I circumnavigated the block four times trying to find the right address. On my third trip, I accepted that the old foundry was the building I wanted. The lot was overgrown with weeds. The checkerboard windows were smashed in. I made one more loop and stopped at a pay phone on the corner. I called New York. The phone rang once before Ben answered. “Hello?” His voice was frantic but also flat. “Hey.” “Are you here?” “I’m in Pittsburgh. I’m going to see my father.” “What? Why? I thought you were coming straight to New York.” “I haven’t seen him in ages, sweetie. I’ll be there tomorrow. Sunday at the latest.” “I thought you were coming directly here. I really need you. It’s killing me to be apart like this.” “Hold on just a few days, ok?” He didn’t respond. I looked at the foreboding old steel mill and seriously considered hopping the next bus to New York. When I wasn’t on the phone with him, my body was practically singing for Ben. We’d met at a tailgate in Ann Arbor. He was tall, slender, wispy haired. He carried himself with an oblivious confidence, like he didn’t know women watched him. His mother was Jewish, like mine, and his father wasn’t, like mine. He was the first man I met who admired and understood the contradictions of my childhood: the disapproving grandparents in the Chicago suburbs, my mother’s bouts of devoutness, my father’s befuddlement at her insistence on celebrating Passover. “Are you ok?” I asked. The television gargled in the background. “I’m hanging in there. I’m not doing well. It’s just…I’m lonely, ok? Nights are tough without you here. It doesn’t feel right. I was expecting you to be here tonight.” “I know. I’m sorry. I’ll be there soon. I promise.” I hung up and crossed the street. The watchman in the guard stand waved me through without a second glance. Whenever I imagined Pittsburgh, I imagined this kind of night. Rain the color of pig-iron was falling insistently, the sewers were coughing steam. The whole city seemed slicked with grease. Everyone seemed to be at a bar. I knocked on the heavy, rusted door. I waited for such a long time that I almost left. But I probably would have waited all night. The rain was drumming rhythmically. Finally, the door slid open. It yawned slowly, like a great beast rousing itself from a lengthy hibernation. “Hello?” His voice was scoured from decades of cigarettes. It sounded like he’d just woken up, or like he’d been awake for days without sleep. “It’s Rachel.” The door yawned a little wider, and a figure stepped into the dreary, purple light. There was a drawn out silence while we recalibrated our mental photographs of the other: what deepened, what vanished, what materialized. My father, three years older. Then he shuffled inside, leaving the door ajar. His space was vast and grim. The city’s residual light filtered through the upper windows, high and indirect. A few worktables burned with lamplight like the chapels of a Gothic cathedral. Half finished heaps of iron and metal sat like the ruins of a demolition, or like bones. Despite its size, the room was cluttered, filled to the brim with my father’s projects and ideas and memories. In the middle of the room, there was an enormous parchment rolled open, its corners held in place by stacked books. Two slender lamps illuminated the paper from opposite corners. It looked like a map. All the room’s traffic had to divert around it. “I wasn’t expecting anyone,” Dad said, no hint of embarrassment in his voice. “I don’t have to stay. I can catch the next bus.” He turned to me. He was wearing a white t-shirt that was punctured with holes and splotched with paint. The sinew of his neck was more prominent. He’d shed weight with the years. The light, vestigial as it was, accentuated the craters and dells of his face. For the first time in my life, he seemed conjoined with the word old. “No,” he said. “I want you to stay. This is an unexpected gift. I hope you’ll stay.” “What are you working on?” “Too many things. Stuff you wouldn’t care about, or understand. Stuff most people don’t care about.” “You know they teach a class on you at Ann Arbor. I took it, actually.” “What do they say about me?” “There’s a serious scholarly debate as to whether your work is Baroque or impressionist.” He laughed, briefly sounding hale and invigorated. “Sometimes they’ll call me for interviews. Although they call less and less. Did anyone know you were my daughter?” “No.” This didn’t surprise him. “They also said that your best work is behind you,” I added. He smiled with sweet affliction, and laughed less robustly. “It’s nice to know the outside world has opinions. Are you hungry?” he asked. “You must be hungry.” “I could eat.” “I know a place. Let me change clothes.” While he changed, I studied the gigantic map on the floor. It resembled a city. It began in the upper left corner, and the lines emanated outwards in supple, elegant parabolas. The strokes were gentle, ethereal. The further from the city’s heart, the more convoluted the sequences of streets and buildings became. Some of them led nowhere, others bent perpetually