So far they’d never had to do it.



I was thirteen at the time, and taking any seconds in the car I could get. Technically I was too young, but if we went in the practice car and lit up the sign on top that said Student Driver, no one said anything. Everyone in our neighborhood was a cop, and they knew me and my father pretty well, so we always drove out to Gerritsen, by the Shit Factory where you could make the widest turns. Sometimes we let Lorris in the back, because he always begged to come, and he took his favorite HotWheel, the red one with the white stripe down the middle. It was always the fastest on our yellow racetrack. He held it in both hands, mimicking the turns and motions I made while I drove.



My mother didn’t like the idea of me driving, especially with my father, because she said thatsomeday we would get caught and it would go on my permanent transcript. That was the kind of thing she was always ragging about, things on my permanent school transcript. Even though I was about to graduate, and I was already in Midwood for high school. She thought that those kinds of things ride on your bumper forever, and maybe they do, but I try to ask as few questions as possible. She wasn’t around when we drove anyway, because she worked nine to seven as a school secretary.



My father lounged around most mornings, doing his shifts in the office three days a week, but other than that he stayed at home until four, when the first lessons were usually scheduled. Sometimes he’d paint the basement just for something to do, or sweep the stoop. I got off the cheese bus from school around three, which left almost an hour for driving. Some days if Lorris was late at after-school program we’d go pick him up. Our mother liked that the least. How could we explain ourselves picking a nine-year-old kid up at school and say this is still a lesson? She was mainly just unhappy because she thought that our father wasn’t a good driver, and that it was terrifying that it was him teaching the whole borough below Fulton Street. Technically she might have been better, but he was confident about it, and didn’t worry about hitting the brakes too hard or conserving gas. She was always stopping at yellows.



When he brought the second air-conditioner home it was April, but one of those hot Aprils that remind you what summer’s like, before it rains again. In Brooklyn that type of weather is always paired with thunderstorms, which is what we waited for. Once our father left for work and before our mother got home I’d get the key for the garage and open the heavy door slowly, hand over hand. Lorris would be drumming on the metal as it went up. We’d pull our bikes out, his fire-yellow, mine blue and white, and race down the sidestreets to Marine Park by the water. At that point in the afternoon you’d be able to feel the heat through the handlebars. We’d make it one lap around the oval, .89 miles, before we heard the first thunder, and then Lorris would yell and dart ahead even though he’d just gotten his training wheels off. The rain came down all at once then, and all of a sudden it would be cold, and this was the best part, when I pulled over by the water fountain and Lorris circled back to me. I pulled the two red and blue windbreakers out of my bike basket and we put them on, invincible against anything from above. We rode two more laps in the zig-zag storm until racing each other home.



Dad put the second air-conditioner in his and Mom’s room. It was just the bathroom and a



closet between their room and mine, and if we had the fan on low Lorris and I could hear the air- conditioning clearing its throat all night. That’s what it sounded like, like it was constantly hacking something up from deep down in its throat. Sometimes if I was awake after going to the bathroom in the early a.m., I could hear our mother wake up and walk over to it, and turn it down a few settings. It took them a long time to get the hang of how high they wanted it to be. It would be too warm when they went to bed, but then freezing by morning, unless Mom got up to fix it. We could tell when she hadn’t gotten up because when we went in before school to say goodbye to Dad, on the days he was sleeping there, he’d have the white sheets all wrapped around his head from the middle of the night.



A few weeks after we got the second air-conditioner it was so hot they started putting out weather advisories over Ten-Ten-WINS in the morning. Stay inside unless absolutely necessary. Mom took this to heart, and tried to get Lorris and me to do it too, but this was the best time for outdoor activities. School was winding down, especially for eighth-graders, so that we didn’t have homework anymore, even from Regents math. My math teacher, Mr. Perlson, had taken to sitting in the back of the classroom and spraying Lysol at anyone if they sneezed too close to him. This was in Independent Math, where we worked at our own pace. We took the tests when we got to the ends of chapters. At this point, everyone seemed to still have a few pages before being ready for their tests. Mr. Perlson didn’t mind. He was concentrating on staying ahead of the sickness wave which always happened the first time the weather changed like this.



It got so hot that the cheese buses broke down, and we had to walk home from school. Dad would have picked us up if we told him, and he did pick Lorris up, but I convinced him that we’d gotten some special buses shipped in from upstate, where the kids biked to school all the time because it was so safe. My friend Harold and I walked towards our neighborhood together, taking everything in.



One of those days, Harold told me that I couldn’t walk straight. I told him he was being ridiculous but it turned out he was right. I’d step with my left foot and fall two or three inches off my forward motion, and then readjust with my right foot, but four or five inches too far. Then I’d have to fix it with my left, but that came off the line a little too. I didn’t know it was happening. Somehow I got wherever I was going, but Harold showed me how, if he was standing pretty close to my shoulder, I kept knocking him, on every third or fourth step.



We were walking down 33rd, which comes off Kings Highway at a curve, and suddenly I wasn’t sure I’d be able to make it all the way home. The more I thought about my feet the more inches I diverged right and left. Harold held my right arm and tried to force me forward, but I started breathing heavy and told him I needed a break. That’s when the station wagon pulled by, slowed up, and someone rolled down the window.



It was a high school kid, with a Madison Football sweatshirt and the chinstrap beard that everyone who could was wearing that year. Harold was pretending that the white tuft on his chin counted. The driver also had a Madison sweatshirt on, and I saw him use his right hand to put the car into park.



“Don’t you live on Quentin?” the guy in the passenger’s seat said. “You coming down from Hudde?”



Harold said yes.



“Jump in,” he said. “We’ll drop you off, it’s too hot to walk.” He leaned his arm out the window and reached behind to open the back door.



Once we were in the car the Madison kid in the passenger’s seat turned the music up, and it wasn’t that it was louder than in our car but it was thumping more in my chest. “You like Z100?” he said, smiling, leaning his left hand behind the headrest.



I was watching the driver while Harold answered for us. He was driving with two fingers, his index and middle ones on one hand, his other arm out the window. Somehow we were going just as fast as my dad always goes on side-streets, but we were getting the soft stops that only my mom, at 15 miles per hour, was able to get. At the stop sign on Avenue P, he jolted out to look once or twice, in exact time with the music. His friend was drumming on the dashboard with both hands.



Dad was sitting on the stoop when they dropped us off, and he stood up once he recognized me getting out of the car. The car waved away. I was able to walk again, the zig-zag curse gone. Harold said, “That car was disgusting, huh?” I was looking at my dad’s face. When I got up to him, he grabbed me under the armpit and dragged me up the stoop. Harold didn’t look away. We were inside with the air-conditioning on when he flat-palmed me in the stomach.



“Are you serious,” he said. “Are you serious.”



When Dad came home with the third air-conditioner it was still blistering out. There were tornados in Texas, more than they’d ever seen before, and in Earth Science Ms. Donatelli said it was what we had to look forward to: global warming in America. Someone in the back asked if this meant no more snow days, and she said, Maybe no snow, period.



He had the air-conditioner in the trunk of the driving instructor car. You don’t notice until you’re close to it, but those cars are a little skinnier than regular ones. Dad says it helps the kids who have a bad sense of hand-eye coordination. There’s more wiggle room when you’re trying to squeeze through tight spaces. He says that the first thing he asks a student when they get in the car is whether they played sports when they were younger, or if they still do now. If not, he’d know it was going to be a long day. You can’t imagine how crappy those kids are, especially the Hasidic Jews.



“Why’s that, Daddy?” asked Lorris.



“Because they didn’t play sports as a kid,” he answered, wiping his mouth with his napkin. I had set the table, and we used the white ones with blue borders that I liked.



“This is how you raise your kids,” Mom said. She was twirling her fork in her fingers. She’d gotten home late and he was back early.



“My kids, yeah?” he shrugged. “It’s just true.”



The new air-conditioner was bigger than the others, mostly because it had extendable plastic wings on the side that were supposed to be for fitting in a window. That afternoon before Mom got back from work he put it in the kitchen, balancing it above the heater and extending the wings so it sat snug. He got some blocks of wood out of the garage and pushed them underneath.



When she came back she had immediate problems. They had a session up in their bedroom where we couldn’t really hear what they were yelling. When they came down, she was pointing at the kitchen window. “How am I supposed to hang the clothes out now,” she said. I guess Dad hadn’t thought about that. The clothesline comes out the kitchen window. He moved it one window over.



That was the spring of people breaking their wrists. I had three friends who did, and at least two more from school. Everyone was walking around with casts on their arms and a permanent marker in their back pockets to ask you to sign. It happened to our next-door neighbor first—he was playing basketball at the courts by Marine Park and when he went up for a rebound someone kneed him the wrong way. He fell full on his knuckles. I wasn’t there, but Lorris had been riding his bike and said he saw him waiting for the ambulance, his hand doubled over and fingers touching his forearm.



The one wrist I did get to see was right by our house. Behind the house there’s a thin alley for the sanitation trucks to get the garbage. This way they don’t clog up the avenues in the mornings. Harold was over and Dad was showing Lorris how to skateboard. The alley has a little hill on each end and dips down in the middle. Dad had him getting speed down the hill and then showed him how to glide. Harold and I were on our Razor scooters, trying to do grind tricks off the concrete sides of the alley. Then, after Lorris beat his own glide record and Dad was giving him a high five, Harold decided to come down the hill backwards.



Dad wasn’t watching. He was pretending to shadowbox with Lorris, who was saying, I’m the greatest, I’m the greatest.



“Don’t do it, man,” I said. “They don’t even try that on Tony Hawk.”



“It’s gonna be sick,” he said, and gave it a little hop to get his speed up.



He made it all the way down before falling. I have to give him credit for that. But then he swerved



towards the wall and got scared and fell. He wasn’t even going that fast. All I heard was a squelch like the sound the black dried-up shark eggs make when we squished them on the beach at Coney Island. It was the same sound. His wrist looked bent sideways. He jumped up and was screaming, My wrist, my wrist, and my dad came running over, Lorris right behind, and that’s when the third air-conditioner fell out the window, crashing and breaking into pieces and my Mom yelling from the kitchen, Goddamnit you’re an asshole. Dad and I drove Harold to the hospital first but when we got back we swept up all the pieces.



It wasn’t long after that until it was my birthday, and to celebrate Dad took me out driving with him. It was a weekend, so we had plenty of time. Mom was home with Lorris playing Legos, because in a recent school art-project his portrait of the family had her smaller than the rest of us, off in the corner. She’d been at work a lot. I don’t think Lorris meant anything about it, he was always a terrible artist. But you could tell she was upset.



When we weren’t rushed, Dad liked to pull out all the stops in the driving. First he drove us to the parking lot in Marine Park, and let me drive around there for a few minutes. We pulled into and out of vertical spaces. Everybody learned how to drive in the Marine Park parking lot, and the cops didn’t mind as long as you were being safe. I’ve heard they’re much more careful now—they jumped all over the two underage kids last week who ran their mother’s car into a hydrant—but this was a while ago. We were particularly safe, of course, because we were in Dad’s driver instructor’s car. It had a problem with the wheel so that it lilted a little to the left if you didn’t correct it, but it was perfect and I loved it.



From there we pulled onto Quentin, rode that all the way down to Flatbush, which was heavy six- lane traffic. Dad took the wheel again at that point. I was still getting used to cars on both sides of me. He exaggerated all his driving motions here, the point being for me to observe. Hit the left blinker. Make sure you’re keeping up with traffic. Always check all three mirrors.



