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Tuesday, February 16, 2016

Feeling like a freak, she almost ran out of the office, rode the B62 home to pack her bare minimum shit, hopped the G and the E, and here she is under the sign of the dog.

"Where to?"

The lean animal devours miles on the wall behind the bored woman's head. Ten customer service windows, two open. Possible combinations of two from a set of ten is forty-five, four times five is twenty, largest prime number less than twenty is nineteen, nineteenth letter is S.

"Seattle."

"Seattle, Washington?"

"Is there another one?"

"I meant, that's a long trip."

Woman is smiling. Probably pointless friendliness.

"Depends what you're comparing it to. Can I get a ticket to Saturn?"

Now a puzzled look.

"Never mind."

The woman, like a Skee-Ball machine, produces a chain of tickets, z-folds and hands them over. Liquid scarlet inch-long artificial nails, gold ring on fourth finger with bulky ruby or rhodolite garnet or chromium paste. The gleam of it is terribly distracting.

She takes the ticket, finds the gate. There's no such thing as luck, but the next departure is only seventy minutes away. First stop, Baltimore. The narrow sprung device bolted to the wall is deliberately designed to be uncomfortable (this fucking world), so she unrolls her pad and settles on the floor. The tiled wall is white, with a black border cutting in at the corners to isolate white squares, very common, there must be a name for it. She googles, finds nothing.

She would take out her Newman, but can't concentrate. Well she certainly fucked up everything, didn't she? Instead of escaping on the bus, she could escape under it. They're everywhere in the city, just wait at a corner and launch yourself so that the two vectors of motion intersect. She envisions the shining wall of white steel and glass humping up and over, then gulping as the driver hits the brakes too late. Windshield wipers like praying hands. Brainless bystanders screaming, fainting. Most people call this ideation. Mathematicians call it "doing a Ramanujan."

So why doesn't she? Cowardice?

A man waiting in line at the next gate keeps looking at her. Twenties, scruffy beard, skinny jeans, dun winter jacket. She wants to inform him, the reason you have skin is so that you will always know where you end and the rest of the world begins. Nature provides this service free of charge. He should read Wishner (everyone should read Wishner): "From the Eastern chipmunk we have learned the lesson of how an animal survives and prospers by minding its own business."

Ambling to the corner, minding her own business. The city where no one notices you. The bus approaching, forearm across her eyes, goodbye, cruel world! Maybe it's not cowardice that's stopping her, but a modicum of dignity. Too dramatic, too public. Calling attention to herself, the way her mother likes to do. She has never needed anyone, witnesses included. A concealing cornfield and a combine harvester. A long-abandoned vat of acid in a crumbling factory in the Rust Belt. A turnout in the Cascades with a spectacular view.

What she needs is a little time to think.

1965-1976

When Mark was five years old, his parents took him and his older sister to the New York World's Fair. They stayed in a dark house that belonged to some lady his mother knew. The front yard sloped down to a busy street. During the boring evenings when they talked, his parents seemed to think he would play in this yard. But he could see: the smallest stumble and he'd roll, roll faster, fall flailing and die under screeching tires.

On the way to the fair, subway doors opened and closed automatically. A family entering a car could be sliced in two, parents and older sister in the accelerating train looking back at the orphaned five-year-old on the platform.

The fair was bright and hot. His mother called it "sweltering," which made him think uneasily of swimming in sweat. There was a big metal Earth called the Unisphere. It had three rings that his dad said represented satellites named Echo, Telstar 1, and Telstar 2. His dad said the theme of the fair was "Peace Through Understanding," and both of his parents laughed. Mark sat with his mother in a boat that floated through the Disney pavilion, while puppets twirled, clacked, and sang "It's a Small, Small World." When they sang, their faces split in half. Mark liked the igloos.

Everyone was eating Belgian Waffles. They were big fluffy seat cushions with pits to hold all the strawberries in syrup and whipped cream Mark wanted. He flapped his arms. His father told him to pipe down.

In the sweltering heat, on a stretch of bright sidewalk, he vomited up a Belgian Waffle.

