Alan Sincic

         Everybody does their very best to do what they think should be done but by the time they pull the Cook boys free there is nobody left to be yelled at: their clothes are all messed up and stuck to their arms and legs and that is the end of the story. The firemen do their best to brush the sand from between the lips and from under the eyelids before the parents see it, but there is not a whole lot that can be done to adjust the picture. Everybody does their very best.

*

         The only way to keep a speeding cab from lofting that puddle into your face is to step out into the puddle ahead of time, to dare the cab to hit you, to create — so long as you're not lofted onto the roof of the cab — an accident of your own choosing.

         I feed my wet socks into the mouth of her toaster-oven and ask Carla what it is we're supposed to be on the lookout for. I listen to the static on the line and watch as the socks on the grill begin to sizzle. I ask her isn't there some kind of home-kit-pregnancy-something-test, some kind of early warning system you could plug yourself into?

         "I thought you liked surprises, you're always so big on surprises."

         "The surprise part I already got. It's the part after the surprise part I'm not so crazy about."

         "But think of how sensational it all is, you know? Like we're invited to this big event going on inside my own body."

         The telephone cord slides back and forth across the oven door as we talk. My socks sag down into the grill of the toaster.

         "But you had the diaphragm --"

         "Which is eighty-something, 89% effective."

         "Like the lottery."

         "Okay, like the lottery."

         "And we lost."

         "You could say we lost, or you could say we won, or you could say that maybe it was supposed to happen."

         "Or maybe we're supposed to just reel the whole thing back and start all over again. You could say that too, couldn't you?"

         How strange to talk about Carla's body like it was some kind of interactive home VCR type thing that keeps giving us the wrong channel. I flip the socks over and turn up the overhead broiler.

         "Say what you will," says Carla. "But I say wait and see. What happens is what happens."

         Again the smell of burning plastic. The telephone cord I scrape from the outside of the oven with a butter knife.

         "We should be doing something," I say.

         "Which is what we're doing right now. We're waiting, waiting's what we're doing."

         "Then maybe you should be doing something."

         "Me?"

         "I'm just saying, what I'm saying is I don't know what this we is all about."

         Silence. The butter knife sticks to the cord of the telephone. Carla has forgotten that it is her turn to talk.

         "Then maybe you're right," she says finally. "Maybe I am on my own with this."

         "I'm just saying if I'd wanted a family I'd have moved in with you in the first place."

         A gooey mass of white plastic slides down into the guts of the toaster.

         "Okay," she says. You know that shoop sound a mortar round makes when it's sliding down a barrel — shoop — on its way to the firing pin? If there was a sound here, that sound would be the sound.

         "Then what," she says, "is all of this junk of yours doing in my apartment?"

         "I don't know, maybe it's just visiting, maybe it's doing the same thing that your junk is doing in my apartment."

         "Then maybe you should visit it back then, just visit it all back to where it belongs. And you can start with the damn toaster. Visit me back my toaster-oven."

         Not the channel that we’d requested, no, no, this is not it at all.

*

         It's crazy. Mrs. Gooding doesn't let her boys leave the yard for a week. She doesn't know that Johnny was digging alongside the Cook boys but went home for lunch before it happened, or that we'd all played army that week in the trenches we'd dug up out of the sand pit and out across the abandoned golf course, and climbed up to get ourselves shot, and crashed to the soft sand at the bottom, and crawled to the enemy's trench, and shot him in the back, and ran out across the mine field and tripped, and blew ourselves into little bits, and it occurs to me that a meteor could break through the roof of the Gooding's house and kill them all at breakfast which meteor I do not make mention of to Mrs. Gooding because perhaps she does not know that I know it exists or perhaps she knows that I know but would rather I not mention it. Perhaps she feels that the most important thing for me and the other children at this point in time is for us to feel a sense of protection. Crazy.

*

         Carla's sister says that Carla had been hoping for an accident like this but that she knew I'd flip so she never told me. She (Carla's sister) feels that although it is not her place to be saying anything, she -- since here I am and her mouth is already open -- might as well let fly. She asks am I comfortable Carla throwing herself out into the future without a father for her child. I tell her a family of one is the family for me. She asks do I want to be the end of my line? I tell her I'm not in line, did I ask to be put into a line?