If you stay on Flatbush and keep going you hit the water, Rockaway and the Atlantic, twenty blocks from our house, but that’s getting onto the highway, and I didn’t want to deal with that yet. We made a right onto U, and Dad stayed in the right lane the whole way. Then, after passing the public library and the salt marsh where the watermill used to be, where you can still see the foundation coming out of the surface, we were in Gerritsen. Dad ceremonially pulled into an open spot and put the car in park and pulled the keys out and handed them to me when we passed each other going around the hood.



This was my favorite moment, using the key, the throat-grumbling the engine makes when it comes on, how if you do it wrong it kick-starts like someone laughing hysterically. Then the way the wheel shakes a little in your hand, your foot on the brake, everything ready to move.



I pulled out and Dad said, Good good, keep it easy, and I imagined the fake line in the middle of the road like he told me to, keeping a little to the left of it. I hit my right blinker and we were on a one-way street, and my turn came perfectly into the center. I accelerated a little and tried to ease off and onto the break at the red light, completely smooth. I navigated around a double-parked car without my dad saying a word.



When we were little, the only activity that Lorris and I wanted every night was wrestling with Dad. He didn’t like to hit us, Mom was the one we were afraid of, her slaps more damaging than any neighborhood scrape. Scarier too because she’d cry after, holding ice to our cheek, even though we told her it was okay and we didn’t need the ice. But wrestling was something that Dad knew how to do. He’d lie down in our living room on his back, and one or the other of us would run down the hallway and take a running leap and jump on top of him. Then the other would come from behind his head and try to cover his eyes or hold his legs. When we jumped, he made an oof sound like we had knocked the air out, but he always caught us, in midair, no matter what part of him we tried to jump on top of. He’d keep us suspended there for a few seconds, turning us back and forth like a steering wheel, and then pull us back down and wrap our arms in a pretzel. Mom liked to watch this from the kitchen, where she’d be cleaning the dishes, usually Dad’s job but she let him off the hook when he was up for wrestling with us.



Coming down a one-way street like that was the same feeling of being suspended in midair, the windows open and the air coming through, the radio off so I could concentrate, the car on a track, almost, so it felt impossible to deviate. I could close my eyes or shut off the driving part of my brain and the car would keep going forward, where I was willing it to go.



It was the corner, the one with two traffic lights, the one with the old storage warehouse on one side, and the Burger King, where teenagers go after the movies to sky the drink machines and not pay; with the Shit Factory on the other side, the green fence shaped like a wave on the top that goes on and on forever. There’s a gate in the fence with an entrance to the recycling dump. When Dad saw it, it was like he woke up from being asleep with his eyes open. He leaned forward and said, Make a right here, go into there. We’ve got to pick something up. Then the red Chevy came screaming up from behind us and crunched into the passenger’s side.



I sat in the driver’s seat. There were doors being opened and slammed shut. I think I heard the sirens immediately. Police cars are never far away. The Chevy driver went right over to Dad’s side and pulled him out and Dad lay on the floor, breathing heavy, on his back, looking up.



I was in the car. I was out of the car. I was sitting on the side of the curb. My dad lay on his back and groaned quietly, talking to himself. There were people all around him. He kept pushing theair in front of him, up and away. My mom got there. My dad was sitting up. She was screaming the whole time. Another fucking air-conditioner, she said. Driving with your fucking underage son. You’ve got some fucking lot of nerve. Dad was sitting up and laughing. He was shaking his head, I remember that. He’d just gotten a haircut, and you could see red skin beneath the gray. I remember when Dad came to say goodnight to us, later, later, he said, Your mother and I love each other very much. He had his hands on the side of the mattress. Don’t take things so seriously, he said.



It was hot that night and Lorris was in my room again. Mom pulled out the pullout bed. She smoothed the sheets. She kept her hand on his cheek, her other hand on my arm, her feet between the two beds, until Lorris told her that he wanted to turn on the other side. She went downstairs, and she put the television on, but we could hear her and Dad arguing. They were quiet. We only heard the sounds of their voices. It stopped soon and they turned the television off. Lorris got out of the pullout bed and stood in front of mine. He put his hand on the side, and I lifted up the sheet. I faced one way, and he faced the other, because I didn’t like when our breaths hit, but he kept his foot next to mine until four in the morning. Then he got up to go to the bathroom, and I had the bed and the sheets and the quiet room to myself.



 

On the morning of the funeral the Castanzo family woke up at nine, and took their turns in the show- er. Mr. Costanzo went first, because he had woken up earliest. Wake up the boys, Mrs. Costanzo whis- pered, while she took off her faded t-shirt and bra. Mr. Costanzo didn’t look at her bare back, although some mornings he did. She went into the shower. Mr. Costanzo went into the boys’ old room and put a hand on each of their heads.



Lorris had come home from college, an hour before Jamison got off work in the city. Mr. Costanzo had waited there on 34th Street, off Seventh Avenue, watching for the MegaBus to come in. Then he and Lorris had left the car parked and walked into the corner coffee shop. Lorris bought his father a cup and a croissant, with a five from his wallet. Lorris drank a cup of tea himself, something Mr. Costanzo had never seen him do before. When Jamison arrived he called and Mr. Costanzo told him to meet them in the coffee shop. It was a dark little room, empty except for people using the bathroom before getting on a bus, or passengers carrying heavy bags looking for a bottle of water or directions afterwards. The three of them sat at a window table and watched the charter buses slowly empty and leave. Then they went outside to drive back to Brooklyn.



The room, facing the avenue, was quiet in the morning. Jamison woke first, although Lorris had been up before. He wasn’t used to sleeping at home again. He always took some days to get accustomed to new beds, the new sounds of people breathing, of the walls and creaking pipes. It had taken him a long time to fall asleep with his brother’s breathing. Sleep ok, said Mr. Costanzo. The pullout bed was close enough to the real bed that he could lean in between both of them. Lorris nodded, and Jamison groaned. He rolled over and reached to the nightstand for his glasses.



Mrs. Costanzo was the last one to get dressed. She had spent a long time picking between the dark navies and black blouses that she had in the closet. Mr. Costanzo was already downstairs, in a suit, looking at his watch and sipping coffee with the boys. Each of them took a mug. We should leave, Mr. Costanzo yelled up. You wait a minute, Mrs. Costanzo answered. She was talking to herself in the mirror. She wasn’t trying on blouses anymore, just looking.



The whole avenue was blocked off. There hadn’t been any notices, nothing hung on trees or bus stop poles, but everyone had known to park their cars on the sidestreets. Mr. Costanzo led them off to where the car was on Kimball, reached around and opened the passenger’s-side door. Lorris and Jamison squeezed their legs into the back. Jamison fingered the broken handhold above his head. We need gas, said Mr. Costanzo. We’re fine, Mrs. Costanzo said. There were other people getting into their cars on the side streets. Mr. Costanzo stopped at the stop sign. The house next door to them was still empty and quiet. There were flowers on the sidewalk.



It was very difficult to find a parking spot. Mr. Costanzo circled the church lot twice. Lorris remem- bered having youth baseball awards nights here, all the kids from the different teams in their different colors. Lorris’s favorite had been yellow, the one year when they let him pitch. He’d been on the son’s team that year, they’d both played outfield together. They’d been in the same school until ninth grade. As they passed the entrance hopelessly for a third time, Lorris was struck suddenly by the memory of one of those awards ceremonies, early in the summer, a lazy blue tinge to the night. Four ice cream trucks had been double-parked on the street fighting for customers. Someone finally came out of the gates to tell them to turn the jingles off. You couldn’t hear the league commissioner. Lorris had gotten the Most Im- proved award, he remembered. For God’s sake, Mrs. Costanzo said. I’ll try Avenue V., said Mr. Costanzo. As they passed Avenue R and the front of the church they saw the long line of firemen walking slowly in through the front doors. They all had their dress uniforms on. They walked down the double yellow line, in the middle of the closed street.



Good Shepherd was not a big church, though it wasn’t a small one. It wasn’t particularly well decorat- ed. There was a large skylight stained-glass window up over the altar, that was supposed to be the crowning work of art, but looked strangely geometrical and out of place. Mrs. Costanzo had once felt strongly that the boys go to church. Her mother had been like that. But it began to feel less and less important. Just the year before one of the deacons was accused of improper sexual conduct. I knew it, Lorris had crowed, over the phone. He had already been at college. The bastard always used to look at me funny. Mr. Costanzo had put an end to such jokes quickly. It’s not seemly, he said. The small bronze font for holy water at the front of the church was almost empty, and the ground was squeaky and damp around it, when the Costanzo’s crossed themselves. They sat in the back row, because it had been so difficult parking. Lorris had only seen a coffin once before. The new priest, from some foreign country, stood up.



Later, at the house, everyone said what a nice service it had been. The wife was nodding too quickly, her chin jutting out too far. People had said such nice things, Lorris heard someone say. He heard someone say, almost excitedly, I didn’t know he went to Brooklyn Tech! The Calder family was all there, showing the new family the ropes. No one played whiffleball on the corner of 35th and R, where the green sign was, the Fire Captain Jonathon K. Calder memorial corner. I didn’t know his firehouse had been so close to the World Trade Center, a woman near Lorris gasped. Make it through that and then. Eventually the wife went with Mrs. Costanzo next door, where they put the food that wouldn’t fit in their fridge into the Costanzo’s. Then she sat on the couch next to Mrs. Costanzo. They talked about when their children used to play in the living room right there. Remember Legos, Mrs. Costanzo said. Oh, she said. Mr. Costanzo came in the door with his hands in his pockets looking for them. He stood in front of the couch. He suddenly didn’t know what to do.



That night, after they’d changed out of their good clothes, the ones they’d had in closets in plastic bags, they sat down to watch television. Mr. Costanzo had been on the couch there since dinner. He hadn’t done the dishes. There wasn’t enough room for all of them on the couch, so Jamison lay on his stomach on the floor. He was laughing at the sitcoms. After the news, Lorris got up and put his shoes on. Just a walk, he said.



It was still light out, and warm. It would almost be summer. Lorris walked up Avenue R, towards Flat- bush. He didn’t even have a sweatshirt on. There were no spaces between the houses here. They grew into each other on both sides. Most of them were painted red. Lorris wondered if someone had planned them out beforehand, or if they shot up in perfect rows. On Quentin Avenue, in front of the supermarket, a man was washing his car. It was white and perfectly polished. He probably hadn’t had it for long. He was scrubbing with a thick sponge. Lorris watched him twist the material in his hand. There was a bucket of water on the ground next to him, the water sloshing against the edges. The hose next to the sidewalk was leaking and getting Lorris’s shoes wet. The man worked over the same point on the car for a long time, and then he leaned his forehead on the hood and kept pressing, not looking. He stayed there for a long time with his head pressed and his arms stopped and the muscles in his legs relaxed behind him.

People used to call my Pops a geep when he got old, which was, in a way, accurate. He used to wear the black socks all around the house. I don’t know where the term comes from: something with guinea, maybe the G-P of grandpa. I used to tell him when he just had the ripped white tee on, Pops, get the hell back in the house before someone respectable sees you. Anyway, it’s something I’ve been thinking about now that I’m around that age. My wife Lola tells me karma’s bitchy. My back isn’t too good. Sometimes I dribble in my pants after I pee. But I’ll tell you one thing, I’m always wearing white socks when people are watching.



My Pops was Italian, but Ma was a Jew, so that makes me a little different background than him. I’ve got a finely sculpted figure, like I used to, just someone recently put a little too much of the extra marble on my belly. I’ve still got the moustache, and the goatee, black, that Pops used to make me shave off, back when he told me I had a little of the Hasid in me, that I looked like a little dwarf when my hair balded at sixteen.



