Colosseum

Of this I can be certain: Liam’s head is swiveled east, away from the remains of the sunset, where what was April 15th, 2012 is saying adios and leaving a wide loud wipe of pinkish residue in its wake. The building that Liam is looking at is tall, rectangular, shore-colored; squares pop on yellow-white as the day recedes. Liam counts five windows illuminated. Six. The aluminum report of contact: Liam whips to watch the ball slice past the third baseman – bounce, catch, runner rounds to second, left fielder throws to second baseman to cut him off, runner’s back at first. Liam’s in right field. Come back, he is saying to himself: what if the batter hadn’t pulled it? He does the mental equivalent of slapping himself in the face to wake up. Say that guy had swung later: the ball would bounce past first, trace its erratic path back to the fence, and the hard cork on chain-link would articulate in a clink – that sound that only he can hear while all of his teammates, his mother, everyone else in the stands watch what is basically a silent-movie comedy reel, where he’s running back and trying to grab the ball while it bounces and rolls all over the place. And Shit, shit, shit, he’d be saying to himself, hearing the cardial fury of his just-awakened heart, the hush of the ball rolling away from him on stiff St. Augustine grass.

Hivelike confusions of gnats buzz up. Parents sit with sweet tea in Styrofoam on the anodized bleachers. Chunks of lemon float with shrinking lumps of ice. On the dirt paths that wind through the 5 and ½ fields (the half being a non-fenced T-ball field) that make up West End Little League, prepubescent kids in flat-bill hats cycle slowly on handmedown bikes beside girls somehow nervous and apathetic simultaneously, holding the boys’ seasoning-scorched French fries in one hand, opening and closing thin, red flip-phones in the other.

Something they say to each other sometimes: “Will you do a lap with me?” Read: “I’m interested.” Can we walk around this field by ourselves, talking every once in a while, generally tense, while I debate whether or not to reach for your hand, using the fact that I’m on an undersized one-speed and, if I actually did try to reach for your hand or arm or whatever, might lose my balance and domino you into the fence and literally never live this down as a reason to keep my right hand firmly on this worn rubber-nubbed handlebar grip that will leave my palm blackened and smelling weird?

Liam is watching one such pair circle the Colosseum, wondering if this is what this kid is thinking. These are kids: 12 or 13, probably. Liam is 14. Technically, this is Pony League, just above Little League. He remembers doing that exact thing once: circling this field — or maybe it was A3 — either way, it was definitely before this field was redone, with Laurie, who at the time still had braces but was about to get them off, but that was okay, it was okay even if they didn’t come off, Liam had thought. They actually made two laps. When they got back to the home plate side, where they’d started, Liam still hadn’t made a move for her hand. He wasn’t even on a bike: just walking beside her. He thought to himself: I can do this. He asked her to walk around the field with him again. He thought he saw something move in the bushes behind the outfield. “If your right hand sins, chop it off.” He always thought this was goofy; he always thought of puppets. But walking beside Laurie, he got it. The thing just would not move; it had an agenda of its own. The fingers would, but not the hand. The closest he got was taking it out of his pocket. He really couldn’t do it.

They come back around to the beginning, marked by the wooden green door below the announcement booth that the older kids say is haunted. One of the older kids once told Liam that he went in there one night and heard a voice. Daring one another to go into the door is usually an important part of the walk-date, but, of course, neither will. 

Alex Morrette walks up to the batter’s box; suddenly, Liam feels like everyone is watching him, like this is some kind of test. He squints at the stands: nobody’s watching him, they’re all watching Morrette. Of course: he’s batting cleanup for a reason. Liam shakes the feeling. He takes his hand out of his back pocket, crouches down.

A slider that doesn’t slide. Absolute meatball. Morrette nails it, but he’s late – it’s a line drive on the outside of the first base line, headed right toward the outfield bleachers. Liam knows he should be running, at least to just make a show that he’s trying to catch a foul ball to end the inning, but he’s being really slowed down by the fact that he’s thinking, It’s going out. It’s totally going out. It’s gonna hit the net – I think it’s gonna hit the net. So really he’s just jogging, setting himself up so that he has totally no real possibility of getting to the ball before it slips, improbably, through the 10-foot space between the dugout fencing and the netting and heads straight for the outer fencing. Oh, fuck, fuck, fuck, Liam thinks, already formulating an explanation as to why he wasn’t even running for the ball.