         "I felt the same way when I was your age, Jackson, but --"

         "So okay then that is the right opinion for somebody my age."

         She takes a breath -- inhale, exhale -- not like punctuation but like a real reply for me to repeat to myself. "You're avoiding the issue."

         "Is that a pun?"

         "You've been together four years now so don't tell me you're surprised."

         "That word again."

         "Jackson, Jackson, Jackson. She's not asking your advice on this."

DEPOSIT TWENTY-FIVE CENTS FOR THE NEXT FIVE MINUTES

         "Do you have a quarter? You don't have a quarter, do you?"

         You are a failure as a human being. There has been some discussion here among the grown-ups. You do not know how to cope.

         "Forget the quarter,” she said. “Give me the number and I'll call you back."

         I let it ring. Say what you want about the monkeys in that old joke about Shakespeare -- you know: chained to those typewriters, clack-clack-clacking out across the prairie, fuzzing up the line of the horizon. I pray for those monkeys, root for them to break the code, kiss their addled little monkey heads. A black guy answers the phone. The receiver disappears into the side of his woolly dome above this crazy earring made out of a paper clip. He's nodding, taking in her description, painting me with his eyes. Six women pass, any/all of which we could father children by, Bill Shakespeare popping out a dozen or two dozen or a million generations down the line and us, a couple of intermediary monkeys, which is why I put my finger to my lips and shake my head. I am not here, I am somebody else, there is nobody home, zip.

*

         All that summer we'd commanded the street. Mr. Barstow pokes his head out the screen door, wipes the shaving cream from his chin, tells us to give him the weather report. Where is it going? What does it look like? How does it feel? "Pretty good, Mr. Barstow, but I would wear some shoes if I were you." The sun's still climbing up out of the Atlantic but already it’s hot enough to sour the milk we swipe from his porch steps. Phillip suggests that we pour it over the cat, Chuck seconds this and raises him one, we end up pouring it over Phillip. When Mr. Barstow trots off to work in his white leather shoes -- I'm walking on the clouds, boys, walking on the clouds -- we drag his aluminum canoe out into the front yard and shoot it full of water from the garden hose. Jay and Johnny play a couple Japs in a sub at the bottom of the ocean. Mike heaves oranges at it from the other side of the hedge, while I crouch in the shade of a lawn jockey, ticking off the hits and the misses. The Japs they flood and sink, we finish them off with depth charges, ka-boom. Sayonara, sucker.

*

         I sense that, in our recent conversations, the communication problem between us has been growing. I head uptown to explain to Carla about the girl on my answering machine.

*

         How fresh to live where no one's ever lived before, where the streets run faster than the houses can catch them and they invent new names to make it sound like Florida -- Cortez Street, Fernandez, Balboa -- where you turn a corner staked down into a grid of strings and flags, and out past the last stack of rectangular green sod, and down the bare blacktop (palmetto and saw grass raking the spokes of your bike) and all the while rolling, trolling through the pines winding left and winding right till the road thins down to a track in the woods, and the wilds close in, and the curbstones melt, and the black tar slams into a mound of white sand.

         We call it "clean sand" because it doesn't stain or stick. You can shake it from your cuffs and scrape it from your nails with a toothpick. It grows at least three recognizable things: palmettos, sandspurs, pines. Here comes Mr. Harrison, Mr. H. retired farm redneck from Macon, GA, who rolls up to the curb next door with a stack of manure in the bed of his pickup. A week passes. He butchers the last of his backyard orange trees and sets fire to the stumps. He welds a gardener's hook to the end of a pool cue and rips out the sandspurs in one long sweep. He rolls out this lawn-mower attachment with sixteen scimitar-looking blades, grinds the yard down to a gravy and then steps out to give us a lecture about the savage business of farming. Naptime. The earth rolls round and round. Out come the cornrows in a flying wedge, the chicory riding point, the sorrel on the flanks, the kumquats and the apricots shooting out across the chain link fencing. Rutabaga. Sweet potato. Cabbages exploding into bloom, dandelion sprouts from a barbeque grill, squash and beans and peas and leeks and, rappelling up the slopes of his grand-daughter's swing set, a squad of red tomatoes. We order seeds; we drive to J.C. Penny and buy seeds; he breaks open his crop and hands us the seeds to assure us that they're real, but what we grow is sand, a kind of vivid white sand that flashes out from the middle of our spotty front lawns, up from the center of our hottest days, to the left and to the right of our rusty lawn sprinklers. Raw, like a wound. Bright, like an abrasion to the flesh. Fresh.