in on themselves. And still others disappeared off the parchment’s boundaries. The voluptuous lines, their curves, reminded me of a woman’s body. Taken as a whole, and viewed from afar, the cartography was beautiful, if incomprehensible. Broken into segments, it became an overwhelming labyrinth. ~ We walked through the softening rain. Dad held an umbrella reminiscent of a circus tent. We forced ourselves to the far edges of it, keeping what distance we were allowed. It was a warm late spring rain, and not entirely unpleasant. He was still taller than me, but I’d mostly caught up. The bars we passed blinked with the hostile melancholy of provinciality. I thought of 19th century Russian stories where a wanderer enters a strange town seeking solace but finding only menace. The row homes spoke quietly of blight. The streets were disconcertingly empty for a Friday night. Faded billboards for extinct companies hawked relics and trinkets. Flyers advertising local bands were plastered onto telephone posts and boarded-up windows. Most of them were torn and tattered, the concert dates long since lapsed. He took me to a diner where the owner still spoke Polish with his sons. Dad had an urban knack for authenticity that I lacked. Mom had always despised it, the way he led us into the bowels of a place. She once compared him to a rat who finds the oldest, mustiest piece of cheese. The diner was spare, fluorescently lit. Black and white photographs of neighborhood heroes adorned the walls. Young, stern faced men in baseball knits and police navies. The tables were nicked and coffee stained. A few older men sat at the bar, sipping coffee and reading soggy newspapers. Dad shook hands with the burly owner. We took a two-seat booth near the back. “I thought you were supposed to be in Montana,” he said after ordering two coffees. “I was. But now I’m on my way to New York. How did you know I was in Montana?” “Your mother told me.” “How often do you two talk?” “It depends.” “On what?” He smiled in a way that made me uncomfortable and lonely. His teeth didn’t look very good. He’d developed the shifty paranoia associated with the reclusive. His unsteady eyes were always checking the door, as if a hit man or a lover left on bad terms might walk in. He was constantly kneading his hands. I reached across the table and took his hands, hoping to calm him. “What were you in Montana for?” “I was training to be a park ranger.” “You’ve wanted that for a long time, haven’t you?” “Yes. I have.” He nodded, but didn’t ask the question almost anyone else would ask. Perhaps Mom had already told him. “Timing can be a difficult thing,” he said. “We all make decisions about what matters, don’t we?” “Sure.” I remembered him coming home very late when I was younger. His clothes were always burned or in tatters. He tracked soot and ash across the floors, which drove Mom mad. I remembered the tension of their whispers while I lolled between reality and dreams. I remembered going to stark white galleries along the lake where people would drink champagne and admire Dad’s sculptures. I remembered thinking his work looked cold and dead against the splendid light coming off the water. I remembered the parties in our apartment where Dad would get into an argument with someone and start throwing glasses across the room, very methodically, one after the other, until the place emptied out. “Do you think this is an opportunity that will come around again?” “I don’t know. It’s very competitive. Who knows if I’ll want to be a park ranger in five years, anyway.” “Your mother has a lot of regrets, you know. She thought I would change, and I didn’t. She thinks she missed out on something. The life she imagined didn’t come to pass. She thinks she might have found stability with someone else. I suspect she’s impressed this onto you. You‘ll have to decide how long to live in the shadow of her regrets.” “She likes Jewish boys.” “You have to fight, sometimes very ferociously, for the life you want. And sometimes you’ll wonder if it’s a fight worth winning, or if it’s better to accept somebody else’s vision for your life. Or a culture’s vision for your life. You can’t allow other people to sway your decisions.” “They don’t. I chose to leave.” “Then ok.” He ordered a tomato and feta omelet. I ordered pirogi’s and a short stack of pancakes. “Do you have any friends here, Dad? Are you lonely?” “People sometimes come by.” “Mom says you live like a fanatic. Like a mystic from an old myth who went to live on a mountain.” “Your mother never understood my motivations.” “What are your motivations?” “That’s a pretty good question.” We mostly ate in silence. Meals, in our family, had always been introverted affairs. To paraphrase Carver, we were into some serious eating. After finishing, we walked home during a caesura in the rain. “Do you go to any baseball games?” I asked. Whenever the Pirates were in Chicago, we took the El out to Wrigley and baked in the bleacher sun. The gentle crowd throb of a languid, forgotten afternoon at the ballpark was a piece of my father‘s