The Colosseum: Noah heard his Dad calling it that to another dad. Nick had just finished a segment in history on ancient Rome and they were talking about the Colosseum and about how it was this big round thing where people would watch people fight each other and prove themselves and Noah and Liam, the two most uncompetitive kids on the field, thought it would be funny to call the baseball field that. “Proving yourself.”

Couldn’t have even gotten there, Coach – sorry but just no way.

Liam watches as the foul ball finds purchase with a nauseous thump right in the mouth of a man with dark but greying hair, sitting alone, wearing scrubs, who wasn’t watching Morrette. The man was watching the young couple circle the field. His hands go to his face, he slumps against the seat behind him, and Liam starts running, really running, hops the fence, and bounds up the empty bleachers to him, each of which makes hollow protestations against his anxious weight.

* * *

Things I should tell you: I’m watching this happen from the announcement booth, and I make notes in my ledger about the things that happen and things that will happen. Basically, they don’t happen — didn’t, won’t happen — unless they go in my ledger. My name is Chad Cronkite. Friends used to call me Cronk. I’m the commissioner for West End Little League. I run all the games. The strange shape of the field is my doing. Once, my daughter, a tomboy, climbed the netting and then fell and broke her arm, cracked her sternum. In the off-season I initiated a big overhaul of the field’s fencing so that it was circular, and then I oversaw the reconfiguration of the benches into an angle that wouldn’t require netting at all, so that kids with big heads wouldn’t be tempted to try and climb it and end up hurting themselves. That, of course, didn’t work — I don’t know much about geometry. The normal netting went back up, but the strange, round fencing stayed. Total waste of money, and people won’t let me forget it. The other dads call it the Colosseum, and everyone knows it’s a joke at my expense.

Things have been tough. I feel often that I’m not a good man. 

* * *

The light in the operating room has a real presence. The light that gives everything a sheen it’ll never get rid of, including this girl’s opened chest, so even when they close her up, the light will still be there, this hot white light, unable to get out, trapped in deep, arterial red, clinging to the purple of her heart, maybe squirming and unable to escape, and she’ll say, Something feels weird, and Mike’ll say, I think it’s that operation-room light, ha, ha, no, I mean, we just performed an angioplasty for Chrissakes, I bet it feels a bit weird, that’s totally normal. Sometimes, people ask him: What do you do for a living, Mike? I save lives, he says. And when he gets home: I saved two lives today, Marg. I only saved one life today, slow day. I saved three. No big deal, it’s just what I do. Scrubs the color of the sea. Breastbone the color of birthday cake. These gloves are too small – out of Large, had to use Medium. Thank God they’re powdered. The balloon/stent’s going in. Good job. He murmurs commands. Everyone’s dialed, everyone knows what they’re doing. Routine. But he has this thing where he always has the urge to look up, just look around, just look at this room, clogged with sharp light and braids of wires, the white walls, to just look up and around and memorize this room, because, Christ, how many rooms in this world have seen the actual inside of somebody’s chest, have seen the real heart of someone, the real actual cardial tissue, the stuff that really keeps you alive?

Linoleum floor in his periphery, peach and lake-foam. The ceiling cross-hatched by erector-set metal reflected in the instrument tray. Somewhere, a window, and an anesthesiologist through the window. Mike doesn’t look up: he looks down; he resists: he does his job. 

One time Mike succumbed to the urge and looked up and around during a surgery he was watching in medical school. Afterwards, the proctor took him aside. What the hell was that? You can’t do that. You cannot do that – you shouldn’t be looking anywhere but where your hands are, or, when you need to, at the monitors. I know you were just watching but we gotta treat these like the real thing. This is literally life-and-death, Michael. I know you know that. This is, what, your eighth year for Chrissakes. It should go without saying. But hey, don’t sweat it.

Did he tell him not to sweat it? Mike doesn’t know if he’s remembering right. Either way: Mike, in this moment, really, really wants to look up, to look around, a compulsion probably a dozen more intense today because of the patient profile. Forceps, please, he says, and dabs his gloved fingers (certainly non-perfused and Jesus Christ probably ischemic any minute now) on the paper towel beside the instrument platter to soak away the slippery blood.

In six full years of medical practice, Mike has so far successfully avoided surgery on patients below the age of thirty. This actually was the reason he decided on his specialty in the first place: it’s extraordinarily rare for a young person to need an angioplasty. Almost every patient he gets is over fifty, often a slightly-overweight to borderline-obese male, usually with a history of smoking and consuming red meat in behemothian quantities, and this is exactly on whom Mike wants to operate.