*

         I find a quarter in the lining of my windbreaker and worry it back out through the ripped pocket. This is a quarter that does not want to be spent, a magic quarter. I feed it into the phone and Carla says hello. I explain that the girl who called at lam is a waitress on a graveyard shift who's reading a book I gave her, thus making lam a reasonable hour for her to call. Thus the use of the words "the other night" and "the next time" giving it that sort of after-hours feel.

         "And did you also have a wonderful time?"

         Wonderful is a broad kind of word, a vague, a wide-ranging sort of word. The dictionary defines wonderful as 1) marvelously astonishing and/or 2) effective far beyond anything previously known. I tell Carla that I have the dictionary in my backpack. I tell her that there has been some kind of mix-up here, some kind of misunderstanding, that everything up to now has been a big accident and yes, even a series of accidents, but that from now on out I am intending to take a greater control in the circumstances of my life. I tell her that I have been inspired by her example and that from now on out I intend to flee in a forward direction, to put to death the hypothetical, to throw my feet far out ahead of my body and into the future. She says that that's poetic and I should put it into a book, I should borrow a hairpin from a waitress and stitch it across the front of my ribcage, I should donate this wonderful living book of my body to the Library of Congress. I tell her I'm coming up. She says I'd better hurry, she's on her way out. I say with who. She says guess. The operator says deposit twenty five cents. I say that I’ll call her (Carla) back. End of quarter.

*

         And the neighborhood is new because (a) we're born into it (b) we know it's never existed before (c) we remember it that way. 1956 Florida, the suburban frontier, the bulldozers decide where the streets should be. The land people mow down an old orange grove to build the houses and here come the Carsons, first to arrive and fresh from the honeymoon. When they pull up to claim the house, there's this dump truck with a pile of scorched white-walls spilling out the tailgate, bouncing down the apron of their brand-new baby-soft freshly-poured driveway. Mr. Carson jumps out to yell at the tires. Mrs. Carson jumps out to take a picture. She has been reading about these tires. When there's a cold snap, the dead clear nights of which freeze the pulp inside an orange into a beautiful inedible crystal, these are the auto tires the Citrus people burn to kill the frost between the trees, trees the driveways will eventually erase, driveway the tire will eventually deface, picture of which will eventually be seen by Mikey Carson the baby who is not in Mrs. Carson's body as this picture is taken, who is the amazing invisible baby at this particular photographic opportunity, who has not yet embarked upon this episode of The Mikey Carson Story wherein he shows his friend Jackson the photograph and they walk to the driveway where Mikey brushes off the gray sand to expose this particular tread mark frozen into the white cement. (a), (b), (c).

*

         I head for the N Train. At the corner of Eighth and Broadway there's a guy sprawled out across an army blanket with his personal estate busting out around him like he's a piñata that's rolled off the back of a flatbed -- a Johnny Mathis record, a spoon and a fork, a western shirt, a pair of cowboy boots, a rolling pin, an incense holder, and a coil of old Playboys in a green beach towel. I squat down beside him.

         "How much for these girlie magazines?" I ask.

         "Fuck-books," he says.

         "What?"

         "Fuck-books." He scratches his eyelid and stares at the boots between his bare feet. There's a Playboy sticking out of one of the boots and he talks to it like from out of the boot is where this conversion is coming. "I don't sell girlie books."

         "Whatever. What'll you take?"

         "Two dollars," he says and again to the boots. Are these his boots? Is he the one who breaks them in? Are they for sale or is he just giving them a rest?

         I say: "How about a buck?"

         "A buck for a girlie book maybe, but not for that," he says. He says but as he talks he pulls the dollar from my hand and pockets it. My feet begin to vibrate. I glance through the sidewalk grating to the heads of the commuters as they go bubbling down the subway gates. He points to the magazine I'm stuffing into my backpack.