soul; maybe the most accessible part. “Not usually. They’re tearing down Three Rivers, that monstrosity.” “That’s good.” “I suppose. It feels like a failure to me. That we thought it was a good idea to build the thing, and that then it barely lasted three decades. That we thought we could create a one-size-fits all public space and transport it to Philly, to St. Louis, to Cincy. All of them gone now, or on their way out. Three decades. Not even half a lifetime. That’s the life span for our public spaces anymore. Before they become obsolete. And yet we haven’t learned a thing. We’re still creating the same generic spaces. The malls, the box stores, the things done on the cheap, relatively speaking. Friends of mine, of your mother’s, swore by that universal, functionalist architecture. I probably did, too. I don’t remember.” I hooked my arm through his, and felt his posture go rigid. He wasn’t used to contact. Steam rose, apparition-like, from the streets. I thought we might disappear into it, might sublimate into the night. “They have home plate from Forbes Field ensconced in glass inside one of the academic buildings at Pitt. An early 70’s, riot-proof claptrap. All exposed concrete, small windows, poor natural lighting. And somewhere in the lobby, the dish where Mazeroski won the ‘60 Series. I want to go to there sometimes with a bat and a ball and start hitting. Start soft tossing and hitting fly balls to the college kids. I wonder how many of them even know Mazeroski.” “Want to go? I’ll pitch.” He laughed at this and I lay my head on his shoulder. When we arrived at his place, he brought me a sleeping bag. It smelled like mold and sweat, and probably hadn’t been used in at least a decade. When Mom and I had gone camping, Dad usually stayed behind to work in his studio. “I’m sorry,” he said. “That’s all I’ve got. I wish I had a spare bed. The couch isn’t awful.” “It’s fine.” “Ok,” he said. “I wake up pretty early. I’ll try to be quiet. Stay as long as you like. Make yourself at home. All of that stuff,” he said, smiling in bemusement. After he went to bed, I wandered the large, cluttered room. The sculptures were indecipherable, relics of some ancient philosophical argument he’d never resolved with his peers, or with his predecessors, or his antecedents; one line of dialogue in a long, hermetic conversation that had no end and a beginning everyone forgot. He’d given his life to a cause and the cause had failed him. There were letters everywhere, dropped casually around the room, as if he’d just received them. Some were from his father. Some were from friends long dead. Some were from women I didn’t know. I read all of them. They were mostly esoteric and erudite; every craft, every life, has its own dialect. I found a letter from my mother, undated. Jack, I was dreaming last night that I was in bed and you snuck into my bedroom like some scoundrel or thief or rapist. I was asleep, in the dream, and you woke me. You led me into the bathroom. It was the kind of bathroom you find in a hotel, cold and expansive, all hard reflective surfaces. Everything shone like brand new. You bent me over the sink and fucked me from behind, ravenously, maybe against my will. I woke up for real and missed you fiercely. What happened to our intensity, Jack? Was there a threshold, a moment we can pinpoint when it lapsed? Or was it a slow death? I miss your cock. Mostly, I miss missing your cock. I feel so terrible using such language at my age. You have my love always. Bec. After that I went to bed. ~ I woke and there was light like pale fire falling from the high windows. I smelled coffee and bacon and toast. Dad was standing very still, looking at his map. He reminded me of a statue, placid yet anguished. He stared, trying to make some sense of the labyrinth, trying to step back and see its intricate patterns. Or maybe it was a dream. ~ The morning after rain in Pittsburgh. The rivers were full and fast, and furiously turbid. The glass towers glinted like solid adamant. The still damp streets were washed in the gossamer light of early summer. I walked into a rich, full day. Ben was at work, so I left him a rambling, evasive message. I climbed a series of switchbacks into Oakland. Most of the students were gone for the summer, and the streets radiated the pleasant, languid silence of a ghost town. A block from Carnegie Mellon, I discovered a used bookstore. I was enveloped by that musty smell universal to all libraries and old bookstores. I sat for a while and read poems by Neruda in Spanish, whispering them to myself even though I couldn’t understand the words. There was grace in their supple syllables. I thought about my father, about the intricate, convoluted map and all the sculptures in states of disarray. Since I was old enough to have opinions, I’d always considered my father’s art to be something like poetry. It was blunt, stark poetry, often fractured by violence, that was mostly formless and adhered to erudite, ancient rhythms. But it was poetry nonetheless. The only other person in the store, save the cashier, was a