Pops was a showman, circus fella, when he got back to New York from the army. I’ve still got the first carousel he used to truck around to all the events. Back then there was big money in it, and he was a respectable man. The borough presidents used to call him up every spring to figure out when he’d bring the show to their big parks for the summer. That’s how I grew up: in a big house on Gerritsen Avenue. We were like the first settlers there, practically, like pioneering days, and we got a house that was as big as half a block. In the backyard was where we’d keep the carousels, the inflatable mazes, the bouncey-bounce, and the little baby roller coaster that took five hours to put together.



It wasn’t all great. People used to call us gypsies behind our backs and ask where the donkeys were. Of course in Kennedy’s America the smalltime carnivals didn’t have animals anymore. If we were a gypsy show we were gasoline-fueled and blow-up, going around in the back of a Chevy: rides, food, music that was strange to the American ear. But probably gypsy is what we would’ve been if we’d still been in one of my parents’ old countries. Then again, if we were in Poland, we’d probably be dead: cause I’ve got a long nose, and nobody likes gypsies even if that’s not really what we are.



Pops liked to tell us stories about his tour. He’d never been to Italy before it, though grandpops was born there. The army gave him a way to see the world, and he appreciated them for that. His war experience had been as good as you could possibly get, I’d bet: he was a truck mechanic in the sunflower fields outside San Gimignano. Pops used to tell us that everywhere, the air smelled like raisins. And when one of the military vans went by, the new ones with diesel engines, the sunflowers turned their faces to follow, and no one could tell if it was the wind from them passing or some weird magnetic force.



Pops had a favorite story, his defining experience, which went something like this: one day, he had leave, just for the second half of the afternoon. He and a buddy took bicycles that they’d stolen from the houses of civilians, and biked up the path towards town. It was a bustling and busy place then, because it was walled, and everybody who was anybody, civilians, in that area of Italy, was inside. They said that the place had withstood every battle since the Venetians dug a hole underneath during the Papal Wars.



Anyway, they weren’t supposed to be there, it was military policy to stay out of town, too many locals were getting screwed. So they go through the gates with local clothes on, no uniforms, and up this crooked alley. They make it to Via Berignano which goes through the whole village and they take that, left, looking for the restaurant that’s supposed to serve wine and hashish even if they know you’re a soldier. But they keep walking and don’t see the place until they get all the way to the city walls. They were crumbling like cookies between a pair of legs, Pops used to say.



There was a grove of peach trees and Pops stopped, peered behind them. There was a big wagon with a cow licking the green moss off the walls. The wagon was all wood and covered and painted in big garish colors. Show of the Universe, it said in purple script. There was smoke coming from a little canvas chimney towards the back—and the last thing Pops saw before the carabinieri came out of nowhere and hustled him and his buddy away with their arms on their asses was the woman lying on her back. She was underneath the wagon, next to the ruts that the wheels made, and she was completely naked, with her hands behind her head and humming something mountainous into the air that was stinking of peaches. 



 



I’m not an anything person. I’m not that cheap and I don’t spend too much, sometimes I like to be outside while at the same time I’d rather just sit on the couch. I used to like country but I listen to rock and roll too. There’s things that I like half of when I should like the whole: women, babies, Oreo cookies. This is how I feel about my marriage sometimes.



I married a black woman, ok?  Sure, Pops didn’t love it. But he didn’t love a lot of things, and in a way he was a filthy racist, which is a whole thing, not half. Her name’s Lola, and I met her at a job in Prospect Park. Once she told me that where she came from, wasn’t no one who didn’t like a little carnival.



Lola I like. We’ve got the house now, on Gerritsen. It’s the only big one left, everything else is rented. We’re this big decrepit place now with leaves stuck in the drainage and everything around us, one floor, is a condominium. I hear their babies squalling through the little walls, and their mothers getting fucked in the bedrooms. Lola likes to leave the music on and pretend the whole thing’s an opera.



I guess we had a kid late. There had been a while when we didn’t think it would work, though it wasn’t for not trying. Really it was like twenty years, which could have been time enough for a whole nother four kids. But we ended up with just the one, Tony. I love him to death.



Right now he’s at school, second grade, which really is a great age but I can’t help wishing that he were a year out of high school, because then he could’ve taken the family business from me and I wouldn’t have to sell the show. I’m getting tired of doing it, I’m a little too old, and it’s just not the same: carnival rides aren’t too popular anymore. We’ll do a summer-opening fair or something, but that’s about it for the major bookers. There’s always a couple of calls for July 4th. But the rest of the summer is pretty empty and you can forget about the winter, I just sit around and oil the machinery while the TV blares from the bedroom and Lola yells out the window, let the goddamn things rust.



It’s something I can’t really do. I remember Ma was really helpful with Pops when we were in season, and even outside it. She used to run the concession stands, sometimes hiring local kids to walk around with white hats and boxes of peanuts. Once, I remember, she had to fill in for Madame Starbright, the fortunetelling lady—and this was the most beautiful moment, her wrapped in blue robes with the sprinkles falling from the ceiling of the wood shack we did the readings in—and I think even Pops was surprised, that maybe Ma was something else entirely that he never gave her credit for.



I’m not saying Pops was perfect. That’s clear: he was a jerk sometimes and especially to Ma. You got the feeling that he thought he could’ve done better in life, coming back from Italy with the G.I. Bill, but somehow things didn’t work out, just a roll of the dice. Somehow he became Brooklyn’s Preeminent Showman. But because he did, he lorded it over Ma and me like he was coming from some other sort of place where things looked much better.



When he died a couple months ago I thought he was going to say something like, Sonny, make sure the show goes on, but instead he said, “Come here.”  I dropped my ear real close. He said hoarsely, “I think, Sonny, that I left some broccoli in the refrigerator.”  Ma had been gone for a while then and I guess he was looking out for my vitamin health. But that was the first time that I thought maybe I could actually sell the thing, get out of the business, retire. I saw a couple of ads the other day in the Skyline for delivery drivers, trucking stuff around to where people bring it into places on those metal pushcarts. I thought I’d look really good in one of those company polos that those guys always wear and maybe, because of my advanced age, they’d let me work part-time and have the rest off to ice my bones. That’d be nice, especially this being the end. Once I saw a stoner on the street with a cap and a sign on cardboard, The End, and I said to him, what, is this the movies? 



Here’s something. I never went to college. Lola was done with high school by the time I got my GED, and at that point I thought, forget it, I make 10 large a go oiling the roller-coaster for Pops. Lola said I should’ve, that it’d come back to bite me in the end, but then there’s another thing I should’ve listened to Lola for, and I was wrong, I’ll admit it.



One thing I always liked about working the carnival when I was little was that Pops used to let me hand out popcorn, and when I was really little I’d give it to all the pretty ladies in high heels. Then when I got a little older my friends used to come and hang out and eat snacks by the generator. We were big into the blow-up obstacle course in those days, that Pops made us take our shoes off for. It was all made of canvas and air, and there was a climbing section and a sliding part and one place where you had to push punching bag things away. There was the year when someone tripped in the middle and punched a hole through the floor. I still remember the hiss while the whole thing sank down and collapsed. There were times we did it as races, two at a time until we’d all gone twice, and then the two fastest raced with everyone else screaming at them from the sides, hanging off the hand-holds and throwing popcorn at each other. Last year during a block party in Rockaway, when we were about to wrap up, I saw two kids sitting in the middle where it’s painted blue like a water trap, just talking. They were playing video games on their hand-helds. I told them they could have one more go through but then we had to close up and they said it was ok. They just left. I don’t know what to think about that.



Once a little girl asked me on the subway what I did for a living, because I was carrying a plastic bag full of balloons over my shoulder that kept trying to float above my head. I told her about the travelling carnival thing or whatever and she said, is that sort of like Santa Claus?  I said first of all we work in the summer. And it’s not like we do presents and it’s not like it’s for free. She nodded really intelligent and said she hoped I’d come visit her neighborhood sometime, she lived in Bay Ridge. This was the R train which always takes forever and she must have been on a school trip, or something. She got off with lots of other little kids and a lady who kept holding the door. She kept looking at the bag and then back at me and then at the bag until finally I gave her a balloon and she got real excited.



Yesterday I was on the train because I dropped the pickup off at Flatbush, to change the breaks, and I’m standing with one hand on the rail when this guy goes, here you go grandfather, it’s your seat. First I was like who talks like that on Newkirk Avenue?  Then I got a look at myself in the window and I said, God, I really am a geep. My goatee’s getting real fuzzy and there’s hair coming out my ears. And here I am sitting with a t-shirt tucked into my shorts.



 



The way it happened was the guy wrote me a check. He had a truck and his cousins had two more and yesterday they just took it all in that. It was 200 grand, which was more than the show would make in the next 15 years, Lola said. She’s right. We all sat down at the kitchen counter and I gave them coffee and introduced them to Tony, before he ran upstairs or something. They didn’t have any of the cake Lola made, which I thought was rude, until she said Jesus, not everyone’s half Italian.



When they left I went into the backyard to straighten the rest of it up. Lola’s in the kitchen making jerk chicken, or something. I almost knock over the plants in front of the screen door where we’ve been trying to grow pot, Lola’s little side business. A story about Lola: once she told me that when she was fourteen, before she came here, she was driving a jeep in Jamaica, up and down the mountain roads. These things were all dirt, she said, and one lane, so that if there were two cars coming at each other, one had to back up and find a little place in the rock to turn into. Lola was never a great driver but this happened to her once, and she was at a point on the hill where there weren’t any niches to turn into for a while, and so she drove down the whole thing backwards, yelling. When she got to the bottom, where the beach was, she got out of the car and grabbed a seashell and threw it at the windshield. It didn’t even make a crack. I’m never driving again, she said. And she didn’t. But she took the shards of the shell and took them with her, and put them back together with crazy glue, and now it’s up above the sink in the kitchen where she washes the fruit.



Our last gig was a week or so before, between Avenue M and N, on one of those streets that curves. Hasid neighborhood, who don’t party much, but some liberal Jews too who eat up this sort of thing. They rented the whole street and closed it down, so we had room for the rollercoaster and even the extra large maze that we hadn’t taken out in a couple years. I ran the barbecue for most of it while Tony ran to and from the truck getting hot-dog packets. He didn’t mind doing it and other little things as long as he got an allowance every Monday.    



Because it was our last one, Lola decided to make it something special. She took out the Madame Starbright costume and did that for a few hours. She was really good too. I listened in a bit from behind the tent. “The Wheel,” she said, “Sagittarius. You resemble the Jilted Man appearing in the pocket of Jupiter.”



The night before, she’d been practicing. Tony was asleep after eating half a chocolate cake. I was just licking the rest off the spatula when she came in from the dining room, where she’d been looking at tarot cards. The way she did it was she came up from behind and spread her hand in the center of my chest.



“Want to hear your fortune?” Lola said. I told her not to be stupid, that she better get back to studying.



“I think I’ve really got it, Sonny,” she said. I kept doing the dishes but she tapped twice on my chest with her hand. “Please,” she said.



I know I turned the faucet off but it was drip-dripping while we went outside. The patio sliding door used to hum when you opened it, but it’s a little broken now so it just squeaks and starts. It was around that time in the summer when it felt like Halloween at nighttime. Next door the baby was crying and the TV going on. We sat down at the little table, next to the vines that went from the ground to over our heads.



She was across from me and she picked up my hand in both of hers and said, “Remind me to get charcoal for tomorrow.” 



“We doing this or what,” I said.



She shook my hand up and down and kissed it on the knuckles. Then she closed her eyes and hummed. I thought she was going to say something any second but she didn’t, so I looked around a little bit, got distracted. I’d promised to paint a free throw line for Tony fifteen feet from the hoop.



When I looked back she’d stopped humming, but I hadn’t even known. Her eyes were wide open and her hands were tight around mine.