         "That's a full-grown lady there, Boss, that's a first-class fuck-book."

         Lannie Balcom, yes, August 1965, the Lannie I missed in the year of her first appearance.

*

         And all so shy about what we really need. Phil Cook gets my five-dollar catcher's mitt and I get the Playboy he steals from his dad's footlocker. I crouch above a flashlight in the backyard, slide my arm into the lawnmower's mouth, extricate the playmates from between the rusty blades. The pines shoot up around me in the moonlight. Glint of motor oil and mosquito repellent on the backs of my hands. Inside I find a message of sorts from Phil -- or from his dad. The six promised pages of Lannie Balcom at liberty from her clothing have been sliced out with a razor knife. The wind makes a sizzling sound high up in the Spanish moss. Here's Lannie Balcom in a ski jacket and stepping out of a helicopter, Lannie Balcom (head of), Lannie Balcom (feet of), description of Anne-Margaret's Vegas costume and two and a half pages of naked cartoon ladies. Lannie, Lannie, Lannie. Why do you hide from us Lannie Balcom? Why so shy? Five black hairs are sprouting out from under my immaculate white skin, Lannie Balcom, and there is not enough of you to go around.

*

         Carla talks as loud as she does because she thinks that she is farther away than she really is.

*

         And everything that you need is right here in front of you. If the kids beg you for a sandbox, you pick up a blue plastic wading pool from the Winn-Dixie, borrow a shovel, take about six steps off of your own back porch. You break an inch or two of mulch to get to it: tiny orange shells the size of BB's, flakes of quartz, the prehistoric beach, the dinosaur surf identical in every way to the shining beach road at Daytona where the tourists cruise in their Chevys through the melting air and a thousand tan bodies throw themselves across the track Johnny Barlow followed in 1921, J. Barlow, sometime stockcar dandy and challenger for the land world speed record, Big John Barlow dangerous among the secretaries and a tiger at the Luau Bar who roars out from under the Flagler pier at 40-50-60, who panics at the sound of the breakers, and who swerves to the dunes, to the powdery sand hard enough to drive on only during hurricanes where he hits a trough, and the Bugatti disintegrates, and he sails on unaccompanied eighty feet through the air -- no time to wave -- land world speed record for unassisted travel, the catapult as a means of transportation, Johnny Barlow clean across the dunes at 37 mph and so glad to be alive as the medics crest the hill that he's rolling like a baby in the talcum powder sand, laughing at the sand in the whorls of his ears, licking the salt from his isinglass goggles, nothing broken but the stem of his walnut pipe.

*

         "It's me."

         "Where are you?"

         "The 54th Street subway. I'm on my way. I want to ask you a question."

         "His name is Rick and you never met him."

         "That's not what I'm asking. The Rick from the craft show?"

         Silence. I ask her how she’s doing. Silence squared. Again I ask. Again she replies, this time with words.

         "Am I gestating? Is that what you mean?"

         "Your sister says you want to go through with this baby thing."

         "I could have told you that myself."

         The people clatter by. A toddler in a Yankee cap stares back over his mother's shoulder at me. His mother has a nice ass.

         "Then why,” I say, “didn't you tell me, like, a month ago?"

         "Maybe I hadn't decided, like, a month ago."

         This is a very long stare, a two-party stare, ten, fifteen, twenty yards long. Children have permission to stare, whereas adults do not, unless a child is involved, in which case they (the adults) have permission to stare at (a) the child (b) the mother/child unit (c) the objects that accompany the mother/child unit e.g., terry cloth bib, molten graham cracker, damp PJ bottom with "Enjoy Home Bowling" stamped across the butt. None of these categories include (d) mothers with nice asses.

         "Then that's it then,” I say. “This just sort of happened and that's it."

         "You were there. I was there. It was an accident."

         "Even if it doesn't sound like an accident."

            "I am going to this movie, Jackson, this movie with Rick and I do not have any more time to talk to you. Goodbye."

         "Wait wait wait — here comes the train. I'm on my way, I'm coming right up." I hang up and head down the ramp to the turnstile. There is no train coming, but neither is there a guy named Rick. I cross to the number 4 platform. The thing is to go up to the East Side and then cut across the park, where there will be some kind of flowers or something I could pick for her. This would be a nice surprise.