boy, high school aged. He was rangy and tall, with delicate walnut hair. He drifted around the store with the insouciance of summertime freedom. Girls and alcohol, books and cigarettes and late night coffee. He was attractive, and he occasioned to smile at me, furtively, with the corners of his eyes. I thought about Ben in his cubicle in New York. He worked in web advertising; “the New Frontier” he called it. He always said I wanted to work on the old frontier. I admired that he didn’t have enormous ambitions. I admired his acceptance of form, his willingness to sacrifice pleasure for things he considered valuable: hard work, discipline, social functioning. I bought a book of poems written by a Pittsburgh poet I’d never heard of but who shared my father’s name. I walked back into the splendor of late morning. For a time, I meandered aimlessly and thought of nothing. Carnegie Mellon gave way to Pitt. I stumbled upon the Cathedral of Learning, whose grotesque body rose like the dungeon at the heart of a bad dream. It struck me as an edifice my father probably loved: foreboding, intense, redolent of violent death. Inside, the cathedral was cold, and dank. My footsteps echoed. I took one of the immense, creaking elevators as high as it would go. The ride was slow. The noises were alarming and inhuman. Whirring and hitching, the dour chamber strained dolefully against gravity. I emerged on a narrow, high floor gashed with full light. At one end was a small cove flanked by a balcony and tall windows. The oxidized city steamed silently outside. There were vast swaths of dun hillsides and slate-roofed homes. A cemetery undulated on a far ridge. Beyond were the verdant, abraded mountains of western Pennsylvania. I lounged in the sun and blithely read the poems I’d bought. A shadow appeared above me on the balcony. It was the boy from the bookstore. He stalked around the windows, and then he was looking down at me. It amazed me, the physical presence of somebody’s eyes; the way we feel other bodies penetrating our space. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d felt so intently watched. “Are you following me?” “Yes, I am.” Inexplicably, I smiled. “Why?” He shrugged. “Are you a student?” “No. I live in the neighborhood. My father’s a professor at Carnegie Mellon.” “What does he teach?” “Studio art.” I nodded. “Well, I’m trying to read.” “Ok.” I read the first line of a poem four times and it was more difficult to understand than the Neruda. The boy was still watching me. “Come down here so this is less weird,” I said. He disappeared for a moment, and then he was standing in the doorway. I stood up and leaned against the window furthest from him. He began to circle the room very slowly, like he was being driven by a dreamy, laconic wind. He was focused on the city below, the cataclysmic void of space. “Have you ever thought of jumping out these windows?” “I’ve never been here before,” I said. “But don’t you want to jump?” “A little bit,” I said. He looked at me and smiled. His face was melancholy and not yet wholly formed. Absent were the lines of age and heartbreak and disappointment. His beauty was still a shadow, an outline. “Isn’t that why we’re drawn to high places?” I said. “Because we want to jump and we want to resist that urge? To reaffirm our commitment to existence.” “Are you from Pittsburgh?” “No. I’m visiting someone.” “Who?” “A friend.” He was still orbiting me, taking an indirect path. I moved away from him, beginning my own ellipses. The windowsills were caked in dust. He’d trailed his fingers through them, I’d noticed, leaving fine imprints that started and stopped at random, like ghosts leaving tracks through the desert, or like an old trail swept away by water or wind. I left my own arteries of motion, my fingertips abscessing with dander and grime, with the methodical abscissions of time. Occasionally he would glance back at me, and half turn his body. His motions were indecisive, endearing. “I have dreams where I’m in a plane and it’s falling out of the sky,” I said. “I have recurring plane crash dreams. I wake up exhilarated.” I stopped opposite him. There were two chairs and a coffee table between us. He sat on one of the chair backs, his legs crossed at the ankle. He wore ragged jeans and a v-neck t-shirt. His chest was smooth and paler than his face. “When I was nine I had a seizure,” he said. “I remember feeling very faint and nauseous, but before I could do anything about it, the whole world went black. It was pretty much like falling asleep. If I’d died, it wouldn’t have been horrifying. There wouldn’t have been any resistance. I would have plunged into it without a choice. But I came to on the floor instead. I thought I’d taken a nap.” I sat down in the other chair. “My father’s a Hari Krishna,” he said. “He wears the bright robes. Sometimes I’ll go to the temple with him. It’s this old, grand building. I’ll drink sugar water and listen to them chant, and I think they’ve got something figured out. Maybe that sleeping isn‘t really any different from death. Maybe that we throw