“Litigus, Dionysiac, Mesopatam,” she said. “I see that the Chariot is aligned with the Prince of Satyrs.”  I grinned. She started to laugh too. She put my fingers over her eyes and looked through them. I mussed up her eyebrows and looked over her shoulder to where some of the equipment was covered by a tarp. There was a little bit of standing water in the middle from the thunderstorm last night.



“When I was sixteen,” I told her, “I used to come out here and make sure the stuff wasn’t getting wet, if it was raining, the night before a job.”



She put her fingers back on the table.



“You’re going to be ok,” she said.



 



When I get to the first delivery place from the ad they tell me they’ve diversified their interests. Actually their owner had gotten himself into real estate. I go to the second but they’re closed for the day. The third is the Herr’s outlet on Quentin Avenue and I find a spot and go inside.



It really is a warehouse: no front door but just an open garage. It’s like a hangar inside, but just filled with rows and rows of bags of chips. There’s a cashier’s desk at the front where it looks like they sell single bags and things like that, and the guy sitting there gets up when I come in and says, “Can we help you?”



I say you can, because it’s obvious that he’s the only one here. He’s got on dress clothes and black socks that are wrapped up around his dress pants, so that it’s like he’s wearing tights below the knees.



“I’m looking for work,” I say.



“Are you a veteran?”



“Do I look like one?”



“Merchandising?”



“No, delivery.”



He looks at me for a second as if to tell me that I’m too old, but then he says one moment please and goes in the back. The guy’s as old as I am. I can hear him making a call. The row of chip bags behind the desk is called Worcestershire Steak Sauce, Special Edition.



He comes back and tells me they’ll try me out for a run, do I have a commercial driver’s license?  I do. Can you sign this paperwork?  I do the pen. He tells me that the truck is parked out on 34th, it’s already loaded and I just have to make the stops on the sheet. Crown Heights, Flushing Park, a hub outlet on 248th in the Bronx. He brings out a map but I tell him I know how to get there. I figure I’ll do the Bronx first, then circle back. Then, while he’s checking over the paperwork and filing it in a folder, he asks me, “So what type of work have you been in?”



“Entertainment,” I say.



“Are you an actor?”



“Used to have a little travelling carnival, we did kids’ birthdays and block parties and things.”



“Maybe I’ve heard of it?  What was the name?”



“Show of the Universe,” I said.



He straightened the papers. “Well this must be a let-down then,” then he looks at me and grins to let me know he’s kidding.



“We’ll see,” I say. He raps the desk with his knuckles. He asks me did I want anything else besides the keys?  I give him an A-OK but don’t even answer, just grab the key-ring and walk my way out.



 



It was one of those days when it’s like the middle of the night on the street, no cars or traffic or anything. Then Ocean Avenue, down from Coney Island. I take Ocean Parkway to the Prospect Expressway, and I’m just flying, me and this truck. This must be what it’s like to drive a Hummer, I think. As if you could roll over the Toyotas in front of you, trunks crushing and bags of chips flying everywhere.



Pops used to say, there are five easy steps to living: The Mariner’s Inn has dollar beers on Thursdays, and I forget the other four. I’m passing Prospect Park, where there’s kids playing baseball and things. I don’t know what Tony’s gonna tell his friends that I do for a living anymore, because he used to say I was a magician, because I’d shown him some tricks with pulling a coin out from behind an ear. All I’m saying is, with the way driving this big baby feels, I want to go in for show-and-tell day, or career day, if they still have those.



I’m on the highway next to the East River, watching Manhattan get more wild as we go North. It’s true: there’s more trees up here by the water, and that big tower that’s supposed to be part of Columbia way up in the 100’s, that looks like a lighthouse, but made of stone. I’m passing Yankee Stadium and I’m changing lanes, going around the 18-wheelers and the little cars too. It’s like the first time I drove on the highway by myself, how it was just like dancing: sort of like when I was little and we’d be cleaning up after a job and everything would be packed, and it’d just be Pops and Ma, but the music still going. They’d put it on to something corny like Frank Sinatra, and sometimes Pops would hug her and go side to side. I had this little move, a sort of jump-in-the-air-split kind of thing that they asked me to do over and over and over. I showed it to Lola once as a joke and she patted my cheek and said, white people.



I double park outside the hub on 248th and some guys come scrambling out to unload. They nod, say, hey, you made good time. One of them claps me on the shoulder before he starts loading the handcart. They won’t let me do anything so I take a bag of Worcestershire and sit on the curb. They tell me it’ll be about half an hour, take a walk, go check out the Stella Dora factory a few blocks away.



I start walking and eating my bag of chips and it’s like when you don’t even realize how far you went because you’re licking your fingers for the crumbs and the salt on the bottom. I’m on Broadway where the 1 train ends and Van Cortlandt Park spreads out in front of me. It’s the badlands up here, no one coming except for track races and the immigrant soccer games. Places where just the crack addicts go at night to use the bathroom.



I walk across the soccer field and into the trees where it’s just a forest part. There’s a pond here where I always wanted to do a gig, set the roller coaster coming down the hill, let kids throw water balloons into the water. Only problem is the shit trees that have these blossoms that smell terrible. There’s a cave here, a waterfall too—it’s so far out in the Bronx that tourists never heard of it, and the locals have other things going on. I sit there for a while until I realize I have to go get the truck back. I take a piss on a tree because I’d been holding it in. When I get back to the outlet some respectable guy in a company polo opens the driver’s door for me, and then he closes the back with a bang and I start driving again.

Officers Nebsky and Hallahan retrieved the money during a routine car stop, down Ocean Parkway coming off the Belt, heading west towards Coney Island. The car had been going 70 miles per hour at the end of the avenue, running three red lights. They had been nearly off-duty—they were already on their way back to the precinct—Officer Hallahan had never been in this situation before, and he did what Officer Nebsky told him. The money was in a black garbage bag in the trunk of the car. The driver, a lean man about 6 foot one, 6 foot two, from what they could estimate when he folded out of the car, was cool and collected, even when they asked to see license and registration, even when they asked if he minded if they took a look in his trunk. His name was Paulson Denihew, and he was, in fact, 6 foot four, according to his license. While Officer Nebsky ran Denihew’s license back in their squad car, Denihew asked Officer Hallahan if he might take off his suit jacket, though it was winter, the end of a day of cold sun. Officer Hallahan obliged this request, and Denihew carefully removed his jacket, revealing a perfectly pressed white dress shirt underneath it, the pearly textured kind that Officer Hallahan knew must have cost at least 400 or 500 dollars—he had uncles who worked on Wall Street. Denihew folded the jacket over his wrist and he and Officer Hallahan waited for Officer Nebsky.

On the first day, I told Shadman that his true love left the house every morning at seven thirty three in order to empty the garbage.  She stepped gingerly over the double layer of bricks that separated the pavement from her family’s garden, in whose corner there was a trash can where she deposited the remains from last night’s meal.  Usually the plastic Key Food bag would leak grease at the bottom and have noodles hanging off the over-stretched handles.  At seven thirty seven she’d be outside again in order to lock the door and run around to the front of the house to catch the seven thirty nine bus which carried her to Kings Highway and, I presume, beyond, but I didn’t tell that part to Shadman because it wasn’t part of our promise.



In school everybody called Shadman “Brown Bear” for all the obvious reasons.  The promise I had with Shadman was for me to tell him one thing about his true love each day while we sat in my backyard doing whatever it was we always did.  We were ten then when we started it, but this game went on for a long time.  Shadman couldn’t find out about his true love himself of course because he lived 15 blocks east, closer to Flatbush, and she took a bus to school, far away.  But she was my next-door neighbor.



The first time we saw her together was the second time I had seen her, and she was long legged and dark haired enough to make us both turn the corner and hide in the bushes while she was still three houses down.  As she approached we furiously elbowed each other silent, thrashing leaves into each other’s eyes.  I got a thorn stuck in my pinky.  When she walked by, head turning neither to the right nor to the left, a scent of crushed wildberries overcame us, and her hair was dark like Shadman’s mother’s, and straight like lines drawn in glass. 



The second thing I told him was that his true love was a girl.  When I had started saying this, prefaced by the statement that I was going to say the second thing about his true love, Shadman’s eyes had gone wide like he was about to hear the Word or the announcement of Lebron James’s signing with the Knicks.  When he processed what I’d said his eyes got narrow and he hit me hard in the shins with a whiffle ball bat that I’d made heavy with many-colored duct tape.  I got angry and instead of telling him about the intricacies of her skin I said that her father wore a button down shirt to work. 



 



I saw her father leave for work every morning—he drove.  He came out of the house by the front door, suitcase and tie flying, throwing the papers he was always clutching to his chest into his car through the back window.  Shadman’s true love always waved goodbye to her father from the front door.  Then she would gather her books for the long trip to wherever school was hers.  Sometimes she would peek her head out the doorframe to eyefollow his vanishing car under the trees and I imagined that she could see me, peeking through the curtains, but of course she never did. Then she’d go take out the garbage. 



The third thing I told Shadman was that once, her glasses had fallen off when she went to push her hair back.  I told him that when she grinned, the edges of her cheeks went up towards the corners of her eyes, and her eyelashes bounced up and down.  I said that she wore a blue bracelet on her right wrist.  Number six was that when she was in the shower, she sang “Stitched Up,” the John Mayer song.  It was hard for her to keep her voice low and raspy like his, and I imagined her cupping a hand over her mouth to hit the low octaves.  Seven turned into a field trip, as I showed him the corner where she got on the bus every morning.  This was the same corner that was home to the foul pole of mine and Shadman’s home run derbies.  For the eighth thing that I told Shadman I said that she was Asian, and he scoffed at me and said he already knew that.



Before I told him the ninth or tenth thing I asked him if he realized that I got the idea for this whole charade from a movie, one of my favorites, in which a shrimpy circus owner tells the actor who plays Obi Wan Kenobi in Star Wars that he’ll tell him one thing about the girl of his dreams every day as long as Obi Wan repays him in constant servitude.  The things that he told him went like this:



 



“She like roses!”



Then Obi Wan would say,



“Roses!”



And repeat the word,



“Roses!”



while he raked the hay, or cleaned the elephants—“She like roses!”—or stood in the middle of a spherical cage yawning with the whine of high speed motorcycles.  In the end the circus owner turns into a wolf, or a bear, or something heavyhaired like that, and relents.  It’s a fairy tale ending of course.  He tells Obi Wan all about Obi Wan’s true love, and then the story goes on from there, and Obi Wan brings his true love roses and eventually he goes to war and fights Commies and Siamese twins and all that, but at the end he sees his true love again.



Shadman said,



“Right, but what’s the ninth thing?”



“She’s a lefty.”



“Not good enough.”



“She only has four toes.”



“No way you could know that.”



“She has a boyfriend named Athens.”



He pushed me and I fell backwards and my head hit the pole of the basketball hoop.  It was one of those bumps where a piece of my head swelled into a lump immediately.  I bit my teeth together so hard they went into the wrong grooves and I swung at him from the floor.  I missed.



“Don’t say that,” he said, pointing an angry finger at me.  “You’re making that up.”







The very first time I had seen her I had not been with Shadman and she had been moving in with her parents.  Their moving truck was big and purple and said, “We Bump Less” on the bumper.  She hopped out of the cab and stumbled a bit over the sidewalk, but caught herself before tripping.  She saw that I had noticed and grinned at me, her cheeks collapsing into her eyecorners.  My father went up to her father and said, “Hi,” drawing out the ending, as if it meant more than two letters.  My mother shook hands awkwardly with her mother which was awkward because my mother hugged everyone.  My father had on his Firehouse 92, “The Nut House!” t-shirt which he wore every Saturday, and the faded jeans that he put on after one o’clock. 



Shadman’s true love’s father wore a nice watch and smiled nicely, I thought, and he introduced himself and his petite wife.