*

         And we know what to do with this sand. My dad takes a wheelbarrow out to where they're dredging and brings back a whole load of it. If you want to widen your driveway, you mix it into a twenty pound bag of powder cement and add a little water. If you want to save on paving, you spread it by itself and keep it smooth with rake. It gives the used car lots a flashy clean look, crisp and photographic, perfect frame for a set of fins. The huge flat pillars of the Interstate Highway cloverleaves? Sand. Our gray green tan pink cinderblock two-bedroom houses? Sand, gray-white sand. So the slide don’t stick, so the weeds don’t grow. The ballast for the balloon, the guts for the hourglass. We know what to do.

*

         I stand at the platform in Grand Central and wonder whether to give Carla a ring so we can make it a little later. I wonder and wonder. In '62 when they asked John Glenn what it meant to be weightless, he said you feel like it's the first time in your whole life that your body is standing completely still. When they asked him how long the feeling lasted, he said what do you mean, you mean when you open your eyes and realize that you're falling ass-backwards over the rim of the earth at 70,000 miles per hour? The train comes and goes. I pick up the phone and dig into my pocket. I do not have a quarter.

*

         We know what to do with the newness of the world. The fifth of July, Jay Gooding and I wake early to look for firecrackers that didn't go off the night before. The sky is damp and overcast, the underside of the lid of a huge gray box. It never occurs to us to picture the stars outside the box on the other side of the lid in that perpetual night through which the box is falling. We go out into the sticky morning and cut across the lawn to the Cook's house, the tall grass flicking at the legs of our rolled-up trousers, a thin film of water shining up over the tips of our white rubber sneakers, seeping into the socks, and our shoestrings catching on the pine needles, and the kids breaking out through the front doors, Summer Bible School and the Lord Jesus floating heavenward on the side of a red balloon, Davy Crockett/Barney Rubble/Cinderella lunchboxes down the street in threes and fours, Mr. Overman wiping the fog from the windshield of his Rambler with a white lace apron, Mrs. Overman untangling Plutobaby's leash, the fat dog's bark bouncing around the screened-in carport, Jay telling me the inside of a firecracker's what they make bullets out of, me telling Jay my dad shot a six-foot rattler in the Mayfair's backyard once, was going to bite him and he pulled out his old army pistol and shot it, two times, once in the head once in the tail, Jay telling me he wouldn't shoot he'd chop it with a shovel, me saying they did that at the golf course and it crawled away in two different directions, Jay saying he'd chop it into mincemeat, me saying he'd pee in his pants, Jay saying if he had a good shovel he wouldn't be a bit scared, not the least bit, the sun breaking out again, the candy in our pockets melting, the paved black cul-de-sac beside the Cook's house littered with scraps and punk and firecracker paper, and the small hard stars of the night before blanked out, pushed out of the box, unreal. The gunpowder? The gunpowder I rub, between the finger and the thumb, as if I were the first, the pioneer, the inventor of skin.

*

         I give the man at the subway Nednick's a dollar bill and he gives me this hot dog and thirty cents change. I tell him I do not want this hot dog. He tells me to eat, to enjoy, that the reason he gives me this change is that I have bought this hot dog. He points to a sign hanging from the steaming pipe above his head — "No Hot Dog, No Change." The platform thickens… something is clogging up the trains. Four, five, six people gather at the phone. I drop my hot dog into the lap of a folded-up bum -- he's hanging onto sleep by a fingertip, his ankle-bones are gripped by his dirty white socks, his cracked shoes are pinned to the bottom of his ass where they can't get swiped and he is flat dead broke and he is going out of business and I wind my way down beneath the pipes and the wires and the I-beams flaking with a 1940's finish to try my luck on the busted phones at the far end of the tunnel.

*

         The trick to a good tunnel is you gotta kneel, thump yourself onto the earth at the foot of the tree where the cinderblock border of the sandbox ovals out around you, carves out shape like the hull of a skiff in the heart of the ocean, skiff with the bottom busted out, and you bailing away, and up through the swell the punch of the gunwale. The swell. The land no less a liquid than a sea -- slower by centuries, sure -- but just as bottomless.