ourselves so willingly into one void and are so afraid of the other.” “I’m supposed to be in New York,” I said. “I’m abandoning something I’ve spent five years working towards, a life of service and solitude, to live in a city I loathe. For a noisy, dirty city full of the self aggrandizing and full of consumers and full of traffic. A city so big it blots out the rest of the world.” “I’ve never been.” “You could always follow me there. Catch a bus and stalk me.” “Maybe.” He floated to the window and then he was sitting on the edge of the table, his knees bent in towards mine. “My father goes to the airport and begs for money. He goes down to the market and begs for money. He comes home and reeks of incense. And then he teaches kids how to draw. He teaches night classes, too. For the blind and the retarded, and then he puts on galleries where he displays their drawings, and their families come, and the guilty come, and they marvel at the drawings even though they’re totally incomprehensible and juvenile. And I kind of hate him for it, because I know it makes him feel so damn good about himself. That he only does it because he worries he’s not a good person.” “So what do you do?” “I draw.” I laughed and he bounced his knee against mine, once, twice, then a hard third time. “Ow,” I said. “Sorry.” I stood up and went to the window. The river, one of them, resembled a conduit of slag. He was at my side. His biceps were reticulated with thick, prominent veins. “The old mills and foundries along the waterfront have mostly been converted into condominiums. The people moving into the city now are executives for the banks or the coal companies,” his hand swept over the panorama. “And over there is the Port Washington Incline. The view of the city is gorgeous, although this is better.” “My father watched the 1960 World Series from the roof of this place.” Somewhere unseen a phone rang. “Do you want to see my dad’s studio?” he asked. “It’s not too far from here. I think you’d like it.” I followed him into the elevator. I fantasized about him kissing me, pushing me against the padded walls. Or I fantasized about him killing me. We stared straight ahead, silent, our feet dancing with discomfort. Again I thought of Ben in his office. One of the anonymous, unreal millions. I thought of the crowd swell, him moving into the street with his tie loosened and the hollow of his neck exposed. The sewer stench and the pot bellied vendors with their rancid, boiled meats. The clouds foundering in the skyscraper glass. Ten million people with their delusions of self importance and their gazes drawn to the blinking advertisements, to the chests and legs of gorgeous, anodyne girls trying to stave off the irrelevance of middle age. I studied the soft, street-map skin of the boy’s inner elbow. The elevator clinked and dinked and throttled us into controlled descent. I was wet, I needed the bathroom. I’d made an enormous mistake going with him. I was perspiring terribly, and I hoped he wouldn’t misconstrue its meaning. A line from my mother’s letter came to me, preposterously. I miss your cock. We spend a lifetime trying not to think about our fathers’ cocks. He led me back to Carnegie Mellon. His father’s building was a new steel-and-glass monstrosity, its shimmering veneer built on the cheap, built not to last. Downtown, between the rivers, they were wiring a thirty-year old stadium for demolition. What was the shelf life for art anymore? For function? The centerpiece of the building’s interior was a multi-story helix. We walked its length, the human genome writ large. Empty, dark classrooms formed the helix’s core. “Do you like Woody Allen?” I asked. “I haven’t seen him.” “You should.” He led me into a windowless classroom. He shut the door, and for a second we stood in total darkness. Then the lights crackled to life. The ceiling was low and the walls were plastered with rudimentary paintings. In the middle of the room there was a bench draped by a sequined blanket. A half circle of chairs surrounded it. He sat down on the bench while I wandered the room’s perimeter. He waited for me in silence. I could feel the lights phosphoresce and pulse. The heart is its own electrical system, I thought. The wall farthest from the door was a bookcase. I came across a slender book about one of my father’s projects; a memorial park he designed in Chicago for Holocaust victims. He’d designed it before I was born. My mother’s mother, a Holocaust survivor herself, had been very active in the city’s Jewish community. She’d pulled strings so that my father won the job, even though he was the only non-Jewish finalist. The park had, of course, caused an uproar. It was a series of ovoid coves connected by winding stairs. Most of the spaces were secluded. The center of the park was depressed. One had to descend to its hidden heart before ascending and emerging on the other side, where the lake greeted them. Most people thought it was too difficult to navigate. The Jewish community wanted to know how in the hell. My grandmother never spoke to my father