“And this,” he said, turning to true love who came hopping up beside him, “is Lily.”



Lily!



 



The first time I talked to Lily it was snowing out, even though it was only November.  It was the type of snowfall where the best snowball packing snow was on the car windshields.  Shadman and I would have snowball fights with the windshield snow, and when you walked down the street you could see angelfingers on the glass over the dashboards where we had gathered the stuff into clumps and tossed it. 



I was shoveling my front stoop, waiting for Shadman’s mom to drop him off, when Lily got off the bus at the bus stop on the other side of the street.  It was one of those days when the street looked only half as wide as it normally did, because the snow was piled up on both sides, and the middle was merrily white, and there wasn’t much slush going black from the smog.  It felt like a snowday even though it was the weekend.



Lily saw me from across the street and she smiled at me.  She waved.  She bent down and her hands were fumbling in the snowdrift and I noticed that the buttons on her jacket were robin-blue.



She was walking towards me with one hand behind her back, and I didn’t see the snowball sticking to her mittens until she was five feet away.  When she threw it at me I was too surprised to avoid it, but when she laughed at the kaleidoscope it made on my chest I laughed too, and got her back with a nice firmly packed one right to the thigh. 



She laughed while she brushed it off.



“You’ve done a nice job shoveling here,” she said.



“It’s not a big deal,” I said.  “I can do yours too if you want.”



“No, no, that’s my job.”



“That’s what my dad tells me too!”



She smiled and didn’t answer, so I said, “I like your buttons.”



She looked down.  “The blue ones?” she asked.



I nodded. 



“Me too.  Blue is my favorite color.”



I said that was cool, I liked blue too.  Also that it would really not be a big deal at all for me to shovel her front.  But she said no, no, that was her chore, and actually she’d better get to it.  I said well I’ll see you out here.  She said it’s a date.



 



Shadman has a round face and there’re stretch marks on the sides of his belly where the fat came dripping off when he started to play in the community soccer league.  He had always been rolypoly before but now he was skinny and baggy, the folds of his skin like the loose jeans our friends would wear to school, the type that falls down without a belt. 



Shadman loved soccer, particularly the way they served donuts on the sidelines during halftime.  His mother, who was only adoptively American, would pack sandwiches for him stuffed with rice and barley and pieces of chicken, enclosed in thick rolls of hot bread.  These would be packaged like sausage links and wrapped in tin foil, and when Shadman’s mother handed them to him at halftime they would tend to be greasy with kitchen oil. 



Usually I ate them.  I could afford to because I played goalie most of the time and stood just outside the net waiting for something to happen.  My goalie gloves were always greasy from reaching into my pockets and eating bits of the chicken.  Once, Shadman tripped in front of the box—he played defense—and the other team’s forward went right past him, just me and him and the ball.  I had my right hand stuck in my pocket fingering for the last bit of rice.  I almost blocked the shot with my left hand but the ball spun off behind me into the net.  The kid threw his hands up and started running downfield. 



“Sorry man,” Shadman said.  I flipped him off and spit in the grass, rubbed it out with my shoe.  I looked behind me instinctively to make sure that Lily wasn’t watching.  Sometimes she went for a walk around the park and she’d stop for a second at the soccer games.  I’d wave from the left goalpost.  She’d stop at the midfield out-of-bounds line where all the parents sat, and say hi to Mom and Dad.  Once I asked Dad what she says to them and he said “Tuh,” and shook his head towards Mom.



“We talk about great films, Johnny,” he said and rolled his eyes. 



Then she’d walk back towards home.  I began to notice the way that the back of her neck curved into her shoulders.







When I get angry at Shadman he knows it.  There were often times soon after we’d met Lily when I’d be playing in his backyard and for one reason or another we’d be in a raging fight, and his mother would have to come around, straighten the hair out of her eyes, and yell at us sharply.  How old are you, really?  She’d bring us back inside and make me sit in one corner in a wicker chair while Shadman sat in the opposite corner.  At first we stared over each other’s heads but then we just looked down at our hands.  I’d trace patterns in the bamboo platform between my legs.  Eventually he’d start to fake-dance in his chair, swinging his hips back and forth, humming pop tunes.  Then he’d do the trick with his fingers that makes it look like his thumb is torn in two.  When I kept ignoring him, he’d whisper, so his Mom couldn’t hear, “but I wanted to be head architect of the fort.”



“You were head architect last time!”



“You promised that I could be for two times in a row.”



“You hit me in the neck when we played whiffleball.”  



“You could’ve jumped out of the way, stupid.”



Shadman’s mom walked back in and I flicked my nails against my thumb.  He rolled his eyes when she wasn’t looking.  I wanted to laugh but I didn’t, I kept my mouth tight.



“Tell me the one thing,” he said.



I ignored him.



Shadman leaned forward and whispered, “Tell me!”



So I leaned back and traced my initials into the wicker patterns.  I said,



“But then I get to be head architect.”



He nodded hungrily.



“So her favorite color is red.”



He jumped up and shouted.



“Red!  Red!  She loves red,” he said.



 



Sometimes, when it’s sunny out, I like to sit at the window after school and watch Lily while she sits outside on her porch, reading.  Mom walks by and says, you still like watching for Dad?  I say yup, and she puts her hand on the back of my neck.  Lily is curled around her book and I can see the way her hair falls, and how many pages she reads a minute.  Some other things I like now that I’m older: soccer, ESPN magazine, knowing the exact number of steps in every stairwell of my junior high.  I thought about writing a poem to Lily for English class but it didn’t work.  I wrote about Shadman instead, and my mom read it and showed it to Shadman’s mom, but I made them promise they wouldn’t show Shadman. 



The poem was about hanging out in Shadman’s room and the posters on his walls.  It wasn’t about any time in particular, exactly, but when I read it over it reminded me of the new game we’d play in his room, now that I’d stopped telling him new things, because I said he knew pretty much everything that I did at this point.  So we entertained ourselves, while playing videogames, by repeating old numbers.



“Four,” he’d say. 



“The blue bracelet.”



“Six.”



“The thing that you hit me for.”



“Seventy-seven.”



“Her hair looks blueish when it’s sunny out.”



“I told you that one.  And I thought that was fifteen?”



“Maybe.”



Shadman jumped up and eased a piece of paper out of one of the hardcover books on the table.  He took a pen from his pocket.  He’d begun to carry pens in his pocket.



“We should write these down,” he said. 



I watched him carefully fold the paper at the top, and above the fold write in neat letters, List.  Underneath he put the numbers from one to thirty-seven.  This was taking forever.  Then as an afterthought he came back to the heading and wrote, underneath it, What We Know About The Girl That Lives Next Door To Johnny.



“Yo, this is a bad idea,” I said.



Shadman kept writing numbers.  38, 39.



“What if she finds it?”



His 40 was loopy at the corners.



“Shadman, that’d be so weird!”



He looked at me, surprised, and said, “We have to tell her about it eventually.”



I asked what he meant.



“You know, she’ll eat it up.  Two guys writing things about how great she is without her knowing.  We’ll show her the highlights.  The top ten.  She’ll think it’s really cute and then I can take her to the movies by myself.”



I grabbed the paper from him and ripped it into shreds, threw the shreds at him so they kaleidoscoped on his chest.  After Shadman’s mother came up to ask what the hell was going on we stopped shoving.  I went and sat in one corner looking at the computer desk and he took up the opposite one and hit Start on the video games.  For a while Shadman’s mom stood in the doorway, pushing the straight hair away from her eyes. 



 



A couple of days ago we talked to Lily for the first time together, on the bus coming home from school.  It was cold out so we hadn’t wanted to walk.  We were in the back sharing Shadman’s iPod when his eyes lit up and he nodded towards the front. 



He jumped up and started swinging towards her, switching hands from one hand-hold to the next.  Halfway there he turned back to me and mouthed come on, like I was crazy to be waiting, but I rolled my eyes and leaned back.



He stepped on an old lady’s shoe and said sorry, then squeezed past a baby carriage.  When he reached her, her back was towards him, so he tapped her on the shoulder.  She had earphones in.  She took them out.  I couldn’t hear what they were saying.  At one point she put her hand on his arm, right above the wrist, and laughed.  She nodded a couple of times up and down and widened her eyes.  She shifted her weight to her right leg.  She waved at Shadman when he waved at her, right before he turned around and started walking back to me.



“Did you see?”



I handed him back his iPod.  “Sure.”



“She was everything you said she was.”



“Right, obviously.”



“And,” he said.  He paused.  “Well, I’ll tell you later.”



We sat there. 



“What,” I said.



He lowered his voice.  “She said we had a date.”



He looked back towards the front where she stood.  He asked, “should I bring flowers?”



 



The thing about Lily was that she was an away-from-school girl.  None of the girls in me and Shadman’s class were like her.  They were pushy, taller than we were, always pointing and laughing when we stood up to go to the bathroom or whatever.  I always had to step over the legs of Sophia, the worst one, to get to the door, and she always wore tight jeans that were lighter at the bottom than the top, and she would refuse to move her legs even a little bit.  I’d accidentally brush up against her and she’d make that “tuh!” sound, point her thumb at me like check this guy out, and when I said sorry she rolled her eyes or turned to giggle with her friends on either side.



Lily wasn’t like that.  When she sat outside reading she always had sweatpants on that bunched up around her waist.  If she saw me I imagined she would pat the chair next to her and say to come sit.  She’d show me the book cover and read me the first few lines from page 77, and I’d nod as if I didn’t know them already, know that the first words were *That afternoon*, and that the page ended with *and later, following along, Jackson paused a minute and set down his sword beside the heavy wrought iron gates.  He watched while the peasants brought the wheat and barley up to the*



 



I had fitful thoughts about the two of them for days.  Us living in the same house together, I don’t know why, in bunkbeds, me on the bottom and the two of them on the top, his leg hanging over the edge.  I took our soccer pictures off the fridge. 



School was a mess.  I’d turn to look at him right before the bell would ring for passing and he’d always have this look on his face, smug. 



“What?” he’d say, and smirk.



At home he came over like always, to play in the backyard.  We’d recently gotten a ping pong table that was in the garage.  We stood out there at opposite ends of the table with the radio on.  I had bloody ideas.  First I would throw my paddle at his face.  He would duck and it would hit the Styrofoam boxes of Christmas ornaments behind him.  I would flip the table over on its end.  He’d be stuck between the old wooden ladder alongside the wall and the bikes that would fall in a heap.  Then I’d start throwing things at him, baseballs, bats, more paddles, the old stereo.  When he was lying on the floor with the inside of his elbow over his eye I’d jump over the table, stand over him, hit him in the side of the neck.  I’d pick him up and throw him down so the ping pong table would start warping on one end. 



“Have you seen Lily?” I asked him.



He nodded.  “Yeah it was fun.”



“What was?”



“You know.”



I was throwing the things back in the garage and they were landing with loud noises.  Shadman looked a little jumpy.  I think he was afraid of me.



By the time everything was back in his mom came.  As usual, she rang the bell in the front, and we could hear her and my mom talking even though the windows were closed.



“Shadman!” she called.  He got up. 



“Later man,” he said.



I stayed outside and practiced my soccer kicks. 



 



The repetition of it was beginning to bow the red fence.  It was about to be dinnertime when Lily walked by.  She didn’t see me at first, and she turned around behind her to beckon towards somebody out of sight.  I kicked the ball against the fence.  It ricocheted against the chain link and she looked up. 



“Johnny!” she said.  I opened the gate to come out.  There was a short guy standing behind her, wearing a Yankees cap and carrying Lily’s bag.  She turned to the guy.



“Amir, this is my next door neighbor Johnny.”