Here’s why: at one point, Mike believed he wanted to be a paramedic. Before medical school, he got his paramedic’s certification, and it wasn’t until the end of his one-month stint as an EMT shadow that he realized he couldn’t do it. It was a weird case: they had to report to the scene of a train/car collision, which only happens maybe once every couple of years in their district. This other EMT on the ambulance, Ryan, was saying that he’s only been on one of these runs once before and it was totally pointless, there was barely anything left of the person, just blood and fascia and bone splinters spread out for like a hundred yards in every direction of the collision. Jesus Christ, said Mike. When they got there, though, the train was still and the car was kinked around the cowcatcher.

Turns out, and Mike gathered this from the location of the clothes in the car and the brief limping spurts of noise that emitted from the glitchy hush of the car’s broken radio, the kids were most likely hooking up in the car (someone asked what in the fuck were they doing straddling the tracks and Mike said no clue), and had music on, and probably the music was loud enough that they didn’t hear the horn of the oncoming train, and in the movements of the act they didn’t notice the car vibrating, only heard the screech of the train’s brakes as it approached, but by then it was too late, maybe the boy’s heart rate rose even more as he reached for the keys in the front seat, fumbling, stomach curdled and brain stem all but coiled for impact. And it seemed that the conductor was able to throw on the brakes right when the car’s outline came appeared in the beam of the 2,000 lumen pilot light because he was, unlike most of his night-shift peers, actually awake, because he “don’t know how to say it but [he] just had a feeling about tonight.” The braking happened soon enough that the train didn’t obliterate the car, and their bodies were relatively intact, but it seemed clear that they were both gone, boy broken-looking over the girl’s body in the back seat, both naked; boy pulled out of the clenched metal fist of the vehicle and declared dead after a round of vitals; girl pulled out after, seemingly more blood on her, although it was assumed that much of it was from the body above her. The call was made to put her on the backboard and take her to the ambulance, although Mike was certain she was lost, a certainty with which came an inflow of some kind of relief, which is a thing that sounds horrible when he thinks about this off-scene but in the end makes total sense because when he is there the worst thing to see is someone in the throes of some hellish suffering and their death at least means the thing is gone. Mike was at the front of the backboard and thus responsible for looking down and watching the girl’s face, an eyelid closed and one half-open, and he’d look down every couple of seconds as a technicality, he thought, but three-quarters of the way down the slope to the ambulance, he looked down and in that instant her eye fluttered totally open and her chest heaved and blood came out of her mouth, and the game, pretty much, was up: Mike almost dropped the backboard, and once they slid her into the ambulance Mike had to go around to the treeline and throw up. He was having what paramedics call a vaso-vagal reaction, something humans have when they aren’t accustomed enough to being around another human’s physical pain. They waited for him. He said, I’m so sorry, it’s not going to happen again, and hopped in through the back and they sped off through the cop cars, and Mike, trying not to imagine a doctor later telling him that they were exactly the amount of time it took for Mike to vomit too late, watching while Ryan put an IV between the bruises on her arm, kept replaying that moment in his head, that moment when he realized how much pain was in front of him, unimaginable, beyond intense, somehow made worse coming right after what they must have been doing in the car, timid unclippings and whispered apologies for uncut fingernails and childish giggling about all the sweat (mid-June), the condensation of all sense and feeling into this one unimaginably dense dough-ball of dark matter, and it was in this moment that Mike felt like he sensed a thing, a value almost numerical in its severity, somewhere in the ballpark of the sum total of life and death. He’d never felt this before, and when he tried to tell Margaret about it later that night at her place he sounded like an insane person. He felt like he was trying to describe something whose only true quality is that it can't be described. He started crying for the first time in front of her in their relationship. He was embarrassed.

After, she held him for a while before they pulled apart, her with her hand still cupping his jaw and cheek. He said, let’s just watch some TV. Of course, she said, whatever you want to watch. He turned on the television and plugged in a random channel. Baseball. The A’s and the Mariners. He never was a fan, but he watched long after Margaret’s breathing steadied and lengthened. In the ninth inning, 5-2 A’s, a Mariners player with “Johnston” on the back of his jersey struck out and threw his bat as hard as he could on the ground. When Mike woke up the next morning (early, long before Margaret, leaving without showering, later telling Margaret it was because he had to go talk to his supervisor), Mike felt two things: one, embarrassment for vomiting on the scene and for how he had acted last night with Margaret, and two, the realization that, really, at the end of the day, for the sake of his patients, he should find some way to avoid dealing with bloody children.