again. “Do you like his work?” the boy asked. “I don’t know much of it.” “My Dad loves him. His sketches of the ideal city were what made Dad want to be an artist.” “Really?” “Yep. Dad says he’s brilliant, and that they’ll still be studying his art centuries from now.” “I’ll have to check him out.” In the years since opening, the park had been ransacked by graffiti (some of it magnificent, actually). It’s also one of the best places downtown to make out or smoke a joint. “Can I draw you?” the boy asked. He’d moved closer, and was smiling dopily. He was too young to feel shame. “No.” This perplexed him instead of wounding him. “Do you bring a lot of girls here?” He smiled sheepishly. “I thought so.” “You’re prettier than them.” I laughed. “Thank you, but I doubt that.” “You are.” He stepped closer. “I’m going to New York for a man.” “I figured as much.” “Did you?” “What else do people leave for?” We were now closer than we were in the elevator. He took the book out of my hands and dropped it to the floor. Its landing was surprisingly contained; there was no echo or reverb. “He’s a good man. He works hard and he’s selfless. He’ll be a good, present father someday. I won’t wake up in the night and find his spot in bed empty.” “Ok.” “So that’s important.” “And you’ll forget all about this dream of yours.” “If I’d lost him, it would haunt me, too.” “Then we’re all haunted eventually.” “Right. You decide what will haunt you less.” In the bus, riding beneath the vast Montana sky, all I could comprehend was how lonely the landscape looked. I felt that I’d spent five years wanting a mistake; that my notions of solitude and service and sustainability had been ideals that were incompatible with the solid adamant of life. I put my hand to the boy’s chest. I twisted the fabric between my fingers. I had forgotten about the dust that had collected on my fingertips, and it stained his shirt, streaked it the color of dirty snow. Before he could kiss me I skipped across the room. He was standing there with a distraught smile wrenched across his face. For the first time, he seemed to grasp the absolute nihility of our encounter. We weren’t destined to be lovers or to be anything. “Come on,” I said. “Let’s go.” He didn’t move. “If you don’t get over here now, I’m leaving without you and turning off the lights.” We walked out of the building in devastating silence. Once he stopped, like he wanted to say something, but I kept walking and be chased desperately after me. We emerged on the street. A crowd of students moved under indifferent, gossamer sunshine. “It was nice to meet you,” I said. “Maybe someday I’ll see some of your drawings.” “How will you know they’re mine?” “I won’t.” I started to walk away. “What’s your name?” he called after me, but I was already drifting down the street, into the lush late afternoon light, into the small but teeming crowd. “In case I want to look you up.” I waved a hand, smiled, and blew him a kiss. He stood there, like a man left in the wake of a boat that is doomed for tragedy. A befuddled, crestfallen look scarred his face. I thought that he would remember me for the rest of his life; that he would carry this image, of me sublimating into the crowd, until the end of his days. My father was gone when I got back to his place. He didn’t come home that night. I spent an hour rooting around his things, and found two more letters from my mother. I read one of them. Jack, Do you remember dancing with the street bands in New Orleans? It was such a real city then, or so I thought. I don’t know much about cities, at least not as much as you do. What feels right to me is always so inauthentic, so terribly generic to you. But you seemed to enjoy New Orleans then, the derelicts and the bums, the musician panhandlers with their faded brass. You loved the grime of the place, the seediness, and especially the music. And the food, of course, the greasy finger foods, the messy shellfish, the leaden weight in your stomach after a meal. I remember the first night, you telling me that this was a trip for eating, not for fucking. I laugh when I think about that now. Why do these things keep coming back to me? I don’t know. Sometimes I feel like a researcher of my own life, like I only exist in a library anymore, like all I do is walk through a vast catalogue of all the experiences I’ve had, and that I’m constantly trying to keep them ordered, constantly checking to make sure they haven’t degraded. But then, how impossible to live within memory. How impossible to keep up with the past, which is ever expanding while the future is winding itself down. How impossible to reconcile these two lives, the one that has already been lived and the one I am still trying to build. You hate these kinds of sentiments, I know. Oh well. We can only be ourselves, can’t we? I admire how you’ve maintained your solitude, Jack. Almost all of us are beholden to some sort of social bonds, and more often than not, these bonds probably inhibit our personal achievement. But we’re obligated to maintain these relationships, through blood, or