He said hi.  He leaned forward with his hand stuck out.  I thought he was going to slap me five, but he wanted a handshake.  Our fingers fumbled.  



“How was school?” she asked.



“Not bad, not bad.”



“Ready for break?”



“Yeah it’ll be nice.”



“I know same.”



Amir grinned at me.  “You play soccer?”  he asked.  I told him a bit. 



“Cool,” he said.  His fingers reached for hers.



“How’s your friend?”  she asked.  She laughed.  “Shadman.”



“Yeah,” I said, “He’s ok.  Just left actually.”



She turned to look at Amir, who stared at her blankly.  He mouthed the word *Shadman*.  She pointed towards our little patch of garden, with the gnarled berry tree whose trunk was weathered like an old man’s face, the flowers trampled from soccer balls, the basil growing up against the fence, the bits of trash stuck in the crumpled leaves.  She pointed at the flowers.  His eyes widened and he started laughing.  She started nudging him towards her door.  He put a hand up to say goodbye.



“Anyway, we better get going,” Lily said.  She was laughing.  She touched my shoulder.  “See you soon.”



“Hey nice to meet you man,” said Amir.  He kept giggling.



“Yeah same.”







I think the very last thing I told Shadman about his true love was that it was her job to shovel the walk in front of her house when it snowed.  This satisfied him and he reminded me of it every time we went shoveling together.  Neither of us saw Lily much any more.  He’d two-hand force his shovel into a particularly deep snowdrift, lean on it, take off his Knicks beanie to wipe his forehead and say,



“I bet she’s doing this right now.”



I’d *tuh* and say, “Yeah.”



We shoveled for money unless the people were old, then Mom forbade us to ask for it but we did let them know that yes, we were hungry.  This year we shoveled an entire driveway for what felt like hours, and at the end the guy gave us four crisp twenties, and said get yourself something nice.  But the shoveling had been so long and so hard.  It was like shoveling an entire soccer field.  It was just Shadman and me by ourselves for a long time.  It wasn’t snowing any more.  I made the same motions over and over again.  I was sweating and grunting and tossing snow left and right like an animal.  Towards the very end I didn’t feel human at all, and I couldn’t think how I was related to someone like Shadman, or the guy paying us, or anybody else.  I felt like a bear, transformed, all sweaty and hairy in my nylon jacket, my arms and legs too long with tiredness, sweat spots appearing on my clothes.  I kept tripping over my shovel.  We kept working and I got more and more uncomfortable, my back sticking to my turtleneck, my blood going like mad. 



Walking home we dragged our shovels behind us.

  We were supposed to go see a movie, get coffee, return calls, kiss, be alone, share a meal together, sleep on the same side of the bed, date, turn the radiator lower, find a studio, get two keys, move out for a while, get coffee, talk, see other people, get drunk, take a cab back to your place at two in the morning, fuck, return calls, date our friends, be angry, run six miles on the sidewalk, take a vacation, try again; get sunburned, sleep on the same side of the bed, reminisce, copy edit, get fired, find new jobs, move to San Francisco, eat only in Italian restaurants, get engaged, wear rings, wear black and console your mother, move back to Brooklyn, find an apartment, have your mother move in, be unhappy—paint the windowsills, drag your fingernails across the floorboard, over the socket with a dusting rag—be parents, buy diapers, find preschools with appropriate learning philosophies, read science books, play classical music, hire babysitters, write Christmas letters, go on family vacation (hate Disneyland, ride It’s a Small World, twice, because the kid loves it), go home, drive to rock concerts with your college friend Stanley, lock the bedroom door, go to Little League, scratch blood on our chests when the kid gets a concussion, play three-way catch, kick soccerballs, gain weight, go to funerals, move to Boston with the office, tell the kid he’ll like the new school, buy a basketball hoop, be pulled away from your mother in assisted living, drink two glasses of red wine at dinner, watch you drink no wine at dinner, stew, be bored in Boston—me walking alongside graveyards, discovering poetry cafes, coming home alone at four in the morning—drive the kid to school, take online classes, go on family vacation, have sex, write longer Christmas letters, watch a De Niro TV movie that hasn’t been on in a while, buy me a leather jacket and let me walk along the water, standing one foot leaned behind the other, watching people, watching men, tell the kid it’s not about him; do well in business, go on family vacation, argue on the balcony while the kid texts, come back, reminisce, edit applications, share a meal, bring your mother home, take prom pictures, shake the kid’s hand, bring the girlfriend on a weekend trip, feel the kid cry, explain love, put the kid’s head on our chests like we used to put ours, unpack the car on a college campus, walk around with college sweatshirts, watch the kid not turn around, wait for the kid to call first: buy books we don’t need any longer, pick grass stems by the river, press our names into each others backs with our fingers sitting on a park bench, stand at a gas station and let the gas drip, go see a movie, get coffee, return, kiss, be alone.

John Wallis sits at his desk in Oxford, England, surrounded by books and mathematical instruments. It is 1655. At the top of a piece of paper he writes the words “Proposition 190” again, hovers over the area underneath, and stops. Out of habit, he crosses the words out. At this point he stands up and sighs, looks out the window, and thinks about his simple, code-breaking youth, before Parliament “honored” him with this Professorship and Chair of Geometry—it really is a terribly drafty workspace. He wonders if these three years of blank pages could have been spent any differently.



At this point, Wallis considers the fact that he has done enough work for the day. He mulls over the idea of walking a few buildings away to talk with his good friend Seth Ward, the Professor of Astronomy, about stars or the rings of Saturn. Nice, healthy, real world stuff. Once again he writes “Proposition 190,” at the top of his sheet of paper. Then he tosses the thing aside to go have a visit across the lawn.



Wallis is writing a book called The Arithmetic of Infinitesimals. Years later, his modern translator will comment that it was “perhaps the one real stroke of genius in Wallis’ long mathematical career,” though she also called it an “often tedious approach through scores of uninspiring Propositions and Corollaries.” When it is done, it will do things like annoy the printer, who will be forced to spend three years fitting Wallis’ odd symbols and drawings into the unwieldy press. It will give Thomas Hobbes, philosopher, fits of cranky rage. It will bridge the gap between geometry and algebra. It will convince a 22-year-old Isaac Newton, after he finishes reading, to invent his calculus. Mostly, it will provide a formula for a funny number called pi, discovering an estimate that is better and cleaner than anything that has come before. After it is done, mathematician Doctor William Oughtred will proclaim Wallis’ “understanding and genius, who have not only gone, but also opened a way into those profoundest mysteries of art, unknown and not thought of by the ancients.”



Right now, however, Wallis is stuck at an uninspired part. In the Comment attached to the end of Proposition 189, he writes, “But here, at last, I am at a loss for words.” He whines at the cruel mathematical fates: “Until now we seem to have carried the thing through happily enough.” He is entirely lost, “For I do not see in what manner I may produce the quantity o.” This value represented by this little square, whose discovery represents the climax of the book, is really pi (If we take 4 and then divide it by o, we get ?).



Pi is a number that appears in every circle: it is the ratio between the circumference and the diameter. In decimal form, it is a number that never ends and never repeats, following no discernible pattern. It is interesting and important because it shows up in all branches of mathematics, from probability to real analysis. The problem is that it’s impossible to define with an exact decimal value, because such a decimal would never end. Indeed, the history of mathematics can in some ways be defined by this side-pursuit, this Holy Grail quest for a good formula for pi. Wallis was one of the first to find one, and his formula laid the groundwork for those that came later.



At Proposition 190, Wallis is still groping for the formula. He doesn’t know all the details yet, though he suspects that he’s approaching something magnificent. Indeed, he calls this elusive o a “slippery Proteus whom we have in hand, both here and above, frequently escaping and disappointing hope.” At times like this the Arithmetica sounds more like a personal journal than a textbook, which is the way Wallis likes to write about math, letting his exuberance for the material pour out unobstructed. When he includes, in the autobiography he wrote near the end of his life, the requisite information about wife and children, he does so only dutifully: “On March 4. 1644/5. I married Susanna daughter of John and Rachel Glyde of Northjam in Sussex; born there about the end of January 1621/2 and baptized Feb. 3 following. By whom I have (beside other children who died young) a Son and two Daughters now surviving.”



But when he talks about his first exposure to mathematics his tone changes completely. “One evening as we were sitting down to supper,” he writes, “a Chaplain of Sir William Waller shewed me an intercepted Letter written in Cipher.” It was a curious little puzzle, and it suited Wallis’ interests from the start. “It was about ten a clock when we rose from Supper,” he writes. “I then withdrew to my chamber to consider of it . . . In about 2 hours time (before I went to bed) I had deciphered it.”



It was the first time he put mathematics to use. Educated at Emmanuel College in Cambridge, he had studied Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Theology, and Logic before undergoing the Holy Orders. As an afterthought, he taught himself rudimentary mathematics from his younger brother’s trade books over the Christmas holiday. With that basic knowledge, Wallis would develop some limited renown for his skill in decoding, working for whatever political group was in power at the moment, by using arithmetic and the laws of numbers to translate letters of utmost state importance.



In 1649 his success led him to a professorship at Oxford, where “Mathematicks, which had before been a pleasing Diversion, was now to be my serious Study.” In 1652 he penned the first words of the Arithmetica, subtitling it, “a New Method of Inquiring into the Quadrature of Curves, and other more difficult mathematical problems.”



What Wallis was doing was moving from geometry to algebra. He was convinced that there was a better way to solve the great mathematical problems than with the circles and conics and outlandish shapes of the Greeks. He wanted to play with numbers. His realm was a pure Platonic one of symbols, ideas. Instead of defining the area of a triangle geometrically he wanted to do it with a series of numbers, added neatly together. That’s how he began, with Proposition 1. Then, in Proposition 3, he ran headlong into the ill-humored Hobbes.



Thomas Hobbes considered himself a terrific mathematician. In a description of his accomplishments written late in life, he wrote, in the third-person, “In mathematics, he solved some most difficult problems, which had been sought in vain by the diligent scrutiny of the greatest geometers since the very beginning of geometry.” In truth he was fairly inept—ridiculed on all sides in the mathematical world—and didn’t quite understand the nuances of more intricate mathematical concepts.



In mathematical philosophy, however, he was annoyingly sharp. It was over such a matter that the Wallis-Hobbes dispute broke out: when, in Proposition 3, Wallis writes, “For the triangle consists, *as it were*, of an infinite number of parallel lines in arithmetic proportion.” Hobbes had a problem with “as it were.” “’As it were’ is no phrase of a geometrician,” Hobbes scolds. The vague wording, complained Hobbes, belied a greater ill. In simple terms, how could width-less lines, even an infinite number of them, make up a finite shape? Philosophical differences on this small matter of infinity led to an increasingly hostile exchange of letters, whose cheeky titles ranged from, “Due Correction for Mr. Hobbes; or Schoole Discipline, for not saying his Lessons right,” to “Markes of the Absurd Geometry, Rural Language, Scottish Church-Politicks, And Barbarismes of John Wallis Professor of Geometry and Doctor of Divinity.”  



Though the essential mathematics of Hobbes’ challenges were entirely wrong, his qualms about Wallis’s conception of infinity still ring true. An example: if you stand one foot away from a red-brick wall, you are a foot away from it. If you go half the distance to the wall, you are half a foot away. Go half the distance again and you’re even closer. But do this forever and you’ll never hit the wall. That’s infinity.



Hobbes refused to wrap his head around the wall. “Whatsoever we imagine,” he wrote in *Leviathan*, “is Finite. Therefore there is no Idea, or conception of anything we call Infinite. No man can have in his mind an Image of infinite magnitude.”