All of this is why Mike decided on being an angioplasty specialist. But this patient, Abigail Something, is seventeen. He’d seen her mother drop her off at the desk.

Mike has done better than he thought he would, though. He never looked up. In fact, he feels that after years of surgery, maybe he’s desensitized enough to the human body to be able to comfortably perform surgery on underage patients. The note on her profile said this would be her third heart operation. The profile said the last one, which was a couple years ago, went really haywire. After, they thought they patched up their mistake — something about a tricky, congenitally fused artery —- enough back then, but after two years it turns out they were wrong, which is why she found her way onto Mike’s table. Christ, he’d thought. Kid’s been through it. But he isn’t letting any of that get to him — he’s doing fine, he’s keeping his eyes down.

This changes, of course, when her eyes open.

Not fully, of course. More of a fluttering, a half-opening. But that’s all it takes for the room to start reeling. Luckily, they’re near the end — his co’s can finish everything up.

He needs to leave.

He spoke to his sister earlier this week — she told him his nephew, Noah, had a baseball game today. Yes, this is it — he hadn’t been to one this season yet, and he told Noah that he would go to one before the playoffs in case they don’t make it.

He leaves the room the moment his co’s start the stitching. Y’all don’t need me for this, he’d said through his mask.

He drives to West End and steps out of his car into the humid dusk. He can’t find his sister, but he sees Noah on second base on the first field he comes to, one with strange round fencing around its perimeter. He takes a seat on the dugout side of the outfield seating. Across the field, Mike can see two kids following the fence on the other side of the field, one on a bike and the other walking beside her. At one point, the boy gets off the bike, and after a few yards of walking, reaches out and takes the girl’s hand. In this moment, Mike remembers turning to look at Margaret that night after the train crash, her face turned toward him, fully asleep. He had not yet memorized all of her features, and had noticed then a freckle on her temple just north of her hairline. Everything was still early with them then, all still carbonated with the intensity of new feeling. Mike remembers looking away from Margaret and putting his head in his hands, bloated with a sadness and a shame that had their roots somewhere in the fact of his proximity to something he wanted so deeply to impress.

A new batter walks up in the Colosseum.

And then, of course: me, Cronk, up in the announcement booth, looking down at the scorecard; Liam, looking at the ball; Mike, lights out.

* * *

A couple years ago, my daughter died on the operating table and then came back to life. I was supposed to be with my wife in the waiting room. I wasn’t — I was working on a chunk of fencing out in right field during the remodel. I’d have gotten slaughtered if I took anything more from the West End budget, so I started going out there after work to finish it up before Opening Day. My wife used the word “obsessed” a lot. I’d buy my own materials, too, which really strained the bank account. My wife’s an English teacher at the public school, and my contracting business has been slowly sinking for a few years.

So I was out there, cutting my palms on fencing, when Abigail was dead on an operating table for a full 68 seconds. When she back came to, it was Sherry, and only Sherry, by the bed, holding her hand.

I came home to find a note from my wife on the kitchen counter. It wasn’t just that you weren’t with there with me — like you said you’d be — when our daughter actually fucking died, one sentence read. It was also that I realized then how thin the boundary is between life and death, how easy it is to slip through it, and how much precious time I’ve wasted with you. When was the last time you told me I was beautiful? When was the last time you asked me if I’ve had a good day? After some more questions like those, she wrote that she and Abigail were going to move into an apartment that her sister rents out, and that the divorce process had already started.

I’ve tried to see Abigail a couple times since then. Sherry tells me she doesn’t want to see me, so I’ve stopped trying. 

* * *

She is climbing, totally blank white sky checkered by the net, polyester of small enough diameter that it seems to cut into her digits but large enough to sustain her ascending weight, feet jutting awkwardly with the net’s give; she is high up, she is not looking down because she feels that if she would she’d fall, blank white sky and bleeding digits reminding her of her father’s bean garden three years before her second operation went wrong; back when he had her weeding roots, thin recalcitrant ropes of living plant like fishline against her middle finger, Dad coming out only periodically with his tumbler of lukewarm water to give her a sip, saying, Abs, sorry, but this needs to be going a bit faster, I will be out in a sec, I just need to do a couple more things, and her continuing to weed, trying to go faster, piles of plants and rootveins steadily growing by the walk to the back door, and the clouds seeming to compress the air into whatever water is the moment before it bloats into a droplet, droplets already condensating on her upper lip like the sweat-stache her mother had coming back from a tennis lesson, which disgusted Abigail.