         So not a sandbox, not a box of sand, but a frame inside of which the sand rises and falls. And not the store-bought kind, either, all sifty and sweet, but a sand with the guts intact, the brack and the ash, the reef and the conch and the bone-meal all boiling up out of the Pleistocene breakers. Dive in. Surf’s up. To the center of the earth you can dive if you want to, if it’s a hole you’re after. But no. Not a hole. A tunnel, a transit, a passage.

         To start with you sharpen your hand like a blade, bulldoze away at the humus and the rosiny fluff till you hit the cakey under-layer and the sculptable mud, diggable dampness you shave with a trowel or the cup of the hand, scoop like you scoop the flesh of a cantaloupe into crescents and half-crescents, hollows that hold the shape of the spoon. To punch out a tunnel longer than a single arm, you gotta dig down with the left arm and the right arm at the same time, belly-down with the elbows wide like a trapper up over the bed of a stream -- you know, Davey Crockett style, coon-skin askew as he buries both arms in the current, as he pulls and he pulls at this invisible thing clinging to the muddy bottom. That’s the trick, see, to complete the embrace, to meet up with the hands in the middle somewhere as you corkscrew your way downward into the coquina, try to choreograph somehow that tender collision where the knuckles bump, the wall gives way, the fingers they strike out across the cold sand to, just the tip now, touch.

*

         "Carla!"

         "Where are you?"

         "They don't have phones on the train."

         "Where are you?"

         "En route."

         "You said that an hour ago."

         "It's a long route."

         "I've got to go now. Rick is waiting."

         "Is he there?"

         "I don't have to answer that."

         "He's there, isn't he?"

         "We're on our way out the door, Jackson."

         "If we stay with it I think that this conversation will get better."

         "Goodbye."

         "I can feel it now. Even now I can feel it getting better."

         If you put your head down on the table at a restaurant in New York City, they will shake you by your shoulders and ask you to leave. This is the difference between eating at a restaurant and eating at home.

*

         Nothing we haven’t already practiced before. It’s all about the traffic, see?  That’s what a tunnel’s for, that’s why we sprinkle the dunes with little green army men, pitch them out of a tin or boomerang them, one by one, out over the grass and into the sandbox where, one by one, we pluck them up, God them into being, kill them or wake them, bake them in the sun or, for the sheer joy of it, magnify them with powers of flight –ramjets burning out the boot-heels and magneto-beam belt buckles and anti-gravity bandoleers and even the pedestal (that slab of green they glue to the boots) we pinch between the finger and the thumb as we surf them over the berm and into the air on a curve that encloses the whole field of battle – the trenches and the middens, the artillery and the tanks, the catapult a wooden spoon, parapet a string of poker chips, the gate a grill-top off a Easy-Bake oven – the whole field of battle over which we hover them, these talismans, spiral them down into a perfect-as-the-peel-of-an-apple deployment up under the shade of the muddy tower there, the walls that we pressed into place between the flats of the palms of the hands, the tower that shields from even the sun the secret entrance to the secret tunnel.

         Farther out is where the bigger boys play, at the edge of the woods, the boys who grew till their voices thickened and their clothes, they shrank, and it’s all of it angles and elbows whichever way they turn, and wild is what the mothers say to the boys that bivouac out beyond the reach of  the voice, beyond where the piercing whistle calls out to summon them back, that sings out over the tall pines to reach them but not these boys, no, these boys that range out beyond where we would go, out where the back-hoes dredge the sandy underbelly up into a set of hills the height of a house, where the damp sand surrenders to the touch, and the plastery mud it sticks to the fingers, and the roof of the tunnel, it yields to the upward pressure of the practiced hand.

*

         Back behind the “Stay Off The Planter” sign sits the flowers, the flowers that cry out to be rescued, and to the people who watch, who make it their business to watch, I say: watch not the picker, no, but watch the flower.

