Kristopher Jansma - Why We Came to the City

William felt for the small lump in his back pocket, beneath the address book, and fished out the little Aqualad figurine. One final time he studied. He liked to think it was part of some thirteenth art piece that she’d never gotten to make. He liked to think it would have had something to do with him. Only then he thought that, really, as much as all the pieces had to do with death and disappointment and her friends, they also had something to do with him, her last love. Gently, he set the little superhero down on the altar beside the candles, and said a quiet prayer for Chongso Kim.

William moved through the apartment, half expecting some dog or husband to appear and kill him. He had hoped — he didn’t know. That he’d walk in and find Irene there, sitting on the couch beside Grandma Fiona, book on her lap, twirling her hair, paint on her arms. That she would ease her body around his as he lay down and touch his hair. That he would call her No Ears and they would talk about Yesterday and Today, with no mention of that foul uninvited guest Tomorrow. If he could have just one more day, he thought, like the first one. Before she’d heard back from the doctors and begun dying. If he could just have one more day when nothing was wrong, when time could be wasted, because there had still been so, so much of it out there.

And then he saw, through the window in what was now a room filled with old boxes. It was the exact view painted in the back of his old book. The Brooklyn Bridge. Cables arching up like the frame of a great harp, vibrating with the whispered secrets of its crossers. This was the window she’d looked out of each night as she fell asleep and each morning when she’d woken up. As he lay there, he imagined he could hear voices traveling up the strings and through the steel, flickering between the cars and in the thump of the bicycle wheels against the wood. He saw the roadway rising and falling, like a wave out on the sea.

It took him a moment to remember that he hadn’t smoked anything all morning. This wasn’t that. All those voices, all those wheels and feet were coming together into a harmony. A simple, perfect note that resonated with the bridge itself and the churning river beneath. Echoing with the cries of the captains of the great wooden ships, just setting sail from South Street, casting off for the seven oceans, to journey in dreams. William watched in awe as the notes moved through the roadway like a sine curve, an octave that caused bricks to detach one at a time from the towers, a flat foot on each shore.

Into the blue sky, cars and people flew like a peppering of seagulls, up and up and never down. Up into the crystal cotton of the clouds. Light gleamed off their wristwatches and hubcaps and handlebars. They became fins in the ocean of sky. Brick by brick, the bridge rose into the air, pulling the river with it, drop by drop. Atlantis rose. Land of tomorrows and yesteryears. Once there was a continent that sank into the sea. Farewell! he cried to the people as they vanished. Trillions of them, it seemed, as the entire bridge fell into the sky.

Sara Sherman ran between the rooms of the bridal suite, lifting her dress so it wouldn’t sweep the Waldorf’s tapestry rugs. The dress was still an eighth of an inch too long, even after she’d told the lady at Nelson’s to shorten it at both the six-week and the one-month fittings. So now the lace along the edge had accumulated a faint grayness as she rushed from the front door — where she’d just received an update from Zacharie, the hotel’s event coordinator, about the situation with the chairs — back into the bedroom where her sisters, Adeline and Eddy, were converging on George’s mother, intent on taking down the hair that the stylist, Erikah, had spent two hours putting up that morning.

Barely had that been handled when she caught her own mother plucking “excess” baby’s breath from the bouquets. Sara redirected her into checking on whether the Krazy Glue was setting properly on George’s Grandma Pertie’s snapped heel. And did anyone have an approximate GPS location on his older brother, Clarence? Who, despite having strict orders to stay in Midtown, had sneaked off that morning to visit the Cloisters near Fort Tryon Park, only to wind up getting stuck in a cab on the West Side Highway behind some kind of gubernatorial motorcade? For all Sara cared, Clarence could rot on the asphalt overlooking the Boat Basin, but of course, this actual Mensa member had decided it would be a good idea to take the two wedding bands with him.

She was interrupted by George’s little niece, Beth, the seven-year-old daughter of George’s younger brother, Franklin (who at sixteen had been absentminded about protection at a post-prom party). Sara liked Beth immensely, for she was apparently the only other responsible human being in the entire bridal suite. Beth had been fully set in her flower-girl dress, with hair done and shoes on, for over two hours now. Now she held Sara’s phone in the air calmly and said, “It’s ringing.” Beth was in charge of fielding calls and beating level twenty in Plants vs. Zombies .

Sara looked at the phone: it was Minister Thaw, who had already left two messages that morning. He had conducted their required premarital counseling sessions, where they’d had plenty of time to delve into the minutiae of Episcopalian dogma and how it differed from George’s Catholicism and “What about the children?”—and now he was bringing up reordering all the readings, even though the programs had already been printed and the whole thing had been successfully rehearsed the night before. Stay the course! she wanted to yell into his fuzzy little ears. We’re almost through this! Instead she rejected the call, handed the phone back to Beth, and called out to the bridal suite, “Does anyone have the chalk?” Again, only Beth knew the location of the Crayola box and began helpfully whitening the gray hem of the wedding dress.

“Thank you, sweetie. And do you know where Adeline is?”

Beth didn’t. No one nearby knew. Perfect. Not only had their mother guilted Sara into asking her uptight older sister to fill the maid of honor post, and not only had Adeline then thrown a spectacularly dull bachelorette party (appletinis and feather boas), but she had already abandoned Sara and the day’s proceedings.

As unhappy as Adeline was to leave the safety of Gloucester for even one weekend, their younger sister Eddy (short, since always, for Edwina) was being no better about being away from her ashram. Eddy had come to town with the uninvited George-Harrison Zimmerman (first name, legally, “George-Harrison”), whose hair was both longer and shinier than Sara’s had been at any point in her life and who had brought his guitar “just in case.”

Sara had a hard time not fixating on how much easier all this would have been with Irene at her side. She didn’t trust anyone else’s opinions on jewelry, decorations, or invitations. At every turn in the planning, she’d wanted to call up Irene about the wisdom of champagne-colored heels, or get her input on calligraphers. And of course, here she had two perfectly good sisters, only the two of them combined couldn’t begin to fill the opening left by her absent best friend. “I hope you don’t think you’re wearing Grandma’s pearls” was Adeline’s only contribution, while Eddy wanted only to remind Sara that the tuna on the reception menu was being dangerously overfished. Sara had found herself talking, half to herself, half to the absence of Irene, all throughout the planning process — and now that it was over, and the wedding was happening, it seemed inconceivable that Irene wasn’t there to see it all through.