Sewanee Review

You might fall in love with one of the moments, and follow her through the leafy streets of Jugtown, pausing sometimes to give a coin to a panhandler, or pat a mangy dog, to give yourself plausibility.She is just a moment, your mother says, scraping a cauterized yolk from the skillet with the edge of the spatula. She won't last, your father says, looking up from the dictionary, where he's memorizing synonyms. There are a million like her, says your little sister, standing on tiptoe before the full-length mirror. Your uncle just clears his throat.Yet you dream of her, you write letters you don't sign, you wait for the Ditmas bus she rides, you eat every night at the little falafel joint. Unless you recall her charm bracelet, you can't imagine the night sky.You might glimpse her in a rearview mirror, or hear her guffaw in the static at the far end of the FM band.Summer is almost over. The hydrants open as if of their own accord. The children are fascinated by that current, all glance, nudge, and dazzling cold. The older kids sit on stoops tossing cards with pictures of the great sluggers from deeper in childhood: Harmon Killebrew, Moose Skowron.All the moments of August fascinate you, their wildness, their silence, how they glint and vanish. But she is the one you can't live without. Even in autumn you sense her sometimes, shepherding a child across the street, running after a dog's snaking leash, combing her hair in a taxi window, even in winter and the night that follows winter. [End Page 407]

I spend more and more time in the underworld. It's not that I don't like this world, Kensington, Brooklyn, long rainy streets, domesticated maples carved with hearts and names, the little factories that make bits of things—second hands for stopwatches, latches for the cases of flutes.I love to lie beside my wife, watching clouds mass in the mirror, waiting for a thread of cold morning rain, listening to her calm adamant breath and perhaps a scrap of Meek Mill from a passing SUV.It's just that the underworld is magnificent. The streets there glitter. The house I am summoned to has no number. A cat waits behind the door; his eyes are dazzling, purely reflective. The bookshelves are imposing, but all the books are blank, no titles on the spines. My father is there, waiting, and there I am as a toddler, a child, a boy, sixty years ago, then fifty. There is my little sister, worried sick over her shiny kneecaps. We all talk together, we are shy, we share so little, but I remember an incipient interest—Miles Davis—and the teenager warms a tad. Where do you come from, he asks.A candle burns in a candlestick. If I blow on it the flame remains vertical. If I comb in the oval mirror, the old man on the other side combs in the opposite direction, grinning slyly.You have been vanishing all your life, my wife explains when I return. You keep disappearing to make way for the next self. Who knew that you were vanishing into the future?I can't help it, our room feels cramped now. The rose in the vase. The calendar with all the days crossed out. [End Page 408]

Can you make it to tomorrow? Can you hold out?There you will find what lies beyond the pines, what the porch lamp hides, who waits at the top of the chipped stone steps.Your father and mother will be circling in the green skiff, far out in the reach. He sculling with one oar, she scanning the glare, eyes shielded. She points, she mouths a name, you break the wave, gasping. Such a delicate operation. She has to lean forward to embrace you, he must slouch back at the same moment, equalizing the thrust, then right himself in increments, while...