The Ferris wheel was a like a big automobile tire. Susan rocked the gondola, but Mark was scared and Dad told her to stop. There was a time capsule that would be opened in five thousand years. There were long lines in the glare. He held his mother's hand while Susan fidgeted in and out of the line and he worried that a man in uniform would appear and announce that she had lost her place, and they would all have to go to the end of the line and it would be her fault but she would never admit it.

Mark loved the ramps, which rose in curvy sweeps and sweepy curves, like flight paths of Whisperjets taking off. There were escalators, monorails, elevators, cable cars, floating seats, rising stands. "Man conquers gravity!" Susan read from a sign. "Pretty corny." Mark fought with her over who could be first to pretend to drive the luxury convertible on the Magic Skyway. He cried and got his way because he was younger. Susan was ten and should know better. The car floated up a ramp and went through the time barrier. Animatronic Triceratops babies broke out of shells; a Brontosaurus in a swamp lifted its head, chewing weeds. Then came the dawn of man. Cavemen invented the wheel and fought a mammoth. To Mark's disbelieving delight, one father caveman was rubbing his butt in front of a campfire.

Even better was Futurama. Mark climbed on the conveyor belt and drank in the dioramas, while the chair he sat in whispered in his ear about the wonders to come. Transports on balloon wheels served lunar mining colonies. Submarine trains carried riches from the ocean floor. The best came at the end: the City of Tomorrow! Streamlined cars moved soundlessly down automated highways. Elevated disks of parkland and arcades led to clean skyscrapers that glowed with yellow squares of rooms and offices.

Mark's whole being ached.

In first grade, he felt serious and adult. The desks were arranged in a grid. The teacher, Miss Peabody, showed the class how to write the full heading that went on top of your schoolwork, if you already knew how to write, which Mark did: Mark Fuller, 1st Grade, Miss Peabody, September 8, 1965.

Writing the year on an official document made him think about it for the first time. He had been born in 1959. He'd just turned six. By the end of this grade, he would be writing "1966" on the heading. 1959 and 1965 would never come back. When he got to Susan's age, it would be 1970.

How strange.

Then it occurred to him that he would probably still be alive, and not even very old, in the year 2000. Which meant that, one day, he would live in the City of Tomorrow. Happiness flooded him. It was a long way off, but he was content to wait. Waiting, in and of itself, had always made him happy.

There was a new show on TV that Mom thought he might like called Lost in Space. It started at 7:30 and was over by 8:00, so he would have time to get ready for bed afterward and have his light out by his bedtime at 8:30. At eight, Mom called downstairs, where he was kneeling on the living room floor with his elbows on the hassock, his face near the screen. Since the show was over, he should come up and brush his teeth.

But the show wasn't over. There had been a mistake in the TV Guide. The show was an hour long. And at some point during the previous half hour, Mark had had a revelation: Lost in Space was the most important thing in the world.

Mark had always obeyed his bedtime, but he howled upstairs to his mother: he couldn't!

Maybe she heard the true note of anguish in his voice. For the first-and it would prove to be the last-time of his childhood, she relaxed the bedtime rule. He rushed upstairs at 8:30, ready to perform speedy, grateful miracles, and his light was out by 8:40. For the rest of Lost in Space's three-year run, he watched it (elbows on the living room hassock, face inches from the screen) in his pajamas with his teeth brushed.

For Christmas that year, he got The Giant Golden Book of Dinosaurs and Other Prehistoric Reptiles. He loved the biggest ones, the sauropods-Brachiosaurus and Diplodocus and Brontosaurus-the ones that stood in swamps and chewed weeds. He loved their long necks and tails and their plump strong legs and circular flat-bottomed feet that looked like the hassock. He loved their smooth gray skin. His favorite was Brontosaurus, Thunder Lizard. ÒLike the two other giants, she is a peace-loving plant-eater,Ó the Golden Book said. The drawing showed her being attacked by Allosaurus. ÒHe likes meat-great chunks of fresh meat!Ó In the drawing, she was up to her shoulders in water. Her long neck was stretched back in a sweeping curve, her long tail curled around her, trying to protect. You couldn't see her eyes, but the straight line of her jaw made her look sad. Allosaurus was biting her neck, and his clawed foot was digging into her back. Blood was dripping down the smooth skin. ÒWhat a battle this is!Ó But Brontosaurus only wanted to chew weeds. ÒBrontosaurus cannot save herself now. But as she sinks, she throws her great weight upon the killer. Allosaurus, with his jaws still locked about BrontoÕs neck, is pushed beneath the water. Thirty tons pin him, helpless, in the sand.Ó

So they both died. But only one of them deserved it.

