Scott Cheshire - High as the Horses' Bridles

I walked for blocks and watched the blur of passing cars and the people, the overwhelming spectacle of street sounds and color, and I felt not quite a part. Almost, but not quite. Swimming above the city noise somehow, I finished the knish. I stepped around a construction crew and a large black hole in the street. I watched the steel-on-rock stammer of the jackhammer, and the hop of the man’s orange helmet as he broke through rock. A small Asian woman approached a hot dog cart. Shock-white bowl-cut hair. She wore purple sweatpants tucked into black leather cowboy boots and pressed a shoulder bag against her belly.

The vendor waved her off before she got to speak.

She came over to me, pulling something from her bag. She looked at me blankly. “DVD?”

“Excuse me?”

“Good quality.”

I looked at the cover, at the plastic sheathing in her hand, and I saw running along the bottom like blunt baby teeth the tops of block letters spelling out the sentence NOT FOR RESALE. I stared at this until she lost patience.

“Five bucks.” She showed me the palm of her hand.

I continued to look at the case until she snatched it back. She disappeared around a corner down the street.

I shook myself, and called Amad.

He said, “Where are you?”

“I’m sitting on a beige brick step at the foot of a tall apartment building in Queens, not so far from the airport, I think. There’s a hot dog cart in front of me. Construction across the street. A large bug is stuck in the rut of a sidewalk square.” Oily water from who knows where drained along the curb and toward the sewer grating.

“And what is on your mind, my friend?”

“A woman just tried to sell me a pirated DVD. I thought of you.”

“She was Indian?”

“Chinese. I think.”

“The immigrant makes you think of me. The shady newcomer. Very nice.”

“The software, you idiot. How’s today? Any better? I’m trying to be a better boss.”

“I have a cousin on my mother’s side, he disappeared ten years ago muling CPUs in his rectum from Eritrea. This woman with the DVDs, she could be screaming inside for help. Did you buy anything from her? Did you give her any money at all?”

“No.”

“Good. I have regretted almost every purchase from these people. The quality is very often bad.”

“I may be here a while.”

“And I am here.”

“My father’s really sick.”

“I had a feeling.”

“And I really do need you. You know that, right?”

He said, “More than you ever could.”

“Good.”

We were quiet for a moment.

“Josie.”

“Yeah.”

“Are you okay?”

“Perfect.”

We were quiet again.

I said, “Make sure you give Teri my love. Rub her belly for me.”

“I’ll do that.”

“So I’ll be here, then,” I said.

“And I am here, my friend.”

I crossed the street and walked by the construction workers, by the bright orange cones, the yellow tape. I looked at my phone: six o’clock. It was rush hour. Six o’clock? The day had gone by so fast! No way Dad was still sleeping. I headed toward the main avenue a few blocks away, toward the subway stair that opened like a hell’s mouth down inside the sidewalk, and I saw the bobbing heads. The bobbing rise of people coming from the trains, and they just kept on coming. They were shoulder close and moving fast, on cell phones sharing with their spouses, and they were coming fast my way. I used to look down on them, people like this. I said they were already dead. I said, Let them walk along their walls like rats in search of scraps. But now I saw not some marching millipede, khaki-legged and gruesome — no, I saw the quivering, the miscellaneous, the crowded and alive, busy soul of humanity. They came at me, surrounding me and passing like a stream flows around a fallen tree. I stayed very still — actually, I was in the way, and I enjoyed every last muttered complaint they made. Every curse. Then I turned and joined them, I walked, and I would go wherever they led me. Not because this was the true way, or the right way, but because this was just one way among how many ways alongside other people right here on this planet and, my God, that sounds so dramatic but really it just felt nice. I couldn’t remember the last time I was so fully alive. Everyone’s head was bobbing, and I saw the front doors of every building, and the TVs through first-floor windows. I felt warm air on my skin, wafting up from the sidewalk grates. The sun was going down orange in the alleys. Evening was on its way, and I was suddenly filled with an overwhelming sense of dread. Six o’clock? Why was I out and about gallivanting? With a sick father at home? Who needed me, more than he knew, and was possibly looking for me, and calling out my name at this very moment? I hailed a taxi, and told the cabbie I was in a hurry.

The bathroom door was open and red light poured into the dark hall, the red pooling on the floor and seeping up the opposite wall. My father was on the cot, his arms limp like snapped wings, belly pressing upward like a boil. There was a bottle of wine beside him, an empty glass. He was breathing. It was labored and thin, but he was breathing. I lowered the toilet lid because open it seemed too portentous, too hungry. I sat. I touched his head and his fine hair. It was nearly seven. I told myself I would call an ambulance if he didn’t wake in the next thirty seconds. I’d bought some groceries from the convenience store down the street: a frozen pizza, crackers and cheese, a soft apple. I put the groceries on the floor. I dialed 911 and asked for an ambulance. He opened his eyes.

“How you doing down there?”

He smiled. “You remember?” He stuttered a bit. “Preaching from door to door?”

“I do. Some.”

“You were what?”

“Maybe seven.”

“You were speaking the old language, and that only comes from one place.…”

“Hey, I called for an ambulance.”

He closed his eyes.

I arranged his legs on the cot and folded the pillow under his head, raising his head.

He pressed his hand to his side. “The body doesn’t want to go.”

“Maybe you should listen to it.”

“No reaching God in a monkey suit.”

The red was all around us. Everything was suffused with dark light. He made a look of disgust, and said, “What’s all this to me, anyway?”

“There’s me.”

He touched my knee. “Of course.”

“Good dreams?”

He laughed. “I was standing right there,” he said, pointing with his finger at the tiled wall, up in the corner by the ceiling. But he couldn’t move his arm. “Right there was Rockaway Beach. You remember Rockaway Beach?”

“I do.”

“We went with your mother.”

“I remember. You threw me in the water.”

“I didn’t scare you?”

“Of course not. We were playing.”

He pointed at the ceiling, and it seemed to take all his strength. “I was hot inside, and light in my belly, and a hand comes taking me to Heaven. Your mother’s all light. And you’re all light. And all your kids are light.”

“I don’t have any kids.”

He said, “You were an old man standing next to them.”

“And Sarah’s where?”

“She was light.”

I drank some wine from the bottle and held it up to the red bulb to see how red, my father on the floor, at the bottom of a deep red gorge. I was supposed to save him, to stop anything like this from happening. I had failed.

He asked, “What time is it?”

“About seven.”

“A few more hours till Sunday.” He looked at my glass.

“You promised you’d eat.”

“I will, come Sunday. At midnight.”

“That’s five more hours. The ambulance will be here by then.”