*

         We run toward it and then we run away from it and then we run toward it again. We're laughing at the coke-bottle bomb Jay Gooding's just invented. We run screaming in circles around him as he tears open the firecrackers, shakes the gunpowder down the funnel, stuffs the matches one by one into the bottle's mouth. It's a hot afternoon and that fresh sheet of water sliding down the Carson's drive looks cold and enough to skate across. The adults putter around at the edges of the picture — Mrs. Gooding on her porch swing, stirring the bowl of potato salad in her lap with a large aluminum spoon; Mr. Carson at the screen door, a box of turtle food in his hand; the sound of a hammer in the distance; a lawnmower thrumming; Mom pinning up the baby's diaper for a trip to Publix market and Dad at the fridge in his boxer shorts, his face a cloud of freezer smoke, blowing smoke rings as the drops of vanilla slide from his spoon and onto the tops of his black dress shoes.

         And here we all are. It's like some kind of extraordinarily complicated statue, booming out in every direction, some kind of intricate human machine assembled on the fly and lacking even the simplest of steering devices. And now the parts have all been assembled, and now it is time for us to be set into motion: for Jim Percell to come rattling down the street on his brother's clunky bike — too short for the seat so he stands as he pedals — skidding, weaving, yelling out about something having happened at the sandpit and that the fire department was there and that we should all of us come quick. The games evaporate as he passes, as he gathers up the street in his wake, shouts back over his shoulder at us running to catch up — Its the Cooks, Philly and Chuckie Cook — and the Gooding boys drop from the pines and break into a run, join the others running, dogs first then children then at last the adults, pried loose from the frames of their houses and out across the doorways out onto the lawn still in their neighborly dignity but surprised at the people pouring out into the street, running headlong to the sandpit, leaping fences, trampling flowerbeds, the names of the boys bobbing back through the crowd and Bruce's little brother somewhere inside the human current carried halfway there but then turning back, he turns his back on his brother breaks across the yard and through the door to tell his parents that Bruce dug a tunnel through the wet sand but it collapsed and that the Fire Department's trying to dig them out but that they can't find them. They are buried in the sand. Everybody is running.

*

         The closer I get, the slower I walk. Halfway I go -- the sidewalk slides away behind me, the books on the sidewalk in front of the literate bums of Columbia U – halfway I will go, halfway, then halfway again, till the seas gang dry and the stars bristle up into slivers.

*

         They say Bruce was outside when it happened, outside the mouth fetching water when it -- but no, they say, some say no, no, he was digging near the entrance and... but everybody, they everybody say he rescued Phil, he dug and he freed him as far as the head and the shoulders, he – Phil -- he said he could breath, he was talking, he was the half of him free but then

*

         I press myself between the pillars of the Cambridge House Hotel and watch Carla on the front steps of her apartment building. Where is this Rick? I unbutton the belly of my flannel shirt to keep the flowers from getting crushed.

         Rick will come in his tallness and she will slip beneath his arm and they will stroll off with their hips swaying left and right. Rick will screech to a halt in his red Ferrari and she will leap to her -- Rick will appear behind her down the steps from her apartment zipping up his fly and running a comb through his wet hair he will open his fist — ha! — the earring she dropped behind the couch -- ha ha! -- and she will slip beneath his their hips swaying left and right as they

*

         but then he -- Phil no not Phil no -- Bruce, Bruce, he left him there, he ran to the other entrance to dig for Chuck, Chuck who’d been digging when it, Chuck from the opposite end – see you dig so you meet in the middle, see -- so Chuck, Chuck who was there but the sand, with the sand he was where he, the sand he, where was he, and then it’s when, that’s when it, it all of it, happened, Chuck and Phil the both of, the brothers, the sand it gives way, and Bruce he falls, he gets up, he falls, he runs for help

*

         I wish we were both statues, that I could stand across the street and watch her and that we neither of us would ever have to move. The cold stones brace me, flatten the blades of my shoulders, push me out into the sunlight. And how well she is supported by those slabs of concrete that glow in the sun, and the sun that shines through the fabric of her dress and the fake red nails on the ends of her fingers and along the outline of her small shoulders. She's got her hair all sprayed up on top of her head like some kind of breakable new helmet. She holds a strand in her fingers and strokes it slowly, deliberately — like this is someone else's hand beside her face here lending her comfort — and at her feet there's this box of my stuff. I think of how huge the earth is, all this hugeness pulling away at us, the old people the skin that melts from the rigging of their bones, their faces fall, they become harder and harder to recognize.