Wallis, on the other hand, is perfectly happy to stick an infinite number of lines in a space two inches wide, to have numbers march on in sequence forever. He just doesn’t worry too much about “out there,” where the numbers get really big. He has a gut feeling that it’s not really necessary to be so exact, and ultimately he’s right: this is where we leave Hobbes, who can’t get over his stubborn adherence to principle.



Wallis’s willingness to fudge things, to keep working forward even if he’s not entirely sure what he’s doing, gets him through nearly 200 propositions, concerning a wild range of information on sequences and arithmetical-geometric connections. But now he has hit a dead end, because, around Proposition 167, he’s found this number, o, that keeps popping up in his wonderfully neat and interesting sequences. He doesn’t know what to do with it. It’s a number that defies expectation.



Imagine trying to think of something that doesn’t exist. Not something vaporous or philosophical, or extraterrestrial in its weirdness, but something that can’t be defined by our rules or systems. This is the difficulty with a number like pi: it cannot be described. It’s not a regular number, not an integer, like the amount of rolls you can buy at a bakery. You can’t get it by dividing two such numbers: it’s more irrational than that. You can’t even describe it with square roots or any such exponential notation, which was the extent of numerical inquiry at the time, after centuries of work. It is a strange number: natural, appearing everywhere, but indescribable, transcendental.



(It deserves mentioning here that we’ve skipped over thousands of years of history, from when the Egyptians built the pyramids and the legend that their measurements had pi in them for spiritual purposes. The point being that mathematics has always been tied up with the world around it, a world that Wallis says is full of “Changes and Alterations.” His is a period during which people were murdered for being Catholic and not Protestant. It is a time “when, by our Civil Wars,” Wallis says, “Academical Studies were much interrupted.” This was a little before the time when Wallis proved the existence of the trinity by the three dimensionality of the cube. All these things are swirling around while Wallis sat at his desk, half a lifetime removed from code-breaking and intrigues of state; half-insulated from the real world in this cocoon of a university; momentarily dropping his religious duties so he could grope for this sea prophet, which, when caught, would tell the future of mathematics in its never-ending succession: 3.1415926535897932384626433 . . .)



Again, here is Wallis, at his desk, at Proposition 190, stuck. He does the only thing he can do, which is keep going. He writes, “It will perhaps not be unwelcome to have put forward.” And then he goes into it, writing out his sequences, juggling them, massaging the information out. He knows what he is up against: “I am inclined to believe (what from the beginning I suspected) that this ratio we seek is such that it cannot be forced out in numbers according to any method of notation so far accepted.” He says, growing bolder, that “what arithmeticians usually do in their work, must also be done here; that is, where some impossibility is arrived at, which indeed must be assumed to be done, but nevertheless can not actually be done, they consider some method of representing what is assumed to be done, though it may not be done in reality.”



This is a wonderful, literary, confusing way of saying that he’s going to use what he knows (infinite sequences of bakery-roll-counting numbers) to describe what he doesn’t know (o). It’s an incredible moment when it happens—when he finally gets to “o =” –but somehow the excitement pales here, in words. One wonders if it’s the discovery, the pure math that’s exciting, or the history: the long search for pi, the march towards understanding, the debates over philosophy and the formative influences of politics and religion. Regardless, this is a moment of pure mathematical insight, a beautifully clean solution, and it made a man famous. One imagines that Wallis knows this as he writes down the last numbers. That he has done something, finally, important. Let’s just assume that when he’s done, he shoves some books from his desk, kicks his chair against the wall, and runs across the lawn to tell the Astronomy professor what has happened.

 



Plato opens his *Republic* with the words, “I went down to the Piraeus yesterday.”  The first verb is “kataben,” from “katabaino,” meaning “I went down,” the same verb that is so prevalent in Book 11 of the Odyssey, in which Odysseus offers his blood and descends into the underworld.



      The movement of Plato’s long meditation can be seen as one of descent.  In many ways the *Republic* is Plato getting off his high horse, descending from the heavens of rationality and righteousness, rolling up his sleeves, licking his lips and preparing to do the dirty work of governance.  He is interested in the human world where people are not perfect.  He is interested in practicality.  His mathematics and high geometry are meant as much for intellectual speculation as they are for the construction of catapults or the guidance of ships at sea.  Plato says that the true philosopher king must go down, must use his rationality and ethics in the sordid real world.



      If the trajectory of the *Republic* starts in the rational heavens and moves to the real world, then Book 11 of the Odyssey starts in the real world and travels down to Hades.  Odysseus is looking for guidance from the dead, but once he obtains it, he busies himself chatting up the residents of this strange land.  He asks his mother for family news.  He greets Achilles who wants to be told all about the exploits of his son.  And everyone else crowds around Odysseus to ask after those they’ve loved and lost.  When Odysseus tells us about his trip he quickly glosses over encounters with the godly dead like Minos and Orion.  He rather spends entire paragraphs on the commonplace: the hovels of fathers, the airing of old arguments, old grudges concerning stolen armor.  No one speaks about death, rather focusing on the banalities and joys of the living.  Death is tempered by this menagerie of the living.



      In Episode 6 of Ulysses, Joyce opens not with kateben but rather with, “Martin Cunningham, first, poked his silkhatted head into the creaking carriage and, entering deftly, seated himself.”  This is Joyce’s recreation of the Odyssean descent to Hades, and while the word kateben itself is lost the motion stays the same: we start with an image of going down, of carriage riders ducking themselves into the funereal vehicle for a ride to the cemetery.  But in this “underworld,” as before, death is only as powerful as the commonplace.  During their deathly descent the men joke amongst themselves (“the sky is uncertain as a child’s bottom”).  They worry about debts. Bloom notes that he is sitting on something hard, and it is making him slightly uncomfortable.  This is a world of death, but it is mostly a world characterized by the worries of the living: where fathers complain about the company their sons keep, where sons observe the anniversaries of their fathers’ suicides.  Death and the everyday go hand in hand, and it is through the everyday that Bloom arrives at the extraordinary. The mutterings of a father remind Bloom of his lost son Rudy, the origins of his marriage: among the most important events in his life.  In the cemetery, Bloom and his compatriots have entered Hades.  But even here—wonder of wonders—they are surrounded by the daily elements of their human world.



      If the tension in literature comes from the embarkation on a journey—a journey down—then the release from that tension comes when we convince ourselves that down-here is mostly the same as up-there.  Bloom sees it when he surveys the crowd-like rows of headstones (“How many!  All these here once walked round Dublin”).  Homer’s underworld and mortal land look strangely alike when, down below, we see Odysseus and Ajax, childlike, failing to reconcile their differences.  But in the *Republic* we see this sameness most explicitly and artistically, in the closing Myth of Er.



      A story of the regenerative afterlife, the myth details the post-mortem travels of the good soldier Er who dies in battle but comes alive again to tell us all about the underworld.  He speaks of hosts of the dead and their great journeys across rivers culminating in a wide meadow where the dead choose who they want to be reincarnated as in the next life.  Should they become rich?  Poor?  Powerful?  Should they be a hero?  Or simply reclusive and unknown?  It is Plato’s belief that to make the right choice, to pick a future life that will be good and happy, one must be schooled in the ways of justice and reason.  This is the ultimate carrot at the end of the string, an all-important reason to be good.



      Tracing the trajectory of the *Republic*, the rational philosopher-king must go down from the heavens in order to school the masses in the ways of justice.  Then these pupils must carry themselves up, just as Er does at the end of the myth.  After their transformation, the reincarnated travel past the River of Unheeding and up the stream of forgetfulness, elevated back to the earthly plane.  What goes down has come up.  The two worlds become the same.



      This is why the opening of the *Republic* sounds so familiar to us, from, “I went down to the Piraeus,” to, “The slave caught hold of my cloak from behind: Polemarchus wants you to wait, he said.” That’s when the philosophical conversation starts.  In the lines up to it, Plato describes his descent into a real world that he can make just as holy as his rational heaven.  He sees it so vividly, this world that he is so fond of, this land of human interaction and human agency: He tells us that “he went down to the Piraeus” yesterday with Glaucon, Ariston’s son.  He wanted to say a prayer to the goddess, but mostly he wanted to see the parade that was coming through.  Perhaps he watched the young girls tossing flowers or saw the old drunks staggering behind.  He says he enjoyed himself at this admittedly frivolous entertainment, and was about to head back to Athens.  Just then—a swish of a cape, a darting hand—a slave catches hold of his cloak.  He bids him wait because his master wants a word.

     It looks just like a real dugout at first, until you notice certain things: the donkeys out in left, the patio where the mental outpatients sit, asking why you’re not allowed to kick the ball when it comes your way. The outpatients live in the psychiatric facility behind the third-base line, next to the stable sitting in home-run territory. Behind home plate is a refugee asylum, where little Eastern-European children ride tricycles out of their sandboxes toward the bleachers when there are games. One of the players brings a blowup tent that he puts over the stands, and there’s a plastic sign somewhere: Ballpark PZ Hard Embrach, home of the Embrach Mustangs, second-best semi-professional baseball team in Switzerland.

     It’s a perfect dugout, even if it is above ground. A banner hanging from the top says in garish font: Home of the Embrach Rainbows. (No longer the organization’s name—there was a change after the Americans on the team explained the insinuation—but old habits die hard). The bench inside is splinter-free; the section closer to home plate has bunkers for helmets and gloves. The concrete floor is spitted with sunflower seeds, happily strewn. You can pretend that you’re in some forgotten corner of America where this plot of land was all that was left to build a baseball field on. You can overlook everything, the bumps at third base, the soccer goal in center—but it’s impossible to glance towards the first-base line and ignore the conspicuous lack of an away-team dugout.



     Baseball stopped being America’s urban game many years ago, overtaken by basketball and football. In inner city fields, in Boston and New York, Los Angeles and Austin, dugouts lie overgrown and neglected, filled with beer cans and shadows. Some dugouts are left without even a bench to sit on: just a little chain-link fence, no canopy to protect from the sun. Without fail, however, there will be two—one dugout for one side, one for the other.

     Because baseball is a symmetrical game. It’s why people don’t mind paying twenty dollars for a cheap seat thirty stories up—from there the diamond is laid out for you in all its night-game splendor. Baseball’s a fair sport, too. Everybody gets the same number of outs, and the home team has to stay until the away team’s done, no matter how long it takes. There are rules on how hot or cold you’re allowed to keep the balls you use in games, so no one has an advantage.

     Which is why it’s just not baseball, just not right, simply unsportsmanlike and downright un-American, to have no dugout for the visiting team. It’s something I never feel confident enough even to joke around about with Roger, our Swiss coach, ace pitcher and roofer-by-day, who discovered baseball at nineteen while on holiday in New York. He’s been pitching ever since. Everyone knows the legend of how he got three wins in a weekend, pitching three complete games. The day we played the Therwil Flyers, European Cup finalists and kings of Swiss baseball, he threw nine innings after spilling boiling tar on his forearms. He explained to us while we were stretching that you have to just let it cool on your arm, otherwise you’d take the skin off along with the tar. People that competitive don’t necessarily care much about the physical comfort of the opposing team.

     No one else seemed to find the missing dugout odd either. True, one day while playing Bern in a near-constant downpour, our right-fielder ran to his car for umbrellas to lend to the Cardinals so they could keep their gear dry. But this was Carly, Australian-born, who shouted God Dahmmit after he struck out, and he wasn’t quite Swiss anyway, though he’d lived here all his life.



     Switzerland is not an obvious tourist hotspot, unless it’s for financial transactions or enjoyment of the country’s physical beauty—the lakes that reach fingers out to mountains scraping snowy tops toward the clouds. The lifestyle blends with the outdoors. In Zurich there are no prohibitions against outdoor drinking, so the lakeside grass fills up with all age-groups, day and night, swimming next to sailboats when it’s hot enough and setting off candle-powered balloons in the dark. The summertime Street Parade brings millions to Zurich’s streets, which grow crowded with truck-drawn floats pumping trance music for hundreds of gyrating bodies. There are city-government tents scattered around where you can get drugs checked for safety. But look in the newspaper the next morning, and you won’t see any incidents of knifings or late-night assaults. The streets are swept clean by noon.