sex, or guilt, or pity. It’s why so few of us ever truly lead lives of true accomplishment and attainment. We’re undone by our capacity for love, by our incessant loneliness which is, of course, little more than fear of death manifest. But you’ve forsaken those bonds, and perhaps because of it, you’ve led a life whose works will endure, at least in some capacity. Only you fully know the price you’ve paid for that, in regret and sorrow, in loneliness and guilt. I put the other letter in my bag. ~ “Hey sweetie.” “Hey. What time is it?” “Almost three.” “I’ve got work in the morning.” “I know. I’m sorry.” “It’s ok. It’s ok. What’s up?” “We didn’t talk today. I missed you.” “I miss you, too. I’m dying without you, Rach. I really am. I know it seems a bit ridiculous, but the loneliness is overwhelming. What’s the point of all this work I’m doing if I don’t have you to share it with?” “…” “Are you there?” “Yeah, I am. I shouldn’t have woken you up. You work so hard, I know that.” “Don’t be sorry. Don’t go.” “No, you need to sleep. Go back to bed. I love you.” I hung up and then sat down in the middle of the street. In one of the row homes across from the payphone, a light was on in a third floor room. A figure, or maybe two figures, moved behind the diaphanous curtain. Whatever they were doing suddenly seemed immensely important. One mysterious room in one small city in one country of one young woman’s mysterious life. What was going on up there? I sat Indian style in the middle of the road, watching the window. I half wanted someone to drive by and to see me; wanted somebody in a car to watch me the way I was watching those anonymous shadows. I don’t know how long I sat there. No one drove by. I strained, but I couldn’t tell what was going on in that room. Eventually, after an hour or a week or a year or maybe a whole lifetime, I went inside and fell asleep. ~ “When I was nineteen, I dropped out of school and decamped for Europe. I had no purpose in mind, no artistic ambitions. I’d worked with metal because my father was a welder. I just wanted to tramp. I don’t think I’ve told you any of this before. Well, I went all over. I hitchhiked, which was pretty common back then. I worked odd jobs to get by. I worked at a winery, I worked at a water treatment plant, I worked pumping gas. There were things I saw that struck me. I stood in Saint Chapelle, and I wanted it. Wanted to build it, or something like it. I wanted to build a cathedral. I went to Mont St. Michel, and already tourists were overrunning the place. So I went back in December when it was empty and grey. And I wanted to be those monks who’d once come there, cut off from everything. But mostly I wanted to erect something massive and divine, something permanent. Something a man could enter and feel the brilliance of.” Dad was sitting on the edge of the couch. I was still wrapped in the musty sleeping bag. “When did you get home last night?” I asked. “Where were you?” “Somehow the work I’ve done has been reductive and deconstructionist. I don’t know how. Maybe it’s because, as a culture, we don’t build things of scale and size anymore. And if we do, those things aren’t built solely to be beautiful. They’re political statements or economic statements, or they’re necessary triumphs of belief systems. There‘s something about being in an extraordinary building, or reading an extraordinary book. There’s a logic to their construction that obliterates all other reasoning and forms of meaning. I‘ve never attained that. I never will. I could have lived a comfortable life, and saved your mother a hell of a lot of grief, and achieved exactly what I‘ve achieved by living this way.” He smiled and put a hand on my hip. It flashed through my mind: my father’s cock, what it might feel like. Sometimes these thoughts happen, and it’s impossible to deny them. “You aren’t pissed off at me the way your mother is. I suppose I don’t know why.” “Me either,” I said. “It’s possible that you understand my motivations, spectral as they are. Or at least you can begin to understand the path that would lead me to where I am.” He put a hand on my cheek. “Maybe you’re coming back from the ledge. Or maybe you’re conceding the only thing in your life that matters. I don’t know.” ~ As I got ready to leave, he was standing like a statue again, looking at his labyrinthine map. I chose not to interrupt him before I slipped out. I never saw him again. ~ I called my mother from the bus station. “Do you send Dad letters?” I asked. She was silent for a long while. “Do you?” “Your father and I talk from time to time, as one would expect. What we say, and how often we talk, is none of your business.” “Except you told me to avoid him. You told me to cut him out of my life, to sever the ties and to not look back.” “Your father can be very insistent and seductive. Charming is a better word, in your case. It’s important that you don’t let him cloud your judgment.” She let out a void of a sigh. “I just want you to live a life that’s better than mine. Can’t I want that for my only daughter?” “…” “How is