Abigail felt that what she was doing was sort of like the opposite of gardening, and something about bending and constant tugging and periodic request to increase her speed was resulting in a kind of tightness in her chest and a mild nausea that Abigail couldn’t quite place, sort of like if she jumped in a carbonated pool, ripped jeans too hot for the day and digging into her stomach bending down, and Dad finally coming out with small packets and saying Here, Abigail, keep doing that maybe even a little faster if you can but have a look at these small packets these are the beans, and if you can when you’re done just make little trenches from one side to the other like this, and Abigail saying Dad I think I need a break I don’t feel great, and Dad not really saying anything, just focusing on the packets of plantable beans, and something starting to seem even more off about the way Abigail felt, and Abigail finally not being able to help it, it just happening, her falling over, desperately hoping that that didn’t seem like some kind of dramatic attention-ploy, really a result of the fact that she could no longer command her arms to rip the roots from the ground or really even to move at all, and Dad saying Abs? and then moving over her, and she remembering this moment, he outlined in the pale sky, fissures in the clouds moving and moving, strangely fast, and she saying something like, Something’s wrong, something’s wrong.

Dad was saying, she thinks, Okay, okay, Abs can you stand no okay I will be right back I am going to get the phone, and he’d come back and sit by her and say just hold tight, Abs, look at me, and she looked at him, and he saying, This will be fine I’m telling you this will be fine, just look at me, until the ambulance came which she could hear from down the street, which by that time she had closed her eyes in pain, hot and emanating from her chest, her first encounter with this pain, Dad saying please just keep your eyes open and look at me, all this a few years before the big thing happened, all this remembered while Abigail climbs the net in the anesthesia dream.

Her arms are not tired, neither are her legs, she’s just climbing, climbing, rope polyester or nylon and really digging into her fingers; eventually she reaches the top of the netting and sees the massive pale sky uncheckered. She looks to her left, into the announcement booth, and sees a two figures, a taller one sitting, a smaller one. She tries to maneuver to the window. From within the booth she hears her dad saying Abs, Christ, please, the ambulance will be here in one second I just really need you to keep your eyes open for me, her remembering that she felt almost a pity for him in that moment in the bean garden and so she manages to open her eyes, strangely, mainly to try and comfort him — and when she does force her eyes open, which feels like shoving open the heavy window to the announcement booth with just one hand, she glimpses a gleaming ceiling like a massive chrome mosquito wing and a man in a mask with dark but greying hair with whom she makes a second’s eye contact, his eyes shrunk down to the size of pellets through the wrong end of a pair of surgeon’s magnified glasses.

* * *

Once people crowded around the man in scrubs, Liam was pretty much shooed out of the way by the adults on the bleachers. Liam saw a lot of blood coming from the man’s mouth and wasn’t at all sure what he should do. He was, shamefully, glad when he was told to get out of the way. Apparently, one of the other dads was also a doctor. The game started again after ten minutes or so, but nobody was focused. It was the ninth inning. Morrette was expected to finish his at-bat even after braining the man in the scrubs, which had him shaken. He flubbed a grounder to third which won the out and finished the game.

Now, Liam is hiding from his mother, having wandered to the Away side of the field while the other kids try to ignore the situation in the bleachers and hit the postgame concessions stand. He wonders what his mother will say, whether she will even realize that Liam believes what happened to be his fault. He is worried that she will not realize this and make some horrible comment or joke about what the guy’s mouth looked like or how he might have run to catch the ball and finish the game. Even though he knows he couldn’t have gotten to it in time, Liam feels like he failed, like he let it happen, like it’s another piece of evidence that proves something about him he doesn’t want proven. He nears the green door, the one at the bottom of the announcement tower.

The coaches are all talking to the parents on the Home side; only one player lingers in the Away dugout, clanking bats into a long black bag. Liam takes a deep breath, steeling against whatever fear he may have of what might be but probably is not on the other side, and opens the green door, the one kids dare each other to go into, the one that his friends say is haunted. He hears his mother calling for him from behind. He takes a deep breath; he walks through the door.