     Baseball in Switzerland conforms to Swiss principles. Nowhere else in the world, probably, do baserunners slide into second with their spikes politely down, to avoid injury to players from opposing teams. After a game when some of our American players got into a good-natured trash-talking match with the Barracudas’ second-baseman, our coach received an email from the opposing coach saying that he should really talk to those unruly players, that such conduct reflected badly on them and the team as a whole.

     Still, there is something very Swiss about the away-dugout situation that is more revealing than neutrality and chocolate. They are a people who like things the way they are, on the left side of the infield or behind their portion of the mountains. If you don’t like it, you really will get out. Here, the visiting teams are visitors, made to feel not entirely at home—squatting in front of the bleachers with their fans and supporters and bags of belongings. That attitude makes sense in a country where it takes twelve years to become a citizen, where you can give birth to a daughter who will never be Swiss, though Switzerland is the land her feet first touched. There is a marked separation between in and out, between foreign and not, in a place that doesn’t allow minarets in the same cities where Zwingli once pounded on vaunted, unornamented Grossmunster pulpits.



     But baseball is baseball, wherever you go. People make errors on ground balls hit right to them, batting practice takes place two hours before game-time, teams sit on the sidelines while they watch the rain on the field. Seasons are won and lost. The smell of pine tar mixes with the smoke from the sausages on the grill. Baseball is apolitical. Teammates from Cuba talk about the price of beer in Berlin with Austrian nationals who’ve lived here all their lives. Switzerland has been the happy home of the Swiss National Baseball League—a vibrant, pulsing group of Americans, Dominicans, Germans, year-after-college-students, itinerant bums—for forty years, even though baseball is anything but a homegrown sport. And besides, what does the lack of one dugout say about a national character—how can you characterize a country, city to city, farm to farm, on the basis of a sports construction?  Maybe they ran out of money before building the second.

     There’s the business of the name, the Rainbows. How many American dugouts, even if there were two of them, would have *Rainbows* painted across one top? It’s still there, on the Embrach dugout, the Swiss team-members refusing to take it down or paint it over. They like telling the story of how the Rainbows got their name; it goes like this:

      It was a hot day out in Embrach, one of the ones where you wear only a T-shirt to take infield before the game starts. The sort where you carry two pairs of socks and change them before the first pitch, wringing the water out of the dirty pair. It was a big game, vs. the Flyers, and the whole Embrach baseball community was out—the friends and family, the refugees kicking soccer balls in their compound, the outpatient who was our biggest fan who told us the scores of all the games in the country, the donkeys out in left. It was a close game until the seventh when a light rain started, and the Flyers put together three runs, on the basis of some bunt-hits and stolen bases. The bottom of the ninth came and Embrach’s cleanup hitter was up, with three men on, two out, a fastball on the upper outside corner, when the rain stopped, and. You understand. Under this sign conquer.

     The name was changed last year after a competition. Mustangs won out over Jets. Still, it doesn’t have the same ring.

When I was eleven there was a real push in my family to build a deck over our backyard, out from the kitchen on the second floor. This was a real motion, like the time when my father said that he was considering getting a dog for my brother and me, though that never actually materialized. But the building of the deck looked real, obstacled only by the old-man berry tree in the garden plot and the basketball hoop whose base was filled with sand. Joe, who lived next door, had promised to help us build it. Or else he knew a guy.



Building a deck meant staying on Avenue R for a summer, a real decision because usually my parents, teachers, saved what they could so we could go away for a few weeks while we were all off school. Both of them had travelled extensively in their youth and it was something of a tradition. This was a priority, more important than new furniture, or painting the kitchen, or going out to dinner. But to build a deck we’d need to stay put for a while, to save the travel money, at least for a year or two.



Joe had been advocating the construction of a deck in our backyard for years, in no small part because he couldn’t wait to be the one who personally cut down the berry tree. It was on the edge of our backyard, right next to the fence, meaning that, to be fair, at least half of it grew over into Joe’s own property. The snow in the winter made the branches crack and fall and in the summer, berries: ones that no amount of scrubbing the carpet or yelling at rulebreakers to take their shoes off could help. Though they smelled wonderful when crushed, purple and everlasting.



Building a deck was serious business on Avenue R, still is. There is an alleyway that runs behind our backyards that was built, so they say, for the garbage trucks to come through and do their business. Which means that we have this illusion of space, enclosed by fences, backyards jutting out to a long asphalt alleyway even in the middle of Brooklyn. We have our berry tree. Most of the houses have basketball hoops and in the alley we play football, tackle, when it snows. The houses touch on either side and Avenue R at our front entrances rumbles citylike by, but out here, where the deck would go, it feels like perpetual country summer. My mother swears that it’s ten degrees more temperate “in the back.”



Which is why everyone wants a deck, to double their living space, to extend their second floors into the outdoors, to have this little quiet area to take the sun and barbecue and listen to Spanish radio. The couple on the end hangs their laundry there. The next one over has lots of plants and vines. Joe on our immediate right has a nice and simple one, just the barbecue and a few lawn chairs, but he likes to stand for hours at the edge of his and watch what’s going on, up and down the alleyway, like at the helm of a ship.



 



What’s going on Joe?



Nothing, nothing.



Same old.



Same old, he says.



 



*



 



When Joe was younger he was a cop. Those were tough days to wear blue, back in the sixties. Some people liked you, sure, but you also had lots of enemies. It didn’t help if your last name was Castellano. He told me that he’d only had to draw his gun once, thank God, but had never shot it, though there were some chases, and guns pulled on him.



There’s a story he sometimes tells that everyone used to know in the city, though most people have forgotten now, about when a city councilman brought a friend into City Hall, and no one patted him down. And then the friend took his place up in the gallery, and stood up and took a shot at the city councilman on the floor. But the real part of the story, what’s crazy, is that there was a cop, a regular police detective, who was plainclothes in the lower level: and he took one look up at the shooter and shot him, surrounded by people, dead, one bullet. It’s a great and gruesome story, but I particularly like the way that Joe tells it: with great sensitivity to the angle of the police detective’s shot, how he was from below, the jutting out of the upper balcony, the levered supports, the force of gravity. These are things he took into consideration when he built his own deck, or oversaw the guys doing it, I forget which: for Joe it amounts to the same thing, him maintaining a terrible disdain for people who can’t or won’t do their own work.



Joe has a lot of respect for the United States Army and fond memories of his days serving in part because it allowed him to get to Europe as a young man, the only time he ever traveled. He was stationed in Germany for a while after the war: not so much fighting as policing, or giving tours, wherever they went. But this seems to have done it for him: he’s satisfied with what he’s seen. The extended family comes to Avenue R on holidays, when his wife Angie cooks enormous dinners at the stove in the kitchen overlooking the deck. He doesn’t like to stay overnight in other places, doesn’t even like to drive so much anymore—once he told me a terrifying story about how sometimes red lights look green to him. Yeah you know, they just look green? he said. It didn’t seem to bother him too much. He likes his time at home.



 



*



 



The thing about a deck on Avenue R is that it stands for stationary. These things aren’t quite legal, by city law, and they cost a lot to do, so it’s not like you’d just move out a couple of years after the last two-by-four’s put down. Decks are for summer afternoons, for people to sit on deck chairs and look up at the smog. From here the cars on the other side of the houses sound like rushing water, or waves, just like you’re on a beach. There aren’t many restaurants in this part of Brooklyn because everyone cooks their own dinners, then eat them out on the decks, staggering dinnertimes so neighbors don’t overlap. The Q train is a car-ride away, so getting into the city is hard—easier to stay out here and relax.



The older my brother and I got on Avenue R, the more decks there were. When we were little there was just the one that was a homerun if you hit a Whiffle ball on top.  Then they started popping up like Bloomberg campaign posters. We kept putting it off. Next year, next year.  That summer when I was eleven or so was the culmination.  There were heated discussions about the construction: my father especially didn’t want to be tethered down. He’d always loved the city across the river and wanted to be as close to it as possible. This was a distant second. This was the year my uncle died, and I remember peering from the stairwell and watching my mother say to the mirror: My world is falling apart.



We never built a deck behind our house and in a way it’s good, because then there’d be five decks in a row with no separation, and we’d really be stepping on each others’ toes. But somehow it signifies that we haven’t put our roots down yet, even though my brother and I have lived here all our lives. We’re afraid to. There’s something of the frightened nomad in us. We could leave anytime. We’d leave nothing behind.



To build a deck, first you have to measure and lay out the site. You have to install the ledger, and pour the footings, and set the posts. There is a point in the middle of the process where you lay the decking. Then the railings, then the sweet-smelling paint that keeps the thing from rotting away. I can imagine Joe building it with me. I can see Joe with a t-shirt tucked into his pants, tossing me a bottle of water, asking me why I went away. Everything’s here. You can even keep the goddamn tree, if you want: it’ll just be a short deck.



I love that tree, the berries, the face of an old man growing out the middle of the trunk. I used to love looking at it when we’d park the car in the backyard after some trip. While Dad got the bags out of the back I’d stand in front of it and let it scare me a little. The face always looks like it’s yelling. I’d stick a twig inside its mouth. Home, I’d say.

In 1639 an Englishman known to history only as R. Willis writes an account of a morality play that he saw seventy years before.  At this time morality plays are widely popular and simply constructed, portraying not flesh and blood characters but Characteristics: Willis and his contemporaries watch spellbound as Mankind, World and Youth wander a stage hindered by Vice, All-For-Money, Riot.  This is Christian country—it is clear who wins in the end.  But for a short time the audience is allowed to cast off its strict morals.  Riot is funny, Vice is captivating.  They drag their innocent charges into taverns for drink, brothels for pleasure.  The attraction of evil and its comic buffoonery is exploited, allowed*.*



Around 1584, not long after Willis saw The Cradle of Security, William Shakespeare writes Titus Andronicus.  The groundlings love it.  Critics deride it.  It is too bloody— outrageously so—exhibiting rape, cannibalism and madness.  The most excessive violence is coordinated by Aaron the Moor, messenger and clown.  He seems simply enamored of chaos, and sports a perverse sense of humor that he tosses about along with ferocious intensity. In the end he is buried alive by his detractors.  But living, he is methodical in villainous planning, chaotic in his use of nonsensical force.



Watching The Dark Knight in 2008, the Joker is the focus.  In truth he always has been, even in the comic books: Batman relied on force, stealth and the good old one-two, the Joker is an artist, meditatively calculating.  Laughing his way through the colored pages, he deploys miniature circuses, exploding footballs, overflowing canals, mist emitting coffee mugs. Just as Aaron discloses  his evil plans to the audience, we catch glimpses of the Joker’s clockwork mind ticking in museum basements, and next to tower windows, as he explains his next act.



Motive is irrelevant, madness underlies method, put your head to this gun and flip your coin to see if you live. Introduce a little anarchy.



In the end the Joker isn’t buried. He doesn’t awkwardly disappear in the face of Virtue like Willis’ specters did.  In the movie we last see him swinging wonderfully from his feet, hair flying, makeup laughing. The cops are coming to take him in.  It seems that the Joker, force of anti-virtue and cold violence, has laughed his last.



But perhaps that’s not what audiences want to see: the Joker’s demise is not what interests us in Batman.  Like Aaron and the Vices, who drive their dusty plays, promising relevancy, the Joker is brought back and back again by reader demand.  In the history of comic books, he is the first character ever to be un-killed.



 

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.