*

         and still careful in her clean white pearls the mother arrives from the Catholic Women's Guild, and hears a shouting in the distance, and runs out to where the road dead-ends and the homes break off and the trim lawns fall behind like tiny green placemats, and careful not to panic as she heads through the pine and scrub and palmetto where the road would run had the suburb not ended and out across the flats her high heels sticking to the damp sand and

*

         I pull the flowers from under my shirt but she refuses to look up.

         "You stole those from the city."

         "No, I talked to the mayor and he told me that the city had decided to give them to me."

         "The city that loves you."

         "The government that loves me."

         Old old joke that we invented ourselves. The tilt of her head tells me yes, I have made the correct choice but I had better be giving her something more substantial on the follow-through. I put the flowers on the steps and squat down beside her. For a long time I say nothing. She ignores me but I can tell that yes, that for right now that this also is the correct choice, this nothing.

*

         and the red glint of a fire truck in the far woods as bright itself as any fire and the blank backs of her neighbors grow closer the sand rips the shoes from her feet her own hands rip the pearls from her neck still she runs

*

         Not till I see her face do I realize that she's been crying.

         "You got your wish," she says, not meeting my eyes.

         Wish. Wish? I stare at her the way a dog stares at the pointing finger instead of the ball to which the finger is pointing.

         "I just got my period."

         I'm not a stupid person, but the advantage of being a stupid person is that bright box of crayons you're issued at the door: the sea burns blue, the earth glows green, the sun slides smartly down a red and yellow sky.

         "Then you're not pregnant," I say.

         "I see you've done the math."

*

         as she runs like the body that they're retrieving from the still center of the crowd is her body, which it is, and she's breaking into the circle, and in a parody of birth clutching and ripping at her own body, the ropes and the shovels digging into her feet as she struggles, and as they pull her away from the scene. And here is the high grass where the fire truck idles, and the woods trailing out behind it in a line of broken shrubbery and here the fireman, barehanded now as they dig, and the sun that's calm and bright above them, and the need to be careful, the sound of the digging, the need to be careful and then no longer the need to be careful.

*

         I tell her I'm sorry. I tell her I can't help feeling that this whole thing was a big mistake, a big accident.

         "It's just amazing to me that anybody ever makes it," she says.

         “You mean,” I say, “into the world?”  I look up, away from her eyes, up into the column of air between the buildings, the sky we wedge between our towers, the warm lit windows stacked one on top of the other down the cliffs of 82nd street to the cliffs of Broadway.

         “No,” she says. “Out of the body I mean. It’s a wonder that anybody...”  The words whisper away, disappear into the white water sounds of traffic, into the stone crust that covers the city and under which runs the number one subterranean express.

         Last night I dreamed, or thought I dreamed, not an answer but a question, not a dream you summon to speak but a dream you cover, uncover, cover again till it fades. In my dream, in my half-sleep, I see a fireman – huge, a full head taller than my father -- who stands at the top of a hill of sand. His men fan out in front of him, their shovels glistening in the sun. The crickets cry out around them, the pines run wild to the horizon. They toss aside their shovels and dig their way into the hill barehanded.

         “Don’t think it doesn’t matter,” she says. “Because it does.”

         I slip my hand into her coat pocket and wait. It’s chilly. She holds the bouquet with one hand, the other just so, just above the blossom, just enough for the wind to slide up under the open palm. Bright and cold and fast outside, up here in the city. The wind it toys with the sun, blows it across the sky, but this also is a game that we play, Cops and Robbers, my hand here in the dark of her pocket, waiting and waiting.

         In my dream then the night falls. The men they break out the bug spray, they break out the ponchos. The moon climbs up into place; there's a firmness in the stars; in the distance above the pines there's the blinking red lights of the radio towers.

         It’s warm in her pocket. I close my hand around a button, a coin, the stub to a ticket. I sift them out between my fingers. I wait.

         She drops her hand to the bud of the bloom. Presses down gently. I can feel her breathing beside me as the firemen they wait, as they break out the coffee, they break out the flashlights.

         I feel her weight shifting as she turns, the scent of the blossom broken, my hidden hand as I open wide, I wait for her to join me.

         They break out the stopwatches. They break out the calendars.