* * *

At night, after the clay-stained children leave with their parents, smack-mouthed with the one snow cone given to players after games, some dust-covered assistant coach familiar with the ancient breaker box will turn off the floodlights, and the field will disappear. But the Colosseum stays there, lightless gnats buzzing in the greenish dark, and if you go there at night, you will feel, despite the absence of signs, like you’re trespassing. More than in the misdemeanor sense: like, the gleam of the moon off the striated bleachers will give you less of a sense of being in the wrong place and more of a sense of being in the wrong time, like this is a closed museum, forgotten only yesterday. Then tomorrow kids in clean uniforms will arrive and start warming up, and tired parents will shimmy past the knees of other tired parents, and eventually the day will recede again, until the photosensors will automatically clunk the floodlights back into light, the preening tooth-glow of military-grade fluorescence.

Behind me, I can hear someone coming up the steps with tired, cautious footing. I turn and wait for him to get to the top. There is a frightened pause on the other side of the door, silence between rustlings, but I know he’ll do it. When the door finally opens, Liam stands there looking at me, almost expectant. We stay like that for a few moments, looking at each other, he with shoulders slumped, head cocked, bleach-blond hair that will grow out and curl at the ends in the years to come, that will stick with sweat to his forehead and breed ridgelines of acne causing a hair-covering-acne/hair-causing-acne feedback loop, he with his habit already of extending the low scoop of the e into the next letter like his mom, he who from the ages of 12 to 13 would wake up multiple times a month and believe, truly believe, that someone was shuffling back and forth at the foot of his bed and stay totally immobile but awake for at least an hour before being able to fall back asleep — with this kid in front of me, I start speaking.

This is what I say:

Liam, it won’t be until you’ve vaulted the formless grey mass of college, four years that weren’t what you’d thought they’d be, until you’ve felt the slender thread of funneled Freon from the ceiling of the very last Greyhound to your parents’ house, until you’ve wondered, seated at the hanglamp-lit dining table of your childhood house, what exactly the point of going home is, until a cat you believe is your neighbor’s sidles up beside you on a midnight walk and allows you to hold him and this feels like some kind of coded revelation, until you’ve spent so many days in a row drinking full pots of coffee after dinner to stay up for the movies you watch (bright palettes, shitty acting, anything that feels quick) until you fall asleep crook-necked on the pillowless sofa arm in the living room, until one morning you decide to eat an entire lemon just for any new kind of brightness or pain, until you’ve grown so tired of living in your parents’ house under the vague banner of “recovery” from some totally unoutlined and unnamable thing that you decide to use the rest of the savings put away from driving Uber in college to buy a plane ticket to Oslo, until you've slowly moved west with your fifty liter pack and hiking boots you’ve had since high school and made your way up the coast to find a young person’s work hostel where you could live and eat for a couple weeks, until you’ve been reading in the hostel common area on your off day, until you’ve seen her walk in through the front door with a sigh as her friend goes to set down groceries in the kitchen, until you’ve watched her removing the caked mud from her boots with a water-compromised stick that breaks in her hands to expose lime-green fingers of young just-alive cambium, until you’ve heard her speak to her traveling partner and discover that she, too, against all odds, is American, until you’ve noticed the impossibly gentle way her hands dismantled a loaf of bread, until you’ve gone for a walk the evening after into town down to the harbor where old boats with leaks leave a variegated film of oil on the surface of the fjord near the docks, until you know with certainty then that even the blunt knuckles of Norwegian mountains cannot change how you feel about what your particular version of failure might mean, until you make your way back to town to the gaudy ridiculous Norse brewery where they seat you outside and you see her, the American, and her American friend, two tables away, until her friend leaves because she forgot something at the hostel and she, my daughter, Abigail, remains there almost painted in her beauty against the fake fjord sunset — only then will you gather the courage to walk up to her, to sit down, as you have walked through the haunted green door to find me. And yes, Liam, then, right then, although the world is full of hearts that barely work, although the earth bends and buckles under its own weight, although I am small in soul and weak in will and I babble to myself in the announcement booth and I build and build things that have no hope of working and in my growing age am getting maudliner and maudliner — Lord, Liam, I need you then to tell her that I at least love her. Let the machinery at least express its purpose. Flatten your hand on the table. Breathe and speak. Look. A window opens.