When Mark took the book out, he usually turned to this page. He stared. He read the text again and looked again at the picture. The rain clouds were dark and mottled. The weeds were bright green. The Allosaurus had evil yellow eyes. You couldn't see her eyes. Sometimes it made Mark cry. "But soon the water rolls peacefully over the hidden forms. Slowly a layer of shifting sand blankets killer and victim alike . . . And so the years roll on." This made Mark sadder. Did her pain matter? She was there, and then not there. The years rolled on. Her suffering, like 1965, would never come back.

That winter his parents gave him and Susan a talk about fire safety. If they smelled smoke or saw a fire, they shouldn't stop to put on clothes or get anything, anything, they should run straight out of the house.

Mark nodded. He had earned their trust. They grilled Susan, whom they suspected of inattention and disobedience. Susan gave Dad the runaround about what if she was in the bathtub, she wasn't going outside bare naked. Susan was close to getting popped. Mark, meanwhile, was surprised to find himself making a mental reservation. He even seemed to be feeling a sly pleasure from the thought that he knew something his parents didn't know, and that the reward of earning their trust was that they would never suspect he would harbor such a thought. Yes, of course he would run straight out of the house-except for a lightning-fast secret diversion to the toy closet, where (he knew exactly where it was, he always put it in the same place) he would grab the Golden Book of Dinosaurs and carry her out of the fire.

Was the luxury convertible that he'd driven on the Magic Skyway a Chevy or a Ford? Dad said Fords had better bodies, but Chevys had better engines, and that was why he always bought a Chevy.

"It was neither, dumbass," Susan said. "It was a Lincoln."

In second grade, the superintendentÕs son came in talking about a Vulcan nerve pinch and started tossing other kids around. He spent the day trying to draw what he said was the coolest spaceship ever, but couldn't get it right, so he got frustrated and scary.

Later, Mark learned that Star Trek came on at 8:30 on Thursdays, which was past his bedtime. One night he woke up with a stomachache and came downstairs and found his father watching the show. He was allowed to lie on the couch for a few minutes. A man wearing those futuristic clothes like pajamas was running through the woods and then a piece of metal like a TV antenna popped up from behind a rock. Mark thought, "This is the kind of show grown-ups watch," thus absolving himself from having to spend any time worrying about it, and fell asleep.

Mom brought Mark to an optometrist. He picked nice frames with dark plastic on the top and clear gray plastic on the bottom, because they looked like what scientists on TV wore. The optometrist called them Òclassic.Ó

He thought glasses would bring everything closer, but instead they made things slightly smaller and clearer. It was astonishing. He wondered how it worked.

He started taking piano lessons. He practiced on his mother's Cable & Sons upright.

There were eighty-eight keys on the piano, and there were also eighty-eight constellations, which was pretty interesting. Mom had wanted to be an astronomer, but she also wanted children. "I made the right choice," she said. He practiced in the dining room while Mom cooked in the kitchen. "That's a wrong note!" she called out, whenever necessary.

ÒI loved summer camp,Ó Mom said, and showed him the brochure. Up until this moment, Mark had assumed he would also love summer camp, but when he looked at the pictures he saw gangs of smirking, confident boys holding balls of various kinds, and he got a dreadful sinking suspicion that camp would be like two straight weeks of gym class.

He was eight. Mom sewed his name tag into all his clothes. She gave him a white cotton laundry bag with a drawstring. She bought him a forest-green sleeping bag with ducks and hunters printed on the flannel inside.

He went.

He had never before experienced the fear and misery of the next two weeks. The kids were bullies. The counselors were inattentive and unjust. One of the latter, refusing to listen to an elementary fact regarding the cause of a disagreement, grabbed the back of Mark's neck and pinched it so hard that Mark was sore for two days afterward. One of the meanest boys could hawk up and send flying gobs of spit so voluminous and solid they looked like milkweed pods. Mark dreamed long afterward of those floating, saggy, soggy hammocks of mean-spirited spit.