he?” she asked, failing to mask the urgency in her voice. “I thought you talked to him.” “Yes, but he’s evasive. He never tells me anything. Or at least not anything honest.” “He’s working.” “Good,” she said. “That’s good.” Another sigh. “You should visit him.” “Sweetheart, I don’t think that would go over well. Besides, I can’t do cities anymore. When I’m in cities, even small ones, I feel like I’m skating on the surface of the world instead of swimming amongst it. Does that make sense?” “It does.” “So. Are you on your way to New York?” ~ There were voices in the street, too soft to discern, and the room felt crowded and impinged upon. Late light, dense with the coming summer, fell like a cataract on the bedspread. The wind disturbed the curtain, and the voices were incessant. I listened to the unyielding conversation of the great city. I lay on the bed, but felt that if I were to fall asleep I’d wake up in an irrevocably changed universe; that the principles of my life would be forever altered. I couldn’t rationalize it then. It’s even harder to explain now. I opened my mother’s last letter. Jack, mi amor, I remember the first fourth of July in Pittsburgh, the first time I met your family. They were steel mill men and their bloated wives, men with prodigious appetites, who looked at you like you spoke a different language. It felt like we were in on some secret together, you and I, the secret of a life they couldn’t begin to understand. Only I understood you, and they hated me for it, and hated you a little, too, for bringing in this outsider, for becoming the outsider. You ran off with the kids, abandoning me to the wolves even then (I should have learned sooner). The kids still loved you, of course, and you left me with your cousins, that ratty haired, evil-eyed bunch. The one who took your virginity stared daggers through me. The children were squealing with glee, swarming you like insects to a corpse. Your youngest brother was drawing his name with a sparkler, this luminous boy, and the city was aflame with a foundry’s heat. I felt so special then to be with you. Thinking back on it, I guess I’d say that you were already gone, lost into your own labyrinth of ambition and wild dreams. So many of us wanted to follow you, you dragged a lot of us with you. And I felt then like I was the only one left, the only one still following you into some dense and terrifying labyrinth that only you and maybe me had the fortitude to follow. Those were the summers when I still wrote poetry, and you came to my readings and listened to my awful, awful poems. You’re the only person in this world who ever thought of me as a poet. I don’t think you ever knew what that meant to me, to be a poet in your eyes. God, your family looked at us like we spoke Chinese. The kids thought you were a God. Climbing all over you, dying to be close to you. Rachel was the same way as a girl, just dying to be in your arms. I’m sorry for rambling, I’ve been into some wine, I feel like this letter is spiraling away from me. What I want to say is now you’re still in there, in your labyrinth, but now you’re all alone, and I have days where I think the only way my life can be saved is to follow you down there. But I tried that. I tried to drag you out, but you didn’t even look back, and I was so terrified and lost, and beginning to grow old and wasted. Which happened anyway, to both of us, you in your maze and me out here on the surface of the strange sea where everyone treats me like a survivor of some cataclysm, your life…I’m babbling now, I know. There was a fourth of July in Pittsburgh once. You were young and brilliant and the envy of your world, and I was a poet, and the two of us spoke in a secret language that was entirely ours.. How to get back to that? There must be a way, I keep telling myself, how can such a thing wither and die? It can’t, can it? We have to go deeper. Ben was out of the shower. I was naked on his bed. He stood there and watched me read. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I have to go to this dinner. My boss is going to be there. All my bosses. It would look bad if I weren’t there…” “No. It’s ok. I understand.” He smiled blithely, a man in control of his surroundings. He kissed me on my forehead. “I’m so happy you’re here,” he said. “We’re going to have an amazing time. This is going to be great. We’re going to have a great life together here.” ~ In September the towers fell. In November an Airbus obliterated a block in Queens. By December, when Dad died, I had moved out and was beginning a new life in Astoria, alone. I spent a week sleeping on the couch of his apartment, cleaning out his things. Some people from MOMA came. The enormous map has been on display there since he died. I go to see it occasionally. It takes up an entire wall. I sit on a bench and stare at that gorgeous, unfinished labyrinth of his. People come and go. Most don’t spend more than a few seconds admiring it. But some sit down beside me. I can feel their heat, smell their odors, hear their breathing. “Hm,” they usually say. “Hm.”