the road and where it takes us

I was walking through the park this evening as it began to get dark and found myself caught up, briefly, in a certain feeling of dread that used to strike quite regularly. A few weeks ago Erica and I were discussing dread, specifically in the context of McCarthy's The Road, which I read a few years ago and which Erica recently read, and out of which they are now making a movie. (This seems strange to me, and perhaps best avoided, though I will undoubtedly end up watching it.)

I'd forgotten, until tonight, this conversation in particular but also more generally this feeling -- it's been awhile now since I've been out walking alone, no specific destination in mind, just at that point when the day begins to fade. It got me to remembering a rather silly melodramatic thing I wrote a few years back, caught up in crazy love and loneliness, but which I think still captures something in moments, in certain turns of phrase.

I thought, for a few years, that I was in love with a boy. His family lived just north of Lincoln Center. I was new to the city then, and afraid -- of many things, but especially of the city and its threatening urban landscapes. We would meet at his apartment and spend nights drinking vodka and cranberry juice out of water bottles on the stoop, smoking cloves, walking the streets, pacing out step by drunken step the measure of our confinement. Wait; there is a story here.

The streets sparkled after rain and felt clean sometimes, and vast. We would walk north along Broadway and circle the Apple Bank, stark and monstrous at 4 a.m., keeping company with garbage trucks and empty taxis circling their prey. We would walk east until we came up against the wall enclosing Central Park, all those trees trapped there in the dark, exuding oxygen and (I swear) straining against their bonds, breaking free of concrete, the dirt moist in New York's muggy summer heat. Our breath swirled out in poisonous clouds under streetlights. We would stumble home at dawn, lock ourselves in his room, and behind closed doors sleep through till dusk. But wait.
I thought I was in love with a girl. Sometimes I think I still am. The city does not frighten me anymore, but I cling still to the familiar -- I have never been comfortable with change. She stopped talking to me a while back, this girl around whom some part of my world revolved.

I have always been afraid of dusk: the twilight hour, the witching hour, that time of encroaching darkness, of sleek claws and scales and teeth. It was hot that day, and I was feeling lost, and as it began to grow dark I wanted to see the girl, needed to see her face luminescent in that urban evening haze. I called her and asked her to meet me, suggested Lincoln Center, the lip of the fountain. She said no, how about the reflecting pool, there is music and dancing at the fountain tonight. And in all those years of wandering that neighborhood I had never been to the reflecting pool, never knew of its existence, nestled there in concrete, strangely isolated and quiet.

The girl and I sat on a bench that night, smoking cigarettes, staring at each other, crying, even talking some. She commented on the lovers kissing all around us in the dark. I made her go to the water with me, dip our feet in, throw quarters arching silver out over its surface. Later we walked north along Broadway, and then east until we came up against the wall enclosing Central Park, all those trees trapped there in the dark, exuding oxygen and (I swear) straining against their bonds, breaking free of concrete, the dirt moist in New York's muggy summer heat.

We talked more there under the streetlights, pressed up against the darkness rising out of the park. We took the subway north. She said that on the 4th of July she had watched the fireworks from a rooftop in Williamsburg, and that fireworks had been her brother's favorite thing in the entire world, and that she had cried the whole night long. And I wanted to hold her, then. I wanted to gather her in to me and cradle her like a child against my chest. But I was afraid to touch her then, sitting next to her on that train hurtling northward beneath New York City -- this city so easy to get lost in, to drown in, to go so slowly slipping under. He drowned in his own vomit, she said. But she wasn't quite honest about the fireworks, was she? He loved the drugs more than anything else in the entire world. But wait.

It is winter now, and cold, and gray, and it has been over half a year since that summer night. It was been over half a year since I've seen her face outside of sleep, outside of dreams of running through apocalyptic urban landscapes, trees breathing and clawing at the sky. I return to the reflecting pool every so often, I see the boy every once in awhile. I walk down long straight avenues at dusk with my headphones on, watching as the streetlights change, as headlights come hurtling toward me out of the gathering night. Wait; there is a story here.
(January 2001)